Fish- a History of One Migration

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  The Estonians staked out homesteads, burned the woods and pulled the stumps. In the first year, they built low, sturdy barns for cattle and wintered there alongside their animals, keeping each other warm. By the beginning of the 20th century, the land of Nurmekunde (Nurmekundia in Russian), which means “a union of homesteads,” stood firmly on its own two feet. Almost everyone had learned the local language, while, of course, retaining their languid tongue and native habits. People continued to correspond with distant relatives from the old country, places like Yanni, Antsl, Lavassaare or Kallaste. One could boast to them of their newly-raised kirik,[13] of their Estonian school for which their relatives had sent books in the native tongue, of their veterinary and medical clinics, flour- and sawmills. The Baltic cattle grew larger and fatter on the Tver meadows, grew stronger and more vigorous and, crossbred with fresh bloodlines brought from the old country, produced the creamiest milk in the whole province.

  Like their cattle, the people breathed easier and prospered. Mail regularly brought news of flaxen-haired, industrious Estonian farmers flourishing in the Altai foothills and in Siberia, on the Volga steppes, in Pitsunda, and even in faraway Australia. They began to marry locals; love has no rules, as everyone knows, and does not follow bloodlines like a cattle herd. Two orchestras were started in Nurmekundia—a brass band and a folk-instrument group. Trombones, clarinets, trumpets, contrabasses, cellos and violins were mail-ordered from Europe via Petersburg and mandolins and balalaikas could be found at the Tver Fair. The Nurmekundians played at holidays and weddings, adopting, rather than neglecting, local accordion tunes, whose simpler harmonies they found more pleasing than the louder, flashier voices of the German accordions. The Estonians bought the latest in agricultural machinery: seeders, winnowers, steam-powered thrashers, and even the first tractors to be owned by anyone in Tver province.

  Then came the revolution, followed by collectivization. Homesteads were to be no more. The NKVD rake thinned out those not agreeable with the new way of life and, for the sake of fairness, those who did agree to join the kolkhoz as well. Those who were left learned to sing revolutionary anthems, organized an Estonian Komsomol, and began to print a newspaper, The Voice of Nurmekundia. Like all other kolkhoz workers across the great country, they, stripped of their passports and returned to the new serfdom, overproduced daily norms of the Socialist plan, went to war and, if they returned home, were laid in the ground of their graveyard surrounded by an aged wrought-iron fence with a square Protestant cross above the gate.

  Passports were finally issued in 1980. Even before that, however, many who had secretly continued to sing Lutheran psalms managed to slither back to Estonia. Men, when they finished their military service, would sign up for the fishing fleet and receive fishermen’s passports, which radically changed their status. They went back to their ancestral lands, settled there and immediately arranged for their families to join them. With perestroika, everyone was on the move—a mass exodus began. Some found homes with distant relatives—not in vain had they written letters for more than a hundred years—others relied on the help of those who had left before them. In short, by the end of the 1980s all that was left of the lively province was empty fields and random rows of moss-covered logs where the houses once stood; the Russian neighbors, thrifty and descending into poverty, quickly squirreled away everything else that could be of use.

  . 7 .

  In ’94, when i moved to Karmanovo, an old Latvian man Krastin and an ancient Estonian lady lived in the neighboring village of Pochinok. No trace remained of the Russian Skomorokhovo and Kuzlovo, or of any other villages. The distant Konakovo, ten miles from us, still counted about twenty families. After the demise of the kolkhoz, people lived hand-to-mouth, surviving gypsy-style. They relied on their elderly parents’ pensions or aid to families with multiple children,[14] stole lumber or aluminum wires, harvested mushrooms and berries, cut and dried beech bark to sell as a raw pharmaceutical, trapped beavers and sold fur to dealers for kopeks. Money was converted into ethyl alcohol, which burned the residents’ insides slowly but surely, until it delivered them to the moist Tver soil of the ancient graveyard.

  Leyda Yanovna Kyart, my neighbor, spent her working life as a mail carrier, mapped all the Nurmekundian homesteads and villages first with her feet and later by bicycle, sent three children to universities, buried her husband, and had no intention of moving anywhere.

