Сергей Огольцов – Rascally Romance. The Vagabond Cherub (страница 9)

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Another ten years passed, and Galina, the eldest daughter, met Nikolai Ogoltsoff, a Petty Officer Second Class of the Black Sea Navy of Order of the Red Banner, by means of correspondence. "Pen pal acquaintance" is when the postman delivers a letter whose first line reads, "Hello, unknown Galina… " and the missive ends with, "Please send me your photograph!"

That's why, six months later, Nikolai Ogoltsoff didn't use his usual vacation to visit his native village in Russia's Ryazan region. No, breaking with his long-standing habit, he bought a ticket to Konotop station in Ukraine.

There he arrived demonstrating the wide flare of the dress naval trousers, the width of his chest under his striped singlet, peeping through the deep V-cut of his uniform shirt. The gold-lettered inscription "BLACK SEA FLEET" on the black ribbon of his sailor cap ran across his forehead, forking, near the back of his head, into a pair of tails. The rather long couple of ribbons hung down to his shoulder blades, each ending with a printed gold anchor. Another anchor (this time copper) shone in the polished buckle of his belt.

This atmospheric style deeply impressed the quiet outskirts lanes where he wandered in search for the house at the address he had been six months sending letters to. Each envelope had an extra line on its back: "Fly with my greeting, bring back a promise of meeting!" The decorous addition designed and executed by himself.

And three days later, my parents registered their marriage at the Konotop registry office, spurred on by the anticipation of happiness, forgetting in their haste to warn my grandmother Katerina.

(… did Regional Trade Inspector Vakimov frame innocent people after his arrest?

Absolutely yes. The show went on like clockwork, with conveyor-belt inevitability, and everything they planted on you, you signed voluntarily, or you signed the same papers as a mutilated cripple after the beatings and torture that were called "investigation".

Did he collaborate with the Nazi invaders?

Knowing the language would have given him this opportunity, but in that case, one must assume he did it secretly, keeping his neighbors unaware, and for free, without improving his living conditions or even buying his wife a new pair of shoes.

The bicycle is also a telling detail: the Germans still had over a year of war ahead of them; they would have found room for an able-bodied collaborator in the back of a truck heading west…

Most likely, the prospect of a second "investigation" by the NKVD terrified him to death, which is why he pedaled his bicycle along the roadside, desperately trying to survive… a frail shell of two wheels at the crossroads in the raging ocean of global carnage. Where did a breaker wooshed over sinking you?

Was my missing grandfather Iosif a Jew?

Participation in the Civil War as a Commissar, knowledge of the relevant language, and – why beating about the bush! – the name itself, all that coalesces into a chain of indirect evidence.

However, the high percentage of children of the chosen people among the revolutionary activists of that era does not eliminate the possibility of exceptions.

Language skills could have been acquired while working as an errand boy and/or shop-assistant in the trading establishment of some Jewish merchant.

Regarding the name, it should not be forgotten that even such a time-tested anti-Semite as Comrade Stalin shared his name…

Nevertheless, when introducing herself to new acquaintances, my mother preferred to substitute her patronymic (rooted in a comely character from the Old Testament) for its Russified, peasantrized form—"Osipovna"…)

Galina inherited her dark, moist-gleaming eyes from her mother, Katerina Ivanovna (Katarzhyna Yanovna?), whose kinship with the tribes of Israel seems rather dubious.

Firstly, in the red corner of her kitchen hung a dark varnished board with a half-length portrait of a saint sporting a grim beard (I won't attempt to determine the denomination; the attribute could easily have been Catholic in origin). Plus, in the barn enclosure, she fattened up her pig, Mashka, for slaughter…

But then again: the icon could have become a camouflaging element of the interior during the Nazi occupation, and the kosher dietary restrictions are easily negated by the Ukrainian proverb: "Bleak times teach eating cakes with lard".

Of course, all these unanswered questions will not arise in their full scope immediately, but only after your distant ancestors return from their marriage registration ceremony at the Konotop Civil Registry Office, where we won't follow them. We're making a sharp U-turn and moving back to trace the line of descent of your grandfather's father.

