Down Among the Fishes

Holes in time

HOLES IN TIMEWhat I like most of all is digging holes in time. When I’m digging them I now and again hear the earth whispering to me. But not very often.

Stradche, Lyubche and Dobratyche

Everything in my life went arse up right from the very start — literally. Against the advice of her mother — so, my grandmother — my mother went off to have me in the outpatient clinic of the hospital that had just been opened in the neighbouring village. Granny Makrynya — that’s what they called my mother’s mother — didn’t see any need for it and so tried to dissuade her in her usual manner: with a big stick in her hands. She did not, however, dare to hit her pregnant daughter. So off my mother went to the clinic. After all, she was a teacher, young, educated, with a firm belief in the necessity of progress, drug and hygiene. The paramedic who was assigned to deliver her baby was also a believer. Maybe his faith wasn’t strong enough, or he just didn’t have enough experience, or he put his faith in vodka as well as progress, but as soon as the baby was born — my sister Ulia (or, as they say around here, Vlyana) — and without waiting for anything else to happen, he started to stitch up my mother’s lacerated v****a, concentrating on trying to make the stitches even.

“No, no, no, we have to stitch it up,” this in response to my mother’s agonised protests, “otherwise we’ll have your uterus dangling between your knees. Not a pretty sight!”

And so on he stitched. My mother, of course, was screaming — not surprisingly, if your skin and muscles are being sewn up without anaesthetic in an open wound, and if, to top it all, the needle being used is a really thick one …

She was in such agony that any other feeling was completely blotted out; it came therefore as a complete surprise, to both her and the paramedic, when I suddenly broke through the fresh stitches and burst out into the world.

“What the f**k!? There’s something else coming out!”– according to my mother, these were the exact words used by this latter-day Asclepius as he stood there rooted to the spot, flabbergasted, with a surgical needle in his hand.

In the teacher training college that my mother had gone to in order to get an education, they had no courses on how to give birth, and so she, barely conscious and in terrible pain, was unable to dispel his astonishment. In any case she didn’t have any idea of what was happening either. She had exhausted all her strength during the birth, and when the pain had let up a bit, she had tried to get her breath back at least. So the paramedic simply stared goggle-eyed at what the medics call the birth canal — and which in normal language we try to avoid giving a name to. The entrance to the canal was framed by pubic hairs that weren’t exactly what you would call nicely shaved, full of pain and shimmering blood, and gaping wider and wider like a pulsating star.

Fortunately for me, it was right at this moment that the nurse came back into the ward. Thanks to her, I didn’t end up being dropped on the floor: she grabbed me from the arms of the gob-smacked labourer in the vineyard of public health care and managed to prevent him from starting to stitch my mother up again until the placenta had come out. Only an hour later everyone in Dobratyche already knew that Makrynya’s girl Eva had given birth to twin girls. That’s us, me and my sister.

After the nurse had washed and swaddled me and Ulia, they all — that is, the nurse, my mother and the paramedic (who still had an utterly gormless expression on his face) — noticed how alike we were. Peas in a pod. Mum always used to say that we stopped crying once we had been born, and just lay there looking at the world with identical dark eyes. The paramedic said we were OK, but neither my mother nor the nurse took any notice of him. I now think that we weren’t crying because we had no idea what the sequel was going to be. We didn’t know that people are not born for their own benefit. At best they are born so that someone else benefits from it.

Although my sister and I looked alike it was easy to tell us apart once we had begun to walk — I walked with a limp. Mum was in despair when she saw this and rushed me off to a woman doctor in Brest. She said that the limp was the result of an injury sustained during birth, because the baby came out feet first, and it should soon pass. It still hasn’t passed, although you don’t really notice it now.

It was late spring when we were born, a spring of a self-confident kind that you don’t get any more in our parts. There were occasional gusts of cold wind; on the sandy hills the p***y willows drooped even more with catkins in full bloom, the railway embankment was speckled white with the flowering spurge that had come with the gravel strewn under the tracks. Tiny white five-petalled flowers of chickweed trembled on beds of brown moss in forest clearings. Yellow marsh marigolds flourished on the silt left behind when the river changed its course. These are the earth’s soft colours. There were hardly any people around. That was the spring when they replaced the wooden posts on the frontier with concrete ones that lasted for about thirty years. They were constantly replacing the barbed wire.

My mum Eva and my dad — whose name, by the way, wasn’t Adam, but Anatol (or Tolik, as my mum called him) — won’t appear in this story, so I had better say a few words about them now, just out of filial respect. Both of them died when Ulia and I were nine. I don’t even remember what they looked like (I’ve got a bad memory for faces), especially when I try to imagine them close up; I don’t think I can recall what they were actually like as people. But I can remember that the focal point of my mum’s life — second only to her fear of hunger, something that everyone in our parts had a phobia about — was her fear of anything associated with machinery. She was afraid of cars, of roads, of electricity, of domestic appliances and even of the drugs that brought progress and hygiene, things that it was her job — as a teacher at a primary school — to promote. I vaguely remember how, whenever dad was held up at work or anywhere else for more than ten minutes, her face would change (although I still cannot remember anything about her facial features) and she would start howling and weeping, and so gradually reduce my sister and me to a state of tearful hysteria. Tolik, our daddy, was the one we have to thank for the fact that we can both speak Russian without an accent. Right from the time we were born he deliberately spoke only Russian to us, so that we would learn it. He had had to learn the language on his own, because his parents, of course, didn’t know a word. He made his way in the world so well that the factory where he worked gave him a flat in Brest, and a year later he reached the top of the queue to get a car. There weren’t any car dealerships back then, where you could just walk in and buy a car. You had to join the queue and, when your turn came, off you had to go to Tolyatti, the town where the Volga Car Plant was, to collect it — just over 2,000 kilometres away from where we were.

