Сергей Огольцов – DIY Masterpiece (страница 11)

Yesterday, they did the laundry, the two of them, in a trough by the ice hole in the river. First, they rubbed it with ash, instead of the pre-war soap, but after rinsing it thoroughly a couple of times, it's clean, only your hands get numb, and cold, rigid as sticks. So you have to take turns—one is washing, the other holding her crossed arms hands under her padded jacket, stuck into the armpits to let her hands get a bit warmer.

And after lunch, Yulia would get out the threads, canvas, and needle to go on embroidering the towel she had started…

. . .

But this day wasn't like all the other days. Someone started pounding on the door, barking like crazy, and Uncle Mityai—who else could be so hell-bent, drunk from morning till night?—bawled in a hoarse voice:

‘Folks! Folks! Hey! Folks!’

Mother went out into the corridor to see what he wanted. And the comb, while Yulia listened anxiously before the mirror above the washstand, froze in her stilled hand.

Soon, Mother returned, her brows tight-knit above a stupefied face, and she ordered Yulia to change into nice clothes, and to her daughter's frightened questions, she only replied, ‘But quicker! Come on, hurry!’

She gathered up a couple of boiled potatoes, still unpeeled, left over from the evening, two onions, and poured some salt into a small pocket she had folded from a page of Yulia's school textbook. She wrapped in a rag the last scrap of ham in the hut.

The food collected on the table Mother put into a canvas bag, adding a whole loaf of bread.

Then she grabbed Yulia's shoulders, over her daughter's coat and woolen headscarf, and burst into sobs:

‘Oh, God! Oh, my God!’

Yulia—though she had no idea why—also burst into tears, the typical crying that comes of itself, from times immeasurably faraway: a girl's lament, howled in the ugly yet invariably same way in these parts. No change since the Scythians, the Obrs, the Polovtsians, and the Pechenegs, before the vagrant princes’ retinues, before the Golden Horde:

‘Mommy! My dear!’

Uncle Mityai flung the door from the corridor open to barge in:

‘Why wailing, huh?’ he yelled at Yulia. ‘Going to town, you fool!’

. . .

Near the gates, which had been collapsed since autumn, a squat sledge loomed dark against the sun sheen in the snow. Uncle Mityai's shabby gelding squinted from under frost-covered eyelashes, sighed, and snorted in the shafts. Frost whitened the sparse hairs under the lip in the horse's face and formed on the animal’s sides long white feathers trailing down to his belly and legs.

Timokha, Yulia's pre-war classmate, sat in the sleigh, also wearing a good coat that covered the knees of his legs, pulled up to his chin.

Next to him, in a black padded jacket, Uncle Mityai's son, Yurko, stared motionless back along the furrows ploughed by the sledge runners in the snow, on either side of the uneven dents left by the Mukhorty's hooves.

The snowdrifts around the tracks were whiter than the light bandage on Yurko's black sleeve, ringed with a thick fence of Gothic script.

A carbine, laid along the sleigh's bottom, divided it in two. Yulia sat with her back to the weapon, facing Mother, who stood with her hand on the tilted gateless post. With the other she grabbed the corners of her headscarf, tied in a loose knot under her chin, and pressed them to cover her lips.

Her head swayed above the shoulders of her padded jacket, tears running into the washed-out fabric balled in her hand, moaning sobs still escaping through the calico gag, but she no longer called out to anyone.

Uncle Mityai untied the reins and plopped down in the back:

‘Nya! Go!’

Mukhorty leaned forward and walked ahead…

. . .

Before the war, life was just as hungry, but good. And there was soap before the war. Sometimes.

Before the war, Yulia loved Yurko, even though he was a senior in school. She loved him even more than Lyubov Orlova loved her boyfriend in the film "Volga-Volga”. But she didn't tell anyone about it, because Yurko already loved Ganya, who was in his grade.

He was so tall, handsome, and his eyes were as blue as a clear sky, below his black curls.

