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.

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        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