Mum, despite her fear of cars, wanted a Zhiguli* so much that she scrimped and saved every copeck; she made dresses and coats for herself and the two of us, stitched on extra strips of cloth to the sleeves and hems as we grew, and fed us just enough to make sure we didn’t die of hunger. The sea-blue Zhiguli that they had bought at the factory and in which they were driving back, overturned and ended up on its roof in a ditch near Pinsk when their journey was almost over. They were already in their coffins when they were brought back home.

It’s been a long time since I last looked at the photographs of mum Eva and dad Tolik that granny had kept. There weren’t many, all rust-coloured as a result of the poor quality fixer used in developing them. Finger-smudged memories of a few seconds of lives long gone.

Dad’s surname was Hadun, just like mum’s, so she didn’t even need to change her passport when they got married. People often used to tell me how like dad’s mother Ulia I was. Nobody ever said anything like that to my sister Ulia, who was after all given the same name. My memories of granny Ulia are even murkier than what I can recall of my parents — just a general sense of boundless kindness and vulnerability in her eyes and wrinkles. According to granny Makrynya, granny Ulia was the type of woman who allowed herself to be used as a doormat. When she was young and the children were still small, she was regularly beaten by her husband. And he was a whole head shorter than she was.

Later on I saw both the paramedic and the nurse a few times. I saw her in the church in Stradche, a skinny woman with a weather-beaten face, definitely one of us, huge hands work-worn and callused, still wearing what had been fashionable in the first half of the twentieth century — blouse, jumper, skirt and headscarf. The paramedic had a round, well-fed face covered with a web of fine red veins, his fingers were chubby and squeaky clean. His clothes were drab and cheap, bought in the Brest shop called simply “Clothing”. As an educated man and therefore a member of the intellectual elite — the local elite, of course — he was always getting himself elected on to the local council. Neither of them is with us now. Nor is the rural hospital in Duryche where Ulia and I first came into the world. Duryche has been renamed; presumably the association with fools (dury) was too strong. Now we call it Znamenka; I suppose this was to make us think of the banner (znamia) of communism leading us forwards. So the hospital is in Znamenka. This, we must assume, has made it a better place.

We were driven from the hospital in Duryche to our home village of Dobratyche along a road that twists its way through fields right next to the frontier, past tumbledown little farmsteads basking in the warm sun, to one side adder-infested oak woods and a marsh. Then comes the Hill; from here you can see the houses of Dobratyche next to the cemetery. Then there’s another marsh — white cotton-like seed heads of bulrushes, reeds swaying over the mucky brown water, yellow irises. There’s a place right by the barbed wire of the frontier, where — if you stand on tip-toe — you can just about make out a few apple trees and lilac bushes some distance away. You can see it all much more clearly in springtime. It was here, right by the lilac, where the village of Dobratyche once stood. Before 1939. Before the Soviets came*. Before the arrival of progress and hygiene.

Stradche, Dobratyche, Duryche** — this was how the locals still said the names of the villages in our area when I was young, with a very soft-sounding ‘ch’. The names hadn’t changed in the slightest since the register of 1566 was produced. I came across this document when I was a student doing field work in the archives of the town of Lutsk in Ukraine and read it, trembling with excitement. Who had these villages once belonged to? Was there someone called Strada, and had he been a martyr (stradnyk) to some kind of cause? Was Dobratyche founded by a kind (dobry) fellow? And had Duryche been rudely named because the people living there were regarded as fools (dury)? There was another village listed in the register — Lyubche — that, by that time I came along, no one living locally had ever heard of, or even knew where this settlement of forty homesteads had once stood. It had simply disappeared. It was no more, this little place that may have belonged to a woman called Lyubou (love). All the other villages were still there. It was in Duryche that we were born, me and my sister, and in Dobratyche we lived.

For centuries my ancestors had toiled away here — in Stradche, Lyubche and Dobratyche — living out their lives day after day with no sense of order or purpose. Beings with no faces, freezing cold, bodies covered with sores and pus. Living in holes. With no idea who they were. Fortunately, there are none of them left. Progress, hygiene and the Soviets have won. Basking in the warm sun and fanned by the occasional breeze, the ghosts of ancient farmsteads and the people who once inhabited them, the ghosts of the adder-infested oak woodlands live on.

The very first — wow! — Belarusian astronaut Pyatro Klimuk was born not far from us, in the village of Kamarouka. The composer Ihar Karnyalyuk comes from Hershony. Andrei Dynko, editor of Nasha Niva (‘Our Pasture’), was born in Zakazanka. And, as my readers in Belarus probably already know, the poet Mikhas Yarash lives in our very own Dobratyche.

If I hadn’t invited our famous poet Mikhas Yarash over to our house for a visit, there wouldn’t have been two murders.

The Baptists wouldn’t have built a chapel for themselves.

And that airship — the very latest model, by the way, all shiny, fast and completely see-through — would never have started flying tourists on excursions over Dobratyche, Stradche and Zakazanka.

A great deal would never have happened if I had taken my laptop out of the house into the yard. But it’s old and won’t work properly unless it’s plugged into the mains; it keeps shutting down or playing up in all sorts of odd ways. So I invited Mikhas to come over to the house, and soon after that the phone rang.