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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среда, 30 января 2019 г.

My mother's stories (chapter twenty five - the continuation)


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


       I don't know exactly when my mother learnt the truth about her father's fate. But it definitely happened at the beginning of the 60s. By that turbulent time known, as Khrushchev's Thaw, she hadn't lived in the village for several years. After travelling all over the country or through half the country at least, my mother settled down in Odessa, a city near the Black Sea. She and her young husband had to rent their place of living at first. My mother had a lot of funny stories about that time. I remember her telling me with amusement how when I was a baby we lived at the edge of the city in some kind of a shed, which she used to call “a goat box”. Or telling me with awe how I, being a toddler, narrowly escaped my untimely death when I came up on my unstable legs to a big and very aggressive chained dog and tried to seize it by the ears. I was saved by our landlady, who snatched me from under the very nose of the astonished beast at the last second.
      Anyway, it was not something new for my mother to endure privations. I believe she felt much worse when my father got a flat in the factory region at last, and she had to suffer from foul air, bad water and lack of greenery. Occasionally her mother visited her there. My grandmother usually arrived surrounded by a bunch of her fellow-villagers, and my mother had lots of trouble making the bed on the floor for all of them. I think in that wet and shadowy flat she got the first news about the identity of a man whose denunciation brought her poor father to his destiny.
      It was especially painful for my mother to learn that the man was their neighbour. And she used to be so friendly with his wife! That young woman was respected in the village as she married a much older man with two small children to look after. My mother liked her because she was benevolent and, unlike most of the villagers, was always ready to share the secrets of her housewife skills with anybody. It was she who taught my mother how to remove stains from linen by boiling it in soap solution. In my mother's own family sheets were never washed, and unless they were new they looked revoltingly dark gray.
      As for borsch (the famous Ukrainian vegetable soup), which was an important part of everyday meal, her granny didn't know how to cook it properly. She threw all the vegetables into a pot at the same time, boiling all of them till the beetroot became soft enough, while the rest got overcooked, of course. Trying to disguise the unpleasant odour, the old woman put too much dill into her borsch, but it didn't help. The smell that she got in the end was really disgusting and the taste was not much better.
      My mother's mother on the whole hated most of the housework, and, to be honest, I do understand her. Nevertheless, as my mother used to tell me with bitterness, her mother did cook tasty dishes, but only on those rare occasions when a crowd of guests was expected to a feast. On ordinary days making borsch she poured too little oil on the frying pan and her fried onion was always burnt and smelled badly.
      Naturally my mother was eager to learn why, when their neighbour's young wife was making borsch, the flavour floating through the air was so delicious. So she tried to be somewhere nearby just to watch this skillful housewife in the process of cooking. Soon she knew by heart in what succession the vegetables had to be thrown into the pot. After that, every time her younger sister was called to dine, she asked suspiciously who had cooked borsch. Although their mother always answered her sister had, the distrustful girl used to run to the pot, and lifting its lid, sniffed carefully. If it was not true, the little one understood it at once and snorted scornfully, “Let the person who made this broth eat it herself then!” My mother was pleased, of course, with such appreciation of her cooking, and felt really grateful to her new friend for all the priceless knowledge that she had so selflessly shared with her.
      My mother had never been able to get anything useful out of her own mother, who had very little patience for her unloved daughter, and was always ready to pull her by the hair if she was not quick enough to understand her explanations. No wonder my mother was so happy to find a friend and a teacher in their neighbour's young wife. And what a blow it was for her to learn that her good friend's husband informed the punitive agency against her dear father!
      Why did he do it? He seemed to be like any other man in the village. Although there was one peculiarity - he never looked into your eyes while speaking to you. Was it guilty conscience or just fear that people could find out the truth about him being an informer?
      If this was his worst fear, it came true in the end. It happened after Nikita Khrushchev started the rehabilitation of political convicts. All the village was buzzing about that man when the shocking news had finally reached it. As my mother was told by her agitated fellow-villagers, their neighbour the manager was summoned to the punitive agency and asked why he had written the false information against her father. It turned out that the man, whom my grandfather had supposedly killed, was in good health and the oil-mill that he had set on fire stood undamaged. They didn't ask themselves, though, why they didn't check this information much earlier.
      Many years later I learnt to my dismay that at the time of Stalin's rule millions of denunciations were written, and they were full of such groundless and often ridiculous accusations, which nobody bothered to check. It was difficult for me to accept that my grandfather's story was not some local blunder but a tiny part of the global process that was much more sinister, thinning out the country, killing its best citizens in the first place.

To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
27. The importance of family (the ending)
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вторник, 27 ноября 2018 г.

