My mother's stories (chapter two)

My mother's stories
chapter 2
 A merry-go-round

The everyday reality during that period of my childhood was not too bright. In comparison with multicoloured demonstrations it was dull and gray, because this was the main colour in my surroundings. The air was not good either and it was not surprising. We lived in the factory region near the crossroad, which was overcrowded with cars even then, when not many people could afford to have their own vehicle. Our dwelling was one-storeyed and wet with a tiny front garden. It was situated in a common yard with similar dwellings adjacent to each other and the shell rock wall behind them.  There were one or two exits into the similar yards, and in this tangled maze of yards a big amount of children were playing, fighting and running around. A huge puddle filled almost all our yard after the rains, and people usually crossed it, walking on the separate bricks they had put in there. Once I stepped aside, running after other children, got my feet wet and had a really bad cold after that.

         A small plant, just behind one of the shell rock walls, was rumbling and clanking all day long. At the back of the yard there was a big scrap-heap and an awful common toilet with all its dirt and smell, where my mother forbade me to go. We didn’t have any water pipes inside our apartment, of course – only a common tap under a big willow-tree in the yard.  

         The only attractive thing about the place was that it was not far from the seashore. The sea could not be seen from our yard but it was heard sometimes. On our way to the seashore we had to walk past our own rubbish heap and a lot of others too. Maybe this is the reason why I hate the sight of rubbish among the grass so much.

         I forgot everything about the sea itself except that once the water was so transparent that I was not afraid of it and allowed it to support me. I was sure I was swimming on that day, although my parents said I had a false memory. Maybe they were right and it was only my father’s hands that supported me when I imagined myself swimming.

         My recollections were often different, especially from my mother’s. I could never come to an agreement with her about them. She assured me I had never been in the park where I was swinging, for example. My father and aunt confirmed the fact but it could be my friend’s family who took me there. Or maybe again it was just my imagination that I was swinging in the park as I longed to go there so much. The park was not too far from our dwelling, however all my relatives, even my aunt, refused to go there with me. And, of course, they didn’t want to go to the Central Park where I could ride a real merry-go-round. I went there for the first time with my classmates when I was 17. It was the end of our last year at school, just after “the last bell celebration”, during which our teachers declared how happy they were to have taught us and asked us not to forget our school years. We didn't care much for those sentimental speeches and just waited for the ceremony to end. After that we promised to meet each other at the bus stop and rushed home to have lunch and get some money for entertainment. To my surprise, when I said we were going to the Central Park and asked for money, my mother began to say something so unfair and offensive, that I got angry and ran away without money, forgetting completely, that my friend had to come and pick me up. Bus tickets were very cheap – so it was not a problem, anyone could lend me this sum, but I needed money for a merry-go-round and an ice-cream at least.

         I could never understand why my mother often tried to spoil my pleasure, when I had a real longing for something. And it was not greediness. That day, when I went to the Central Park with my classmates, she gave the money on my entertainment to my friend, when she came to our house. The sum was even twice bigger than I had asked for.

         And it was always like that. If I asked her for something too persistently it was the right way not to get anything or to have my pleasure spoilt – just as it was with a rubber goat when I was four or five. It was a cheap toy but for some reason I wanted it very much. My mother said if I behaved myself for the whole day she would buy it. I remember how difficult it was for me to control myself. And I knew one wrong step and our agreement would be cancelled. When I got my toy in the end I felt it was not worth it.

         It was actually a wise thought for a girl of my age. So maybe there was some truth in my mother’s belief, that I was the best and the most intelligent at the age of five. As a proof of it she used to tell two stories. One – how my aunt was complaining about her boyfriend to my mother. I was listening to their conversation for some time and then asked in surprise: “Why don’t you split up with him?” And another one – how my mother didn’t manage to place me in a kindergarten and I offered to lock myself up when she was at work. I remember as I used to sit alone at home, drawing in my sketch-book some series about a family of mice or looking through the window. It was very nice of me, of course, to be so responsible and brave. However later, as I was growing up, I felt more and more irritated, listening to my mother’s stories how I deteriorated since the age of five. Now, fifty years later, sometimes I think – maybe my mother was not so wrong after all.

To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations

My mother's stories (chapter one)

    This is just a short announcement for those who’ve been reading “Five favourite things since my childhood” more or less regularly. I decided to divide my story into two parts. At first it was supposed to be five short stories united under the title “Five favourite things since my childhood”, but when I reached the fifth story “Travelling” I couldn’t start it properly for a long time. Maybe it happened because there was no travelling in my childhood – only dreams about it. So I started to write about trips and walking tours with my husband and children and my story moved forward easily enough. But gradually I noticed that I couldn’t stop writing and the story about my love for travelling turned into an actual travelling through time. After some search I found the place where “Travelling” should be finished. The following story I called “My mother’s stories”. Actually, it’s my stories too – just a mixture of them, an attempt to understand why everything in my family and in my country was going on as if people had a goal to spoil their life as much as they were able to.