And besides the Komsomol badge, he had a row of different badges on his jacket. There was one with an airplane on top, above a star and rifles, and even one with a parachute, because Yurko was planning to enroll in an armored academy. And when their school went to town, he jumped from a parachute tower in the park. He wasn't afraid at all.

Before the war, things were good, although sometimes it was scary. When a car with NKVD officers arrived from the city to pick up the village council chairman. Yes, it was scary, but at least it was understandable, because later, when they had taken him away, the school principal lined up all the students of their village.

He told them that Chairman Mikhalchuk, back in the Civil War, which was a long time ago, before Yulia was born, while serving in Comrade Budyonny's Cavalry Army, had started spying for imperialist intelligence and served them like a low grade enemy of the people…

And the next day, during the history class, the principal walked into Yulia's classroom and told everyone to open their textbooks to the page with Marshal Tukhachevsky. Then he ordered to take their pens, and scribble over his portrait in ink, because he, too, was an agent and a people’s enemy.

And again, it became scary, although it was already clear, but still…

But then, one after another, the nibs of the pens began to click into the bottoms of the inkwells…

However, Chairman Mikhalchuk turned out to be not the last enemy in their village, and a month later, a car from the city arrived again and took away Pyotr Ivanovich, the school principal, too.

Then the young school teacher of the elementary grade, Sofia Onisimovna, became the principal.

She didn't tell anyone to scribble, but only told them to take all their history textbooks out into the yard, because there were too many enemies.

It became scary again. Understandable, but scary. They built a fire there, not as high as the one on Ivan Kupala, and no one jumped over it because it was daylight.

The smoke got into Sofya Onisimovna's eyes; she rubbed them with a handkerchief and said it was nothing, and that next year they'd bring new history textbooks.

But next year, the war was already all about, and it made everything completely strange and scary…

. . .

Our soldiers retreated so quickly that they didn't have time to take Yurko to the armored academy.

And the Germans didn't even enter the village; they rode past—on their way to the city.

Some of our soldiers remained hiding in the forest, two with rifles, and one with a machine gun. They didn't have time to retreat in time, and began living there like partisans.

Yulia heard from the women's gossip that the three of them even dug a partisan dugout to live in the forest, only no one knows where.

The partisans were hungry, so they walked from village to village begging for salt and flour. They once begged Aunt Motrya for a piglet in exchange for a wristwatch. What did she need a watch for? But she took it and gave then the piglet—she's kind…

But another time, Aunt Motrya wasn't home, and they dragged Ganya into the barn, where they raped her. The three of them.

Yurko was digging potatoes in the far field, and when he ran into Ganya's hut that evening, she was sitting there, as if dead. Her mother yelled at Yurko to get out.

The next morning, he took his black-faced Dzhulbars, whom he'd gotten when he wanted to become a border guard, Karatsupa, before his plans of an armored academy, and went into the forest.

He returned two days later with a machine gun and a sack. He tied Dzhulbars up by his hut and went to check on Ganya. She was just sitting in the yard.

When he emptied the three heads from the sack, Ganya screamed terribly, fell to the ground, and cried and cried.

And Yurko stood over her, asking, ‘These?’

But she just cried, pressing her face to the ground.

He leaned over and pulled her head up by the hair from the ground. ‘These?’

She glanced at him and nodded silently. She didn't cry anymore.

He piled the heads into the sack like cabbage, threw them over his shoulder, and left the yard.

And Ganya hanged herself that night in the barn…

. . .

Yulia has been terrified ever since, and she doesn't understand anything at all. Now there are no more "ours", no "theirs", and anyone can rape her in the barn that Yurko later burned down. While he stood by silently.

You can't love someone who's so deeply, so terribly silent. Invariably.

Everyone's afraid of him, even the Germans who came to give him the white ‘Schutzmann’ armband, because you can't guess what's going on in a man's head if he's always silent.

And the black curls on his head are gone, just short shorn hair, completely white with gray. His face has turned black, as if scorched by flames or dirty with soot from the barn he burned. Silently.

He doesn't even speak to his father, whom the Germans appointed the village headman because of him.

And since then, Uncle Mityai has been drinking heavily. All stops pulled.