chapter 32
Reading between the lines
As I expected, all my good intentions to stop reading the news came to nothing. I can't help seeing that it's not really the news but just an ill-informing and ill-performed show meant for fools. So why do I keep reading it? Is it just fear that my dear country is going to be torn to pieces or that ferocious Russian troops will burst into my unfortunate city and begin to kill and rape? It's stupid to believe that it's possible to be prepared for that. Yet I continue to rummage through the news as if searching for a needle in a haystack and never finding it. The only comforting thing is that I've learned how to scroll through quickly: reading mostly the headlines and clicking only if the news looks more or less promising. Some of the texts just contain their own headline repeated several times and diluted with a good deal of water, the others don't correspond to their headlines at all. It's so irritating! No wonder that people in their comments scold the news-makers with the same rage as they scold politicians. As for all sorts of politicians, I can't find another word for their performance except “clownery”. And what is more, I can't get rid of the nasty feeling that they use words not to express their own thoughts but rather to distract us all from their true intentions and activities.
Somehow it reminded me of one book that I read years ago, actually at the time of my distant youth in the USSR. It was a thick volume, but it was well-written and, it seemed, the author knew his subject well. In addition, there was a touching love story there. So, it was quite understandable that, in spite of its considerable size, I liked to reread the book, which is why so many details from it got stuck in my memory. The main character was a soviet agent working somewhere in the occupied France during the Second World War. I was impressed, of course, by his good looks, valiance and nobility, but especially by his talent for languages, that allowed him to learn German so perfectly. It seemed impossible to achieve it with our school education. Obviously, there had to be some special schools for our soviet agents, where they, unlike our teachers, did know how to teach languages properly.
Still, the most useful information that I derived from that old book was about the importance of the ability to read between the lines. Naturally, it was a vital skill if you lived in the occupied country, where all the newspapers lied about the situation on the battle-fields. For example, if they wrote about German troops leveling the front line, it only meant that the Germans continued to retreat and that they had lost a few more settlements. I used to find this joke really funny. Nowadays it doesn't seem so amusing to me, because it's our Ukrainian troops that are gradually retreating before superior enemy forces. And it's our Ukrainian news I read every day, trying to understand how much truth I can extract from it.
Anyway, I am not good enough at “reading between the lines” and don't think I'll ever become proficient in this art. Yet, after reading the news for several months, it's not that hard for me to understand that for some reason my country has become the hostage in somebody else's dirty games. I will never be able to accept that it should be so. It's beyond my comprehension why Western countries give us weapons to fight Russia with one hand and with the other hand they continue to trade with it. It really looks like some kind of a perpetual motion machine that can't be stopped. Doesn't it seem that in spite of all the talks about high values of modern civilization it can't exist without wars? I am afraid I can't think about it without the deepest disgust. There could be some doubts about it all, of course, but they definitely say that before the Second World War and even some time after it started, Western countries continued to trade with Germany. Business has always been above all other concerns. And my business here is to continue my mother's stories about the Second World War. She, at least, was an eye-witness and didn't base her tales on unreliable and often untruthful news.
For four long years the great waves of the Second World War rolled over my mother's village, bringing with them a lot of troubles and insecurities. From time immemorial villages have been considered as the natural and inexhaustible source of food for passing military troops. So it was not something really new for them. Not to mention that under communist regime peasants had to endure the same treatment, at least since the beginning of the total collectivization that started in 1930 and actually brought the second serfdom to them. No wonder, my mother's fellow-villagers knew so well how to hide their food supplies if they didn't want to be robbed of everything. During the War they even had more options and sometimes swapped their food for something valuable. But mostly always hungry and hardened in battles soldiers grabbed everything more or less nourishing that they managed to find.
For some reason one vivid episode particularly struck my little mother's imagination. I think it was the Romanians who burst into their yard that time because they immediately demanded corn or “papushoi” as they called it in Romanian. I imagine how they shouted for joy when somewhere on the shelves they suddenly found a small bag full of corn grits. Or maybe it was corn flour. Anyway, without delay the hungry men kindled a bonfire straight in my mother's family's yard. And there, in the pot of their own, they started to cook hominy, the traditional Romanian dish. “Corn and hominy. It seemed they just couldn't live without them,” my mother used to sniff a little scornfully, forgetting at that moment that the Ukrainians had the same attitude towards wheat and bread. But the hungry Romanians did manage to impress her when after taking their pot away from the fire they started to eat extremely hot porridge without any spoons. She was really fascinated by the sight when after seizing small portions of hot hominy they skillfully shaped them into small balls and began to throw those pellets from one hand to another. They just wished to cool them a bit before eating, but for my little mother the whole scene looked like some odd game or a ritual. No wonder she was so impressed.
This may seem even weirder, but in my school days, when I was a couple of years older than my mother back then, I was just as much impressed by a story about pilaf that I found in one book. Its author was telling how he used to travel around some eastern Soviet republic in search of the original recipe of pilaf. He never managed to find out what their secret was and why it was so delicious. But his description of the process of cooking was full of inspiration. The local chef looked like a real magician when, with a concentrated expression on his swarthy face, he was adding different ingredients to the rice that was quietly bubbling in the large pot. And how astonished I was when in the end all the guests sat around the very hot pot with pilaf and started to eat it with their bare hands. The author assured his readers that with such manner of eating pilaf seemed even more delicious.
That picturesque story about pilaf couldn't help but remind me of my mother's tale about the hungry Romanian soldiers eating hominy. They hardly had all the necessary ingredients for their dish, but I am sure they found it no less tasty. Anyway, it was not too often that my mother's family got off so easily as in the case of those Romanians. Closer to the end of the war some German soldiers found their beloved sow, which they had been hiding so successfully for three years. It was really fertile, having its piglets twice a year and in that way giving them a good addition to their moderate income. Their grandma Euphemia with tears in her eyes ran towards their swine's hiding place and tried to plead with the Germans. But everything was in vain – neither her own old age nor their pig's pregnancy touched anyone. Without delay it was killed and eaten immediately after it was more or less baked.
And that's how I imagine the war-time after listening to my mother's stories, reading all those books and watching a lot of movies about the Second World War. First of all, it's a great number of tired, hungry men, most of whom are ruthlessly, and often against their own will, uprooted from their habitual soil and who are aware of the fact that tomorrow they may well be dead. So is it really surprising that they become ruthless and even savage?
To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