~ ~ ~

An examination of the proposed lineage reveals its artless simplicity. From any angle, the line's down-to-earth nature is striking. Well, what's the point of further elaboration? Mikhail Ogoltsoff came from the most ancient of human stock: peasantry, simple and pure…

In the depths of the Ryazan land lies the district center of Sapozhok, west of which at nine or eleven kilometers (depending on who of the dwellers you ask) is located the village of Kanino. My father liked to boast that the village, when in the pink, counted up to four hundred houses.

A hollow with a brook, silent due to its leisurely pace, divided the village into "theirs" and "ours." Since ancient times, people would gather on its right bank, gently tilted, for the valiant sport of "Wall-to-Wall" fistfights. In a frenzy of collective brawling, men from both ends of the village merrily smashed each other's mugs, either to celebrate some religious holiday or just to mark a Sunday. Yes, the folks knew how to have a raving time, to the fullest extent of their souls…

What was now is no more. Some hazy memory has remained of Alyokha the Saddler, the legendary fighter and obedient son. But his father—ugh!—kept him in check.

‘Where to?’ He'd yell abruptly. ‘Are you a too rich son of a bitch? Come on, get to work!’ And the mighty, thirty-three years old son of a bitch bends his broad shoulders over an unfinished horse collar, pokes with an awl, pulls the thread…

But he himself is still there, at the lists by the brook, from where breathless boys run with a report on the combat situation: ‘Oh, Alyokha! Oh, how they're pressing! They're crushing the ours !’

But one wordless glance of his father—and Alyokha keeps silent, sniffle-snuffling over his work. And only when the "Get it!", "Crash!", "Wooy!" sounds of a stubborn retreat along the street are heard in the hut, the father would be run out of patience.

He'd jump to his feet, run up to Alyokha, and—box his ear: ‘Fuck! They crush our guys there, and this here son of a…’

Alyokha doesn't hear the end of fatherly rebuke—he's already out the door, through backyards and vegetable gardens, circling the "Walls" battle, because the rules forbid attacking the enemy from the rear; that's fair game…

‘Alyokha's out!’ And—our guys get a second wind, and some of "their guys" are already falling to the ground, the rule is: don't hit the one on the ground. And Alyokha, deeply focused, knocks out the standing ones one after another, and without a single 4-letter word by the way…

Yep, the village was thundering…

The collectivization of agriculture in the USSR put an end to innocent fun and games, and the wisely planned Great Famine, intended to consolidate the revolutionary changes in rural life, wiped Alyokha out, and his father was carried off too, no other choice…

~ ~ ~

My father's mother, Marfa, witnessed life under the Tsar, having turned ten only by the time of onslaught of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Ten years later, she was already married to Mikhail Ogoltsoff, and had three children: Kolya, Sehrguey, and Alexandra (in that exact order).

Mikhail somehow survived the conducting of collectivization, but he couldn't cope with the Great Famine implementation, and Marfa remained a single mother.

She cooked soup from quinoa and less edible herbs; her body and that of her children swelled from hunger, and wherever you pressed, a depression would form… But they survived.

Then came the era of hard labor on the socialized farms, also known as collective farms, where labor was paid in meager "workdays". Life revolved around these "workdays" (three-quarters of a "workday" was paid in kind—products grown and gathered by the slave labor of the villagers themselves in the collective farm fields) and get-togethers at the collective farm club, where Soviet films were brought twice a month: "Lenin in October", "The Pig Farm Girl and the Shepherd", and the like…

To watch movies for free, village boys queued up to turn the crank of a dynamo that generated electricity. It arrived by the same truck, along with a projector and film reels in bucket-sized tin cans.

In the summer of 1941, Comrade Iosif Stalin stunned the people with his words on the radio: "Dear brothers and sisters"—it was as if the Almighty God had suddenly recognized you His relative. Then he announced the treacherous attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union, and the peasants were driven to the war, the whole livestock of them…