Сергей Огольцов – Rascally Romance. The Vagabond Cherub (страница 11)

Thus, the well-coordinated crew saved each other's lives…

Five years later, there remained no squares on sea lanes unswept by navy minesweepers, and my father was transferred to serve on a patrol ship, again as a marine diesel engine mechanic. A year later, his second hitch of naval service expired—

(… due to the heavy losses in World War II, the period of service in the Soviet Army was doubled until the next generation of conscripts grew up: army service for up to six years, naval service for up to eight… Yes, it's two years more of toil than in infantry, but take comfort in the fact that only sailors are spiffed up in a striped singlet, ribbons, flared pants… when they go ashore…)

–and my father was offered a job at a "mailbox".

~ ~ ~

At that time, the USSR was home to numerous secret institutes, secret factories, and even secret cities. To maintain secrecy, the usual postal addresses had to be partially abolished, so that enemy intelligence spies wouldn't guess the location of particular secrets.

As a result, the addressee no longer lived on a specific street, in a specific city, in any given region, but was reached in a simplified way: "N. Ogoltsoff, Post Office Box No. ****".

Since Red Navy sailor N.M. Ogoltsoff had married citizen G.I. Vakimova six months before his demobilization, she also moved to a "post office box" in the Carpathian Mountains.

There was no maternity hospital in the "box", so my mother, to deliver me, had to visit the city of Nadvirna, 30 kilometers from the regional center, also known as Stanislavl, later renamed Ivano-Frankivsk (apparently, someone else needed to be confused and thrown off the scent).

The trip frightened her more than the upcoming labors, since Bandera men were shooting at vehicles on the roads.

(… for a long time, I considered the Bandera men to be cruel bandits and Nazi collaborators. And what else would you think if an entire division of Western Ukrainians, "Galichina," fought against the Red Army?

Then, quite gradually, it dawned on me that two years before the German invasion, the Red Army occupied Western Ukraine and assisted the Soviet secret police, aka the NKVD, in the deportation and murder of potential opponents of the Soviet regime.

They executed without trial, just in case, by mass shootings.

Besides, what is a division in comparison compared to an army? Among the comrades-in-arms of the German Wehrmacht was the Russian Liberation Army, ROA, whose ranks numbered up to a million soldiers fighting for Russia, against the USSR.

And finally, rank and file Red Army soldiers, participants in the events of that time, told me that the Bandera men fought equally fiercely against the Soviet and German troops.

Thus, the legendary Soviet intelligence officer N. Kuznetsov died in a chance encounter with Bandera's followers, while wearing the uniform of a Fascist Major…

These were Carpathian partisans who defended their homeland from successive liberators, aka enslavers.

However, for my parents, throughout their entire lives, Bandera men remained bandits…)

And even two years later, when the time came for my mother to once again be treated at the maternity hospital, the fierce bursts of automatic and machine gun fire still thundered on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains.

However, she no longer heard the shooting, because her husband had been transferred from one "mailbox" to another, from Transcarpathia to the Valdai Hills.

The reason for the change in my parents' circumstances was a snitcher note to the Special Department of the previous "mailbox". The snitching arrived in a letter from Konotop, from residents of the house where Galina Vakimova lived before her marriage.

. .. .

The ordinary single-story structure measuring 12 by 12 meters, of those colloquially in Konotop as "khata”, was a divided property. Half of the house belonged to citizen Ignat Pilyuta.

The remaining half was divided equally between citizen Katerina Vakimova with her three children, and the married couple, citizens Duzenko with their daughter, so that each of the two families had 1 (one) wooden entryway, 1 (one) kitchen, and 1 (one) room.

The daughter of citizens Duzenko married citizen Starikov, who moved into the khata’s quarter belonging to her parents. One kitchen and one room proved insufficient for the parents and the young couple to coexist comfortably.

Seeking to expand their living space, Duzenko and Starikov found out the number of the "post office box" and wrote a letter to its Special Department.

