My Russian Family

by Lilia Sariecheva

  “I am here alone. I am big enough to be alone. I am a man. I am even smoking!”

  “Yes, I see!” said the man as the others smiled and laughed. The man took Slahva by his hand and walked him home. Amid mixed feelings of fear and anger at Slahva and gratitude to the man who brought him home, Mareika thanked the good Samaritan.

  “I wonder how he escaped,” she remarked to the man as he was leaving. They looked around and saw some stacked up bricks next to the gate and realized that he had piled up the bricks so that he could reach the latch.

  “Well, he is pretty smart. When he gets a bit bigger, send him over to us and we will give him a job,” the trainman said in parting with a broad smile. After that episode a lock appeared on the garden gate and the key was hidden from the young adventurer. This event bothered the young mother and she was still lamenting over it when Slahva reached his 50th birthday.

  About this same time Slahva had a girlfriend named Irena who was five years old. They enjoyed playing together and were quite compatible with each other. One day she asked him to marry her. Slava asked his mother and she said, “That would be fine, my dear. Just who is this lucky girl?”

  “You know, Mom. It’s Irena. She was here yesterday!”

  Mom smiled knowingly and responded, “Did you tell her yes, that you would marry her? Have you talked to her parents yet? How soon will this happen?”

  “I told her that I wanted to marry her. We have not talked to her parents. I don’t know when!”

  Irena asked her parents and they too were in agreement with the proposed nuptials. Slava and Irena were ecstatic. Soon after that Irena’s family moved. Her father was an army officer and he was frequently posted to new bases. Some 14 or 15 years later, my brother received a letter from Irena and they began a correspondence that continued for years.

  In spite of all the good living and fond memories, my father missed his family. It was 1947 and it had been seven years since he had last seen his mother and father. He missed his native land, his childhood places, and his numerous friends. The memories flooded his mind. He recalled the early morning smell of warm milk fresh from the cow’s udder, the noise of the competitive crowing of the roosters, the comforting sounds of the women taking water from the well, and the heavy fragrance of new-mown hay. He could almost smell the sweat and feel the contented exhaustion from the dawn-to-dusk harvesting work. He remembered the sense of security emanating from his birth home and the contentment of sitting beneath the white birches reading a book. He never talked to Mom about these things because he well knew that she was also missing her family. She had her own memories to comfort her and to cause her pain.

  My mom was trying to live a normal life, be happy, and maintain her family but my father understood that something was sucking her dry. She was melting like a burning candle with uncertainties on the fate of her lost family. She was like a bird that had lost her flock in a storm since she’d had no connections with her relatives for so many long years. The war had broken the thin line connecting the young woman with her mother, brother, and sisters. There were no more letters, no more responses, no nothing from them.

  When my mom and dad were married six months prior to the start of the war, they had an address for her mom in a town called Malaya Vishera, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) northeast of Novgorod, the oldest city in Russia. They sent a letter there telling her mom of the marriage and asking for her blessing. Her response was the last letter she received from her mother. My grandmother Lena wrote back with congratulations and blessings and told my mother that Vera, the oldest sister, was married to a militiaman, named Grigorie. Vera had given birth to a baby girl named Galena, and Lena, Ivan, and Shurra moved to St. Petersburg to help with the baby and to bring the family together. However, when the Germans started their effective “900-day siege” no information escaped through the blockade and my mother had heard nothing since. My parents tried to find her family, writing everywhere possible, but there was no information available. It appeared that the family just disappeared in the whirlpool of the war. Very often, Mikhail caught his wife weeping. He tried to get her mind off it and frequently entertained her by inviting friends to their home.

  One evening in early 1947 Mikhail brought home a new officer who had recently arrived to take a position in the town of Pogranichnyi where my parents lived. At the dinner table Mareika asked the officer where he had fought. He described an area near Novgorod where Soviet troops had held the Germans in check. “A magnificent white colonnade house was completely destroyed and a large grove of birch trees melted like it had never been there, the flaming birches were….”

  Mareika went rigid, then quietly interrupted by asking, “What was the name of that place?”

  The officer answered and Mareika cried out and then collapsed on the floor like a rag doll. Although she knew that her family was not living in that house, memories flooded her mind of that cherished, extraordinary home and the stunning copse of birch trees where she and her family were so happy so many years before.

  And now it was gone forever. It just disappeared during WWII like so many others.

  32. The Ficus Tree

  The echoes of World War II affected almost everyone in the world. Some memories still ooze a pain that only death can alleviate. Generations must pass before time can heal it all.

  The Soviet Union had the largest standing army in the world as World War II ended and many of these were stationed at the edge of Western Europe. Long-standing anxieties between the Kremlin and the West led the U.S. to implement the Marshall Plan, a bid to make Europeans prosperous enough and quickly enough to keep them from turning communist. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was also initiated, and the Cold War and the Iron Curtain came into existence.

  Western governments and their people were no longer interested in the horror and heroism of the USSR’s years of blood. The West had little interest in or information about the impact and aftermath of the war on the Soviet policy, economy, and society, though these developments and Western responses to them were clearly to be decisive for the lives and fortunes of all humankind during the balance of the twentieth century.

  Many things were happening in the Soviet Union. World War II left western USSR bare and devastated from the German occupation. There were almost no goods available to purchase anywhere and there were huge problems that needed immediate attention.

  The country had to increase the population but for some reason Soviet women were not that eager to get pregnant and have babies. It was not an easy time for women. Generally, after a bloody war, there is the typical increase in the birthrate and sometimes a high ratio of males over females. Surprisingly after World War II, the Russian birthrate exhibited only a slight rise and then declined. It is still low and the population is waning. A somewhat similar trend is noticeable in Europe and Japan.

  Maybe Soviet women avoided having babies in protest. Perhaps they didn’t want to take the risk that their beloved children could become cannon fodder, could be lost in the slaughterhouse of the next war, or used as free labor in the Gulag. Maybe there were not enough men available to be husbands for the millions of single women whose potential spouses died in the war. Certainly Russian women of that era would not have a baby out of wedlock and literally thousands of these fertile women slowly turned barren and bitter in their old age. Maybe Russian women were tired of Russia supporting the low-income families with large numbers of children, found in some of the republics of the USSR.

  As far back as 1936, Stalin required a larger population to fulfill his five-year goals so the government analyzed the situation and made a law prohibiting abortions. Thousands of women died from problems with induced home abortions because of this law during the next decade. Few doctors would risk the Gulag to perform an abortion. Stalin, to his credit, finally understood that the law was not working and he repealed the hated anti-abortion decree after World War II.

  My mother Mareika had become close friends with a woma
n her age called Yadia. They first met when Mother returned to the Far East in August of 1946. Yadia’s husband was also an army officer and a friend of my father. Yadia’s parents lived nearby. In the early days Yadia’s father had been one of many cooks for Tsar Nicholas II but after the revolt in 1917 he fled St. Petersburg. He always remembered the old proverb, Do not test your destiny twice. He was a distinguished looking man who dressed well and one could easily assume that he was a university professor. The chef’s wife, a woman who also dressed well and always had beautiful hairdos, was taking care of Yadia’s two children while Yadia worked as a schoolteacher.

  My mom was a housewife with a small son and often she would visit Yadia. My brother would play with Yadia’s kids while Mother watched the skilled patriarch practice his culinary arts in the kitchen. He was especially good with standards like perozhki. He also had mastered many desserts and his Napoleons were widely admired. Mother often assisted him and she also mastered this skill. To this day Napoleons are my favorite dessert but they have to be prepared correctly, just as they were for the Tsar. For the rest of her life Mareika joked that her family dined on gourmet meals the like of which were served to Tsar Nicholas II.

  One of our family favorites, which she learned from this chef, was stuffed cabbage rolls. It is a simple recipe with a few crucial steps. First, pan fry a ground meat mix of pork and beef with chopped onions, pepper, salt, and spices. Then mix in cooked rice and chopped hardboiled eggs. Second, put a head of cabbage into a pot of boiling water and as the outside leaves start to soften bring the cabbage head to the surface. One by one, remove the outside leaf when it is soft enough to roll up. Next, place a dab of the warm meat-rice mix on each leaf, fold the leaf and tuck in the ends like an envelope to hold the ingredients in. Cook in an oiled frying pan on both sides until it turns a light brown. Place on a plate, cut open lengthwise, dab some butter on and allowed it to melt down into the meat. Tsar Nicholas would not eat cabbage rolls cooked any other way and neither would my family. Eating that plump bronzed delight with the melted butter running down my chin always made me feel like royalty.

  Time went by and Yadia found herself with an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion was illegal and contraceptives (along with most other things) were unavailable. A common home remedy used successfully by many Soviet women was introducing a rigid shoot from the tip of the ficus tree through the thin-walled vagina and protective cervix into the heavily vascularized uterus.

  Yadia kept her pregnancy a secret. In Soviet society abortion was not something that anyone discussed. One evening there was an officer’s meeting scheduled right after work for members of the Communist Party and she knew that her husband would not return until late, maybe 9:00 p.m. After her children were asleep, Yadia went into her bedroom, took a ficus plant shoot and with a courage borne out of desperation, she overcame her body’s defense mechanisms and induced her own abortion. When her husband returned home he found her sprawled face down on the edge of their bed with her right knee and foot on the floor. Liters of blood had drained out onto the floor. Gentle Yadia was dead.

  The distraught husband phoned my parents and they immediately went to him but there was little that anyone could do for Yadia except mourn and bury her. This death deeply touched my mother. She blamed herself as she remembered earlier conversations with Yadia.

  “How lucky you are, to not get pregnant!”

  Mom countered with, “No, we want to have a baby girl!” Yadia’s response was, “You only have a 50-50 chance that it will be a girl. If it is not a girl, what will you do? Will you have a third pregnancy? No? How will you dispose of it if you have a third pregnancy?”

