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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