My mother's stories (chapter six)

My mother's stories
chapter 6
Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

             Ten years after I visited my mother’s village for the first time I was there again. But it was not really a visit – just passing along the main street of the village in a group of tourists, pupils from different schools. We had a walking tour through the countryside and it was just one of the villages on our way. As we were toiling along the road with heavy rucksacks hurting ruthlessly our shoulders, I was trying hard to find something familiar that could remind me of my first visit, but without success. It was a village like so many others which we had already passed. Maybe one of the poorest as it had so many houses with thatched roofs. I had a feeling that time had stopped there and nothing changed much since my barefooted mother, slightly older than five, was trotting along the same road on one of her mother’s errands.

             Usually my mother was sent to borrow something or to take the thing her mother had lent to someone back. Actually, her mother could lend anything: from a smart headscarf to a toothbrush if a person, who had asked her, was skillful enough in flattery. Sometimes it took a long time to find a borrowed thing, because people continued to lend it to each other and it was travelling around the village. My mother still remembers one pretty kerchief, cream-coloured with red flowers - she had been searching for it for weeks. She was especially persistent in that case, because she had just reached her teens and it was her turn to inherit this nice-looking thing from her mother.

             However, it was not safe for a little girl, who was afraid of dogs, to stroll through the village - they say those animals can smell fear. Or maybe my mother was running and that is why a pack of dogs began to chase her. Anyway, she stopped dead, watching the dogs that were slowly approaching her, growling. Thanks God a man with an iron chain in his hands was passing by. He rushed forward shouting, attacked those dogs, who didn’t want to retreat, and my mother was saved. This accident didn’t stop her mother from sending her elder daughter on errands, of course. But, I think, my mother didn’t mind it, actually – at least those journeys through the village saved her from hard work in the kitchen garden or from housework, which she was forced to do since the age of five.

             Sometimes my mother even had some benefits from her wanderings, as it was when she found the cream-coloured kerchief at last, or when she used to carry a kettle full of milk to the reception center. It was the only way for her to have her beloved milk – she just stopped, when she thought nobody could see her, and sucked surreptitiously one or two mouthfuls of milk from the kettle snout. At the time of my mother’s early childhood it was not really difficult to find such a secluded place – at least half of the houses stood empty, swept out by great famine, which broke out at the very beginning of total collectivization. Yet they were lucky, as far as I know in the steppe regions the whole villages stood deserted, swept empty by death. Of course, those poor people didn’t have their forest with its berries, mushrooms and nuts to help them to survive. Besides, the forest was a good hiding place for those cunning people, who managed to save some of livestock from being taken to the collective farm. In fact, most of the cattle was lost, slaughtered by those who didn’t want to give their animals away or died from hunger and bad treatment in the collective farms. Sometimes it caused a real tragedy.
       My daughter has recently reminded me one of my mother’s stories that I had forgotten for some reason – maybe because it was that kind of story, which is better to forget. It was about a man, who loved his horses. I think those two horses were really handsome and thoroughbred, because some people from abroad came to the village and tried to buy them. Those people offered a really high price, but the man refused point blank. And later, after those poor horses were taken to the collective farm and died somewhere among the other doomed animals, their master lost his mind. He was often seen roaming about the village, almost naked or completely naked in different versions of my mother’s story, complaining that his horses had escaped again and asking if anybody had seen them. People usually said they had and waved their arms in some direction. The man didn’t change his manner of clothing even when winter came. Some time later he just disappeared and nobody had ever seen him again. And nobody had ever learnt if it was frost that did it or he was secretly imprisoned or taken to the asylum not to compromise the noble idea of collectivization.

         To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country