The snitchers’ note stated that Galina Vakimova's (now Ogoltsova's) father had been arrested by the NKVD as an enemy of the people. Yet, he had somehow managed to reappear in Ukraine on the eve of the Nazi onslaught.

During the Fascist occupation, his residence house served the site of a German headquarters (which is partly true, as staff officers of a German Wehrmacht company were quartered in Pilyuta's half khata). When the Red Army advanced, Iosif Vakimov fled with the retreating Nazis.

The Special Departments at secret establishments were prominent for their indomitable vigilance and tenacity, so the relatives of Iosif, who had disappeared in such a blatantly treacherous manner, faced, at a minimum, arrest and exile, which solved the informers' housing problem.

However, in their perfectly logical calculations, or rather, in their slavish copying of the staple method of securing housing at that time, they failed to take into account the time factor.

By that time, the Great Helmsman, Leader, and Teacher of the People, Comrade Stalin, had already passed away. The nuts, tightened to the utmost while he was Tsar and God, were gradually beginning to loosen.

Of course, Nikolai Ogoltsoff didn’t avoid repeated summons to the Special Department to testify. Official correspondence was exchanged between the "mailbox’s" Special Department and the Konotop Department of Internal Affairs. And yet, my father was subjected to no repression, given his purebred peasant origins, as well as the fact that the diesel engines generating electricity at classified locations so readily obeyed him.

At the same time, the Special Department's long-standing action pattern meant that the informants'"signals" could not be ignored. And my father was, just in case, transferred to another "mailbox", farther away from the borders with foreign countries.

. .. .

Galina Ogoltsova's second birth giving took place outside the new "box"—in a neighboring, unclassified district center.

(… it seems the maternity hospital, or rather the lack thereof, represented the Achilles' heel of the anti-spy precautions of the time…)

At first, the out-box maternity hospital flatly refused to admit her. Because of her extremely black hair and the bright red flowers on the calico of her robe, Galina was considered a Gypsy.

However, her husband, who was accompanying her ("Kolya, come on, tell them!"), so forcefully refuted this hasty misconception that the segregationist nurses changed their attitude and finally unlatched the door for the woman in labor.

An hour and a half later, the medical staff informed the father that his wife had given birth to a daughter, and five minutes later, they congratulated him again, this time on the birth of a son.

And then: ‘Turn it off!’ Our father (both to me and the newborns) cried out jubilantly, ‘Quick, turn off the bulb in the delivery room! It’s to the light they are coming!’

~ ~ ~

(… there are two kinds of history, and it makes no difference whether we're talking about an individual’s one or the history of society of millions:

1) immemorial history, presented in ambiguous legends, dubious myths, and obscure traditions; and

2) fixed history, whose facts (sometimes falsified) are clearly delineated, linked to a specific chronology, and reflected in social chronicles of one kind or another, or in personal memory, if we undertake deliberation of an individual’s case…)

All my parents' children listened with delight to family legends when Mom and Dad were in the mood to recount the deeds committed by the listeners in bygone times, past the limits of their infant memories…

About how the eldest, for example, first learned to walk at the train station, a few minutes before the train from the Carpathians to Valdai departed.

At subsequent major stations, Dad would carry me out to the next platform to practice my still-wobbly walking skills, since the unsteady floor of a speeding train car isn't exactly suitable for beginners…

. .. .

At our new location, the family was provided with a wooden house, from which I was allowed to walk alone in the yard, enclosed with a medium-height picket fence. And each time, Mom was amazed—where, in so neat a yard, could I possibly find such dirt? And here I was again, home from a walk, all dirty and filthy.

While changing my clothes, she challenged Dad to solve this riddle.

And what does he see, peeking through the crack of the half-closed door?

Barely over the threshold, the child, without a second’s hesitation, stomps to the corner of the yard, where one of the fence boards is hanging by only one nail—at the top.