My mother's stories
chapter 3
The settlement in the steppe
Those five years, during which we lived in the factory region, were the hardest in my childhood. I lived in the place I didn’t like and played with the children, who disliked me and were mostly older. Who knows how many times I ran home, crying after being knocked or pushed to the ground, before my mother lost her temper and rushed into the yard, shouting and promising to kill everybody, who touched a hair on my head? Things improved more or less after that. I remember how a girl, who often beat me, knocked me down as usual, but as I was going to run home in tears, all the children surrounded me asking not to complain – otherwise this girl would be flogged by her parents with a leather belt. I was shocked after I learnt about the belt, but when they offered to punch her back instead, I couldn’t raise my arm. Were they trying to provoke me to have a real fight or was it their idea of real justice? I am not sure about that even now when I am much more experienced.
So it was a great relief for me to move
to a new place. My father received a piece of land beyond the boundaries of the
city and it took at least 40 minutes to walk to our place from the last tram
stop. The environment was almost unspoilt by human presence there and it made such
a nice difference after living in the factory region. I remember how delighted
my mother was as she told me about a hare, which crossed their way, when she
and my father were walking to our plot for the first time. When we moved there,
a small cottage and a well for imported water had already been built.
I was sure that my father got this land as a
worker of a big factory, which produced agricultural machines. Our authorities’
policy was to attract people to work at factories. They gave some advantages to
workers: the possibility to buy goods, that couldn’t be found in ordinary shops
or vouchers to health resorts with trade union discounts. Why couldn’t they give
plots of land either?
Nowadays, in spite of my mother’s
memory problems, she still remembers a lot of details from her childhood and
youth. So, after careful questioning, I learnt I was wrong about the land. My
mother’s story was that Father received it as an orphan when he was still in
the army as an extended–service man. There was some conflict because of this
land with his captain. My father was promised a flat in an almost finished new
building. The captain, however, intended to get this flat for himself, and he
managed to persuade my father to take his own apartment in the factory region instead.
Father agreed because he was told it was a very nice place at a short distance
from the sea. But after we moved there my parents discovered, that the
captain’s flat was wet with some water pool under the floor, where frogs began
to croak before the rain.
At that time one family couldn’t have more
than one dwelling. So, when the captain learnt that my father had hid the fact
that he had a flat and got a piece of land, where he had already built a small
cottage, he tried to take it in his possession too.
The captain had already had his flat,
but it was not too difficult to deceive the law. People usually used names of
their relatives for that. My parents, on the contrary, couldn’t do this even if
they were able to overcome their reluctance to break the law: Father was
brought up in an orphanage, Mother came from a village and didn’t like her
relatives very much. So she didn’t think long – she took me and moved to our
hut among the fields. Father didn’t want to move, but after living alone with
frogs under the floor for company, he gave up and joined his wife and daughter.
Later they returned the keys of the flat with frogs to some official. Nobody
was tempted by it any more – it stayed empty. The last news about it was that
someone had stolen glass from its window frames.
To
be continued…
(c) Anna Shevchenko
