Mother Russia
It was probably a man from the Kyiv Oblast Social Fund checking that Ludmila was still alive. They'd be only too happy to stop her widow's pension and leave her son Vasya with just his tiny disability payment to live on. She'd fought hard for that, but it was so meagre it would not be enough to feed him if she died. She pushed aside the rolled-up rags that kept the cold wind from whistling under the plywood door and unbolted the top and bottom locks, opening it a crack but leaving the safety chain attached. There were bandits around who could kick their way in, but if they started, she should have a chance to get out of the mud-room and back inside the stronger main door. Through the crack of daylight, she could see a handsome young man with blonde hair and blue eyes, but Ludmila had learned in her long life not to be taken in by appearances.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"We want to help," the young man said.
"Why?" she answered. She hadn't asked for help. A strange man showing up at her door was suspicious.
"My name is Sergei, and my friend is Karel," he said, leaning sideways so she could see a dark-haired youth. "We are good people. We heard you don't have much food."
"Who told you that?" she said, squinting in the morning light to see if someone was behind the young men. It was probably that busybody Ekaterina who had sent them. As long as Ludmila had known her, that rancid butterball couldn't keep her nose out of other people's business.
"It doesn't matter," Sergei said.
Ludmila eyed him up and down, from his expensive boots, already muddied from the walk to the house, to his American-style jeans and his white pullover made of a material that looked like fur. He was probably the spoiled city kid of an apparatchik father who made sure his son got the best of everything but who had never done a day's proper work in his life. A twinge of jealousy made her think of Vasya, who was standing just inside the main door behind her. He would probably be dazzled by this young man. He'd never have such fine clothes and would have to make do with her late husband's clothes until they rotted off him.
"We don't need anything," she said and began to close the door.
"Wait!" Sergei said. "At least let me give you this." He held out a purple-and-brown 500-rouble note that would be enough to buy 12 eggs, a loaf of bread, and a litre of milk. He waved the note in her direction like he was offering a treat to a zoo animal, but Ludmila had seen bribery attempts before, and she wasn't about to fall for it. Vasya must have seen the banknote flapping in the breeze as he opened the main door wider to come out and stand beside his mother. She didn't want him there, but he was bigger than her, and she wouldn't have been able to fend him off.
"Are you Vasya?" Sergei asked.
Ludmila began to ask how they knew his name, but her son answered "Yes" over the top of her head.
"Maybe you would like to give this to your mother." Sergei held out the banknote to Vasya. Ludmila pushed it away, but Vasya got around her.
"What do you want from us?" she asked.
"Only to help you. Maybe Vasya would like a new coat or some shoes."
Vasya reached for the 500-ruble note. When Ludmila was unable to stop him, she stepped out of the way.
"How easily you are bought," she said to her son, looking at him with disgust as if he had soiled his trousers.
"Will there be a fight when we are gone?" Sergei asked.
"Probably," Vasya said, but he kept the bank note.
A week later, Sergei and his friend came back to ask if Ludmila and Vasya needed anything in particular. They offered to take Vasya to get a haircut and buy him some shoes, as he was wearing broken-down purple plastic ones.
"We need nothing," Ludmila said, and pulled the untouched 500-ruble note out of the pocket of the checked dressing gown that used to be her husband's, and was now her everyday wear.
"No. You keep it. It's for you," Sergei insisted.
"There's no need. No need." She held out the money to Sergei, but Vasya tried to grab it. This time, she forcibly put it into the pocket of Sergei's shirt, but had to slap her son's hand out of the way when he tried to take it back.
"Vasya can buy himself something," Sergei protested.
"There's nothing we need," she said, and grabbed Vasya's elbow to pull him back into the house.
The visitors left, and Ludmila was happy to see them go. It wasn't like she had no use for the money, but they could be blackmailers who would steal her house and the few possessions she had left. An eon ago, she had left her teaching post in Leningrad and, sponsored by Moscow, had followed her new husband to the countryside, dreaming of doing her part to help her country develop its agricultural prowess. After she arrived at the collective farm village, she taught at the local school until it closed. Even before she and her husband had moved there, Khrushchev had begun reversing Stalin's agricultural policies. Khrushchev said that Stalin's 5-year plans and 10-year plans had nothing to do with reality, and there needed to be a new system, though nobody was quite sure what that would be. There were droughts and floods, and much of the land Stalin had insisted be cultivated to feed the masses wasn't the best farmland and would have been better left alone. By the time Khrushchev was succeeded by Brezhnev, the local collective farm where Ludmila and her husband lived barely existed. There was only one working tractor, no parts for repair were available, and the time it took to get approval for fuel rations often meant the harvest was left in the fields. When that happened, those who remained in the village would go out and collect what they could by hand. There was no extra produce to send to the central depot, so the village had no money to maintain its infrastructure. The roads were left to deteriorate, barns collapsed, animals died and weren't replaced. Brezhnev located a power plant an hour's walk from the village, and anyone who was able-bodied found work there, but the construction period only lasted 3 years. Any of the young men who might have stayed around to revive the village's fortunes were lured off the failing farm by the promise of high salaries in the army. By then, the only inhabitants in the village were old people who were beyond working age.
Ludmila's husband had taken the army up on their offer but had come back from Afghanistan a hollow man. Vodka had always been part of the Russian identity, but with so much disillusionment, many husbands and wives drank and made more babies than they were able to feed. Ludmila had kept to herself in the village, attempting to be self-sufficient by growing vegetables, but greedy and hungry neighbours pilfered the produce, and the winters were so long that by spring, there was nothing left to eat. She and her small family might have been able to survive if there had been work for her husband, but he had nothing to do except hoe the garden in the summer months, and in the long winter, drink vodka and complain. She suggested they should move to the kinder climate of Leningrad, where she might be able to use her university degree and work as a teacher again, but her husband wouldn't hear of it.
"Nobody will tell me I can't support my family," he'd say.
"But you can't," Ludmila would counter. "I could earn good money, and we could have a nice apartment."
"There will be no living in an apartment, and that's the end of it," he'd say, slamming his empty glass on the table, then storming out in the direction of a house where a local man made vodka from the potatoes and sugar beets he scrounged from the almost abandoned fields.
Early in Vasya's life, Ludmila and her husband had noticed that their son, who was born two years after his sister, was a vivacious baby who sang to himself, and when he could walk, would dance to the music on the radio. He liked to draw pictures, but there was no paper to be had. When he drew on the walls, his father slapped him so hard it affected his balance and some of his hearing. Vasya wasn't easily discouraged and loved music, dancing, and drawing on the old newspapers his mother dug out of other people's rubbish. Ludmila talked about sending him to the city to develop his talents, but her husband declared that no son of his was a faggot artist. A few times when Vasya's father walked in on his son spinning around the room to music, he kicked him so hard that the boy would fall to the floor, whimpering like his leg had been broken. "Tell your son to stop flapping around like he's a damn headless chicken," he'd say to Ludmila. Vasya also had a slight lisp when he spoke, which angered his father so much that whenever Vasya said something in his father's presence, he would throw at him whatever came to hand. His sister tried to defend her younger brother, but her efforts stopped when she was a teenager. One day, her father came home earlier than expected because his drinking hole had run dry. He was in a foul temper because it was so early. Ludmila was out searching for stray grains of wheat to make bread. When his father lashed out at the 12-year-old Vasya for playing foreign music on the radio, his sister tried to defend her brother, but his father's reaction was to take a swing at her. He ordered his daughter to go out and weed the garden while he had a nap, but when she refused, he manhandled her into the bedroom and raped her. Vasya told his mother afterwards that his sister had screamed and screamed, but when he went into the bedroom to make his father stop, his father threw an oil lamp at him. Ludmila was so angry she pounded her fists on her husband's chest and called him every bad name she could think of, which made him leave the house again and not come back for a couple of days.
Ludmila's teenage daughter became more and more rebellious, and one day, when she was sixteen, she left to walk to the nearest town and never came back. Ludmila went looking for her, but people said they heard she had hitchhiked to Ivankiv. When Ludmila took the bus to Ivankiv, she heard her daughter had gone to the army base at Novi Petrivtsi, but when she went there, her daughter had left, though this time, people said she had been working as a prostitute. Ludmila gave up her search because she didn't feel right about leaving Vasya at home with her husband's drunken rages. He could kill the boy with hardly a thought. Since her daughter had always been the rebellious kind, she was beyond saving, so the best Ludmila could do was to protect her son.
During the next few years, Ludmila's husband drank himself into a stupor every day at the moonshine house and stumbled home when his pension money ran out. One night, in the middle of a blizzard, he never returned. Every night he was away, Ludmila was grateful for another night of peace. It didn't take long for a neighbour to report that her husband had been found frozen to death in a field. Ludmila simply nodded her head as she had known it would happen one day. The harsh winter had relieved her of the burden of having to kill him if he became too violent. It was a shame their dreams as a young couple had been consumed in an alcoholic haze, but her university life, her hopes for the gleaming Soviet People's Republic, and her love of teaching children had all taken place in a country that didn't exist anymore.
When her husband died, she and Vasya stayed on in the dilapidated house, almost freezing in winter, and invaded by damp and flies in the summer. Vasya had lost all desire to go out in the world and stuck to running local errands for his mother, who found the few remaining people in the village more evil every day. She was sure they were conspiring to burn her house down with her and Vasya in it.
Sergei and his friend, who had offered help a few years earlier, had stopped trying after their first two visits, but Ludmila could have used their help when she fell ill. She had such a bad relationship with her neighbours that nobody checked on her, and anyway, she didn't think her illness was their business. Soon, she couldn't get out of bed and had to rely on Vasya to do everything for her, to feed her, and to clean her after toilet accidents. He read to her in the daylight hours, because there was no light at night.
After one of the neighbours realized she hadn't seen Ludmila in six months and wondered if Vasya was living with a corpse. She wrote a letter to the Social Fund explaining that it wouldn't be right if Vasya were collecting his mother's pension if she were dead. When a social worker came by and managed to talk her way past Vasya, who wasn't far from being a skeleton himself, she found Ludmila in a coma. The social worker called an ambulance for Ludmila, but she only lasted a day in the hospital before she died. The ministry contacted Sergei, who had continued his work of helping people in abandoned villages, to ask if he could do something for Vasya. This time, with no mother to hold him back, Vasya accepted help.
Sergei convinced Vasya to abandon his mother's tumbledown, mildewed house and move to an apartment in Pripyat so he could be cleaned up, nursed back to health, clothed properly, and sent to adult school where he might train for some kind of work. It didn't take long for Vasya to find his real self. His favourite thing to do was spend time in the local library catching up on what he had missed in his childhood and adolescence. He covered reams of paper with drawings he copied from books. "It's so lovely to see him smile," the librarian said, though Vasya was without teeth. He said he missed his mother, but he was happy without the responsibility. His manner was still tentative and uncertain, as he had been a prisoner for so long that he didn't always understand what people wanted from him.
Passing through the village a few times on his way to help other people, Sergei occasionally arranged to meet Vasya in a park to see how he was doing. On one visit, he noticed that Vasya was more subdued than normal. He was getting thinner again, and his hair had reverted to the rat's nest it had been when he lived with his mother. He was not wearing the winter coat Sergei had bought him a month before.
"Ivan is using it," he said.
"Who is Ivan?" Sergei asked.
"A friend," Vasya said in a voice so weak it was hardly audible.
"What about you?" Sergei asked. "You need an overcoat as much as he does."
Vasya shrugged. "I am used to the cold," he said.
"That may be, but it's your coat. Why have you given it to Ivan?'
"He needed it."
"Can we go back to your apartment and talk to Ivan?"
Vasya didn't move. "He wouldn't like that," he said.
Sergei convinced him that it would be a friendly visit, that he could leave the winter coat with Ivan if he needed it. "I will buy you a new one," he said. "You need to stay warm."
When Vasya opened the door of the apartment, the smell of urine was overwhelming. What Sergei found was not what he expected. Ivan wasn't in the apartment, but his wife and her four children were. There was an open bottle of vodka on the table, and the children were crawling around the floor, the two youngest in visibly soiled diapers.
"Who are you?" Sergei asked.
"I am Ivan's," the young woman said. "Vasya is so kind. He invited my family to live here with him. He says he doesn't need all the space, and has plenty of money from his pension, so we can eat properly."
Sergei picked up the bottle of vodka, but the woman snatched it back.
"I think you're taking advantage of our friend," Sergei said. "He only has a single pension, and by the look of him, he is not eating enough."
"I'm fine," Vasya said. "I don't need so much."
"He invited us," the woman said as if Sergei were an official from one of the ministries.
"This apartment is small," Sergei answered. "The authorities say it is only for one or two people."
"There's Ivan and me," she said. "That's two."
"And what about Vasya? And the children?"
The mother made a bubbling noise with her lips and a dismissive gesture with a hand, as if the children didn't count for anything. "And where do you expect us to go?" she asked.
"I don't mind," Vasya said. "I'm fine sleeping on the floor."
"But we bought you a good bed," Sergei said.
Vasya shrugged, which probably meant he had surrendered it to Ivan and his wife. Before he left, Sergei took Vasya aside and said, "You need to get rid of these people. They are taking advantage of you. I know you are kind-hearted, but it will not be good for you to let them stay here."
Vasya wouldn't look at him.
The next month, when Sergei travelled through Pripyat, he tried to make contact with Vasya, but he was nowhere to be found. This time, Ivan was at the apartment, and he wouldn't let Sergei in. "He left," was all Ivan would say.
Not knowing if Vasya was alive or dead, Sergei decided on a hunch to visit the abandoned village where he had first met Ludmila, and was not surprised when Vasya answered the door of his mother's house.
"What are you doing back here?" he asked.
"Ivan needed my apartment for his family," he said.
"But it was yours. Don't you want a better life?"
Vasya looked sheepish as he stared at the floor. "I have no need," he said, sounding like his mother. Even though she was dead and didn't need anyone to care for her, her paranoia must have sunk so deeply into Vasya's soul that he had lost the will to participate in life. After his father died, followed by years of being his mother's hostage in the filthy cabin, it had become his only safe place. The short time he had his own apartment in the city would probably be a highlight of his life, but it would probably be the last time Vasya ever ventured into the larger world. Sergei left Vasya's home village just outside Chernobyl to drive back to Kyiv, with the knowledge that Vasya had been given a lifeline, but his damaged psyche had been unable to hold onto the rope.
1_2.jpg)
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment