Philipovna

by Valentina Gal

  “I don’t know,” I answered. I picked up Auntie’s Bible to read for a distraction.

  Uncle Misha found out that I could keep my word. After another long week, he came into the cottage grinning. He set the board up on the table with the white men on one side and the black on the other. We crowded around him in excitement.

  “Easy does it,” Uncle Misha said. “You’ll all have a turn. Philipovna, you’ll be in the first round because we all know now that you can keep a secret.”

  I stuck out my chin with pride. We all learned to play. The days passed by more quickly then. Whenever we got restless or complained about being hungry, the checkers came out and we’d have our tournament. I loved the game and became a good player. But I never did beat Uncle Misha.

  Thanks to the good doctor’s medicine, Viktor’s health very slowly improved. The winter days inevitably lengthened and we looked forward to the coming spring. The cold hung in so that it was plain to see that spring would be taking its own sweet time to arrive no matter how hungry we were. Auntie didn’t rally. As her hands and feet healed, she resumed her duties around the house, but I could see a hint of the Unravelled One’s look in Auntie’s eyes. It didn’t help that Mitya brought in the last bag of wheat weeks before we could plant the garden.

  “Dear God,” Auntie said, lamenting. “Does no one in Heaven see how much we suffer? I have no more spoons to trade. How will I ever find anything to feed us?”

  “Have faith,” Uncle said. “We’ll figure something out.”

  “When? After another one of us dies? Look at how thin Viktor is.”

  It seems that God was listening. About a week after the wheat ran out, Xenkovna came in with her bucket of water in one hand and her apron tied in a bundle with the other.

  “What’s in the bundle?” Auntie asked.

  Xenkovna had noticed a flock of little birds returning for spring. They were pecking at something on the ground. She tossed her apron over them— not really knowing what she was going to do with them— but thinking that they might be eaten somehow.

  “See,” Uncle said, smiling. “I told you that God would send something.”

  “But, they’re smaller than sparrows — and there’s no meat on them,” Auntie said.

  “Mama, I’ll clean them and we can make soup. I’m sure their bones will have something in them that our bellies can use.” Xenkovna was looking tired and anxious too.

  So we learned to catch the birds with an apron or cloth and stick them into the snow headfirst till there were enough to cook in a small soup pot. One of us would always be on watch to make sure no one else discovered the secret. As Xenkovna observed, there wasn’t meat on the birds to eat but their bones had enough good things in them to keep us from starving. We ate the soup and kept the bones for proper burial in the spring.

  One afternoon a loud knocking disturbed the house.

  “Put the Bible away,” Auntie whispered. She scooped Viktor up awkwardly and motioned to me for a blanket. Xenkovna swept the checker game off of the table, into her apron.

  “Good afternoon,” Uncle said tersely.

  “Comrade,” the intruder responded.

  The hair on my arms stood on end. I was not accustomed to seeing the snake Asimov standing at our cottage door. What could he possibly want?

  “What can I do for you?” Uncle Misha asked.

  “It’s not me that you can do anything for,” the snake replied. “It is the welfare of your Children that I’m concerned with. You have how many school-aged Children under your roof?”

  “My nephew is needed to help me with the chores,” Uncle answered motioning in Mitya’s direction.

  “What chores?” Asimov said laughing. “Have you acquired a cow lately—or could it be a horse —or pigs? It’s not the stupid buffoon I’m here about. There are just some who can’t be taught. He’s much better off doing your grunt work. That way he will always know his place.”

  He looked at me — then at Viktor in Auntie’s lap.

  My chest tightened.

  “Is the young one on the school register yet? He looks about starting age. It’s time he was learning about his place in the new order.”

  Auntie’s face turned white.

  I moved closer to Xenkovna.

  “If things in this village were working right,” Uncle said, “he would be going in the spring term, but as they are so ...”

  “Are you saying something about how the Party is running the village?”

