chapter 29
The village that I lost
To my mother's misfortune she spent her childhood and teens in a shabby hut that was situated not far from a local cemetery. It was not a pleasant experience and perhaps that's why she was always so perceptive to the dark side of life. I remember her complaining to me how she couldn't help hearing all that crying and sobbing because by rural tradition it was a proper behaviour for close relatives. “Such hypocrisy!” my mother used to tell me with bitterness. “At first they made me listen to all of that and then after a few drinks at the funeral banquet most of them forgot what all that was about and were almost ready to dance.”
Nevertheless, even my mother with her flat rejection of rural customs had to admit that it was not always the case. Sometimes one person's grief was so strong that nobody could be left unmoved. It was definitely so with that poor mother whose babies lived only a few months after they were born. Villagers were whispering, telling each other that she lost 13 or even 17 of them. I believe they exaggerated the number, as rumours usually do, but there was no doubt about that inconsolable mother's grief. At first, she tried to be patient, listening to the old wise women's advice. But, in the end, something snapped inside her and to people's horror she suddenly started shouting offenses to the sky, shaking her fists and asking God why He was so cruel to take all her babies away from her. Everyone stood there rooted to the spot, expecting that at any moment the lightning would flash from the sky and incinerate that lunatic of a woman. But it never came. What is more, the poor soul came to her senses in the end and afterwards had two or three children, who all lived to grow up. It really looked like a miracle after all her previous losses.
My own maternal instinct has never been as strong as that woman's. Actually, it was a bit slow to reveal itself. I have never been one of those girls who like to play with somebody else's kids, and was already 25 when, to my surprise, I suddenly understood I'd like to have children of my own. Still, even before that time I had always felt that the ending of this story was extremely comforting. The poor woman wanted to have children so badly, and she got them in the end. When I am thinking of it nowadays, I usually feel a pang of regret that I have never been able to overcome my atheistic up-bringing. In such stories I feel the presence of God. Here He is as I'd like Him to be: strict but at the same time kind and understanding.
I don't really know when and why Christian tradition was broken in our family. Most of my playmates were baptized and had godparents in spite of official disapproval of such things. I remember when we were already at secondary school one of my friends told me in secret: “You know, my mother and I discussed it all and decided it's the right thing to celebrate Easter and Christmas. Just in case. They say there is no God. But who really knows?” Actually, it was a wide-spread attitude towards religion in the USSR, even among communists, I suspect. Only they, especially those of higher rank, couldn't afford to show it in public. There were no communists in our family. So why was it so uncompromisingly atheistic? My mother used to bake Easter cakes every spring. But she always emphasized that it had nothing to do with religion, that she just loved the taste of them. As for making them in the shape of prolonged rolls, according to her words, she was simply incapable of baking them thoroughly in their traditional cylindrical form. Yet, I am not sure it was entirely true. Perhaps it was that aspiration of hers for being different and her desperate desire to forget her old rural customs.
It was not so with my great-grandmother Euphemia, who taught my mother to say her first prayers. As far as I can remember my mother's stories about her: she was devout, hard-working and had immense knowledge of life that was really priceless during those hard times. If to think about it, she was a typical representative of rural women of her generation. Besides, she belonged to that part of the female population, who were tough and resilient enough to live till old age in spite of poverty, hard labour, famines and epidemics. But what frightens me most is those poor women's fate to give birth to a lot of children knowing that as likely as not only some of them will survive.
Euphemia, or Euhima as everybody in the village called her, was born in 1870. I believe that after the revolution of 1917 and the Civil war that followed it all old records were lost. Not to mention that all the churches, where they usually kept such documents, were ransacked during that awful time and later were closed or turned into store-houses by Bolsheviks. Anyway, it was the year that Euhima remembered and always gave as her year of birth to her relatives. The same year when Lenin was born as my mother liked to emphasize. It was the easiest way to remember it. Everybody, who finished school in the USSR, knew when the first communist leader was born, especially taking into account that every April Soviet propaganda made a great fuss about it.
Unlike her grandchildren, Euphemia was ignorant in such matters. She had never attended school and couldn't read or write just like most of her contemporaries from the lower classes. Actually, from an early age she had to work and take care of her invalid mother. Soon after her mother's death, when Euhima was about 16, she was forced to get married. In her own words it was not something unusual, because at the time of her youth parents didn't pay much attention to their daughter's actual age. If a girl began to look more or less feminine, it was a sign that they could marry her off and preferably without delay. After that her main task would be to have children and bring them up properly, that is to ensure the continuation of her kin. And hasn't it always been the main part of any female in human society or in the wild nature?
Euphemia undoubtedly followed this tradition. But when she was over 30 and already had five children an epidemic of typhoid fever or some other intestinal infection rolled over the villages. All five of her children died, including her elder girl, who was at least 16, because she was just about to get married at that time. Euphemia herself was close to death and it seemed there was little hope for her recovery. Still, she obediently followed a local doctor's strict orders not to eat anything at all. I suppose her husband watched her in secret, because the doctor definitely warned them that eating in that state would mean the death of her. Nevertheless, the time came when Euhima couldn't stand it any longer and surreptitiously stole into the inner porch, where a big barrel with sour cabbage stood in the corner. As she confessed to my mother many years later, she had never had more pleasure from food than at that moment when, after breaking the thin crust of ice, she started gobbling the icy cold sour cabbage. After eating her fill, she resignedly hobbled to her bed and lay down to wait for her death. Miraculously, it didn't come. What is more, it was the beginning of her recovery, and it only confirmed my great-grandmother's inner belief that nature had always had some hidden wonderful remedies. The only problem was that very few people were able to find them.
After her full recovery, Euphemia didn't fall into some incurable nervous break-down or anything of the sort but continued to work as hard as before and gave birth to four more children who all lived till old age. Even her two sons survived, although they fought Germans during the Second World War.
To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
