Chapter 1. Start Over
How to start?.. When this question arises, the answer is often half-jokingly advised to start at the beginning. That's fine. But what in this case is the beginning of the biography? If consider everything I know and take the very origins of my story as the beginning, then I need to rewind very far back. Really far away: several thousand years. And look for sources not only in another country, but even in another part of the world. Probably not: we won't get that far. Although in the course of the narrative we will look there with one eye. We will not do without it, because here we have the case when you can't understand the present without the past.
If I don't start there, where do I start? Where are my closer origins? Probably in my family. And although I have, shall we say, a complicated attitude towards questions of kinship, still... My current life began and continues among these people. I was sent to them by the laws of rebirth, which means that it matters. So, apparently, we need to say at least a few words about this.
Yeah, just a few words. After all, if you think about it, what do I know about this? Very few. There are people who are keenly interested in the past of their family, who attach great importance to such things, who dig up various facts from family history, and so on. It's important to them. They do not think of themselves in isolation from the family, from the context of their life, which it is. For such a person, breaking away from the common past would be tantamount to losing himself or at least an important part of himself, that is, it would be a serious psychological trauma. Whether it's good or bad, I'm not one of them. For me, the family history is interesting, but not too important. That's how it always used to be. Why? Maybe, in large part, because for other family members it was about the same. Such an attitude does not usually arise on its own. It is instilled by upbringing. When no one around you pays much attention to such things, then you don't either. Besides, the attitude towards the family past can be seen in the attitude towards the family present. After all, the present is cemented by the past. If it is not, then it almost inevitably becomes loose and gradually crumbles. Which is what I have been observing for many years. But we'll talk about this later, in due time.
So what do I know about my family's past? My older relatives told me something as a child, something I learnt from their conversations, something I learnt when I was already at a more conscious age. In general — a little, very little.
My parents come from the village of Dudzičy, which is about forty kilometers from Homieĺ, in the Čačerski district. Now the village is dead, uninhabited, as it is in a zone of severe radiation contamination.
By nationality, I am Belarusian. Although on the maternal side, there are Russians and Latvians among the ancestors. On my father's side, according to rumours, there are Ukrainians and Poles. But just according to rumors, which, as far as I understood, are based solely on the sound of surnames.
The question of what a nationality is as such, and what it is for me, does not have a simple answer. We will touch upon it later on.
The oldest family history that I know anything about is from around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Something was told by my great-grandmother Domna, my father's grandmother, who still had a chance to work for the landowner in her youth — not as a serf, of course. She recalled how she worked with other peasant girls on the field, where the landowner's son, a cheeky pimply-faced teenager, came and began to wind up behind them, sometimes giving free rein to his hands. They chased him away, whipping him with nettles. My great-grandfather Rodion, her future husband, served as a coachman for the landowner.
That's pretty much it. Then there is a gap in the information. If I was told anything about the times before the revolution, during it and after, my memory did not preserve it.
The next memories I heard were from my grandmother Anna, my father's mother, and they related to the times of the Great Patriotic War and the German occupation. She told how the family looked at the glow on the horizon, where the bombed-out Homieĺ was burning. And then the Germans entered the village, and a tank drove right into the front garden.
I don't know how true these stories were. I can only retell how I remembered what I heard from her.
Her father, that is, my great-grandfather, then acted as chairman of the collective farm that went to the front. He was semi-literate, but he knew how to sign, and this was enough, apparently for lack of better options. When the occupiers came, his wife hid him by burying in hay. A German officer came to their house and said that the new authorities knew what position her husband was holding. They will not look for him yet, but give him a couple of hours to voluntarily come to the commandant's office and register. If he does not appear, then they will find him and shoot him. As soon as he left, Domna rushed to dig her husband out of hay, and drove him to the commandant's office herself. The Germans did not deceive, they left him alive.
After that, two soldiers settled in their house. They were not too aggressive, did not oppress the owners, and even sometimes fed them from their rations. The guests had a very peculiar sense of humor. One day, the following case occurred. A local boy nicknamed Tsiapa stole their watch. He was quickly identified, captured, had his ear cut off as punishment and was released. The ear was thrown on a bed of cucumbers. Then they returned home and told my grandmother, then still a young girl, to go and bring them cucumbers. She comes to the garden, and sees what's in the bed. She runs home in horror and shouts: "There's a human ear! Blue! It's scary!" The Germans laughed a lot. Well, I saw Tsiapa, an old man, with my own eyes. He really didn't have one ear.
Grandmother said that later, already retreating, the occupiers gathered the locals, who were younger, among whom she was, and drove them to the railway station to be sent to Germany. But along the way, they were repulsed by partisans.
Domna's great-grandmother's family was huge. For thirteen children — of whom, however, not all survived — she was awarded an order, the gold star "Mother Heroine" of the first degree. Her two sons, my grandmother's brothers, died in the war.
After the war, Anna married the front-line soldier Nikolai. Peaceful, but not easy, collective farm everyday life began.
It was hungry; they often had to survive eating rotten potatoes. Grief was added to all the difficulties of the young family: their first child died at the age of three. Then Anatoly, my father, was born. Who knows what would have happened if Nikolai hadn't turned into a bitter drunkard by then. According to my grandmother, it became unbearable to live with him. Something she said — how he drank a little family money, skipped work, because of which the chairman of the collective farm came to their house to swear, etc. But, apparently, there was still a lot of things there, if in the end she made a radical decision and just left the house with a baby in her arms. As she said, "Gone to the world." Because, in general, there was nowhere to go. She knew that the harsh mother — as the character of Domna's great-grandmother was very tough, she kept her husband and all the household in a tight grip — would not accept her back. It was not clear what to do next. Despair had set in. And at some point, she was walking along the railway track, thinking that there was nothing left but to throw herself with the child under the train. She met a strange old woman who read her thoughts on her face, took pity on her, brought her to her little house, comforted her, fed, and then let her live. Some time passed. Anna got on her feet and left to seek happiness.
Life has been throwing her all over the country. Karelia, Siberia, then Kazakhstan. She settled in Karaganda. Settled in just fine, found a job, and sent her son to school. She got together with a good man (at the same time, however, not officially divorced from her husband, about whose fate she knew nothing). She adopted a girl, Svetlana.
In short, life got better. It was so good that she wrote out some of her brothers and sisters and helped them to settle down in their new place. They were fertile, and therefore I still have a huge number of relatives in Kazakhstan. I know some of them, but most of them I have never seen, not even in photos, and I don't know their names. Once, while still in school, I tried to draw my family tree. I was still able to draw my mother's side of the family tree, which was also quite numerous; but when the tree on my father's side split into dozens of branches and it turned out that no one could tell me exactly how many children and grandchildren there were, I abandoned this hopeless enterprise.
There, in Kazakhstan, a real international community had gathered. In addition to the Kazakhs, there are Russians, Belarusians, Jews, Germans who moved there themselves or were forcibly deported there before the war... One shameful and sad moment will have to be noted here. Grandmother disliked the Kazakhs, looked down on them, considering them not even second-rate, but third-rate people, the most real savages. According to her, contempt for the indigenous population was in the order of things among representatives of "civilised nations", especially Russians and Belarusians, who always supported each other, helped out, helped to settle. Almost all posts and positions, albeit slightly significant, were occupied by Russians at that time. At times she told me terrible things. For example, how the police, in which there were practically no Kazakhs, struggled with the problem of vagrancy. In winter, when the frosts were hard, the vagrants were collected in cars like funnels, taken far out of the city, into the steppe, planted and left. They froze to death. Then all that was left was to collect the corpses.
This refers to the issue of the notorious "brotherhood" of the Soviet peoples. The newcomers from the European part of the Union did not consider the Kazakhs equal to themselves — and on their own land. And even much later, this didn't change much. Relatives who came to visit us in the 90s from the already independent Kazakhstan spoke with the same disdain about the Kazakhs, and their children were ashamed to admit that they were friends with Kazakh children.
She also told outright fables about the Kazakhs — that their women allegedly wear burqas with only their eyes visible, defecate in public, right on the streets of the city, and so on. I drew her attention to the fact that we are talking about the Soviet republic and Soviet citizens of the second half of the 20th century, and that such a thing could not have happened then, even in Central Asia, shamed her for such attitudes and such tales, but everything was in vain.
...Years passed. Having settled the family and buried her partner, my grandmother, together with her grown-up son and adopted daughter, returned home to her native village, and then bought a small house in Homieĺ.
I know very little about my father's youth. My relationship with him has always been the wrong kind of relationship for me to talk to him and ask him about his life. My grandmother told me that he had a congenital heart defect, which he "outgrew” I don't know if it's true, and if it happens. He studied reluctantly and rather poorly, and eventually dropped out of school. He served in the army (rocket forces), in what was then Turkmenistan, from where he brought memories of the desert, grueling heat and scorpions.
Then, after returning to his homeland, he got a job. But it soon became clear that he does not appear at work, but just sits until the evening in the city park. After a reprimand from his mother, he got a job at Gomselmash — as far as I know, in those years it was the second most important factory in the USSR that produced agricultural machinery — where he worked for several decades, until his retirement.
My mother Nadezhda's family lived in the same Dudzičy. All I know here is what she told me. Her mother, my grandmother Vera, also had a "Heroine Mother" award, but of the III degree, for eight children, of which five survived. Her husband, my grandfather Kirill, did not get to the front due to disability, as in his youth he lost his leg and walked on a wooden prosthesis, just like a movie pirate. According to family legend, he was left without a leg, rushing to save a child from under the wheels of a train.
During the occupation, two German soldiers were also lived in their house, one good-natured, the other angry. Mum hadn't been born yet. But her older brother Mikhail had a habit of stealing bullets from dangerous tenants, which he hid behind the bed. They once moved it from its place, the bullets fell and rolled on the floor. An angry German grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck and drag into the yard, to shoot him. The second forcefully persuaded him not to do it.
Mum didn't talk too much about her childhood. She was a big jokester, and not only in her childhood, by the way. They lived poorly. The children received something from new clothes once or twice a year, for big holidays, and the treat was rye bread sprinkled with sugar. Grandmother Vera worked on a collective farm, where one day, as a result of an accident, she lost all her fingers, except the thumb, on her right hand. I remember how, as a very small child, I couldn't understand that her fingers were missing and thought she was hiding them by clenching them into a fist. Now she, too, could not fully work and, like her husband, received a pension of several rubles. Grandfather Kirill earned money by making baskets, as well as large baskets for storing potatoes, and sold them to fellow villagers. In addition, he had another peculiar way of earning money. He arranged excursions to fish places on local reservoirs to the local authorities coming from the district center from time to time. High-ranking poachers jammed the fish with dynamite, shared the prey with my grandfather, and paid a little extra.
His mother, my mother's grandmother and my great-grandmother Olga, who seemed to be a school teacher, became insane by the end of her life. It seemed to her that her son and daughter-in-law wanted to poison her. In order not to give them such an opportunity, she tried not to eat at home, went to neighboring villages and asked for pieces of bread. But it also happened that at home she secretly, at night, poured herself borscht from cast-iron dish and topped up the brew with raw water, which caused the whole family to suffer from stomachs. One day she was caught doing this. The quick-tempered son became furious, lost control of himself, grabbed a large grip that was at hand and struck her in the stomach. Fortunately, the skinny old woman just turned sideways; the horns of the grip passed in front and behind, enveloping her with an iron half-ring, and were put her into the oven, knocking out the brick crumb. If she hadn't turned around so successfully, the further history of the family would have been completely different. After that incident, she was sent to a mental hospital, where she died.
My mother studied quite well. After school, she went to Moldova to study further — I don't remember what exactly. There, a Moldovan, twice her age, fell in love with her. He courted, offered to marry him. Having not received reciprocity, he promised that he would steal her and still marry her. She was very scared and returned home.
As a result, she graduated from the Construction School in Homieĺ and worked in the women's insulation brigade. An accident happened there: a container with molten bitumen overturned on her left hand. It was a terrible burn, the skin on the hand and part of the forearm was gone, the muscles were damaged. The arm lost its mobility, and the medics did not expect to save it. But giving up wasn't in my mother's nature. She treated her hand with all available means, developed it, exercised every day, moved her hand and fingers, gradually clenching and unclenching them. The burn was unbearably painful, the growing young skin burst, blood flowed, tears flowed, but the exercises continued, the fingers bent better and better. When a few months later she was invited to a medical commission to do the final examination of a non-working hand and give a disability, the members of the commission were stunned to see a normally functioning hand and fully movable fingers. After that, Nadezhda returned to her brigade.
Both she and my father worked in the city, but they knew each other in the village, where everyone ran over quite often. That's where they started their relationship. My mother told me that she laughed at the lanky and big-eared red-haired guy, rewarding him with all sorts of offensive nicknames — and she did not understand how it came to love, and then to the wedding.
Having married, they settled in Homieĺ, at Anna's grandmother's house. That's where I was born.
As you can see, I don't know much about family history. Maybe it's a bad thing. But now there's nothing you can do. There's no one else to ask. The oldest generation, my grandparents, are long gone. My parents' generation is almost completely gone. The few people who stayed won't say much anymore. My generation is about to become the oldest. And among almost a dozen cousins, I seem to be the oldest (although I know almost nothing about two or three of them, so I will not vouch for the latter). All of them are even less familiar with the family background than I am.
In fact, it is very strange when you still remember your great-grandfather, and next to him — you as a child, and suddenly it turns out that you are now almost the oldest of his kind, as he once was. You watched how it went, but it is still perceived as something sudden, as "out of the blue". That's the weird thing. We age slowly but unexpectedly.
A few years ago, there was a case. I was talking to someone and he mentioned an acquaintance. When I asked him how old he was, he said, "Thirty." I thought, "Youngster!" — and then I inwardly stoped short. "There you go..." — I said to myself. — "Look at you... Thirty-year-olds already seem like youngster to me... I guess I'm getting old."
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