My mother’s stories
chapter 11
My mother's departure from the village forever
As my mother
believed that with her weak heart she could die at any moment, as soon as her
sister finished her seventh form she went to
the district centre to obtain permission for her to leave the village. Maybe it
was even her sister’s sixth form because they lost one or two school years
during the Second World War. For a long time I thought that my favourite aunt
Zina needed that document because of her young age and only much later I
learnt that at that time peasants could not move from their villages of their
own free will. I remember my shock when I found out that our peasants didn’t
have any passports till 1974. How could I shut my ears to such information?
There was nothing about this in our textbooks and we rarely communicated with
our rural relatives but surely I should have heard something about it. I think it was
one of those cases when you didn’t comprehend the meaning of what you had just
heard.
A passport for me has always been a document to be proud of. When I
think about it, the slashing rhythm of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry begins to
sound in my ears, and I can see his face with its strong chin and tragic
expression of his big eyes – exactly how he looked in our textbook on
literature. “The fiery tribune” they called him and he really was. It was
impossible not to trust him when he was triumphantly finishing the poem about
“his red leather-bound passport” – “Read it and envy me: I am the citizen of
the USSR
Yet it was not too big an obstacle for young people if they really
wanted to leave the village as the state needed more and more hands to work at
the factories. So after some trouble my mother got the permission for her
sister. I think my fifteen-year-old aunt was glad to escape – perhaps she
thought the wide world was waiting for her to find her own nice place under the
sun. In reality most of her life she had been living in the dormitory, doing
the hard masculine work at the machine-building plant and raising a daughter as
a single mother till she died at the age of 52. And the same was going on
everywhere: people flew away from poverty and hard work in the villages and found
the same life in the cities, only without fresh air, tasty water and natural
food. Most of them, however, never came back. Was their life in the villages
even worse than that or was it merely the global process of industrialization
that left them no choice?
Despite all my mother’s hatred and bitterness towards the woman who brought her into the world there was some well-suppressed admiration deeply inside her. It slipped out sometimes when she was telling me about her mother’s mad tempers and reckless bravery. There was, undoubtedly, some bond between them, which my mother had never been able to break. We all have this bond with our mothers despite all our attempts to free ourselves from it and bitter feelings and old grudges. At the age of 20 my mother was determined to break this bond forever and the only thing which could stop her was her poor health.
“Can you imagine?” my mother used to tell me “I was so ill when I was 20 that a person standing beside me could see my blouse stirring, because my heart was thumping so hard. And every time, when I was slowly dragging my feet along the street, one or two well-wishers emerged from their gates to let me know that everybody said I was going to die soon. How can it be possible to say things like that to a person?”
Even now in spite of the problems with her memory my 84-year-old mother still mentions those well-wishers from time to time. Fluffing her natural grey curls and looking at me with her weak-sighted eyes, she usually exclaims with simple-hearted joy, “Can you imagine? Nobody of those people reached the age of forty and here I am! Who could have predicted this? So don’t wish ill to your neighbour”.
And back then two sympathetic male teachers encouraged her to leave the village, telling her that it was the only way to recover her health. One of those teachers, who had a big house in a nighbouring village and was definitely in love, asked my mother to marry him. She declined his offer, saying she couldn’t marry a man without loving him. So she decided to move to her uncle, who lived in the distant northern Soviet republic of Bashkiria
My mother needed money for tickets and some warm clothes, I suppose, but she was lucky. They had a very fertile sow, which had 12 piglets three times a year. As peasants never received any money for their work in the collective farm fields selling their own produce was the only way to get some cash. Luckily, my mother made a good profit from those piglets and provided her sister with money when the latter was leaving. In the end when she sold the sow, she had enough money for her own trip. So a year after her sister’s departure my mother did it at last – she left her village forever.
To be continued…
(c) Anna Shevchenko
