Philipovna

by Valentina Gal

  At other times, I would stare at a particular cloud and picture my Mama floating on it, right above where I lay. I wondered if she sent the silver spoon that brought us that bit of wheat which kept us alive till the thawing gardens and burgeoning forest came to life. I pictured Mama and me sitting on the edge of the cloud and letting our legs swing freely. I imagined us on the cloud eating bread that she baked in Heaven, all different kinds of bread in different shapes and colours, made from all of the different grains that grew around us. I imagined every size of bread from the tiniest of buns to the very large ones with the little birds on top like the loaves of bread that were used for weddings — the kind of loaves that Xenkovna loved to bake. It would be fresh from the oven, warm and dripping with butter that melted into its fluffy centre and run down my fingers so that I could lick it off and languish in its nourishing glory.

  I would ask my Mama to help me be grateful like Auntie said I should be, but the truth was that I didn’t like the taste of most of the food we ate to survive. I ate because I was hungry, but often ended up with a stomach-ache after eating. The tea that Auntie insisted we keep drinking didn’t help with my stomach cramps any longer. I watched the wagons coming through the village every morning to pick up the people who had died overnight to bring them to the mass graves. I wondered when they would come for me. Once I heard Katerina tell Auntie that one of the Children was put onto that wagon while he was sleeping.

  “The man putting the bodies into the grave would have dumped the boy in if not for the fact that he cried when they moved him,” Katerina said.

  After that, I had many sleepless nights fighting nightmares in which I was lost among those bodies. I dreamed of being thrown into dark caverns full of dead people and not able to find my way home.

  The familiar path that I took to cross the pasture and go around what used to be Uncle Paulo’s orchard seemed different, too. The wind still tickled my nose with the sweet smells of the growing grasses and blooming meadows as I walked, but it didn’t feel right. I looked up at sunset and expected to see one of the boys coming back from the fields with the cow. I listened to see if I could hear her lowing. I went into her empty shed and tried sniffing really hard to see if her smell still hung in the warm air inside. I fantasized about drinking her frothy milk and would have gladly put up with the ache in my arms after churning for a taste of fresh bread and butter or Auntie’s chiding for a forbidden dip of my finger into the newly-set smetana.

  “Will we ever have a cow again?” I asked Auntie.

  “I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “We have no notion of what will happen. We can only hope and pray.”

  The blossoms dropped from the cherry trees. I watched the buds grow and develop into beautiful cherries. The spring was warm and it seemed that the fruit was maturing hourly. I couldn’t wait till Mitya and I could get another pail and sneak into the trees again. The fruit, green as it was beckoned to me, begging me to pick it— for just one taste. But I waited.

  “Don’t eat the cherries while they’re still green,” Auntie said. “Your tummy is very tender. If you give in, the strong juice will hurt you more than it will help. And, we have no medicine. The last thing I need right now is a sick Child from eating green fruit.”

  I soon found out that I didn’t have to concern myself with the cherries. I was coming home from one of my jaunts to the river and heard the sound of a motor. I rounded the bend at the edge of the orchard and almost walked straight into an army truck. I expected to see Comrade Zabluda, but was surprised to find Uncle Ivan with a half-dozen Party men instead.

  “We’re here to guard the orchard,” Uncle Ivan said when he saw me.

  “Guard the orchard?” I spit it out before I had time to think.

  “The bread procurement committee has appointed me to make sure that all of the cherries are accounted for. So take care not to be caught in a tree. I won’t be as kind as Simon and Paulo were the last time we caught you.”

  “Yes, Comrade,” I said, shivering though it was a warm day. His nostrils flared like those of a pig as he looked slowly at me from top to bottom. I had the sickest feeling that he wanted something more, but I couldn’t put a finger on what exactly that could be. I remembered that he wasn’t there when Uncle Paulo and Uncle Simon brought me back home last spring. How did he know that I had been picking cherries? I bolted from Uncle Ivan’s lecherous stare and ran home to Auntie as fast as I could.

  “I guess we won’t be eating cherries this year,” Auntie said. “Is there anything that they won’t steal away from us?”

  Mitya surprised us on the Sunday morning after I met Uncle Ivan.

  “Those bastards weren’t quick enough,” he said. “Look what I have.” Somehow, while we were sleeping, Mitya sneaked into the orchard and picked half a pail full of cherries. I was about to squeal with joy but his hand smothered my mouth before anything could come out.

  “What about the bells?” I asked.

  “What bells?” His eyes had a shadow of the ice blue sparkle of old.

  “You know. The ones they had strung on ropes.”

  “A knife can take care of a rope, can’t it?”

  So for a few delicious days, we ate cherries with our mush and I was truly thankful.

  Uncle Ivan was true to his word. The bread procurement committee arrived just as most of the cherries were turning from pale green to dark red. They stayed for the two weeks that it took for the cherries to ripen. They stripped every cherry from every tree.

  One day, as I turned off the path, I heard a commotion by the woodpile. It was unusual as I heard the yelling of men and the barking of several dogs, like the dogs of a hunting Party. There hadn’t been a hunting Party around the village for years. Those villagers who hadn’t eaten their dog or cat guarded them jealously. What could this be? I cautiously moved toward the sounds and rounded the corner of our house. One of the Comrades raised his gun and shot Sharik right in the head. He yelped and crumpled at Mitya’s feet in a pool of blood while the three men with him raised their guns in salute. My screaming drew both Auntie out of the house and Uncle Misha out of the barn.

  “Help, help. Uncle Misha, make them stop! Please make them stop. They’re hurting Sharik,”

  Mitya cried. He bent to pick up our poor Sharik, but one of the Comrades struck him with the butt of his gun.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded. “I’m taking him to my Mama’s grave.”

  “Hold it there, son,” another of the Comrades said with a sarcastic grin.

  Mitya tried to run, but the Comrade grabbed Sharik by the tail and swung him into a horse drawn cart which was waiting for the hunters on the road and already held a quantity of dead dogs and cats. Mitya bolted from the scene and didn’t show his face to anyone for more than a week. I ran into the house and cried into Mama’s feather bed till Auntie made our meagre supper.

  This is how we were informed the Party had decided that, since people were eating dogs and cats, a hunt for them should be conducted and that they were now a valuable commodity. Father Stalin had need of their furs for the good of the new order. They were brought to the kolhosp for skinning.

  “What’s that smell?” I asked Auntie one evening after I brought in the water pail. “It’s so bad I might throw up.”

  “There aren’t enough people to skin the dogs and cats,” Auntie said.

  “What are they going to do with them?”

  “Burn them so that we don’t get a plague,” she said.

  Since the villagers no longer had any arms, the Thousanders in the area were commissioned to do the hunting. They came through, from one end of the village to the other and slaughtered every four-legged creature they could find. Their sport did not begin and end with dogs and cats.

  “They’re killing the nightingales!” Xenkovna said after going out for water one early May morning in the spring of 1932.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “No one would do that.”

  Each household in the
village had its own family or two of nightingales that lived in its orchard or on its tree.

  “If a nightingale dies or, God forbid, you should kill it,” Auntie said, “something terrible will happen to your family or household.”

  Though this was a legend, Auntie took it as gospel truth. She lectured all of us as to the sanctity of “God’s musical guest,” and was especially vigilant when she got wind of little Children planning mischievous tricks that may involve birds’ nests. Respect for the nightingale and its nest was drilled into every Ukrainian Child from the time he or she was old enough to wander around the village. It was said that the nightingale’s song represented the soul of the Ukrainian countryside. I have yet to hear a concert that compares with the song of that beautiful bird. The Thousanders assaulted our village with their hunting parties morning and evening when the nightingales did their best singing.

  “Auntie, why are they shooting the nightingales?” I cried after watching one of these parties stake out our own nest. “You should see how the feathers fly all over when they hit one of them. Poor little things. Why are they doing it?”

  “The world has gone mad,” Auntie said. “I could understand killing one or two if you were hungry, but to kill them for target practice or just for sport! God have mercy on our people. What would our ancestors say if they could see such a travesty?”

  “It’s so lonely,” I said after the nightingales were all gone. “Will they ever come back?”

  “I don’t know,” Auntie said. She crossed herself wearily and looked at the icon. But when she turned to stare out the window to our empty garden, I could see tears trickling down her hollow cheeks. It would be a good three years before the nightingales returned to their normal ways.

  Since it was spring again, it was also time to plant a garden. “What are you doing?” I asked on coming home from school one warm spring afternoon.

  “Digging the garden,” Michael said. “What does it look like?”

  “I thought we had no seeds.”

  “Mama found a few in her trunk,” Alexander said. “And Xenkovna found some rotten potatoes that had enough eyes in them for planting.”

  Uncle Misha and the cousins dug up the plot where we always grew our vegetables. That is, they tried to dig up enough of the plot to plant whatever they could. I could see that the silver wasn’t just at Uncle’s temples any longer. His whole head was a dull gray now and his shoulder blades stuck out of his shirt as he stooped. He still had the cough from the sickness that took away Maria and Marta.

  “Imagine,” Uncle Misha said by the fire that evening. “We used to plough half a field in a day and now I don’t have enough strength to plant a few potatoes. I’m in worse shape than a little woman.”

  “At least you can use your hands,” Auntie said, massaging her stiff fingers. “Oh God how we suffer ... and for what?”

  We watched that garden grow with great anticipation. Each bud and each leaf was like a new member of the family, welcomed with joy and coddled to make sure that the plant it fed would grow and produce. We also had to make sure that no hungry wanderer would help himself in order to ease his own suffering. It happened often that one of the neighbours woke up in the morning to find his almost ripe vegetables cleaned out as he slept.

  The kolhosp gardens did not escape the notice of hungry foragers either. It got so bad that the Comrades stationed guards night and day to keep the vegetables in the ground. Half-ripe carrots and beets were dug up; potatoes were stolen and half-grown cabbages were uprooted. Where there once had been a peaceful, charitable community of sharing and hospitality, there now was suspicion and silence. Fights and serious personal injury were now commonplace as hungry people struggled to find food. There were stories of villagers being so desperate that they killed intruders for stealing vegetables and helping themselves to strawberries.

  “It’s shocking,” Auntie said when we heard about a boy from a neighbouring village who had been beaten to death by one of our own hungry neighbours. “It wasn’t long ago that he would have been welcomed and fed in someone’s house whether we knew him or not. What is this world coming to?”

  But as the summer came, everyone’s garden grew—not as large or abundant as in normal years, but enough to put some vegetables together for a reasonable borscht or pot of mashed potatoes. It wasn’t because of the weather; in Ukraine, where there was no famine, there was a bumper crop that year. The gardens were not as full in our village because either there weren’t enough family members to tend them or those who could were too sick to put out the energy necessary for maintaining a good garden. I would sit by the stove, watching the pot boil and salivate over the smell of the cooking vegetables. The beets had a particularly sweet smell while the onions smelled sharp and tangy.

  “Go out to play,” Auntie finally said. “You’re sitting like a hungry vulture. It won’t cook the food any faster. Take Viktor out for a game of squash or a walk to the river.”

  We could make a summer supper of fresh greens, pickles and eventually beets, carrots and tomatoes. There was no bread or meat, but at least we ate food that tasted good and didn’t leave us with a sore belly or diarrhoea, though there was never enough of it to feel full. Auntie’s hands were still too stiff to work normally so we didn’t have all of the herbs that were usually grown for medicine. There was still the occasional visit from the Comrades or bread procurement committee to demand one thing or another, but they must have realized that they couldn’t take everything or there would be no one to tend their new collective farm.

  I didn’t see much of Mitya at that time. He was always far out in the woods, looking for edible plants that I didn’t recognize. Other times, he came with mushrooms or wild berries. He looked for a secluded spot far from the village so that he could go fishing or hunting for rabbits or hedgehogs. He would appear from behind the woodpile, bring an offering to Auntie, stay for supper and then disappear again. He became sullen and silent, much like he was when his mother died. He seemed so lost and lonely without his precious Sharik.

  The Party’s efforts were not confined to the cherry orchard. When it was time to plant the spring grains, they brought in workers from the city. They were sent “to help the peasants and show solidarity.” But in practice, it didn’t quite work out that way. While their well-fed bodies did help with the physical labour, their work groups were always kept separate from us. They worked beside us in the field, but never left the safety of their group— not even to say a “good-morning” or share a drink from the well.

  I watched them turn the black earth and plant the spring barley and buckwheat. When the planting was done, the city workers were moved on to the next kolhosp while the villagers maintained the fields and waited for the harvest. It was strange to see the many small farms that used to belong to the village Uncles become just one great field, a part of the new kolhosp.

  City workers were the first of the additions to the new order. Along with the work groups came the army. They built watchtowers in the field and kept an eye on the work.

  “Disgusting!” Uncle Misha said. “We’ve farmed the land for thousands of years and didn’t need an overseer. Now, these city know-it-alls have sent idiots to make sure we do it right.”

  “Doing it right” was not the real reason for those towers. Once the city workers were moved on to the next kolhosp, the villagers were forced to maintain the fields themselves. If one should stop for rest or drop from exhaustion, as many of them did in the summer sun, they were beaten with the soldiers’ batons until they stood on their feet again. They were given a ration of bread for their effort on the kolhosp, but it was nothing close to the needs of a hardworking man who got up at dawn and toiled till dusk.

  Many of the men ate only a small part of their ration and tried to save it to share with the hungry ones at home. Workers and foragers alike would sneak onto the ripening field and break out the eye of the wheat from the maturing plants. If they could collect enough of it, they would take it home and coo
k porridge out of the green grain.

  On a late summer afternoon as I wandered back from the river, I heard a commotion going on in the ripening wheat. I crouched down so that I was hidden by the tall grass that grew by the edge of the kolhosp and crept as close as I dared. Everyone stopped working and was staring towards the corner of the field by which I was hidden. What was it all about?

  Two of the soldiers held the arms of Stepan Tymashenko, the brother of Oksana, one of my schoolmates. He was about fifteen years old. His thin face was contorted with pain and his eyes were as large as sunflowers. A third soldier took a knife from his belt and slashed Stepan’s grubby shirt from collar to belt. A pile of ripening wheat ears spilled to the ground at his feet.

  “This is how you treat Father Stalin?” the soldier who was facing the unfortunate boy demanded. “He gives you an opportunity to be part of his glorious plan and you steal the wheat from his field?”

  “I’m hungry ... my sister is hungry ... our parents are sick ... my

  Grandmother just died ...” He sobbed without shame.

  Poor Stepan didn’t get any farther. The next sound I heard was a crack from the watchtower. With a single shot, he crumpled to the ground just two metres from where I hid and sank into the golden fragrance of the ripening grain.

  “Now back to work,” the guard barked. No one dared to disobey. I watched the blood ooze out of Stepan’s head until I felt like vomiting and then I went on my way to tell Auntie and Uncle what had happened. They sent Xenkovna to tell Stepan’s mother. It was after dusk, after the soldiers were safely in their barracks, that the family came to collect the body of their son and take him to the mass grave. In the Party meeting that followed Stepan’s demise, the Comrades announced that the grain belonged to the state and Father Stalin. Anyone caught stealing it would be considered an enemy of the people and risked execution by firing squad or, if the state was compassionate upon the judgement, confiscation of their property or transport to Siberia. It was another new law.