вторник, 27 ноября 2018 г.

My mother's stories (chapter twenty five)

My mother's stories
chapter 25
The informer


       After her miraculous survival in 1947 my mother lived in the village only four more years. I don't know why but I have never before associated my mother's heart problems and nightmares during that period with the damage that she received at the time of the famine. She almost starved to death then and definitely needed a special treatment and really good nourishment. I am sure she got nothing of the sort. As far as I can remember my mother's tale, her mother did take her to see a doctor in the neighbouring town a few times. But she was not satisfied with his prescription. So, choosing the time when the doctor left his consulting room, her mother bribed a nurse asking her for some injection, which, in her opinion, would be good for her daughter's heart. But obviously it was not, because as soon as my mother got it she unexpectedly fainted. The doctor, who just came in at this moment, scolded the nurse furiously. My mother, however, flatly refused to look for help of official medicine after that incident. So she continued to suffer from nightmares, dreaming about a snake hiding inside her pillow almost every night, and inevitably attracting sympathetic stares when, extremely weak with her heart racing, she was slowly dragging herself through the village.
      It so happened that the children of my mother's generation had a big gap in their education because of the Second World War. Actually, since 1941 till 1945 they attended school only for about a year when they were under the Romanian rule. Then the Germans came to replace the Romanians and those didn't bother themselves with education on the occupied territories, having enough trouble on their front line. Thus children started studying again only in 1945 after they had been freed by the Soviet army. I think my mother was still at school at the age of 19 or even 20. Yet she never finished it. Her excellent memory suddenly began to fail and she couldn't utter a word when a teacher asked her a question.
      No wonder that seeing her people whispered behind my mother's back, foretelling her untimely death. But she survived this time too, and being encouraged by one of her teachers, left the village with firm determination not to set her foot there ever again. Nevertheless, 30 years later she had to return to the village and live there for a month taking care of her ill mother. As soon as the old woman felt better my mother hired a bus and took her to our city with all her worldly possessions. I remember even the chickens were brought to our place as we lived in a private house and had a spacious yard. And here my grandmother lived for the last two years of her life, quarreling in turn with her two daughters and changing her place of living all the time – exactly like her own old mother used to do during her time.
      A few years later my mother tried to go to her native parts one more time, moved by her elderly aunt's plea to visit her. But it was a total failure. I remember how they departed: she and my 7-year-old daughter, who was full of elation that she was accompanying her granny on this trip. My father had to see them both off to the train station. I was not really surprised when an hour or two later my father and daughter suddenly appeared saying they came back by tram but my mother had to reach home much later. As it turned out they took a taxi but half way to the station she felt really sick. So after vomiting at the edge of the road my mother couldn't force herself to board any kind of transport and said that she would come home on foot.
      When they were leaving something in my mother's countenance prepared me for such an ending. But still, although I had had a nasty feeling that something like that was going to happen, I felt infuriated. Didn't my mother know she suffered from seasickness most of all in cars? Surely they had to catch a bus! Knowing my mother's love for theatrical effects, I suspected it was just a little performance organized for me personally. Nowadays I understand it was not a pretense. In spite of her love for a bit of acting it would have been too much even for her to pretend like that.
      As for my rage because of the trip which hadn't taken place it was my usual reaction to my mother's tricks at that time. It seemed to me that all my life was punctuated by such enthusiastic beginnings which suddenly came to a failure. How often did I hear from her “Oh, I really wanted to do this or that but I felt dizzy all of a sudden. I just couldn't enter that shop, or office or whatever it was”? And that was not all. Didn't she have this nasty habit to persuade me to do something and then pour a cool bucket of discouragement on my head? I believed the roots of my lack of self-confidence lay there. And wasn't it my damn uncertainty and constant hesitation that prevented me from reaching any success in my life? However, I think it was my marriage that killed our trust in each other once and for all. I couldn't forgive my mother for her extreme hostility towards it, and what hurt my feelings even more was her stubborn refusal to respect my right to make my own mistakes.
      And only now, so many years after I split up with my husband, I began to understand my mother's desperate reluctance to visit her native land. It was not only a place of hard labour and poverty. It was the place where her mother always preferred her sister to her, where her beloved father was arrested and everybody could poke their finger at her calling her “a daughter of the enemy of the people”. I imagine what a shock it was for my mother when she learnt who had written the false information against her father. She could never have thought it was him! Who could have guessed it was their neighbour the manager – the very man who had enough grain to feed his chickens even during the famine, and whose hen once laid an egg in their yard during that hungry time?

      To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
27. The importance of family (the ending)

Комментариев нет:

Отправить комментарий