пятница, 14 июня 2019 г.

My mother's stories (chapter twenty five - the ending)


My mother's stories
chapter 25
The informer
(the ending)


    When I think about all those numerous people, who used to scribble information against their neighbours and colleagues, I usually recall our own neighbours, who live just across the street: a woman, five or ten years younger than my mother, and her divorced son, who have always considered our street as the continuation of their yard. I could never understand them, as if they were aliens. Still her son reached the top of his outrageous behaviour at the time of wild 90s, when he slaughtered two pigs just under my kitchen windows. It was not a matter of a minute and our panes vibrated with the pig's awful yells. In vain I tried to close my ears with my fingers: it didn't muffle the sound. So when it came to the second pig, I lost my head completely and ran out of our house with firm intention to stop that horror at any cost. I remember how furious I was when my husband stopped me at our gates. Nowadays I feel grateful for his intervention. What an awful scene I could have witnessed if he hadn't forced me to return to the house!
      Actually, that man has always preferred to do all his dirty and unpleasant work in the street. I remember him sawing up the tiles with a disk grinder on concrete floor in front of their gates. The sounds were so piercingly annoying that I wondered how he could stand them working there for hours, not even wearing protective earmuffs. Sometimes I thought the man just loved being exposed, being watched by all his neighbours and passers-by. And, maybe, the feeling of unfriendly glances at his back. My son, perhaps, understands our neighbours better, saying it's not as complicated as that. In his opinion it's their well-known tendency for neatness – they just don't want to pollute their precious yard.
      Anyway, it was not all of that that stopped us saying hello to each other in the end. It was their dogs, whom they have always allowed to run freely in the street. The thought that those audacious animals weren't pigs for slaughter after all didn't help much. “Don't be afraid”, our neighbours usually said to scared passers-by, “They are only barking. They wouldn't bite”. But I knew it was not true. The small white dog was really only barking. In fact, he was doing it all day long and part of the night, often without any visible reason at all. But his main fault was that he egged his companion on. And that big black dog did bite sometimes. I witnessed it three times at least. Not to mention one lucky girl, who got off with only her bag ripped because the owner of the dogs called them back in the nick of time. Standing at my open window I saw the girl coming to our neighbour's fence to show her torn bag. I was unable to catch the words, only the tone and was struck by our neighbour's rude answer. In confusion I tried to guess what arguments she could have offered to justify herself for being so rude in such a situation. What gave her so much confidence in her own rightness? Did she really like to terrorize people with her dogs or was it that she just didn't understand what she was doing?
      In any case, those dogs didn't usually bark at us as we were their neighbours, but they often used the space in front of our gates as their toilet. I believe they were marking their territory, showing us where the border, in their opinion, actually lay. Several generations of our neighbours' dogs have had this irritating habit, but in reply to my mother's accusations that woman always said that they were just animals and that she could do nothing about it. Naturally I got tired of dirtying my shoes while coming home in the dark, but it was only when my mother got senile and I understood that it was my turn to clean after those nasty animals, I decided to teach them their spot. And it turned into a real war for the territory.
      I had to get up very early to shoo them away. Sometimes even risking my skin and jumping out of our gates. My task was to persuade those animals that I was as fierce as a dog myself. And I really was sometimes. Our neighbour was quick to catch me at it and she asked me with indignation what was the meaning of that – shouting “shoo” at her dogs. I started to explain to her that I was going to teach her dogs to behave if she was not able to, but she didn't give me a chance to finish my speech. Every time when I opened my mouth to continue she began to talk too. Such kind of conversation usually turns into a real battle of lungs, when two furious women are shouting at the same time, trying to muffle each other's words. Two women from the market – that's how people usually call them. It's really funny to watch such a scene, but I had no desire to take part in it. So I used the only decent option left for me and turned my contemptuous back on that woman. But I didn't stop my war with her dogs and did win that miserable space in front of our gates in the end. The price of my victory was that our neighbour stopped saying hello not only to me but to all the members of my family.
      So every time I am thinking about our neighbours as I try to understand their motivation, I imagine them scribbling a denunciation about me being a spy at the time of Stalin's rule. Just to punish me for my interference with their dogs' up-bringing. And then I begin to think about all those people who are shouting now, demanding to bring Stalin's statues back. Perhaps, they are not as harmless as they seem. Wouldn't they be the first to write a denunciation against people, whom they were angry with, if that bloody regime suddenly came back? They don't understand, it seems, that they would not be out of reach themselves and could be hit by the same stick that they are so eager to use against others. 

          To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
27. The importance of family (the ending)
32. The informer (the continuation)
33. The informer (the continuation)
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воскресенье, 31 марта 2019 г.

