7. My Grandmother

Перевод рассаза "Моя Бабушка" из сборника "Устная традиция"

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In my childhood, she was always somewhere nearby, an inseparable part of my world. I lived on Proletarskaya Street until I was five, and in all my memories of that period there is a little of my mother and father, but my grandmother is always there. She would come to look after the children while Mother was at work; fortunately, she lived nearby then. Father was often away on business trips, and Mother went on them frequently as well. Their work consisted of inspecting enterprises throughout the Kazakh republic. At such times Grandmother would come and live with us. She looked after me even when I was still an infant, when Mother had gone away for a long time. 

My grandmother was my father’s mother. My other grandmother, my mother’s mother, died during the war while still relatively young. In my mother’s stories and in photographs, she appeared to me as a beautiful woman from some other world, and the ordinary word “grandmother” somehow did not suit her.

I was more than ten when I began to notice that Mother did not like Grandmother and did whatever she could to keep us children from having contact with her and with my father’s relatives. Later, having gradually won herself some ground, she began telling us about the wrongs she had suffered. Little by little, a picture emerged: a young, well-brought-up, excessively kind woman with a simple, trusting husband, surrounded by a greedy crowd of ignorant and ungrateful relatives.

There was some reality in this picture. My mother came from an educated, urban milieu, with its accustomed taste for comfort—which in those days was so difficult to achieve—and with relatively few family ties. My father and all his relatives, on the other hand, were rural and patriarchal, with no conception of comfort, and themselves represented a threat to the comfort Mother was trying to create. They often needed help from Father: sometimes money, sometimes help finding work or getting into school, sometimes a place to stay, but above all warmth, concern, and participation.

Father was the head and support of a large family descended from his grandfather, Pyotr Ilyich, while Mother tried to create an empty space between us and the rest of the relatives. Yet by protecting the family’s interests in her narrow understanding of them, this position undermined the foundations of the extended family. If one wanted to build comfort for our particular family, one would first have had to surround it with a wall separating it from the other relatives. I think the fate of such small, isolated communities is degeneration. So, strategically speaking, all her efforts weakened the future of her own descendants.

So we moved to Dachnaya Street in newly built house, Mother stopped working, and Grandmother began coming to see us less often—only as a guest. Sometimes she would stay with us in the new house for a week, sometimes she would simply drop by. Later, when it became difficult for her to walk on her own, Father would bring her in his official car.

I always remember her telling me things about the past. I do not know whether she talked this way with all her grandchildren, and if she did with some of them, I wonder what they remember. Many of the stories were told to us more than once; that is probably the only reason I remember some of them. I do not even know who gave me more for my understanding of the world: Grandmother or Father. They told stories about the same things, almost identically. From Grandmother’s stories, what remained in my imagination was some enormous canvas of a happy peasant life. It was a difficult, laborious happiness, but it was happiness, unlike what came later. Against this canvas, individual details and figures were filled in by Father.

Grandmother was short and always wore a headscarf. Today I would say she was a positive person, because she never quarreled, grumbled, or condemned anyone. As for Mother, whom she could hardly have loved, I never heard a single unkind hint about her from Grandmother.

Whenever she came to us, she would take out a little treat for us—most often a piece of candy: a "barbariska", a "podushechka", or a caramel, sometimes a cookie. Occasionally, when there was no candy, she would take out a handkerchief. Coins were tied into its corners, and she would give us one.

Her positive nature did not, however, exclude punishment. For this she would break off a fresh shoot of elm and use it to whip the calves of children’s legs. This was called “nadzhigat.” She used this punishment on me too. I remember myself at three or four, running ahead of her, being spurred on, squealing. I was filled with anger mixed with despair. I already felt my helplessness against the will of adults, but I had not yet surrendered. How dare they? Whom, me?

I remember only this one occasion, but there were probably many. Father used to say, laughing, that I took such punishments badly: I was afraid, cried, and tried to avoid them. Perhaps he would have been proud of me if I had despised them and refused to obey so readily.

Later there were no more punishments, only pretend threats:

“I'm going to "nadzhigat" you right now!”

I was no longer afraid of her at all, because by then I had learned the simplest rules, and, most importantly, I knew that she loved me no matter what and would always love me. And I loved her.

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I will not retell here everything I heard from Grandmother, because I do not possess the talent needed to convey the canvas of peasant life before collectivization—the happy, joyful life that Grandmother painted and Father confirmed.

Happy? But what about the fact that children slept huddled together on a "koshma" - type of carpet made from felt batts, spread on the floor near the entrance, covered only with their sheepskin coats? What about the fact that chicken noodle soup and dumplings were the only festive dishes, while on other days they sometimes had to eat "zatirukha" (flour mixed with hot water)? What about the homespun clothes the children wore? What… I asked Father about all this. It seemed that for the first time he stopped to think: what, really, had been so good about that happy life?

- But we did not know any other life, and we were content with the one we had.

It turned out that later they may have acquired more material goods and comfort, but they were never happy again.

And then they were happy because they lived as their fathers had lived: freely, on their own land, in their own houses, according to customs established long ago.

And above all, I think, it was freedom—the freedom they completely lost in the new world.

At the time, people did not really talk about this. Only occasionally, in Grandmother’s stories, some strange words would slip out and pass over my head. Later I discovered that we came from a Cossack family that had been transferred in the middle of the nineteenth century from Siberia to guard the new borders.

It immediately turned out that there were photographs and documents confirming this right at hand, and that everyone except me had always known it—they had simply kept quiet.

I typed our surname into Google and discovered many people bearing it living around Tyumen and in the Altai region. The earliest mention of it appears in a sixteenth-century petition. In it, our surname belonged to one of conqueror of Siberia Yermak’s companions, named Olfer. These companions received nothing from the conquest of Siberia and spent their remaining years in poverty and illness. In their petition they asked the tsar for mercy. Thus my surname entered Russian history.

In early-eighteenth-century censuses, the surname appears in the same Siberian areas. One bearer of it, in 1713, is identified as a dragoon. (Which, incidentally, raises the question: what could a dragoon have been doing in Siberia?)

If we are descendants of that Olfer who came to Siberia with Yermak, then our family way of life, although already fading, was the direct heir not merely to pre-Peterian Russia, but perhaps to pre-Romanov Russia—a Russia quietly living out its final days far from Moscow, with its troubles, serfdom, and reforms.

In the parish register of the stanitsa of Lyubavinskaya for 1900, there is my great-grandfather, Cossack Pyotr Ilyin. There is no one else with the same surname. So we are all his descendants.

I also learned—Grandmother and Father had told me about it long ago, but when listening to them I had not really heard them—that when the Reds finally prevailed, all the Cossack men left for China with the retreating forces of Ataman Annenkov, or perhaps Dutov; some went with their families, some without them. In other words, Father and Grandmother had somehow managed to tell me the whole story accurately without mentioning the Reds or Whites at all, or the fact that those who were too slow to leave were put against the wall by the Reds.

My grandfather, leaving for China, placed his family, including my father, who was three or four years old, with a friend of his, a Kazakh named Nurmambet, in an aul (settlement). A "tomyr" among Kazakhs is something like a sworn or adopted brother. There my barefoot, runny-nosed father ran around with children his own age, chatting with them in Kazakh, drinking "ayran", riding horses, while the villagers called Grandmother "mardzha". Grandmother wore a white scarf covering her entire head, like all the women around her, said “Amen” after meals (she acted all this out for me), and told everyone that she was the wife of a Tatar who had converted to Islam. Her husband, she said, had gone away on business but would soon return. She told this to those who were always looking for enemies; their own people, of course, knew the truth. She spoke Kazakh, as did most of that family.

Later the Cossacks were granted an amnesty, and some of them, like my grandfather, returned to their native stanitsa, which by then had been renamed Stanitsa Trotskaya after that very creator of the Red Army. Others remained in China. Later Stanitsa Trotskaya was renamed Kaskelen. Today it has almost merged with Almaty, whereas back then it took half a day to get there by cart.

Among those who remained there was another Cossack with the same surname as Grandmother’s—perhaps her brother, perhaps her uncle. I know about him because he became part of the online history of Russian China. The Cossacks there established new stanitsas and fought again in the 1930s, on various sides: for the central government, for the Dungans, for the Uyghurs. Then, when the Communists came to power in China, everyone who had survived left for Australia to build stanitsas there.

On the other hand, my first wife’s grandmother (they were Ukrainians, not Cossacks) found herself at the same time in the area around Gavrilovka, where the front between Reds and Whites was passing. She said that the Cossacks of Ataman Annenkov, who held that section of the front, would, after battles, choose a young woman from among the local civilians and take her away with them into the steppe. “They would put her on a cart and take her away,” she said. After that the girl never returned. They presumably raped her and killed her. (So does that mean that some relative of mine could have been among them?)

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This is how she got married: Grandfather came to ask for her hand.

- Did you know him before that?

- No, I had only seen him from a distance, and my girlfriends had told me, ‘Look, someone like that has appeared.’ So they are sitting there with Father, and they sent us girls out, but we were listening at the door. Petenka asks Father to give me to him, and Father says, ‘It is up to her.’ They called me in. I stood there, unable even to raise my eyes. Father said, ‘So, will you go with him?’ I could not say anything, only nodded my head like this.

She demonstrated how she had stood there without daring to look up and how she had nodded her head. She was smiling throughout the whole story.

- How old were you?

- I was going on fifteen.

I learned only recently, however, that they were married in church and had their wedding celebration when they already had two children: Nyura and Vera. My father was the first child born within the legal marriage. There is no one left to ask how it really happened.

At that time Grandfather’s brother Adrian was away at military training somewhere near Issyk. There he fell in love with a Cossack girl and brought her home. When they asked the priest to marry Grandmother and Grandfather, the priest made it a condition that Adrian and Agafya also be married at the same time. And so the two church weddings took place simultaneously. As for the actual wedding celebration, I do not know whether there were two of them or one shared celebration.

My great-grandfather Pyotr Ilyich was a harsh (cruel) man, and my grandfather left home as soon as he was able to because of him. He was exempted from military service because of a weak heart. That did not prevent him from doing hard labor as a hired hand for a wealthy Kazakh. After ten years of service, he left, receiving, in addition to his wages, a log house as a reward. I saw that house myself. It was made of black, age-old fir trees, and by then it was being used as someone’s barn.

Pyotr Ilyich died, and Grandfather and his family moved into the ancestral house. The brothers added a second floor made of fir logs floated down the Kaskelenka River. I cannot imagine how they managed it. At that time the river rushed angrily, tumbling among enormous boulders. Smaller stones rolled along the riverbed, and the impact made the ground tremble beneath your feet. For a child to fall into that torrent meant certain death. All the mountain rivers were like that in their upper reaches. Later they were diverted into irrigation channels.

Two brothers and their families lived in the enlarged house, along with the family of a third brother who had died, while a fourth, Dmitry, who lived with his family in the city, was constantly present there. The daughters-in-law were ruled over by Pyotr Ilyich’s widow, Tatyana Ivanovna.

The daughters-in-law did not love her. She kept everyone under strict control. Grandmother used to grumble about how, when there turned out to be a large quantity of potatoes, whether spoiled or frostbitten, her mother-in-law ordered all of them to be grated into starch. Their hands would turn black and crack until they bled, but they grated away. Everything that was good went for sale—so did all the sour cream and butter—and they longed to taste some of it. One of the daughters-in-law came up with an idea and then taught Grandmother: eat some, and then scratch the surface with a fork.

- Cats! - the mother-in-law exclaimed when she saw it.

My grandmother would chuckle about her little trick even fifty years later.

The only kind word ever spoken about that mother-in-law came from Aunt Vera. At the time she was quarreling with Grandmother (her own mother) and her sister Nyura but was friendly with my mother. She told me that when she was about four years old, she became so ill that her relatives and mother thought she was already dead. Only her grandmother—that is, that same mother-in-law, Tatyana Ivanovna placed a feather against her little nose and determined from the movement of the hairs that the girl was alive. She scolded everyone for their negligence and nursed the child back to health. After that, she loved her more than anyone else. Of course, someone must have told Vera this—how could she herself know?

Grandmother said that when the new Soviet government came, the first thing it did was take the brothers Dmitry and Alexander to be shot as officers. They were not officers, but they wore silver shoulder boards. Their ranks were very low, something like "vakhtmisters" - corporal. There is a photograph of Dmitry in the album; he looks quite dashing, and the shoulder boards really do shine.

So they had already been placed against the wall, and I saw it in my mind as a clay, half-collapsed "duval" on the edge of a ravine. They asked for a cigarette before they died, and were given one. As they were smoking, a Cossack boy appeared in the distance, running along the path and shouting frantically:

- Stop! Stop! The Second Regiment has been ordered not to shoot!

Here I should explain. The Second Semirechensk Cossack Regiment, which had emerged from Persia in full strength and with its weapons, remained neutral in the struggle for power between Reds and Whites. If it had taken the ataman’s side, entirely different people would have been standing at the execution wall.

The brothers were released. Dmitry’s legs gave way and he could not walk, while Alexander merely laughed. By evening Dmitry had recovered, and they went to the bathhouse. After the bath, Alexander died of a stroke.

Once I climbed into the experimental garden of the pedagogical institute adjoining our yard—a place I will never tire of talking about—and picked some wheat there.

When Grandmother saw the bunch of ears, she told me that in the old days a wheat ear extended the entire length of the stalk, growing from the very ground. People sowed little and harvested huge crops; they lived richly and joyfully.

“Once Christ came down to earth and walked among people disguised as a poor wanderer, to see how ordinary people lived. He was walking past a field and stopped, as if to rest, beside a stream in the shade of some trees, where unharnessed carts stood and a little fire was burning. The people were working in the field, while a young woman was busy there. The Lord sat down beside her and began talking to her. Then her baby began to cry—it had soiled itself. The young woman wanted to wipe the child, but she had nothing at hand. So she pulled up a bunch of green wheat to wipe the baby’s bottom.”

Grandmother accompanied her story with gestures, making it immediately obvious that for her this story was completely real.

“Christ, seeing this, became angry! If people treat God’s gift this way, they do not deserve it! And in his anger he cursed the wheat. He wanted to turn all of it into barren stalks, but the Mother of God did not let him carry it through. She too was invisibly present there, following her Son. She seized the stalk and begged him not to do it, to have pity on the people. The Lord relented and left the ear only where she had grasped it. That is why the ear grows only there, at the place where her hand held the stalk. Now everyone has to work hard.”

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The most frequently used word in Grandmother’s stories was "pashnya"—the plowed field.

The plowed field was their natural environment. They would set out for it before dawn, the whole family going together, with infants among them. A family consisted sometimes of two, sometimes of three brothers with their wives. They all lived together, in one house, one household. At any given moment there were at least a dozen children running around, with just as many lying in cradles or being held in arms. The fields were irrigated by "aryks" - channels as deep as a child was tall, winding down the mountain slopes. When there was no water in them, one could walk along them, picking blackberries growing along the edges and popping them into one’s mouth. The fields were crossed by the floodplains of little rivers, overgrown with vegetation where foxes and pheasants lived. Wild apricot trees grew along the edges. When they blossomed pink in early spring, the feeling in your soul was one of celebration. By late summer, the ground beneath them was covered with fruit. They would rake the fruit into pits filled with water so that the stones would separate. The stones were then sold to a pharmacy. Quails lived in the wheat. Grandmother’s father—whom she always called Tyatenka, and only that—had a dog named Djerkalka.

- You would be walking past the field, just say, ‘Djerkalka, ishshi!’ and instantly she’d run off, and before you knew it she’d be coming back with a quail in her teeth. She’d fetch two or three of them, and straight into the soup they went.

That Djerkalka lived more than a century and a half ago.

Animals were part of the family. One such animal was a gelding named Ryzhka. There are countless stories about him. I no longer remember which ones Father told and which Grandmother told; their stories, repeated over and over, became intertwined.

Once, having arrived at the field, they discovered that they had forgotten to bring some small but necessary item from home, something like a whetstone for the scythe. “Why not send Mishenka for it?” Mishenka was five years old and delighted to be useful. They put him on Ryzhka, since home was six versts (three miles) away. On the way, Ryzhka was frightened by something and bolted at a gallop. Father held on well, despite having no saddle. Ryzhka flew toward home. The gate into the yard was open, and the crossbar across it was low, and Father realized he was about to smash into it. But clever, kind Ryzhka stopped directly in front of the gate. Father flew head over heels. Well, such things were not unusual for them. He got up, found what was needed, and took it back to the field.

Another time, Ryzhka came into the yard harnessed to a cart and stood by the porch. No one noticed where two-year-old Nyura had disappeared to. When they finally realized she was missing, they froze: she had climbed down from the porch and was standing between Ryzhka’s hind legs, laughing, hugging them and rocking back and forth, or grabbing at the dangling, well, you know what. Grandmother demonstrated how the little girl stretched her arms upward. Clever Ryzhka froze, afraid to move a hoof.

There is no Grandmother, no Aunt Nyura, no Father. What remains is a picture in my imagination: a little girl in a long shirt swaying beneath the horse, hugging its legs.

Collectivization struck animals even harder than it struck people. Ryzhka, already old, was taken away to the collective farm. My grandfather was separated from him. Someone told him that Ryzhka was not being treated with any care. Grandfather saw him, and he felt pain and shame before Ryzhka, but he was completely powerless. It was time to think about himself—to save himself and his family. Run away from the collective farm? That would mean abandoning the ancestral home, the property they had accumulated, the fields, the memories, their entire life, for the sake of the children’s future. They ran away without any resources to live on. During that flight, some of the children died.

The memory of Ryzhka was entirely real; he continued to live in it. Already in the 1970s, Father got up during the night and, not fully awake, went out into the yard and headed toward its far corner. He had dreamed that Ryzhka was standing there, tangled in his fetters, calling for help. When Father bent down toward the bushes to untangle Ryzhka, Grandmother, who had followed him, came up to him. She too had awakened.

- What are you doing?

- I’m untangling Ryzhka.

They both told me about it the next day.

Another member of the family was a cow. I do not remember her name. Everyone loved her, and when she grew old and stopped giving milk, instead of being sent to the slaughterhouse, she was taken to the fields and turned loose to graze, and they continued to visit her. At first she wandered around, then she lay down and did not get up. Father continued feeding her for several days. When they found her already dead, Father and Grandfather buried her right there. Father visited the burial place some time later. There was a damp spot visible on the ground.

In the 1937 questionnaire of Grandfather’s brother Adrian, who had been arrested, it is recorded that in 1917 he had five horses, three foals, three cows, and fifteen desyatinas (37 acres) of sown land.

Another animal was a bear. They brought him down from the mountains as a cub, and he lived with the family. The children played with him when he was small. When he grew up, the young men began wrestling with him. The tournaments took place on the riverbank, drawing spectators from everywhere. But then he grew up and began causing trouble. How?

- He climbed onto the roof of the cellar, tore it apart, and did more damage to the food than he actually ate, - Father said.

- He started bothering me, - Grandmother said, - So Petenka got angry. He wouldn’t leave me alone in the yard.

And she added:

- They say that in one village a bear dragged a young woman into the forest. They had children there afterward.

They got rid of the bear, but I never asked how.

Once all the adults left the house, taking my infant father in their arms, presumably, while three-year-old Vera and four-year-old Nyura decided to play at being "kumushki" (godmothers). They went visiting one another and offered each other treats. Their treat was real homemade "braga" (booze), just like the adults drank. When the parents returned, the cellar hatch where the girls had gotten the "braga" was open, and the girls were lying on the floor, vomiting into the opening.

- We were playing kuma, - Nyura, the older girl, explained.

- I'm doomed, - was all little Vera could say, - (I feel likho)

- She said ‘ikho,’” Grandmother chuckled? - She couldn’t pronounce ‘likho’ properly.

According to Aunt Vera, it was as a result of this incident that she later could not tolerate alcohol. But on the women’s side of that family, nobody drank anyway. My sister and her daughters do not like alcohol, nor do my daughters.

Whether it was the Military Commissariat or the People’s Commissariat of Trade, either on its own initiative or at Father’s request from the front, they gave Grandmother a separate apartment in a house that had once been a summer cottage. Grandmother spoke proudly about it; she loved that apartment. The house, and accordingly the yard, had been divided into three apartments with separate entrances. The apartment consisted of a room with a tiny kitchen-hallway, entered by way of a high porch.

Grandmother told the story—and I saw it myself, because I knew that apartment well—of how one winter someone knocked or called, as it seemed to me, from the gate. She looked out. It was snowing. A young woman stood there holding a child in her arms. To me it seemed that the child was wrapped in something like a skirt or curtain. Grandmother recognized the girl as the girlfriend of her son Petya, who had been drafted into the army and sent to serve in Mongolia.

- I saw her at the railway station when I went to see him off.

- Here is your granddaughter,” the girl Valya said.

Grandmother invited her into the house, and they began living together. That is how they all lived there together, with Aunt Vera and her son Gena.

That is how I saw the scene until recently, when I came across a photograph of Uncle Petya with Aunt Valya, that same girl. The photograph was from 1940; it showed two grown adults leaning closely against each other. Somehow it does not quite fit Grandmother’s story. And was it really as I remembered it?

Aunt Valya and her daughter Galya left the apartment when Uncle Petya returned from the army. Grandmother moved in with her daughter, Aunt Nyura, after they built their house on Belinsky Street. Aunt Vera and Gena remained in the apartment.

Grandmother had not merely scarred on her legs, but deep cicatrices, like cuts.

“What are those?”

“Oh, that was when I had "rozhа" (erysipelas desease). One evening, it was hot, and I sat on the edge of an aryk and put my feet into the water. It felt so good. The next day my whole body was swollen. I collapsed with a fever, and no one could do anything. They already thought I was going to die; I was so ill. They had already told Petenka that he would have to find a new wife so the children wouldn’t be left without anyone.”

An old medical orderly—or perhaps a veterinarian—was found. He made incisions in Grandmother’s calves, and little by little she recovered. On another occasion Grandmother had typhus. She lay in a typhus barracks for a month. During that time, her infant child died.

My parents went away on a business trip. I was one year old, and I developed diarrhea that would not stop. The doctor’s treatment did nothing. Grandmother had lost more than one of her own children, and she knew what this could lead to. Once again she found an old medical orderly, perhaps a veterinarian. He prescribed a raw egg, or perhaps just the white, and they poured it down my throat. I gagged but swallowed. Grandmother showed me how. It worked. Later I told Mother about it, and she waved it away: “Nonsense. It didn’t happen that way at all.”

When I was three or four, I began to stutter after being frightened by a coat rack falling on me. After some time, when it once again became clear that medicine was not helping me, Grandmother took me to a "znakharka", a traditional healer. I remember that visit. The healer poured something into a ladle of water. I watched the patterns spreading through it and answered her questions about my father and mother. The stuttering went away, and I was instructed not to tell anyone about the visit, so as not to cause trouble for Father. He could have been expelled from the Communist Party and dismissed from his job for it.

Grandmother died of old age when I was in my fourth year at university. At the same time, I and some friends ended up at the police station over some foolish and trivial matter, but the dean’s office was notified and there was an investigation. Everyone’s parents got them off; I told my family nothing. I was supposed to appear before the disciplinary meeting, but I did not go. Later, in front of everyone, the dean asked why. I answered that I had been at my grandmother’s funeral. “Is that true?” the dean asked, looking at my fellow students. “True,” confirmed Seryy, my friend. And that was the end of it.

From my grandfather and grandmother’s marriage, a couple of dozen great-great-grandchildren are living today, and those are only the ones I know about. There are probably twice as many more on branches of the family tree about which I know only that they must exist somewhere. Many of them already have children of their own.