My mother's stories (chapter twenty five)

My mother's stories
chapter 25
The informer


       After her miraculous survival in 1947 my mother lived in the village only four more years. I don't know why but I have never before associated my mother's heart problems and nightmares during that period with the damage that she received at the time of the famine. She almost starved to death then and definitely needed a special treatment and really good nourishment. I am sure she got nothing of the sort. As far as I can remember my mother's tale, her mother did take her to see a doctor in the neighbouring town a few times. But she was not satisfied with his prescription. So, choosing the time when the doctor left his consulting room, her mother bribed a nurse asking her for some injection, which, in her opinion, would be good for her daughter's heart. But obviously it was not, because as soon as my mother got it she unexpectedly fainted. The doctor, who just came in at this moment, scolded the nurse furiously. My mother, however, flatly refused to look for help of official medicine after that incident. So she continued to suffer from nightmares, dreaming about a snake hiding inside her pillow almost every night, and inevitably attracting sympathetic stares when, extremely weak with her heart racing, she was slowly dragging herself through the village.
      It so happened that the children of my mother's generation had a big gap in their education because of the Second World War. Actually, since 1941 till 1945 they attended school only for about a year when they were under the Romanian rule. Then the Germans came to replace the Romanians and those didn't bother themselves with education on the occupied territories, having enough trouble on their front line. Thus children started studying again only in 1945 after they had been freed by the Soviet army. I think my mother was still at school at the age of 19 or even 20. Yet she never finished it. Her excellent memory suddenly began to fail and she couldn't utter a word when a teacher asked her a question.
      No wonder that seeing her people whispered behind my mother's back, foretelling her untimely death. But she survived this time too, and being encouraged by one of her teachers, left the village with firm determination not to set her foot there ever again. Nevertheless, 30 years later she had to return to the village and live there for a month taking care of her ill mother. As soon as the old woman felt better my mother hired a bus and took her to our city with all her worldly possessions. I remember even the chickens were brought to our place as we lived in a private house and had a spacious yard. And here my grandmother lived for the last two years of her life, quarreling in turn with her two daughters and changing her place of living all the time – exactly like her own old mother used to do during her time.
      A few years later my mother tried to go to her native parts one more time, moved by her elderly aunt's plea to visit her. But it was a total failure. I remember how they departed: she and my 7-year-old daughter, who was full of elation that she was accompanying her granny on this trip. My father had to see them both off to the train station. I was not really surprised when an hour or two later my father and daughter suddenly appeared saying they came back by tram but my mother had to reach home much later. As it turned out they took a taxi but half way to the station she felt really sick. So after vomiting at the edge of the road my mother couldn't force herself to board any kind of transport and said that she would come home on foot.
      When they were leaving something in my mother's countenance prepared me for such an ending. But still, although I had had a nasty feeling that something like that was going to happen, I felt infuriated. Didn't my mother know she suffered from seasickness most of all in cars? Surely they had to catch a bus! Knowing my mother's love for theatrical effects, I suspected it was just a little performance organized for me personally. Nowadays I understand it was not a pretense. In spite of her love for a bit of acting it would have been too much even for her to pretend like that.
      As for my rage because of the trip which hadn't taken place it was my usual reaction to my mother's tricks at that time. It seemed to me that all my life was punctuated by such enthusiastic beginnings which suddenly came to a failure. How often did I hear from her “Oh, I really wanted to do this or that but I felt dizzy all of a sudden. I just couldn't enter that shop, or office or whatever it was”? And that was not all. Didn't she have this nasty habit to persuade me to do something and then pour a cool bucket of discouragement on my head? I believed the roots of my lack of self-confidence lay there. And wasn't it my damn uncertainty and constant hesitation that prevented me from reaching any success in my life? However, I think it was my marriage that killed our trust in each other once and for all. I couldn't forgive my mother for her extreme hostility towards it, and what hurt my feelings even more was her stubborn refusal to respect my right to make my own mistakes.
      And only now, so many years after I split up with my husband, I began to understand my mother's desperate reluctance to visit her native land. It was not only a place of hard labour and poverty. It was the place where her mother always preferred her sister to her, where her beloved father was arrested and everybody could poke their finger at her calling her “a daughter of the enemy of the people”. I imagine what a shock it was for my mother when she learnt who had written the false information against her father. She could never have thought it was him! Who could have guessed it was their neighbour the manager – the very man who had enough grain to feed his chickens even during the famine, and whose hen once laid an egg in their yard during that hungry time?

      To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
27. The importance of family (the ending)
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четверг, 27 сентября 2018 г.

My mother's stories (chapter twenty four - the ending)


My mother's stories
chapter 24
The great famine of '47
 (the ending)


      The awfulness of the idea of starvation never occurred to me when I was a child. I liked my mother's tales about the famine and found them rather amusing. I don't understand now what was so fascinating about them for me but I am afraid I was actually laughing listening to the story about cutlets from grass and stew from sparrows that my mother's granny Euphemia cooked for them that deadly spring of 1947. At the time I didn't realize, of course, that my mother and aunt were really lucky to see the end of that year. In fact, I didn't find it odd that instead of gulping down that stew the poor girls began to cry the moment they noticed tiny birds' legs sticking out from the pan and flatly refused to eat it. Euphemia, on the contrary, seemed to me rather unfeeling when I learnt that she got angry with her granddaughters' untimely sensitivity and ate the sparrows completely by herself.
      Nowadays after having the experience of half-starvation in the wild 90s (following the noisy fall of the USSR) I know that the old woman was right. It was not rats or human flesh after all. Although some people ate the latter too, overcome by the instinct of self-preservation. And can I really blame them? Can I be entirely sure that I wouldn't have done the same in their place? Yet it's a relief for me that there were no known cases of cannibalism in my mother's village.
       And my mother, it seemed, tried to draw her own death ever nearer with that overscrupulousness of hers - like in that amazing story about an egg that I remember so well. She and her sister were really lucky to find that egg in their yard one day. It was definitely laid by their neighbour's hen, because he was one of the few who still had chickens left alive. Most of his fellow-villagers slaughtered their cattle and poultry long ago, knowing that famine was coming and that it was better to eat their animals before they started to lose their flesh. They knew that they wouldn't be able to keep them alive. But their neighbour was lucky to work as a manager of a food storehouse. No wonder he had enough grain to feed his chickens even during that hard time. However, the most incredible thing was that after finding that egg lying on the ground, my mother and aunt didn't eat it at once. Having months of starvation behind their backs, they just stood there arguing and offering that small vessel with proteins to each other. The end of the story has been variable: sometimes my mother said they gave the egg to a cat in the end, another time – that they ate it together, giving the cat its share. I don't know exactly why she was playing with details in some of her stories. Was it just her love for the art of story-telling or her usual desire to create another picture which would confirm that she was different, that in no situation she would forget about her dignity.
       And their situation was really desperate in the year of famine. It was even worse than it could have been because of her mother's unfortunate habit of lending everything to everybody in spite of the fact that she rarely got her things back. Yet, it was a really great misfortune that she lent her sister two sacks of wheat for her daughter's wedding just when the famine was about to start. If I remember correctly it was the very sister, who joked once, when answering their claims: “If I borrowed things and then gave them back I would never become rich”. Sure enough they never got their grain back. Nevertheless when at the end of winter they almost ran out of food supplies they were saved by their mother's other fault – her passion for clothes. She never had enough of them – even that money that her poor husband had saved in secret to buy them a house she wasted on garments after his arrest.
      Although I have to do my grandmother justice and mention that she bought two suits for her husband too, sincerely believing that sooner or later he was going to come back. Most of those clothes were dark-coloured or black, because, as my mother used to tell me with disgust, black was her mother's favourite colour.
      Anyway, in the year of famine my mother and her sister appreciated at last how lucky they were that their mother's trunks were full. So when it became clear that their food supplies wouldn't last them long she filled two heavy bags with those dark-coloured garments and went to Western Ukraine to swap clothes for food. By that time their granny Euphemia had already left for her elder daughter's place. The old woman always did it after having one of her numerous huge rows with their mother.
      My mother and her sister were left alone. Waiting for their mother's return, the girls tried to spare that food that she left for them as much as possible. But the day came at last when they had eaten the last crumbs and still their mother hadn't come back. So they were just staying in bed, drinking water from time to time. Lying there for three long days, my mother had some kind of hallucinations – as soon as she closed her eyes a long table began to float in front of her. It was crammed with different dishes, but mostly it was bread, freshly baked bread, nice and brown.
      I remember my mother told me once that actually there had been some people she could have asked for help. I think she meant her aunt who lived in the neighbouring town and their fortunate neighbour's young wife. That girl married the man when he was left a widower with two small children. My mother and she were almost of the same age and they immediately became friends. That young woman could definitely give them something in secret from her husband the manager.
      But here my mother's pride, her habitual shield from the outer world, played a bad trick with her. Perhaps she had some hesitation if she should go asking for help but soon she and her sister were too weak to walk anywhere. They were saved by their mother's long-expected return. Her arrival, I am afraid, was not so triumphant as she had meant it to be. As she went to the toilet at the train station two sacks with food were stolen from her. Hot-tempered as usual their mother tried to attack her companions whom she had asked to keep an eye on her things. Furious, she accused them of a secret agreement against her. But everything was in vain – she couldn't prove anything, of course. Luckily for the girls their mother had never let go of the smaller bag with cereals. So now she could act as a savior of her poor daughters, starting cooking porridge for them as soon as she came home. That small bag lasted them long enough to live till the field works started in spring and the state began to provide peasants with miserable rations of bread giving them back at last the small part of that grain which they grew with their own hands.

To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
27. The importance of family (the ending)
29. The great famine of '47
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вторник, 22 мая 2018 г.

