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
31. The informer