  “I was born here and here I will die. My grandmother told me what it’s like to move the whole family. There’s enough work and trouble for me here.”

  I understood Leyda’s grandmother very well. Someone had painted her portrait in white zinc on the wall of a hand-built wardrobe: a white woman in a lace dress sternly regarded anyone who entered the Kyarts’ bedroom. Next to it stood an old, worn-out piano with the word “PARIS” written in gold letters on its lid.

  The homestead possessed many useful implements: a hand-operated milk separator, a meat grinder of vintage design, an ingenious line saw, the likes of which you could not find even in a museum, a sharpening stone the size of a barrel lid, kerosene lamps, drills, chisels, bits and other tools whose names and uses were obscure even to their owner. Still, everything was in working order, oiled, sharpened and ready. The Kyart fortress was equipped to withstand electricity shortages as well, which happened all the time—the lights would go out and not come back on for several days.

  There was no hope of a phone. Instead, a combine, a bailing machine, a two-horse mower and a tractor trailer were parked in the street outside the house: Leyda’s youngest son Viktor lived in Zhukovo, and he hid his share of the divided kolkhoz property here. Now that the kolkhoz was rising again, this time as a joint-stock enterprise, Viktor had joined it as a simple laborer and rented out the machinery. Basically, he worked for free, since you could not really call what he was paid a rent or a salary.

  I learned all this gradually—Aunt Leyda and I now had plenty of time. Under her tutelage, I learned to live in the country. This turned out to be no easy task. There was the silence and the endless woods, the wild animals who left tracks on the road, the large Russian stove and the warm loft atop it, and the smaller Dutch stove next to the bed. Then there were also two cows, chickens, a horse, a piglet, a dog and three cats, and Leyda Yanovna took care of them all. The vegetable garden required regular hoeing; every morning, when I pulled up weeds, a cloud of gnats would burst out of the wet grass into my face and sting me until my eyes watered. I cried in the garden without embarrassment, just as I did in the kitchen when I chopped small, pungent onions. But I had no tears at other times. With my sleeves rolled up, I helped muck the barn stalls and even learned to milk the cows—it turned out to be just as easy as squeezing off my own excess milk. When Pavlik was born, I had so much milk that I shared it with Farshida’s baby.

  . 8 .

  Karmanovo and Zhukovo are five miles apart. The distance we had covered so quickly in a car, I had to cover daily by bicycle or on foot. The bicycle, an old, heavy “Ukraine,” was in the shed; Valerka made a special trip a week later, took it apart, oiled it, put it back together and fashioned a carrier over the rear wheel, so that I could bring groceries back from the store. Having thus fixed my life, he left; communications were broken off.

  When the rains came, the clay road became impassable and the trip became a form of torture; I had to walk part of the way, leading the bicycle alongside me. Two hills to climb and one steep one to descend. The mile and a quarter in the middle, where the village of Skomorokhovo once stood, were sometimes impassable even on foot: massive tractors had ground deep ruts in the road and I had to step so carefully on the narrow, slippery shoulder, it was as if I were training to take a tight-rope walking exam.

  I got up early, at five, had some tea and bread, and set out to make it to work by eight. The linen factory was an old, long shack, clogged with dust, its dirty windows never washed. The conveyer belt ran through different machines and implements along one wall and back along half the
length of the other.

  Twelve people in the shift. The supervisor, a local girl named Nadezhda; three men of indeterminate age; an ancient stoker in the boiler room and seven women. Duties assigned regardless of gender. Number one unwinds the rolls of washed and dried linen and, with the help of number two, feeds them into the maw of the brake. Raw fibers begin their ride on the conveyer. They crawl along slowly, through a series of rolls and combs on their way to the shaker (numbers three, four and five). The machine bangs like a machine gun, kneading and combing linen stalks. In the end, it produces low-grade fiber and soft wool, weightless as cotton. This was packaged separately and shipped off for more refined processing. The factory performed cheap, uncomplicated operations. Our product was of the lowest grade, since the prehistoric line was not designed for quality.

  At eight-fifteen, when they started the line, the thunderous racket, the moaning and screeching of the machine, the vibrating and clattering, drowned out everything; the greedy conveyer demanded more and more food. Our monotonous, noisy work destroyed any desire to talk; people stiffened and retreated into themselves, became robots whose only purpose was to perform certain functions for the insatiable machine with its rumbling iron guts and clanging, polished ribs. For the first two weeks, the merciless noise haunted me and wore me out worse than the physical strain, stifling all thought. Eventually, this passed.

  In exchange, I learned to appreciate silence in a whole new way. On my way home, I would listen to the wind whistling in the electrical wires, the brook burbling under the vast canopy of a pine tree, the tiny birds chirping and cheeping in the bushes. There was greenery and water and the kindly non-burning sun, the skies always swaddled in clouds and the chirr of grasshoppers, not nearly as irritating as the choruses of Asian cicadas. I hated flies and gadflies, but I soon got used to their persistence and tried to dress in light colors: darker clothes attract bloodsucking insects. The only thing I could not get used to was the morning swarms of gnats, but no one can get used to those. I saw mowers go out to the fields dressed in white robes with scarves tied around their heads. They covered their faces completely, only leaving an opening for their eyes, making them resemble our Turkmen girls from the marketplace who insisted on veiling their beauty, even in the Soviet days, and it was probably the right thing to do: only houris in the Muslim heaven are more beautiful than young Turkmen girls.

  I came home by five or six, helped Leyda with the chores, fired up the stove, boiled some potatoes (from the two sacks the kolkhoz rationed me) in a small cast-iron pot, peeled an onion, made a simple vegetable soup, ate it hot, and lay down on the lumpy sofa by the lamp light. I would stare thoughtlessly at a book for a while and soon fall asleep.

  In the morning, I washed in a tub with water kept warm on the stove from the night before, brushed my teeth, drank tea and set out for work. My clean skin eagerly absorbed the intoxicating scents of nature, but also soaked up the stench of burning motor oil and the sweet fumes of the factory’s diesel fuel, mixed with the heavy smells of damp hay and the sour notes of linen fungus. This repeated day after day. In exchange for my nightly help with her chores, Aunt Leyda gave me a pint of milk every day and a dozen eggs on Sundays.

  On Saturdays, Leyda let me use her bathhouse, which had to be stoked, heated and supplied with twelve buckets of water carried from the well. Leyda’s children, who visited regularly, chopped the firewood. Only a steam bath could rid the skin of the factory dust. The daily ablutions in the tub alleviated the problem, but did not solve it completely, and by the end of the week my skin itched and scratched. Only the bathhouse steam and the heat from the rocks could purge the dirt and ash that clung to my body after a week in that industrial hell. Soft water and soapy potash revived my hair and returned elasticity to my skin. Wearied from the heat of the steam bath, on Saturdays I fell asleep on fresh linen sheets, feeling weightless—freed from my voluntary servitude. Sundays were all mine: I mended clothes and linens, cleaned the house and baked pies and cheese-puffs in the large oven from the dough that had been rising since the day before. Leyda Yanovna also mentored me in culinary arts. By dinnertime I had changed into clean clothes, walked the two hundred yards that separated our houses and knocked on my neighbor’s door. On Sundays we dined together, and if she had guests (she sometimes hosted hunters), everyone sat down to the table together; that was the custom. I confess I looked forward to those Sunday dinners: lonely evenings had begun to depress me; my books, read two or three times, no longer helped, and the mumbling of the radio only added to the white noise, I could never focus on the words.

  Leyda Yanovna, of course, knew about my loss, but never mentioned it, instead always finding something to praise, or telling me about her life with her husband, or sharing the settler stories she had heard from her grandmother, who sternly watched over our conversations from the bedroom wardrobe. My neighbor was so kindly and so wise that soon I began to share my troubles with her. The elderly Estonian only shook her head at my accounts of Gennady’s doings.