My mother's stories (chapter twenty four)


My mother's stories
chapter 24
The great famine of '47



        Somehow listening to my mother's stories I have never understood what it was for her to live in her village marked as “a daughter of the enemy of the people”. I think she was too proud to show me that it bothered her too much. It was not really strange, of course, that she was so eager to leave the village, considering poverty and hard labour. But it couldn't explain why my mother was so determined not to set her foot there ever again. In contrast to her grudge against her mother she was fond of her grandmother and aunt, her father's sister. The latter didn't have children with her husband and they treated my mother as their own child. Moreover she really missed her beloved oak forest, where she used to spend so many happy hours wandering with her granny. So why was the very thought of coming back so hateful for her?
        For a long time I believed it was my mother's hatred towards her own mother that prevented her from visiting the village. Yet, after putting together all the details, while writing my memoirs, I began to think that the main reason was rather different. It was her fellow-villagers' enmity that hurt her feelings even more than her mother's dislike. It was them who couldn't forgive my mother her proud demeanour, her flat refusal to bear her status of “the daughter of the enemy” as a stain of shame. I imagine it was not so easy for her to stand on her dignity because of the rural custom not only to hiss accusations behind someone's back but to throw them straight to their faces. So that was the time, I think, when my mother developed a habit of using her pride as a shield against everything and everybody, a trait that cost me so many inconveniences in my childhood and irritated me so much in later years.
       I don't remember exactly if my mother had ever had any doubts as to her father's innocence. But I do recall clearly her tale about some young Komsomol activists, members of Young Communist League, who came to her house once. They explained to her that if she meant to continue her education she had to join their ranks but before that she had to sign a statement with - a renunciation of her father.
       My mother didn't think twice to say “no”, adding mockingly at the end that Komsomol could easily do without her but she couldn't do without her father. It was dangerous to joke like that at that time and my mother was really lucky to get away with it. Nevertheless, that refusal predetermined all her future life. The doors of the college were closed for her after that in spite of her good marks at school and all the hopes of a good career were now lost.
         Besides, my mother had to pay for that refusal when a great famine of 1947 broke out in the country. I remember her looking at my father with a mixture of light envy and amusement and telling me with mild indignation that during the famine he got as much bread as an adult in his orphanage, while they received half as much as ordinary citizens being “the family of an enemy of the people”. To my surprise my father reacted with good humour to her remark. He just smiled reminiscently and said that he had even more than that – there were one or two pieces of sausage floating in his soup on all red-letter days. And what a joy it was for orphans to fish those small delicious bits out of their festive broth!
        At the same time my mother had to survive on their miserable bread rations – she and the majority of the population, that is, those who didn't belong to some strictly limited privileged group. The others weren't in much better position than my mother's family. Actually, they began to receive that poor help from the state only after the field work began in spring. Before that, in autumn, that very state grabbed most of the wheat that was grown on the collective farms' fields, leaving peasants to survive with that grain that they managed to grow on their personal plots. And it was not much as it was a notorious year of great drought and bad harvest.
       They say Stalin's regime never stopped trading in grain. Even in 1933 and 1947, at the time of great famines, heavy laden trains continued to cross our borders – exactly like in that joke that was popular at the beginning of the Second World War when the USSR was still happily trading with Germany. As my father told me the narrators of the joke started with the question “Do you know what our wagon wheels say when they go abroad and then on their way back?” The answer, as for me, was simple and brilliant: going abroad the wheels rattled “rye - wheat, rye – wheat” and coming back they tapped “screws – bolts, screws – bolts”. The narrators pronounced slowly the first pair of words, giving their listeners the impression of heavy carriages full of grain. The second pair, on the contrary, was pronounced in quick succession, creating immediately the image of more than half-empty wagons with small piles of iron produce somewhere at the bottom.
         So that was the price for our industrialization. But still I can't grasp why they continued to send grain abroad when people were eating grass and swelling from starvation. I can accept a wide-spread explanation that communists organized the famine of 1933 just to suppress peasants' rebellions and force them to enter collective farms. How else could they make people work hard without getting any money for their labour? But the famine of '47 was different. It happened just after the war, when the country had been rendered lifeless with heavy death toll. It seemed mad to organize a new famine at the time like this, even if Stalin was afraid of new rebellions. But then I remembered a phrase which was ascribed to Stalin “No one is irreplaceable”. It inevitably reminded me a well-known Russian proverb “Women are still giving birth” where the same thought was put into simpler words. I can only imagine how modern feminists would react to such a statement. As for Stalin's words they say nowadays that the great moustached leader never said anything of the sort. But does it really matter? It's enough to know that it was the invariable motto of communists at the time of Stalin's rule.

      To be continued..
(c) Anna Shevchenko
27. The importance of family (the ending)
28. Why did they kill him?
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