My apologies to my Russian Blogget family and friends. Many
years have passed since I had to spell
Russian words. The words I remember, but the spelling? Mind you, having
said that, I am English, and I don’t get the spellings right of my Mother
tongue either? Here is another short story!
FEAR FROM THE RIVER VOLGA
BY FIONA CUMMINGS
My name is Sergei and I am from Russia. I am of an age where
by I remember things, oh yes, I remember things!
It was the cold harsh
winter of 1978. I was just in our apartment from Kindergarten.
Sasha, my best friend was with me and Mama had served us
some Borsch and black bread. We had a
fun morning from seven thirty when our class began till two. So we were
ready for our lunch.
Papa, was working away. I missed him, he had been away for
about well, I would say the whole of the autumn and most of the winter. For
sure he was not here at the most important time of the year, when we received a
visit from Father Frost, with his sack of gifts.
All I wanted was my Papa. Every time I asked about him, my
Mama cried, so I learned to not say his name. In fact I was starting to forget
his face too, as Mama, had removed the old black and white photograph, of him
in the army as a brave soldier from the piano. It had been replaced with more
of Mama’s music books. I was learning to
hate the piano, as I heard it morning and night. My Mama,
gave lessons to the children in our block and in return, she was given
in summer, vegetables from the neighbours Dacha’s and by winter, we received
jars of pickled whatever could be grown in the country retreats.
Sometimes my
Mama had one of the children from
Leninski Prospect. The Golovanov family. They were rich kids. They wore western clothes. Mama used to say to my
Babushka, that the family of the Golovanovs, never went abroad, so it was
beyond her how they got western clothing?
They were awful children. Boris and Mikhail. They were eight
and nine. Their Mother used to drop the children off at our Doma and Sasha and I used to laugh
behind the kitchen doorway, as we peeped looking at the lady. She looked like
the tea cosies, the ones the tourists were all obsessed by, the tea cosies,
that were the big round Babushkas. She was like a round tennis ball and wore
her hair pinned tightly up high on her head. Her cheeks were round and looked
like they were going to burst.
They were red and shiny with perspiration. She puffed and
panted like an old steam boat from the 1940s perhaps on the river Volga?
“Borja Moy!” She
would exclaim to my Mama. Complaining about the elevators not working again.
I hated it when they
worked, as Mama used to use them with me and they terrified me. A tiny dark box
with a cage on the front you had to manually pull closed. They always stunk of
cats pee.
You never got them to stop at the floor? They would stop
just before or just after. Sometimes they were so high, when I was just tiny,
before I was three, Mama had to get out first.
“Padajdi, she would say, so I did as I was told and waited,
until she got out and turned to carry me out. Then slam, as we again closed the
cage doors. You could see all of the mechanisms
as you travelled from floor adeen, to our floor, Vosim.
The eighth floor and high in the snowy sky, but our
apartments were always hot in winter, as was everyone’s in those days. We had
no say when our heating got turned on, the government decided on that one?
If we needed some fresh air, we would open the stiff wooden
balcony window. They were todays modern double glazed windows. As in two sets
of windows, with about a gap, of 5 inches, in between the two windows.
Rickety but warm.
We didn’t have washing machines like I do now in my
apartment. We would wash our clothes in the bath. We would have to hang them on
the tiny balcony and in winter, they would come in so stiff with the days of minus
22 and below
The Golovanov family left me feeling colder than I did
walking home from our Kinta garden.
They were bad, I didn’t know why at the time, just I knew my
Mama was terrified of them and my Papa, would come home and Mama would cry in
his arms as he looked over her shoulder at me with tears in his eyes.
“Shtotakoy?” I would ask them, but they never answered my
question of what was the matter?
My parents had no privacy, un like Russia now days? We had a
tiny kitchen, a small bathroom and one room where we shared it with not only
the three of us, Mama, Papa and myself, but my Babushka and of course the piano,
the well stocked bookshelf, the dining table, the television and the old couch
that was used as a bed for my Grandmother and myself. Mama and Papa, slept
behind a curtain next to the door leading to the hall.
It was life, a simple life, ruled by fear.
Fear of the Golovanovs.
It was only when I was an adult, I knew the exact goings on
between our two families.
CH 2
I never saw my Papa again. I watched my Mama crumble and
start to look as the same age as my Babushka. As Perestroika gave us our freedom, it also took away our old
traditions. No one wanted to sit for six to nine hours a day playing piano
until our fingers were numb. We had the money now, we had
the knowledge of corruption. We paid for our exam results and knew nothing, but
didn’t need to. Flash of cash and on our way, but where? To go where? To do
what?
The KGB, was replaced with a stronger form of the Russian mafia.
Don’t misunderstand me, there has always
been mafia in the former Soviet Union
just there were other organisations too, so the mafia, were just a
fringe for the head and it was the head, which made my Papa disappear.
My Mama died in 1988. At the age of forty one.
She was the size in weight of an eight year old girl. The
Doctors said, cause of death, “A broken heart!”
I was a sixteen year old boy, living with my aging Babushka,
who was in her early seventies, but since the loss of my Papa an now her
daughter in law, my Mama, my Babushka, had lost her children. Her history and
all she had was her future in me, so I battled to show her I would make it in
life, unlike her son, and poor daughter in law.
Money was invisible, but I was determined not to go down the
path of my Papa and make it against all odds in the new USSR.