  “We are starving to death and none of the Party is paying attention. Two of my Children have already died and your Comrades won’t allow me to send for a doctor for this boy who is barely surviving.”

  Asimov stepped closer to Uncle Misha, his hand on his holster.

  “Look here you ignorant peasant,” he hissed. “My business has nothing to do with your belly. I’m here to make your stupid Children come to school—especially that young one. He’s too big to be tied on to his mother’s apron string. The girl”— his hand gestured in my direction— “has not been to school for weeks and the buffoon, I don’t need. I’ll be inviting the Comrades to see you unless those two show up for school in the morning. There’s no place for lazy brats in the new order.”

  “But he has diphtherial croup,” Auntie blurted out.

  “What would you know about diphtherial croup?” Asimov asked. He stepped closer to Auntie and Viktor. “Only a doctor would be able to say something like that.”

  “Nothing,” Auntie answered, swallowing hard. She pulled her little son closer and put her head down so that she didn’t have to meet the Snake’s unrelenting stare.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Asimov said. “Or you’ll be having a visit you’ll not forget.”

  The next morning, with Viktor bundled from head to toe, I went back to school. As we joined the village Children, I could see that all of them were suffering much the same way as we were. Their cheeks were hollow and there were dark circles under their eyes. They didn’t run and play; nor did they laugh or talk as we went to school. Their eyes were focused on the path in front of them or on the adjoining gardens or fields we passed— in case someone had overlooked or dropped something they could eat. Some of them already had swollen bellies. It didn’t take long for me to find out that most families had lost a brother or sister over the winter months.

  In the classroom, nothing changed. The Snake made Viktor sit up at the front with the little Children where he could be more easily terrorized if he made mistakes or fell asleep from exhaustion as many of the younger ones did every day. The mornings were filled with the usual mathematics, history and reading lessons while the afternoons were strictly devoted to Party politics and brainwashing.

  I learned that Asimov planned a festival for Pioneer Day at the end of February. He wanted to set up a Young Pioneer Group for the village Children. The young Pioneers were modelled on the Boy Scout movement, but in those days the Party used them for propaganda and politics. When the Young Pioneers took hold, one couldn’t enter a university or get a good job after finishing school if one wasn’t in good standing with the organization.

  On February 25, which was Pioneer Day all across the country, the Young Pioneers made a brief stop at the school. A Brigade arrived from the city fully arrayed in its light blue dress uniforms with red necktie, kerchief and hat, not to mention the pin that was engraved with “Be Prepared,” the Pioneers’ motto. They came armed with their red and white posters and banners with their Party slogans “Long Live the Communist Party,” “Long Live the Soviet Regime!” and “We Thank the Communist Party for Our Happy and Prosperous Life!”

  They performed their marches, songs and flag ceremonies around a big bonfire in the square. I would have liked the Young Pioneer Anthem had it not been a song that was pushing me towards the Comrades and their Party. I certainly would have liked to look as well-dressed and fed as the energetic Children I was watching. I felt particularly dirty as I compared my unwashed, ragged clothes to their crisp unifor
ms. It had been months since anyone in the village could get soap, especially since our zone borders were tightened up. The show didn’t stay for as long as Asimov hoped. When the leaders of the visiting brigade saw how many of our Children were ill, they moved the Pioneers on to the next village as quickly as they could. Their leader didn’t want any of his healthy city Children to pick up any pestilences from “these filthy peasants.”

  Asimov made no secret of his disappointment. After our poor showing, he was determined to remedy this problem by the coming May Day celebrations which were due to take place in a matter of weeks. He taught us more songs about “living in Paradise, happy and well-fed on our new collective farms.” He sang them line-by-line so that we could memorize them by rote. He divided the school Children into groups with the older ones as team leaders and taught us marching drills which we practiced until we felt like collapsing.

  “You must look happy,” he said. “Put a smile on those ungrateful faces. The Comrades from the city must see how glad you are to show solidarity with them and Mother Russia.”