  “Fancy that. Peter and I never fought. He liked to drink, and I always poured him some, but he listened to me: if I said that’s enough, he smiled and went to bed. Although I have seen what you are talking about, and not only from the Russians. Estonians, they also learned to drink vodka, and to beat their wives, and I saw children suffer, I saw all kinds of things.”

  She spoke Russian as if she were chanting, and her slight accent only added to the charm of her speech; listening to her was like listening to a fairytale. She peppered her sentences with “oi” or “fancy that!” and liked to begin with “I’ll tell you a tale now, you listen,” which might be followed by an account of her battles with the notary to divide the property among her children. She never lost heart and never feared her isolation, saying only, “Wait till the blizzards come howling in winter, then you’ll come running to my stove.”

  Her words and practical advice comforted me.

  “You were right to leave, that was the thing to do. You can’t meddle in young peoples’ lives, and when your Valerka doesn’t visit—well, he’s working, he’s busy, he’ll come when he can. Don’t mope around, go play with my little chickens.”

  She loved her “little chickens,” and her “little cows,” and her “pony,” and “doggies,” and “kitties.” On her advice, I would go to visit the “little chickens.” Stupid, evil-eyed, and quarrelsome, the chickens appalled me, the way they dashed so greedily after bread crumbs, choked on their food and shoved each other. Naturally, I did not share these observations with Leyda. Mustang, the old gelding, was the one who became my friend. I could brush him endlessly. I would bring him treats of salted bread and rub his powerful, knobby hocks. Or I would just stand there, pressing my face into his dark neck and inhaling the sweet smell of horse sweat. He also came to love me—instantly and forever; he neighed every time I walked or biked past his barn, stuck his head out through the half-open door, scissored the air with his ears and swished his tail to convey his horsey delight. Aunt Leyda welcomed our friendship. I took over looking after the horse, shortening her list of daily chores. She now rarely stopped by the barn, only to visit the gelding and to remind him who his real master was. Still, Mustang adored her as did all the other animals. “A horse gives wings to a man,” she liked to say as she watched me curry Mustang’s shiny sides. I could see perfectly why she did not want to live anyplace else.

  In the middle of August, the factory paid me my first wages, two months late. It was not much of a salary either: a hundred rubles in cash, a hundred-rubles’ worth of bread from the kolkhoz store, another hundred in soap, laundry detergent and butter, and the last hundred in tiny potatoes, also deducted from the cash payout. The linen factory seemed to have a complicated barter system with the kolkhoz. It was useless to object, that much was obvious; the system was maintained by the bosses, and if you did not like it, you were free to go back to your warm stove at home. Which many did, creating constant labor turnover on our production line. People would j
ust disappear one day. New people would replace them; they were just as faceless, gloomy, empty-eyed and fond of gossiping during lunch break about the goings on in the district. Local news washed over them like soft dew over fields of linen. The dew moistens the plants’ yellowish-green stalks and spreads the invisible fungus that breaks down the cells between the bundled fibers and the bark. The straw—trestá—must then be dried in bundles and rolled into heavy round bales by a special combine. Some of it would be left in the field to rot under the snow, some would be stolen by the quick locals to insulate their homes or use as bedding for cattle; some more would be lost under the wheels of the heavy machines. The whole operation hinged on accident and custom, and the local news was the same.

  Whether I liked it or not, I caught snippets of the recent goings-on: Kolka Myagi had come unstitched again[15] and went drinking, sold all his sheep and ground his wife’s face into the floor when she tried to defend her flock. Someone stole Sergeyev’s Minsk motorcycle, but it broke down and the thieves left it in a roadside ditch, where the happy owner found it, fixed it, and now rides it to the forest farm as if nothing happened. Mahonia from Staraya village found some extra-special Estonian clay in the woods near Skomorokhovo, the kind they’d been searching for but could never find. You don’t even have to mix it with sand, it practically sticks to things by itself and dries better than plaster. He found it, fixed up his stove, but isn’t telling where the spot is, but give him a drink and he’ll crack like the Swedes at Poltava, and he’s about due for a binge, since he’s been dry for three weeks.