  The question would keep coming, slipped into other conversations. Another time Yadia asked mother what experiences she had had as a nurse with pregnant women in the hospital. Yet again, Yadia told Mom that she should not try to be pregnant because the second and the third pregnancy would catch up with her no matter what. The more my mom pondered their past conversations, the more guilty she felt. Mother thought that she should have seen this coming and somehow she should have been there to help her friend and prevent her death.

  No one likes or wants an abortion. Even after abortions finally became legal in the Soviet Union, they were still discouraged. First, a paper was required from a gynecologist and the doctor would spend at least an hour trying to discourage a woman. Often a second or third visit was required. Then a time was scheduled for the procedure which included a mandatory three-day stay, which is difficult for women who are trying to keep a secret. Most women, who underwent this procedure with little or no anesthetic, were left with the impression that it probably was another technique to discourage future abortions. The abortions were inevitably painful to the point that most women would cry out. Many horrible stories came out of this technique of inadequate anesthetic. Even though women knew all this they continued to apply for abortions-a silent resistance to their Soviet government.

  The World Health Organization recently reported that 19 million women-nearly all women in developing countries-have unsafe abortions each year, done by someone unskilled or in a place with poor medical standards. Of them, nearly 600,000 die from complications. What purpose does this serve? Who benefits from this slaughter? Is there a money trail to follow or is it just moral righteousness?

  Figures from Engender Health in 2006 estimated that every minute around the world, 380 women become pregnant, 190 face an unintended pregnancy, 110 experience a pregnancy-related complication, 40 have unsafe abortions, and one dies as the result of her pregnancy. Complications of pregnancy and childbirth remain the leading causes of death and disability in developing countries. All this is perhaps partly why so many Russian widowers refused to marry for a second time; the danger of an unwanted pregnancy was just too high.

  Mother purchased a small ficus plant and kept it as a houseplant in memory of her beloved friend. This tree always accompanied the family as they frequently moved to father’s new duty stations. Years later, Father received a great promotion as the overall head of the KGB in Kasimov, only three hours northeast of Ryazan. It was the dead of winter and when the family moved, the ficus tree and some other nonessential items stayed behind with friends. Early the following spring, Mama made the trip back and with numerous complications, she arranged a river boat trip (which she hated) on the Oka River back to her family because a boat was the only way to transport the large ficus tree. The Oka flows past Ryazan and on to Kasimov in a complicated zigzag route comparable to the path of a young boy spending the afternoon in a park. I remember when she returned from her journey and she visited me in the Pioneer Camp. She said, “I brought back the ficus tree. I had to prune it but it looks just fine. I’m so happy!”

  I asked, “Did you bring me my piano?”

  “No,” she responded, “but I brought you this beautiful pair of silver colored shoes.”

  I was not impressed. I wanted my piano and I asked her why that tree was more important than my piano. Her expensive bribe did not work with me even though I was a shoe freak.

  That winter of 1959, Nikita Khrushchev reduced the number of personnel in the armed forces and the KGB. One result was that the KGB office closed in our new city and my dad transferred back to Ryazan. They left without the ficus tree. Mikhail had had enough and he forbade mama to move the large overgrown tree again. When they settled into their new apartment in Ryazan, Mother promptly purchased another small ficus tree, which she kept until old age.

  My mother developed permanent stress because of the many negative events in her life, the difficult childhood, mourning her missing family, and her girlfriend Yadia’s death. My father thought that a second child would keep his wife from her suffering. Nevertheless, she could not become pregnant. Finally, my mother went to a sophisticated spa for an extended duration. She returned home invigorated both mentally and physically and the desired event occurred; she became pregnant and the following September of 1950 I was born following a very hard labor for my m
other.

  My mother Mareika about 1950.

  One thought occupied my mom’s mind for years: she was ready to die to give birth to a baby, but Yadia was ready to die for the opposite reason.

  We all have our own destiny. We all have to make our own choices. It is a fact that the availability of birth control techniques and medically accurate sex education prevents unintended pregnancies and decreases abortion requests. Banning abortions does not reduce the number of abortions, it just drives them underground and more women die.

  My mother lost many friends for lousy reasons during and after World War II. During and after the Boris Yeltsin years, I too lost many friends for lousy reasons, including five cousins during Yeltsin’s era and four since then, leaving just five out of 14 cousins still alive.

  History unfolds itself and keeps repeating.

  33. A Spoonful of Tar

  Life is like a zebra’s coat, one stripe is black and the next stripe is white. And good follows bad just as sure as the sun rises and sets.

  The years of 1946 to 1952 were very good for my father. The war was over, he loved his wife, life in the Far East was enjoyable, and his work was challenging with travel, excellent pay, and advances in rank. Nevertheless, there was a spoonful of tar in the barrel of honey.

  The USSR was still very poor after the ravages of World War II, which had eaten up the resources of industrial power, collective farms, and humankind itself. During 1946 and 1947 there was widespread and disastrous droughts and famine throughout Russia, especially severe the second year. The country people survived on the food they had grown themselves and little or no money. The city people had some money with their small salaries but there was almost no food available for them to buy. In addition, for two years after the war coupons issued by the government were still required for food and certain other items such as salt, soap, and kerosene. No coupons meant no purchase.