  His metre stick was very busy keeping us hungry and tired Children in line.

  I could hardly wait for classes to finish. The days were getting warm and the signs of spring were popping up everywhere. The air was sweet with the scent of the thawing earth; the warming sun lifted the pungent smell of last year’s decaying vegetation. The grass turned green after the snow. As Viktor and I went off to forage for food along with the rest of the villagers, the nightingales came back and built their nests. They went on singing as if everything was the way it always had been. Somehow, their singing gave us some energy and a renewed desire to help ourselves.

  In the river we found tender plants, especially the young reeds. I would hold on tight to Viktor so that he could reach out further over the water’s edge and pick the best shoots. I’m sure that Auntie would have been horrified to see us do that. In the forest we peeled off the young bark and newly developing buds from the trees. We collected the mushrooms as soon as they could grow and dug up any roots that looked remotely edible. We tried to keep any newfound patch a secret so that we could come back to it before another hungry villager picked it clean. These excursions with Viktor reminded me of the times Mitya and I had spent in happier days.

  The fields were our favourite places for foraging even though we had to wade through the water of the melting snow. We could often find something—mainly root vegetables from last year’s crop, preserved by the winter snow and frost. Potatoes, beets and onions were priceless, despite the fact that they were rotten or frozen. Sometimes, we were so hungry we would eat the vegetables right in the field or forest, but usually we brought them home and Xenkovna or Auntie made a kind of potato pancake, mixing them with leaves or even peelings from other vegetables. Other days, they put potato peels, grape seeds and roots all together and cooked it in water to make a soup of sorts. When the potatoes or onions were rotten the smell of the soup made me retch.

  “A starving man does not sniff his food,” Uncle Misha would say, pinching his nose and swallowing whatever Auntie could put together, no matter how bad it tasted.

  “It keeps us alive, if there is enough of it,” Auntie said. “If you can find grass, we’ll cook grass and remember to thank God for it.”

  It wasn’t an easy task for people weakened by starvation to wander around in the fields hunting for vegetables. Because so many were looking for any scraps they could find, they had to go to faraway areas and this required strength and stamina. A lot of villagers didn’t survive. Although they succeeded in getting to a place where there was food they could glean, many of them fell dead in the fields from exhaustion before finding anything to sustain them.

  “He’s sleeping,” I said to Viktor when we found a man who had given up the ghost this way.

  “Won’t he get cold?” Viktor asked.

  “He’ll wake up and go home when he does,” I said. “Let’s not bother him.”

  Mitya and the cousins took to collecting nightingale eggs and catching birds. On the days they caught a rabbit, we had a feast. Auntie would always cry over the nightingale eggs because it meant that one less bird would sing for each egg we ate.

  “After all, those birds are sacred,” she said.

  One day the cousins came home with a pair of hedgehogs. But hunting for animals proved difficult as anyone who had the strength was fighting for whatever animal could be caught and eaten. It was made worse by the fact that all of the guns, right down to those smaller ones that were just meant for game, had been confiscated by the Comrades. Thanks to the propagandists and their fearmongering, wherever a man tried to leave the zone to seek food outside his village, he was hunted like a wild animal by the local villagers and then executed as a traitor.

  Sharik was never out of Mitya’s sight.

  “You never know who’s going to grab him and eat him for dinner,” he told me one afternoon after school.

  “Do you really think they would?” I asked.

  “What do you think happened to the cats that lived in the shed?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered in horror. It had been some time since I had seen the scrawny orange cat and her five little kittens that had lived in the shed over the winter. “Who would have done such a thing?”

  Then Mitya looked at me—looked in a weird way that I’d never seen before.

  “No, no!” I screamed. “We couldn’t have —we ...” The realization choked off the rest of my protestation. My stomach heaved and my heart twisted. Which of the little animals that was in our soup was the cat?

  I ran out to the river again and didn’t come back to the house for a long, long time. I threw myself down on the mossy spot where I had cut the willow branches so long ago and screamed out loud to my mother and father. How could we have eaten those little furry kittens? Couldn’t my parents let Jesus know how frightened I was? Didn’t He see how hungry I was? I swore I’d never go back to Auntie’s house to eat any more cats or other little animals that should be running about in the forest. But the afternoon waned; dusk fell and yes, I was sharply hungry. I had to go home and, like everyone else in the village, eat anything I could find.

  May Day finally arrived. Asimov strutted around like a proud cockerel lording over his flock of hens. He marched us into the village with a flourish where we joined the Pioneer brigade that had visited us in the winter. The officials from the kolhosp set up a new tractor in the centre of the square. The Comrades were already preaching their propaganda to the villagers who were gathered before a makeshift stage. As one Comrade after another droned on with their platitudes about our “Communist Paradise” and “good fortune to be one of Father Stalin’s prosperous farmers,” my tummy rumbled. I noticed that there was a large army presence. I saw that the villagers were looking at something that was not on the stage.

  Off to one side of the square, the army had barricaded an area where a couple of bonfires burned. Over these fires, hung several large army sized cooking pots and stirring these pots were women from the kolhosp. The people closest to the bonfires slowly migrated towards the fires. They remained facing the speakers, but gradually almost imperceptibly they kept sidestepping toward the barricade between them and the women. They moved closer and closer as the speeches dragged on. A gentle spring breeze blew the smoke from the cooking fires towards us and the smell of cooking porridge harassed my nose. I could have pushed everyone out of my way and jumped right into one of those pots.

  I was not the only one who felt that way. Just as the visiting Comrade official reached the climax of his speech, a commotion broke out by the barricade. Walter, who was one of the boys that liked to sing songs at the crossroads with my older cousins, couldn’t stand the smell of the porridge any longer. He took a running leap at one of the stirring women and tried to grab her spoon. But his heroic effort was of no use. The army commander grabbed him in mid-air and pushed him back roughly.

  “That’s enough,” the official bellowed.
“Get to the back of the group. If anyone of you makes another move before you are invited to Father Stalin’s feast, you’ll find out what real trouble is. Will you greedy peasants never learn your manners?”

  The speeches finally finished. The army lined everyone up and the women started ladling exactly two spoons of the porridge into containers which the villagers brought with them. Each person, old or young, big or small got exactly two spoons.

  “We have no favourites in the Party,” the Comrade from the city explained.

  While the line progressed we Children sang our songs about ripening fields and golden harvests and the glory of our motherland Mother Russia. I could hardly stand the cramps in my belly. I thought I’d faint with hunger. The city visitors from the Young Pioneers joined in the marches and flag raising ceremonies to show solidarity. But they did not eat. When everyone had been served, it was our turn. I don’t know where the containers came from, but we all were given a can, a cup or a dish of the porridge.

  We sat on the square eating like ravenous wolves. We licked our containers clean like so many dogs and looked to the pots for more. Those who worked on the kolhosp were sent to another line for their allotment of two pounds of bread since “they had earned a special consideration from Father Stalin” while the rest of us watched. The city visitors went away; then we were sent home to enjoy the rest of our holiday.

  The Empty Harvest

  AS THE MAY sun warmed the earth, the kalyna blessed us with its white blossoms like it did every other spring. I wandered by the river, not just to see what it might provide for me to eat, but also to escape from the endless weight of a daily struggle for survival.

  The dell of forget-me-nots and lily-of-the-valley where I found the silver spoon came to be my own special place. I looked for another spoon many times, hoping that I could bring it home to Auntie so that we might be able to trade it for wheat again, but I never found anything other than pretty stones and tadpoles. Auntie always welcomed the bunches of wild flowers I brought to her. She would set them in a glass as she used to do. I was happy to see her smile. Once in a while, I would convince Viktor to come with me and we went to the river to look for crayfish. I would lie in the fragrant grass soaking in the sun’s rays, resting like a scruffy cat.