My mother' stories (chapter twenty five - the continuation)


My mother's stories
chapter 25
The informer
(the  continuation)


        Although at school we learnt about the 20th Congress of the Communist Party that condemned Joseph Stalin's cult of personality there was nothing in our textbooks to show us the real scale of political repressions of the time. In fact, I don't remember the term “political repressions” used there at all. We rather heard about them from some vague rumours circulating among the people. So I imagined Stalin's cult of personality as his portraits hanging everywhere on the walls and printed on the front pages of all the newspapers. But didn't we have the same with our current leader Leonid Brezhnev? His portraits looking at us from everywhere and TV news starting with inevitable words “Today Leonid Ilyich..." followed by what he had said or done? So what was the difference?
      I don't know why I couldn't see this difference. It was so easy to do just by paying a bit more attention to one of my mother's little stories. It happened on the day of Stalin's funeral. My mother was 23 then and at the height of her beauty. No wonder she and her friend couldn't get rid of some young admirer. They met him somewhere in the street and he just didn't want to leave them alone. But my quick-witted mother did find the way to shake him off their tail. Losing her patience with him at last, she exclaimed loudly “How dare you bother two mourning girls on a day like this?!” And it worked immediately: the young man turned pale, muttered “Sorry” and flew away as quickly as his legs could carry him, leaving them behind laughing quietly at his back.
      “Quietly” - that's it. At that time I think even jokes about Stalin were told in a whisper. It was so different from what it was like at the time of my student youth when jokes about Brezhnev were extremely popular. Although my future husband and his friend did pay for their zeal in retelling them. At least our professor of History of the Communist Party hinted to us that was the reason why they weren't allowed to visit Poland with our group of students. Yet, we were lucky to live at that period when people weren't sent to Camps for their long tongues any more – they were just forbidden to go abroad.
      Actually it's odd that the news about Stalin's repressions came to me like a shock. If I hadn't been blinded by my grudge against my mother, I think, I would have easily got the right notion of them from another remarkable story of hers. In that story she was telling me how she got her father's rehabilitation documents. After getting them my mother was sent to some archives to learn more details about his destiny. She was really impressed by a large room with filing cabinets along the walls. A woman, who was in charge there, fished her father's card from one of the drawers and went to look for his folder. My mother was just standing there, looking around at all those cabinets, and all of a sudden she realized that they were full of numerous cards and folders with the names of poor people, who were ground by Stalin's repressive machine. Feeling as if the room started to spin around her she rushed out of there and never came to that chamber again. I couldn't properly appreciate this story when I was a child, of course, but when my mother was telling it to my children I used to feel only a familiar fit of irritation - “feeling unwell” again and again while I was deprived of something important because of her unstable character. And the true significance of her story just slipped my mind, obscured by old offenses.
       As for the story about the informer, it was much longer and no less significant. I imagine it as a few pieces of a puzzle with big gaps between them, and my task is to put them all in chronological order and try to see the whole picture. I have already told how all the village was buzzing after people learnt what part my mother's neighbour played in her father's fate. The informer said to everybody, who would ask him, that he was forced to write his denunciation. Actually, I think, it could be true but nobody believed him. People began to recollect that my mother's neighbour got his lucrative job of the food store manager just after her father's arrest, and he also got her family's fertile piece of land by the river. Didn't it look like a reward for the denunciation? Meeting the informer in the street some people hissed into his face “You just wait till Nahum Andreevich comes back!” I have a suspicion that those haters were the same people, who used to abuse my mother for being “a daughter of the enemy of the people”.
        Anyway, my mother's poor father never came back, of course, but she was told a lot of thrilling details about her neigbour's destiny by her visitors from the village. How the informer's 18-year-old daughter, for example, couldn't bear the shame and turned gray overnight. How the informer was stupid enough to go to the opening of some War memorial. He shouldn't have gone there, of course, considering his new status and the people's attitude. It was, I think, the deeply rooted fear to miss such social events that drew him there. At the time of Stalin's rule you could easily draw attention of the punitive agency's ruthless eye if you didn't show proper respect to such gatherings. That time was already slipping away but people hadn't understood this yet. In any case it was the informer's big mistake to come to that crowded meeting as there he was attacked by my hot-tempered grandmother, who was cursing him and shouting something about her poor husband. Who knows, perhaps that ugly scene was the last straw, which led that man to his untimely death. Soon he had a stroke, was paralyzed and died half a year later. Although it's difficult for me personally, but if to think about it without prejudice, in that way he became one more victim of Stalin's bloody regime, which killed him a few years after its creator's death.
       I remember once my mother told me that when her father started to work at some small plant in the neighbouring town the authorities didn't bother him at all, and it was only when he used to come to the village that people, who were in charge there, didn't leave him alone. She was sure they longed to get rid of her father, because he, in her words, liked to poke his nose into other people's business, and didn't think he had to hold his tongue. And those guys did have plenty of things they would prefer to keep secret.
       In the the USSR people never had proper respect for the State property, and the higher the position of a person was the more freely they could misuse it. They definitely didn't limit their appetites with “three spikelets”. It was not something unusual that my mother's neighbour the informer with his lucrative job of the food store manager had enough grain to feed his chickens even during the famine. Certainly he didn't take that forage from his official rations. So it's quite understandable why the local elite longed to get my grandfather out of their way, considering him too nosy and dangerous. And a denunciation was a very convenient way to get rid of inconvenient people.
      
