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