My mother’s stories
chapter 10
My grandmother's imprisonment
My mother’s choice to live at the edge of the city might look strange
considering that she was so eager to leave her village for ever and break all
the ties which bound her to people who lived there. It was not so easy for her,
I think, as she really loved the picturesque nature of the place but soon after
her friend left for the military service she got another blow. She was going to
continue her education in the primary school teacher’s training college in the
nearest town but had to give it up because of her mother’s imprisonment.
According to my mother’s words her mother got herself imprisoned on purpose for she had a false idea that a prison was something like a boarding school, where she could read books lying in bed and would have lectures from time to time. She was the youngest child looked after by two elder brothers and a sister and spoilt by her mother who lost her first five children during two epidemics of typhoid and some intestinal disease, which had rolled over the village. So my mother’s mother didn’t get used to hard work and tried to avoid it by all means. From time to time she got herself put in hospital for this reason. Besides she loved medical treatment and everything connected with it. That is why, I suppose, she started making illegal abortions. At that time such operations were forbidden and a lot of women died after they received unqualified help.
My grandmother didn’t have such cases in her practice, thank goodness, and the case, which led her to imprisonment, was rather the opposite. It was her bad temper that did it, actually. She failed once and the baby was born after all. Its mother came and demanded a piece of fabric that she had given as the price for the operation back. My grandmother didn’t have it any more and offered something different in return. The woman refused and a huge row followed. In the end my grandmother, beside herself with fury, shouted “So go to the police and write a statement on me!” And that’s exactly what the woman did. All my grandmother’s old clients came to the trial and shouted vigorously that she was innocent and hadn’t done anything of the sort. Nevertheless she was convicted and sentenced to four years of imprisonment. My mother had been just admitted to the college but after her mother’s conviction she had to take her documents back because she couldn’t leave their household and her younger sister alone. I don’t know why but she had never tried to continue her education after that.
My grandmother’s imprisonment was, actually, payment for her adventurous character. As my mother used to tell me she could lie ill with high temperature, but when some neighbour knocked on their window late in the evening to warn them that a truck was going to leave for the nearest town or even some far-off city at the crack of dawn, her mother would jump out of bed, fill her bags with something for sale and there she was in that truck early in the morning rushing to that remote market, where she could convert her goods into money. Here my mother usually added that later her mother wasted that money lending it to someone and never getting it back or buying some ugly clothes. It looked like the process was more important for my grandmother than the result or, probably, she just liked the feeling of her own importance when people were flattering her and asking for money.
At that time people didn’t have enough respect for the state property. They never do, as a matter of fact; but back then it was more justifiable. Half-starved existence in the collective farms didn’t increase people’s desire to follow the law. My grandmother had never been afraid to break it and for her it was especially dangerous. As a wife of “the enemy of the people” she was always at the top of the list of those who could be punished. Yet my grandmother had always been too reckless, too risky. And it was the time when the Law of Three Spikelets was raging in full. I remember my inability to understand the point of the Law after my mother had explained the meaning of its name to me. Why, on earth, could people be imprisoned for three spikelets taken from the fields? Those spikelets were left behind after the harvest had already been collected and were going to rot in the fields anyway. I just couldn’t understand this. And it looked like people weren’t in a hurry to obey that law either. So no wonder that show trials were carried out all over the country.
My mother often described one of those trials maybe because it showed her mother’s character so well. Two men were convicted there for stealing some amount of wheat. Their judges seemed to have specific sense of humour or, perhaps, they had some special instructions about that. Anyway, my mother was startled by the fact that the two men were sentenced to eight and twelve years of imprisonment – precisely in accordance with the weight of stolen grain. As soon as they came home after the trial my grandmother seized two empty bags and said to my mother, “Let’s go to the fields and pinch some wheat”. My mother stared at her in disbelief and spluttered, “You just saw those two men getting one year for a kilo of stolen grain and you are going to take the same road?” But my grandmother just couldn’t understand what she was talking about. So my mother put her foot down and said she was not going anywhere.
It was far from being their first quarrel when my mother tried to bring her mother to reason. Everything was in vain. Her mother was imprisoned in the end and she was left alone to deal with their big household and her younger sister who was not used to hard work just like their own mother.
To be continued…