      To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
27. The importance of family (the ending)
32. The informer (the continuation)
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среда, 30 января 2019 г.

My mother's stories (chapter twenty five - the continuation)


My mother's stories
chapter 25
The informer
(the continuation)


       I don't know exactly when my mother learnt the truth about her father's fate. But it definitely happened at the beginning of the 60s. By that turbulent time known, as Khrushchev's Thaw, she hadn't lived in the village for several years. After travelling all over the country or through half the country at least, my mother settled down in Odessa, a city near the Black Sea. She and her young husband had to rent their place of living at first. My mother had a lot of funny stories about that time. I remember her telling me with amusement how when I was a baby we lived at the edge of the city in some kind of a shed, which she used to call “a goat box”. Or telling me with awe how I, being a toddler, narrowly escaped my untimely death when I came up on my unstable legs to a big and very aggressive chained dog and tried to seize it by the ears. I was saved by our landlady, who snatched me from under the very nose of the astonished beast at the last second.
      Anyway, it was not something new for my mother to endure privations. I believe she felt much worse when my father got a flat in the factory region at last, and she had to suffer from foul air, bad water and lack of greenery. Occasionally her mother visited her there. My grandmother usually arrived surrounded by a bunch of her fellow-villagers, and my mother had lots of trouble making the bed on the floor for all of them. I think in that wet and shadowy flat she got the first news about the identity of a man whose denunciation brought her poor father to his destiny.
      It was especially painful for my mother to learn that the man was their neighbour. And she used to be so friendly with his wife! That young woman was respected in the village as she married a much older man with two small children to look after. My mother liked her because she was benevolent and, unlike most of the villagers, was always ready to share the secrets of her housewife skills with anybody. It was she who taught my mother how to remove stains from linen by boiling it in soap solution. In my mother's own family sheets were never washed, and unless they were new they looked revoltingly dark gray.
      As for borsch (the famous Ukrainian vegetable soup), which was an important part of everyday meal, her granny didn't know how to cook it properly. She threw all the vegetables into a pot at the same time, boiling all of them till the beetroot became soft enough, while the rest got overcooked, of course. Trying to disguise the unpleasant odour, the old woman put too much dill into her borsch, but it didn't help. The smell that she got in the end was really disgusting and the taste was not much better.
      My mother's mother on the whole hated most of the housework, and, to be honest, I do understand her. Nevertheless, as my mother used to tell me with bitterness, her mother did cook tasty dishes, but only on those rare occasions when a crowd of guests was expected to a feast. On ordinary days making borsch she poured too little oil on the frying pan and her fried onion was always burnt and smelled badly.
      Naturally my mother was eager to learn why, when their neighbour's young wife was making borsch, the flavour floating through the air was so delicious. So she tried to be somewhere nearby just to watch this skillful housewife in the process of cooking. Soon she knew by heart in what succession the vegetables had to be thrown into the pot. After that, every time her younger sister was called to dine, she asked suspiciously who had cooked borsch. Although their mother always answered her sister had, the distrustful girl used to run to the pot, and lifting its lid, sniffed carefully. If it was not true, the little one understood it at once and snorted scornfully, “Let the person who made this broth eat it herself then!” My mother was pleased, of course, with such appreciation of her cooking, and felt really grateful to her new friend for all the priceless knowledge that she had so selflessly shared with her.
      My mother had never been able to get anything useful out of her own mother, who had very little patience for her unloved daughter, and was always ready to pull her by the hair if she was not quick enough to understand her explanations. No wonder my mother was so happy to find a friend and a teacher in their neighbour's young wife. And what a blow it was for her to learn that her good friend's husband informed the punitive agency against her dear father!
      Why did he do it? He seemed to be like any other man in the village. Although there was one peculiarity - he never looked into your eyes while speaking to you. Was it guilty conscience or just fear that people could find out the truth about him being an informer?
      If this was his worst fear, it came true in the end. It happened after Nikita Khrushchev started the rehabilitation of political convicts. All the village was buzzing about that man when the shocking news had finally reached it. As my mother was told by her agitated fellow-villagers, their neighbour the manager was summoned to the punitive agency and asked why he had written the false information against her father. It turned out that the man, whom my grandfather had supposedly killed, was in good health and the oil-mill that he had set on fire stood undamaged. They didn't ask themselves, though, why they didn't check this information much earlier.
      Many years later I learnt to my dismay that at the time of Stalin's rule millions of denunciations were written, and they were full of such groundless and often ridiculous accusations, which nobody bothered to check. It was difficult for me to accept that my grandfather's story was not some local blunder but a tiny part of the global process that was much more sinister, thinning out the country, killing its best citizens in the first place.

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