My mother's stories (chapter twelve)

My mother’s stories

chapter 12

My mother's triuphs and mishaps in Bashkiria

It was exactly how her uncle, who knew her mother’s character too well, had foretold her: the further her train went away from the village the better she felt. And the first thing that she did after she crossed half the country - she went to a dance with her cousins. She was asked to dance almost immediately but seeing that nobody had invited her cousins yet she tried to reject an offer saying she couldn’t dance. A young man was persistent, however, and said he was a dance teacher. After some argument my mother agreed at last and they were dancing, joking and laughing all the evening, while her cousins stood uninvited leaning against the wall.

“Small wonder it was,” my mother usually concluded this scene with satisfaction “as they were so stupid and ugly”. She, unlike her cousins, was never deprived of dancing partners and after the ending of that first party three or four young fellows insisted on accompanying her to her uncle’s house. It was a real triumph to return with an escort of admirers. But this was, I suppose, the beginning of strong mutual dislike between her and her cousins.
        She got on well with her uncle’s younger son and daughter but his elder daughters never missed an opportunity to harm her. One of those girls was known as a kleptomaniac. She reached the peak of her ill fame by stealing the money which her parents had been saving to buy a cow. They discovered the absence of the money after their neighbour came to their house and reported that their daughter had been seen in town sitting on the bench surrounded by a bunch of boys treating all of them to expensive sweets and biscuits. After being caught by her father, the girl denied everything until he seized her, pulled her skirt up and found the money, or rather what was left of it, shoved in one of her stockings.

Nevertheless, she was not properly punished even then because she had a faultless weapon against her father. Every time after being caught stealing, the girl began to shout, reminding her father that he stole a horse at the age of 17 and was caught trying to sell it. He was deported for this crime beyond the boundaries of Ukraine. Nowadays, people consider an opportunity to leave these boundaries as good luck, but at the time of Stalin’s government it was a wide-spread punishment. “I should be send beyond the boundaries of Ukraine for this,” my mother used to say this phrase very often, usually when she blamed herself for something. So that is why my mother’s uncle was sent to the distant northern republic, where the frost reached minus 45 degrees of Celsius in winter, snow-drifts could reach the roofs of the houses and people usually attended the first of May demonstrations in their hats and warm coats. Her uncle, however, got married there, settled down and became a respectable member of society, but every time his kleptomaniac daughter hurled accusations into his face he was lost for words.

To be continued… 

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country

7. Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

8. My mother's struggle for freedom

9. A boy from the orphanage across the road

10. Living at the edge of the city

11. My grandmother's imprisonment

12. My mother's departure from the village forever

My mother's stories (chapter eleven)

My mother’s stories

chapter 11

My mother's departure from the village forever

As my mother believed that with her weak heart she could die at any moment, as soon as her sister finished her seventh form she went to the district centre to obtain permission for her to leave the village. Maybe it was even her sister’s sixth form because they lost one or two school years during the Second World War. For a long time I thought that my favourite aunt Zina needed that document because of her young age and only much later I learnt that at that time peasants could not move from their villages of their own free will. I remember my shock when I found out that our peasants didn’t have any passports till 1974. How could I shut my ears to such information? There was nothing about this in our textbooks and we rarely communicated with our rural relatives but surely I should have heard something about it. I think it was one of those cases when you didn’t comprehend the meaning of what you had just heard.

A passport for me has always been a document to be proud of. When I think about it, the slashing rhythm of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry begins to sound in my ears, and I can see his face with its strong chin and tragic expression of his big eyes – exactly how he looked in our textbook on literature. “The fiery tribune” they called him and he really was. It was impossible not to trust him when he was triumphantly finishing the poem about “his red leather-bound passport” – “Read it and envy me: I am the citizen of the USSR!” And at the same time when I recited these full of exaltation lines at school half the population in our country didn’t have their passports at all.