My mother's stories
chapter 1 
Festive demonstrations

        I started writing this story unaware that I did it. Actually I had been writing another story, which was supposed to have five short parts united under the common title “Five favourite things since my childhood”. However, when I reached the fifth part “Travelling” I couldn’t begin it for a long time – no beginning satisfied me. No wonder in that as there was no travelling in my childhood except one trip to my grandmother’s village when I was five. My story moved forward easily enough as soon as I started to describe my adult life when I did have trips and walking tours – all these things that I still love so much. Yet, somehow imperceptibly for me the story about my love for traveling turned into an actual travelling through time. So I found the place where this transformation happened and gave the following story a new name.  I called it “My mother’s stories”. Although, it’s my stories too, just a mixture of them – an attempt to understand why I spent my early years listening to my mother’s stories about her travels around the country, but the most distant place that I reached in her company was the center of the city.

And it was not so easy for her to go even there. How often the trip, which we were planning, was cancelled because she couldn’t find her purse or hair-pins or because of several raindrops that fell from the small gray cloud in the sky. Sometimes being especially reluctant to go anywhere she easily provoked me to some rudeness and exclaimed with relief that we were staying at home after that. There was perhaps a note of gloating in her voice too or at least it was how I felt it, being utterly upset after our trip was cancelled.  It was different with my father. We liked to discuss the only trip to the village that I made with him and my aunt. Besides, we loved to dream about different nice places where we could go together. But the time came when I understood it was only talking – nothing more. From time to time I pestered my mother with requests to go to her mother’s village, but her face darkened every time I mentioned it. And every time I asked her to go anywhere else I heard I was just like her mother having an itch in my backside and it was an argument I was never able to defeat.

*  *  *

        It’s a natural desire of any child to explore the outer world. My grandson, for example, always cried if his mother or I left home without him when he was only six months old. This feeling of bitter disappointment that you were left behind – it seems to me I still remember it. Did I have a lot of opportunities for exploration in my childhood? Small shops, the cinema nearby and my aunt’s factory dormitory – these were my usual places to go to. I loved being at my aunt’s and having all those young women and girls’ attention. Most of them had recently left their villages. I reminded them their younger sisters or nieces, I suppose, and who knows, maybe - their own children, whom they left behind in an attempt to find a better life in the city.

      And in November and May we had festive demonstrations at the center of the city. My mother didn’t like them and preferred to stay at home, but I loved going there with my father. The sea of red flags, multicoloured balloons, flowers and cheerful well-dressed people – that was my impression from them. It was much later that I began to find our demonstrations formal and boring, and the huge portraits of communist leaders, which people were carrying – ridiculous. Nevertheless even at the time of my early childhood my father tried to avoid carrying one of the portraits or flags, and we escaped half-way to the tribunes at the main square of the city, where our authorities were waiting to greet us and listen to our shouts of “Hurray!” in response.

      It was much more exciting for me to stand in the crowd on the pavement, staring at the endless column of demonstrators. I liked watching little girls in smart dresses with huge bows on their heads and large decorated trucks, where people in costumes performed different scenes from famous books or films. Some time later we left the crowd and went to roam the streets, decorated with red flags and bright banners, which proclaimed: “Peace, labour, May”, “Freedom, equality and brotherhood”, “For peace in the world” and so on. I used the huge letters of the slogans to sharpen my reading skills, but I don’t think I understood their meaning. The comprehension came later and deeply inside I still can’t accept the fact, that all the nice things, declared on those banners, can not be achieved by human society.

     At the time of those happy strolls with my father through the brightly-coloured city I followed him in high spirits, totally unaware of my future disappointment. In the end, we headed to the city garden, where a local photographer took a photo of us near the fountain, and then Father used to buy two portions of my beloved ice-cream for both of us. It was a really good ending of all the entertainment. When I was in my teens, I still cherished warm feelings about the demonstrations, but it was rather a memory how I used to love them. In reality I was glad not to wake up early and my father also preferred to stay at home on his day off.

         Only once again I had this half-forgotten festive sensation on the first of May. It was my first year at university. On the warm sunny day I was walking with my friends in a column of girls in the gymnastic costumes along the central streets of the city. We had blooming branches in our hands and, as someone invisible commanded, raised them high into the air. It was really exciting walking there, knowing that everybody was looking at our young smooth bodies and legs. We crossed the main square of the city, full of inspiration, raising cheerfully the flowering branches above our heads to the bravura sounds of music, and the announcer proclaimed solemnly: “Long live our Soviet intelligentsia!” But after we passed the platform, where our leaders were standing, waving slightly their hands at us, we discovered that nobody took care to give us some hiding place to change. So we refused to do that just among the square and ran in our costumes to the university along the almost deserted streets, when suddenly someone, the cleverest of us, offered to find a shelter for changing in one of the empty yards, that we met on our way. It was very thrilling, like in films about spies, to go there and change.

        After that last adventure the only entertainment we had during the demonstrations was to giggle when we were supposed to cry “hurray” because one of our student mates, trying to cheer us up, began to shout in a hoarse loud voice long before we reached the tribunes. If my memory doesn’t deceive me at the time of my early childhood even adults’ attitude to such social events was different. “Thaw” – that was the term used for the time just after Stalin’s death and the ending of his bloody regime. It was the time of the first space flights and great hopes – time when people believed in scientific and technological progress and felt optimistic about their own future and the whole mankind in general. Many years later I was talking with Americans about that period in their history and learnt that at that time their people also joyfully believed in the bright future which John Kennedy promised them.

To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko