Down Among the Fishes

Velkom to our polyphonic world

VELKOM TO OUR POLYPHONIC WORLDIt’s people like my granny who support the world on their shoulders. She’s sitting opposite me right now, at a table that’s gone black with age. From time to time dry pine needles drop from the tall tree next to us on to the table, and in to the pan with fried potatoes and our mugs of kvass*. People round here call these needles shypata, presumably after the sound they make when the wind blows through them. We’re having our supper in the open air, just like we’ve done many times over the past fifty years. There were times when other people joined us — mum, dad, Ulia, her children, my daughter… But now Ulia is in Norway, where she is lecturing to the scholarly descendants of the Vikings about the journeyings of their restless ancestors. Her children, Lina and Kazik, are in Mensk. So here we are, just the two of us.

The seven o’clock train has just chugged off to town, taking the townies from the dachas with it. Dobratyche is at peace again; the wind has dropped and the voices have fallen silent. There are just the villagers left, five homesteads in all; they too are eating their supper under the ancient oaks or settling their domestic animals down for the night.

So, imagine our surprise when at this quiet hour a young man with a holster on his hip came casually walking down our village street — if, that is, a deeply-rutted sand track with patches of wild oats growing here and there is worthy of the name ‘street’ — and, looking round in a perfectly relaxed way, stopped by our gate, opened it and came into the yard where we were sitting.

What did he want from us? Where had he come from?

Young, dark-haired, open honest face. And with a gun. You could see at once that he wasn’t some kind of robber, but then what do I know about people? So who was he?

Everything soon became clear.

“Good evening, I’m your local police officer. Rudkovsky’s the name. Call me Andrei. Can I come in?” This in Russian.

Granny looked at him with interest.

“What do you want, sonny?”she asked in reply. In Ukrainian.

“Can I ask you to draw me some water? It’s still terribly hot.”

Granny nodded in my direction, so I handed a clean mug to the lad. He ‘drew’ — his word, after all — a bucketful of water from the well, enjoyed his drink and then rinsed out the mug.

“The body of a man was found on the road not far from here. Do you know anything about it?” he asked, looking at me.

“We didn’t hear anything,” replied granny. “What sort of man was it?”

Through the thick lenses of her spectacles granny gave him the kind of look that demanded a reply. The lad heaved an almost imperceptible sigh and began his story.

Stop, hang on a minute. What language should I use to tell you what happened here? This is in fact not a simple question. The people of Dobratyche speak Ukrainian, but there aren’t many of them. The director of the firm called ‘Agrovitalika Plus’, Vital Charota, speaks Belarusian. He was evacuated here after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, from somewhere near Chachersk. Now and again my readers in Belarus will occasionally mumble a few words in Belarusian, but on the whole Russian dominates here. Charota, or the local police officer, the local newspaper or the doctor, or the Baptist pastor will sometimes lace their speech with a juicy Ukrainian phrase or two — something that the young local Orthodox priest and his good lady wife would never do.

As I’ve already said, the earth speaks Ukrainian, but only very, very rarely.

The wind whistles in its own way, beyond any human language.

So, velkom to our polyphonic world.

This is what the young police officer told us:

Our local Dobratyche news agency, our newsmaker or, in other words, our local gossip, is known hereabouts as Lyonikha, which is our village way of saying that she is Lyonya’s missus. So her husband’s name is Lyonya, or, to be formal, Leanid. The police officer, who doesn’t come from our village, politely calls her Auntie Masha, which means that her official first name is Maria. Anyway, Lyonikha was the primary source of information on this occasion as well. Yesterday she was taking milk to sell to the townies in the dachas, when all of a sudden she spotted someone lying on a slope by the road. It turned out to be one of the townies — Grey Toper we used to call him, because of his grey hair and his fondness for the hard stuff. He was lying in a position that was unnatural, even for him. On closer inspection, Lyonikha saw that he was dead, so she went back home and called the police. They soon arrived on the scene and ascertained that aforementioned Grey Toper had been despatched by three drinking companions to the shop in Pryluki to replenish their depleted supplies of alcohol. It looked like he had been knocked down by a car. All this had been put on record yesterday; today’s visit by the police had however been occasioned by the fact that Grey Toper’s widow had reported her husband’s bicycle missing. According to her, it was on this bicycle that he had set off on the final journey of his life and, when the police turned up, there was no sign of it near the body.

“No, we don’t know anything about it. Lyonikha didn’t come and see us yesterday,” this was me confirming, in Russian of course, our complete lack of information.

“OK, thanks for the water. Really tasty. I’ll get off then, maybe Auntie Masha’s already got back.”

So off the young fellow went, obviously in no great hurry. There’s a copse of aspen trees between us and Lyonikha’s house, but even so we soon heard a great racket coming from that direction. Lyonikha’s gone as deaf as a post in her old age, so the police officer really had to strain his voice to get his message across.

“Was there anyone around when you found the body? Did you see anything else?” we could hear the officer yelling.

“Believe me, I didn’t see anyone. There wasn’t anyone around at all. No, I didn’t see a bicycle.” Lyonikha’s loud replies came drifting towards us.

Strictly speaking this episode with the police officer was not directly linked to what happened afterwards. It wasn’t the actual pebble that started the avalanche. That particular pebble shifted in another place and at another time. But it was the first abnormal, unexpected event in a whole string of such events that came tumbling down on me so insistently that I was soon suffocating beneath a whole avalanche of them.