Yet it was not too big an obstacle for young people if they really wanted to leave the village as the state needed more and more hands to work at the factories. So after some trouble my mother got the permission for her sister. I think my fifteen-year-old aunt was glad to escape – perhaps she thought the wide world was waiting for her to find her own nice place under the sun. In reality most of her life she had been living in the dormitory, doing the hard masculine work at the machine-building plant and raising a daughter as a single mother till she died at the age of 52. And the same was going on everywhere: people flew away from poverty and hard work in the villages and found the same life in the cities, only without fresh air, tasty water and natural food. Most of them, however, never came back. Was their life in the villages even worse than that or was it merely the global process of industrialization that left them no choice?

Despite all my mother’s hatred and bitterness towards the woman who brought her into the world there was some well-suppressed admiration deeply inside her. It slipped out sometimes when she was telling me about her mother’s mad tempers and reckless bravery. There was, undoubtedly, some bond between them, which my mother had never been able to break. We all have this bond with our mothers despite all our attempts to free ourselves from it and bitter feelings and old grudges. At the age of 20 my mother was determined to break this bond forever and the only thing which could stop her was her poor health.

“Can you imagine?” my mother used to tell me “I was so ill when I was 20 that a person standing beside me could see my blouse stirring, because my heart was thumping so hard. And every time, when I was slowly dragging my feet along the street, one or two well-wishers emerged from their gates to let me know that everybody said I was going to die soon. How can it be possible to say things like that to a person?”

Even now in spite of the problems with her memory my 84-year-old mother still mentions those well-wishers from time to time. Fluffing her natural grey curls and looking at me with her weak-sighted eyes, she usually exclaims with simple-hearted joy, “Can you imagine? Nobody of those people reached the age of forty and here I am! Who could have predicted this? So don’t wish ill to your neighbour”.

And back then two sympathetic male teachers encouraged her to leave the village, telling her that it was the only way to recover her health. One of those teachers, who had a big house in a nighbouring village and was definitely in love, asked my mother to marry him. She declined his offer, saying she couldn’t marry a man without loving him. So she decided to move to her uncle, who lived in the distant northern Soviet republic of Bashkiria. He was especially fond of my mother because she was the only one who wrote him letters while he was fighting in the Second World War. Later, when he visited the village, the War hero, his entire breast decorated with medals, he invited his favourite niece to live with him and his family after she finished school and try her luck there. 

My mother needed money for tickets and some warm clothes, I suppose, but she was lucky. They had a very fertile sow, which had 12 piglets three times a year. As peasants never received any money for their work in the collective farm fields selling their own produce was the only way to get some cash. Luckily, my mother made a good profit from those piglets and provided her sister with money when the latter was leaving. In the end when she sold the sow, she had enough money for her own trip. So a year after her sister’s departure my mother did it at last – she left her village forever.

To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country

7. Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

8. My mother's struggle for freedom

9. A boy from the orphanage across the road

10. Living at the edge of the city

11. My grandmother's imprisonment

My mother's stories (chapter ten)

My mother’s stories

chapter 10

My grandmother's imprisonment

 My mother’s choice to live at the edge of the city might look strange considering that she was so eager to leave her village for ever and break all the ties which bound her to people who lived there. It was not so easy for her, I think, as she really loved the picturesque nature of the place but soon after her friend left for the military service she got another blow. She was going to continue her education in the primary school teacher’s training college in the nearest town but had to give it up because of her mother’s imprisonment.

According to my mother’s words her mother got herself imprisoned on purpose for she had a false idea that a prison was something like a boarding school, where she could read books lying in bed and would have lectures from time to time. She was the youngest child looked after by two elder brothers and a sister and spoilt by her mother who lost her first five children during two epidemics of typhoid and some intestinal disease, which had rolled over the village. So my mother’s mother didn’t get used to hard work and tried to avoid it by all means. From time to time she got herself put in hospital for this reason. Besides she loved medical treatment and everything connected with it. That is why, I suppose, she started making illegal abortions. At that time such operations were forbidden and a lot of women died after they received unqualified help.

My grandmother didn’t have such cases in her practice, thank goodness, and the case, which led her to imprisonment, was rather the opposite. It was her bad temper that did it, actually. She failed once and the baby was born after all. Its mother came and demanded a piece of fabric that she had given as the price for the operation back. My grandmother didn’t have it any more and offered something different in return. The woman refused and a huge row followed. In the end my grandmother, beside herself with fury, shouted “So go to the police and write a statement on me!” And that’s exactly what the woman did. All my grandmother’s old clients came to the trial and shouted vigorously that she was innocent and hadn’t done anything of the sort. Nevertheless she was convicted and sentenced to four years of imprisonment. My mother had been just admitted to the college but after her mother’s conviction she had to take her documents back because she couldn’t leave their household and her younger sister alone. I don’t know why but she had never tried to continue her education after that.

My grandmother’s imprisonment was, actually, payment for her adventurous character. As my mother used to tell me she could lie ill with high temperature, but when some neighbour knocked on their window late in the evening to warn them that a truck was going to leave for the nearest town or even some far-off city at the crack of dawn, her mother would jump out of bed, fill her bags with something for sale and there she was in that truck early in the morning rushing to that remote market, where she could convert her goods into money. Here my mother usually added that later her mother wasted that money lending it to someone and never getting it back or buying some ugly clothes. It looked like the process was more important for my grandmother than the result or, probably, she just liked the feeling of her own importance when people were flattering her and asking for money.

At that time people didn’t have enough respect for the state property. They never do, as a matter of fact; but back then it was more justifiable. Half-starved existence in the collective farms didn’t increase people’s desire to follow the law. My grandmother had never been afraid to break it and for her it was especially dangerous. As a wife of “the enemy of the people” she was always at the top of the list of those who could be punished. Yet my grandmother had always been too reckless, too risky. And it was the time when the Law of Three Spikelets was raging in full. I remember my inability to understand the point of the Law after my mother had explained the meaning of its name to me. Why, on earth, could people be imprisoned for three spikelets taken from the fields? Those spikelets were left behind after the harvest had already been collected and were going to rot in the fields anyway. I just couldn’t understand this. And it looked like people weren’t in a hurry to obey that law either. So no wonder that show trials were carried out all over the country.

My mother often described one of those trials maybe because it showed her mother’s character so well. Two men were convicted there for stealing some amount of wheat. Their judges seemed to have specific sense of humour or, perhaps, they had some special instructions about that. Anyway, my mother was startled by the fact that the two men were sentenced to eight and twelve years of imprisonment – precisely in accordance with the weight of stolen grain. As soon as they came home after the trial my grandmother seized two empty bags and said to my mother, “Let’s go to the fields and pinch some wheat”. My mother stared at her in disbelief and spluttered, “You just saw those two men getting one year for a kilo of stolen grain and you are going to take the same road?” But my grandmother just couldn’t understand what she was talking about. So my mother put her foot down and said she was not going anywhere.

It was far from being their first quarrel when my mother tried to bring her mother to reason. Everything was in vain. Her mother was imprisoned in the end and she was left alone to deal with their big household and her younger sister who was not used to hard work just like their own mother. 

To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country

7. Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

8. My mother's struggle for freedom

9. A boy from the orphanage across the road

10. Living at the edge of the city

My mother's stories (chapter nine)

My mother’s stories 
     chapter 9
Living at the edge of the city

       My future parents had to part when the time came for my father to join the army. The orphanage organized a big farewell party on this occasion and a lot of villagers came there attracted by free treat. Following the tradition some of them left some money on a small table standing in the corner. Young recruits usually left that money to their parents to wait for them to come back. As my father had no parents he came to my mother with a considerable sum in his hands and asked her to keep it safe for him. But she told him she couldn’t accept it as with her heart problems she could die at any moment. She advised him to make some hiding place in his trunk or clothes. My father was not a very practical man – nevertheless, somehow he managed to save his money and ten years later it became the initial investment when my parents started to build our house.

They used that money exactly how those people who collected it for a future soldier meant to: for building a nest for a new family. Survival and continuation of your kin – that is the point of rural tradition. I have never been a part of it and have never felt comfortable as a tiny part of human crowd but there is something touching in rural tradition for me. This aspiration to share all the significant events of their lives with their neighbours, whether it was a wedding or a funeral, this readiness to unite their efforts to face some natural disaster – it was the only way to survive. This tradition is lost in the cities completely. What is more, the inhabitants of the cities usually consider themselves superior to the villagers, comfortably forgetting that, in spite of all the achievements of modern technology, they couldn’t live long without those people working hard for them in the fields. Yet it can’t be denied that due to scientific and technological progress the percentage of the villagers has dropped dramatically since the beginning of the 20^th century.

Most of those, who flew away from the villages, were young people– it was a global process, actually. My mother didn’t know anything about it, but it seemed that everything led her to the decision to leave her village for ever. Later in our family’s mythology my mother’s daring to leave the village was always presented as a great feat and, as a matter of fact, I still think that it really was. It doesn’t matter that she was one of many who were brave enough to leave their habitual life and rush forward to meet their unknown destiny. I have never been able to repeat my mother’s feat myself, in spite of a strong desire to do it at the same age of twenty one, when my mother and my future husband were ruthlessly pulling me in opposite directions.

I have lived in our settlement, at the edge of the city, for fifty years. Inhabitants of many-storeyd blocks of flats on the other side of the railroad often called our settlement “the village”, usually with a note of slight contempt in their voices. I remember the time when it hurt my feelings. As a young clumsy wife, who could never have dinner ready on time, I dreamt about a flat with all conveniences, where I could be more successful with my housework. A lot of time passed before I understood what living in a flat would have meant for me. I would have been deprived of all the things that I loved so much: fresh sweet air (‘exactly like in the country-side’ as some of our guests used to say), nightingales singing in the forest belt near the railroad in May, our games among the trees and a strong sweet odour of grass squashed by our children’s feet filling the air. And orange tremulous glow on our faces when we were sitting around the fire on summer evenings. And discordant roll-call of roosters early in the morning. I wouldn’t have had any of it if my mother hadn’t chosen a place for living at the edge of the city where she could keep more or less rural style of life.

Nowadays things changed, of course. The city expansion couldn’t leave the world of my childhood untouched. It’s very nice and helpful to have a gas stove and hot water in the house, especially for a person who dislikes housework as I do. Yet the price for it is a belt of garages, which replaced the forest belt with nightingales. The air isn’t fresh and sweet any more and the trees don’t shade generously our streets in summer heat as they used to do. Some of the trees were felled for different reasons and others were ruthlessly mutilated to prevent them from damaging electrical and Internet wires. Too many wires on our telegraph poles and not enough trees – that is our reality. But still I can get out of my house into my yard in spring and watch some things blooming and butterflies fluttering above them as much as I want to.

It’s funny how often in my youth I used to reproach my mother for her choice to live in a house and not in a flat. And only much later I understood it was really a blessing for me to live in such a place. Didn’t I feel ill and uncomfortable every time when I lived in some flat even for a short period? It was a sensation of living in a too closed space with not enough air in it. Maybe it’s some kind of claustrophobia. And whenever I looked at my favourite landscape of wide open fields covered with motley grass - hasn’t it always stirred up a strong desire within me to turn into a light-footed antelope and rush forward, feeling a fragrant wind whistling in my ears?

          To be continued... 

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country

7. Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

8. My mother's struggle for freedom

9. A boy from the orphanage across the road

My mother's stories (chapter eight)

My mother's stories
chapter 8

A boy from the orphanage across the road

         It was only the female part of population in the village who disapproved of my mother. She was popular among the boys and one of the teachers even asked her to marry him. And it was not surprising. I remember my own impression when I saw her old photographs. I felt rather a pang of envy when I was looking at her nicely-shaped brows and eyes under a crown of thick, wavy hair. These photos were taken a few years after she left the village and she had an expression of a beauty who was well aware of her attractiveness. My own hair didn’t have any curls and I have never been so pretty, of course, but it took me almost 50 years to understand I was not bad-looking either and my daughter was not wrong when she praised my old photographs. It was just my up-bringing. My mother thought it was bad for a young girl’s moral to think she was attractive. So I didn’t. And it had its advantages – when the time came and my youthful attractiveness began to wane it didn’t become such a big tragedy for me as it was for my mother.

     Anyway neither my mother’s good looks nor her success at school improved her mother’s attitude to her. It had a rather opposite effect. Her mother never attended school herself. She was taught to read and write at some short-term courses and was not very good at it. And her elder daughter with her excellent memory was the best pupil at school and was always chosen to recite some long poem at the festive concerts. Everybody was clapping when she was descending from the stage and she was always given some present for her performances. Usually it was a package of sweets and cookies, but once it was a pair of mittens. All the girls were so impressed and envious. Adults couldn’t imagine it was possible to buy such garments for children. It was just a waste of money! Nevertheless, after my mother’s triumph with the mittens several most prosperous fathers bought them for their daughters.  
     Especially warm feeling my mother cherished for the famous Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who lived at the time of serfdom. They used to have a big performance on his birthday and, of course, it was she, who recited one of his long poems with vivid pictures of slave labour and poverty against a beautiful background of Ukrainian nature. Her reciting always drew tears from the most part of the audience. The poet himself was a surf till the age of 24, so no wonder his verses were so touching. My mother learnt most of them by heart from a thick volume she inherited from her father.

My father’s surname was the first thing that attracted my mother when she met him. He was just a boy, several months younger than her, from the orphanage across the road. But he shared his surname with her favourite poet. She even told me once that she chose my father among the other suitors because he had no relatives and she loved his surname. When she was in a more sentimental mood she could tell that he was her devoted friend through all her teens.

It was a really hard time for her. Although her mother didn’t attack her with her fists any more she could never be insensible to her fits of fury with her eyes flashing and her mouth spitting curses. My mother always lost her appetite after those ugly scenes. Maybe this emotional pressure that she had to endure and the great famine in 1947, when she almost starved to death, caused the serious problems with her health. Her heart was racing painfully, she couldn’t eat and sleep. Her excellent memory began to fail and she couldn’t be the best at school any more.

At that time when my mother was sure her life was not going to last for long the boy from the orphanage across the road started to come and look after her. He chopped firewood and brought water from the well and then, while my mother was cooking, her new friend was playing the guitar. She always slept well after his little concerts. I believe the guitar accompanied them as well when they were going for a walk. I remember a post-card that I found once among the old photographs. A young couple was strolling there through the blooming fields. A girl had flowers in her hands or maybe a garland of flowers on her head – I forgot the details. But I remember the inscription made by my mother’s hand: “It’s just like us, darling. Only we would have your guitar with us for company”. My mother used to tell me she had never been in love with my father but it looked like their friendship was gentler than she wanted me to believe, for some reason.

Was she trying to keep me from having close relationship with a man? This instinctive desire is especially strong in those mothers who are attached to their children too much and don’t want them to grow up, as it was in my case. Anyway, although I couldn’t remember my father playing the guitar, as I was pretty small when he played a lot, but I have always been extremely sensitive to its sound. And was it really so strange that when I took notice of my future husband he was playing the guitar? Yet it was not until our third year at university together! I think our marriage lasted so long in spite of all the disagreements that we had because my husband loved playing the guitar and I loved to listen to him playing.

           As for my father it was a great blow for him when working at some dangerous machine at his plant he lost two fingers on his left hand and couldn’t play the guitar any more. All his friends and coworkers assured him it was possible to learn how to press the strings with another hand. My father tried hard but didn’t manage it and smashed his guitar into pieces in the end. I suppose he had another instrument too because I remember myself finding an old guitar, half cracked, lying in the distant corner of the shed. I was really astonished when my mother told me that my father loved playing it and that there was a cat, who always came and sat beside him listening. This animal even tried to join the music with its mewing. I just couldn’t imagine how it was possible for a cat to sing. However, especially surprising for me was that after the end of the concert the cat liked to jump onto my father’s lap and take sweets straight out of his mouth. As far as I can remember I never noticed any affection for the cats from his side. He usually had some hobbies but I don’t think he had ever had a real passion for anything since he lost his fingers. He had definitely loved his wife but it was not the same feeling that he had when at the age of eighteen he had to say farewell to her.

To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

*  *  *   

     This is just a short announcement for those who’ve been reading “Five favourite things since my childhood” more or less regularly. I decided to divide my story into two parts. At first it was supposed to be five short stories united under the title “Five favourite things since my childhood”, but when I reached the fifth story “Travelling” I couldn’t start it properly for a long time. Maybe it happened because there was no travelling in my childhood – only dreams about it. So I started to write about trips and walking tours with my husband and children and my story moved forward easily enough. But gradually I noticed that I couldn’t stop writing and the story about my love for travelling turned into an actual travelling through time. After some search I found the place where “Travelling” should be finished. The following story I called “My mother’s stories”. Actually, it’s my stories too – just a mixture of them, an attempt to understand why everything in my family and in my country was going on as if people had a goal to spoil their life as much as they were able to.

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country
7. Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

8.My mother's struggle for freedom

My mother's stories (chapter seven)

My mother's stories 
chapter seven
My mother's struggle for freedom

         The mass loss of cattle at the beginning of collectivization was not completely in vain. Communist leaders thought better of it and peasants were allowed to have some livestock of their own. According to my mother, they could have a cow, a pig, some poultry and goats in one yard. And that milk in the kettle, that she used to carry to the reception center, was a tax upon a cow that their family had to pay to the state. My mother remembered their cow clearly: it was black and white and aggressive with long sharp horns. No wonder she was afraid of it. It was not very productive, but, of course, they got much more milk than those three liters in the kettle. Her mother, however, preferred to sell it.

         “Of course, she drank a lot of milk in her childhood,”  my mother always finished her story about her longing for milk in quiet rage, “And money she usually lent to someone or spent on clothes. But she never got her money back and the clothes were mostly black. Nobody wanted them except her!”

       Hatred – that was the main feeling my mother had for her mother. Was it really mutual? My mother always believed it was. Their neighbours scarcely had any doubts about it, watching how fiercely her mother punished her for any fault she could find. And their children liked to have some fun telling her mother, when she was coming from the field-work, tired and sulky, how they had seen her elder daughter beat her little one. After that they had a real entertainment, watching the process of punishment over their fences. When my mother’s younger sister Zina grew slightly older, she always rushed forward to protect her sister, shouting that it was not true – it was their neighbours’ slander. She waved her arm, pointing that their neighbours were just laughing at their mother, not even hiding out of sight and calling her “thick-headed goose”.

       So that was how everything was going on in my mother’s childhood. Actually, I was growing up listening to my mother’s stories about her childhood and youth. How often I heard in response to my complaints that it was nothing in comparison with what she had when she was a child. My mother was right, of course, but somehow it didn’t make my tribulations less painful or more bearable. Nevertheless, in spite of all those pictures of poverty, starvation, people’s envy and malevolence, that usually prevailed over their kindness and helpfulness, her stories left me with a feeling of an extremely interesting and exciting life. I think it was her passion and inspiration as she was telling her stories that did it.

         How much bitterness there was in her voice when she used to tell about her sister playing with her ball while she was working hard. Surely their mother was so fond of Zina because she was black-haired, rosy-cheeked and had a good appetite! And, of course, everybody thought her younger sister was sweet because she was lisping something funny till the age of five. And what a surprise it was when one day a 5-year-old Zina came running into the kitchen-garden, where my mother was working, and shouted that their mother called her to join them at the dinner-table. “Why!” exclaimed my mother in shock. “You can speak properly”. And her sister confessed that she was making up her baby-talk so long because everybody was laughing and loved her for that. “But I won’t do it any more!” finished Zina eagerly. “I am going to be like you”.

         It was, I think, the beginning of their friendship. Yet, my mother has never appreciated her sister’s devotion in full measure. She could never forget and forgive that Zina was their mother’s favourite. She was always too small to work and had never been beaten. Except once when during an argument Zina recklessly called their mother a slut and provoked her fit of fury. An ax that their mother threw, as she was chasing Zina across the yard, missed her favourite daughter’s head by inches. “And imagine,” my mother used to finish this story with a note of admiration in her voice, “we had to call a man to pull that ax out of the fence pole”.

         Her voice trembled with vindictive joy when she told me another story – how she made her mother stop beating her at last. She was twelve or thirteen at that time and one or two centimeters higher than her. So no wonder she managed to look steadily into her mother’s eyes and warn her she was going to fight back. “Can you believe it?” my mother usually finished this episode in triumph. “Her fist came to a halt just in front of my eye and she never touched a hair on my head since then!”

         She was rather sarcastic when she told me how their neighbours and relatives disapproved of her blond hair, calling her “White”. She used to mimic eagerly their loud whispers telling me how they pestered her mother with questions about her appearance. How could it be that her blond daughter had black brows and eyelashes? Why has she allowed her to dye them? My mother was, actually, chuckling with pleasure, describing vividly how her mother lost her temper at last, rushed upon her with a white wet cloth and began to rub her brows vigorously - only to discover that it was their natural colour.

       To be continued… 

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country
7. Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

My mother's stories (chapter six)

My mother's stories
chapter 6
Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

             Ten years after I visited my mother’s village for the first time I was there again. But it was not really a visit – just passing along the main street of the village in a group of tourists, pupils from different schools. We had a walking tour through the countryside and it was just one of the villages on our way. As we were toiling along the road with heavy rucksacks hurting ruthlessly our shoulders, I was trying hard to find something familiar that could remind me of my first visit, but without success. It was a village like so many others which we had already passed. Maybe one of the poorest as it had so many houses with thatched roofs. I had a feeling that time had stopped there and nothing changed much since my barefooted mother, slightly older than five, was trotting along the same road on one of her mother’s errands.

             Usually my mother was sent to borrow something or to take the thing her mother had lent to someone back. Actually, her mother could lend anything: from a smart headscarf to a toothbrush if a person, who had asked her, was skillful enough in flattery. Sometimes it took a long time to find a borrowed thing, because people continued to lend it to each other and it was travelling around the village. My mother still remembers one pretty kerchief, cream-coloured with red flowers - she had been searching for it for weeks. She was especially persistent in that case, because she had just reached her teens and it was her turn to inherit this nice-looking thing from her mother.

             However, it was not safe for a little girl, who was afraid of dogs, to stroll through the village - they say those animals can smell fear. Or maybe my mother was running and that is why a pack of dogs began to chase her. Anyway, she stopped dead, watching the dogs that were slowly approaching her, growling. Thanks God a man with an iron chain in his hands was passing by. He rushed forward shouting, attacked those dogs, who didn’t want to retreat, and my mother was saved. This accident didn’t stop her mother from sending her elder daughter on errands, of course. But, I think, my mother didn’t mind it, actually – at least those journeys through the village saved her from hard work in the kitchen garden or from housework, which she was forced to do since the age of five.

             Sometimes my mother even had some benefits from her wanderings, as it was when she found the cream-coloured kerchief at last, or when she used to carry a kettle full of milk to the reception center. It was the only way for her to have her beloved milk – she just stopped, when she thought nobody could see her, and sucked surreptitiously one or two mouthfuls of milk from the kettle snout. At the time of my mother’s early childhood it was not really difficult to find such a secluded place – at least half of the houses stood empty, swept out by great famine, which broke out at the very beginning of total collectivization. Yet they were lucky, as far as I know in the steppe regions the whole villages stood deserted, swept empty by death. Of course, those poor people didn’t have their forest with its berries, mushrooms and nuts to help them to survive. Besides, the forest was a good hiding place for those cunning people, who managed to save some of livestock from being taken to the collective farm. In fact, most of the cattle was lost, slaughtered by those who didn’t want to give their animals away or died from hunger and bad treatment in the collective farms. Sometimes it caused a real tragedy.
       My daughter has recently reminded me one of my mother’s stories that I had forgotten for some reason – maybe because it was that kind of story, which is better to forget. It was about a man, who loved his horses. I think those two horses were really handsome and thoroughbred, because some people from abroad came to the village and tried to buy them. Those people offered a really high price, but the man refused point blank. And later, after those poor horses were taken to the collective farm and died somewhere among the other doomed animals, their master lost his mind. He was often seen roaming about the village, almost naked or completely naked in different versions of my mother’s story, complaining that his horses had escaped again and asking if anybody had seen them. People usually said they had and waved their arms in some direction. The man didn’t change his manner of clothing even when winter came. Some time later he just disappeared and nobody had ever seen him again. And nobody had ever learnt if it was frost that did it or he was secretly imprisoned or taken to the asylum not to compromise the noble idea of collectivization.

         To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country