My best friend from all those years ago, Sasha, had flown
from his motherland and followed the dream of
the pot of gold in the USA. His
Papa, was Moscow’s top Scientist, and his Mama, could paint, she was an amazing
artist, so her work could travel. In Russia, she didn’t make much money, but in
the USA, they just loved her art of days gone by and Russian peasants with the
backdrop of the beautiful detailed statues and wonderful golden domed architecture.
As for Sasha, he was still at school, but a
school in America, in Washington. He was studying all the sciences and wanted
to further his knowledge of science and,
engineering in further education.
So he was, or, would do well. As for me, the one good thing which came out
of Perestroika, was the fact that entrepreneurs were born.
My Papa used to sit me on his knee as a small boy about five
and tell me stories of how to educate the public into believing that they could
not live a full life, without the product that you had to sell them.
I would take a pencil to school and sell it, buy another one
with the money and have Kopeks left over. Save them in my wooden painted mushroom
which stood on top of our bookshelf in our room. After half a year, I would
have enough money to buy other things
for school and then I would visit the confectionary store and buy sweets and
cakes then sell them to school friends for a rouble, knowing they would cost me
80Kp
I would give two sweets to my friends and tell them if I
found out they had given one away to a friend, I would give them the money back
for one of them and next time they bought from me, I would give them a free
sweet.
So the boys in my class would take two sweets, pay for two,
I would see them hand one sweet over or hear of it, I would give them money
back and a sweet. So more people would be eating my goodies, but if I was just
to give them out, it would be like I am trying to sell them, if one boy sees
his friend has that brand of sweet, the one
with the picture on of their favourite cartoon character, he would want
the same as his friends, like a pyramid?
It worked. I made a lot of money, enough to buy bread and
cheese on the way home and if I had
earned enough, I would buy kielbasa. Babushka and I loved that.
So that was where I was heading, but as a child I could buy
pencils, Kopeks would be enough to satisfy. In the real world, we needed more,
it was US $’s that had replaced our Roubles and they were hard to earn.
The Golovanov family still lived in Leninski Prospect now
days they had houses all over the world. Thanks to poor people like my Papa.
The hatred I had for that family, was killing me and it
killed my Papa and Mama, hurt my Babushka
like hell I was going to let them
destroy me?
CH 3
Because of what my family had told me, I knew all about the
dirty dealings the Golovanov family dealt with.
I knew their darkest secrets and how they treat people to
get where they are now. I just had to learn how to break them. This was not
going to be easy, as they had power, power brought on by fear and wealth.
People worked for them or they died. They went against them, or questioned them
at all, they found themselves disappearing.
Way back in 1976, my Papa agreed to travel around Russia
and deliver packages from the Golovanov
family, to their clients. He had been a Post master all his young life, so this
was the next stage, he thought. He was a “Delivery person!” Only rather than
letters placed in the pigeon holes of apartments, he hand delivered boxes of
the gifts given by the Golovanov family, as they did work for charity and
because of their wealth, loved to help people out when they could, people like
my Papa, who worked for water and in the roughest temperatures of Moscow’s
winters, battled through the slushy snow to get from building to building. Mama
struggled looking after me with my Babushka as I was only four. Papa’s wage was
not enough. With me running around the apartment, Mama could not take her students to learn the
piano. It was only a couple of years
later, when I could stay in the kitchen, drawing on the rough paper, on our
table, which squeezed in between the window and
refrigerator.
It was a two seater table painted over and over again. It
belonged to my Babushka, from her Mama’s house sixty years before, my Babushka would say, the family
took turns to eat at the small table.
There were four chairs but we had no room for them and one had a leg which kept
dropping out of the joist.
So that went its journey.
One day in 1977, my Papa was to take a large parcel to an
office in Tashkent. Sadly, someone wanted his delivery. They met him and left
him for dead, of course removing the Golovanovs so called, kind offerings.
Naturally, my Papa, wanted to know why this had happened? He
asked the round shiny lady who used to leave
me with the worst taste in my mouth, after dropping her awful sons off to
learn piano all those years ago.
Well, her false smiles turned as sour as the Smantana we
would drink for breakfast each morning.
My Papa was a happy man before he met with the Golovanovs.
He went to the post office and tried to get his old job back, but the Master told him he was
nothing but trash now he mixed with the Golovanov family’s My Papa asked,
pleading for an explanation, of what this man, who stood with him as a friend
two years before meant?
The man walked away from him.
My Papa told the Golovanovs he no longer wanted to work for
them. They told him my Mama would continue teaching the boys piano, free of charge
and he would work with them.
Mr Golovanov showed his head and he had until this day, had
never been seen? He brought with him, two men dressed in leather jackets,
sporting ID’s, showing they were members of the KGB.
My Papa knew, he was mixing with an illegal organisation.
One day on one of his journeys to pass on a parcel, he
decided to open it.
There the answer was, wrapped in paper, and a sheet of
cloth, under small copies of Matrioshkas. You know the wooden dolls, which nest
many more dolls inside, getting smaller as they go?
Well not these Matrioshka’s. These ones had no dolls inside.
But they were not empty?
And there the guns lay, looking as evil and full of torture
as the Golovanov family members faces.
Papa didn’t know what the white substance was in the dolls,
but learned.
A short time after then, my dear Papa, was never seen again.
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