The most difficult thing is to start...

26.07.2008

The most difficult thing is to start.... and get back in my memory to the events that happened a long time ago when I still lived in a country called the USSR, a country that actually doesn’t exist anymore… Thinking that I am born in a country that doesn’t exist makes me feel bizarre as if I was some kind of alien that came from a strange planet. And it was a strange planet I should say. I lived there till I was thirty, and then I fled in the west but I certainly did have more than enough time to experience what is a soviet country with all its positive and negative aspects. I just have to concentrate on those old souvenirs and try to slip mentally into my former life….

All that I need is just to take my eyes off the windows and stop looking at cows walking slowly in the fields lit by the evening sun. Why cows? Because I am in Normandy, in France and Normandy means cows everywhere.
I am sitting at a table near the window in a farm house belonging to my ex, looking at the fields, cows, apple trees, the brick building of the sauna and the forest behind. Why cows, it seems to be clear… Why sauna? Because my ex is a Finn and Finns according to the common knowledge are crazy about sauna (if not just simply crazy) , so my ex who lives in France has built a sauna in front of his summer house; I guess it makes him feel less nostalgic.

Why am I in France and why am I sitting in my ex’s summer house looking at cows? This a very long story. I’d better start at the very beginning…

I was born in a small Ukrainian village, lost in the middle of nowhere (and never suspected what surprises this life has prepared to me).
My parents moved when I was still a baby and I never went back to my birth place, that’s why I can not describe it to you.
When I was about five, we moved again but this time without my father, only my mother, my little sister and I. We went to my grandmother’s place, in the south of Ukraine. We stayed there till I turned seven. Then my mother found a job in a town situated in the mining area, called Donbass, and we moved again and there I started my schooling.

Fortunately every summer I went back for my holidays to grandmother’s. I loved that little village with houses painted in white surrounded by gardens and orchards with flower beds in front of the houses. These are a large part of my first memories as a child. After my mother left my father, as I mentioned above, we moved in with my grandmother. She lived alone, my grandfather died during the war. Later when her two daughters, my mother and her younger sister, started their adult lives, grandma got married to a widow from the same village and moved over to his place and, to my big sorrow, sold her house that I loved so much.

The house was not very big. One half of it was used for living and another, separated by a corridor, was used as a storage and sort of hencoop to keep chicken and rabbits in it when the weather turned extremely cold. That was a typical peasant house, or izba, built with clay bricks, the walls painted traditionally in white with whitewash, and having clay floors covered by colourful mats produced by the local women.
The mats were woven with long strips of cloth; it was a good way to avoid wasting old clothing and house linen. The final product was those long, narrow, multicoloured mats with discrete nods in the places where the strips were tied together.
The mats were neatly put on the earth floor covering it completely, thus keeping the house warm and protecting it from dust. It gave to the living space that happy fistful look.

Every Saturday it was a cleaning day. My grandma would take the mats out in the yard and give them a good shake. In the winter time she would put them on the snow and would beat them with a broom so hard as if she was angry with them for something. And after she took them away, the snow that was so clean and white before her vigorous beating would loose its fluffy texture and become all grey. My grandma or my aunt would carefully sweep the floors that were green in colour being covered with a layer of a mixture of clay and horse-dung. My sister and I were supposed to help bringing the mats in and putting them exactly in the same order as they were placed before; the long colourful mats that looked quite similar to me had some particular meaning for my grandmother; she would never accept to change her floor arrangements. The rooms with freshly swept floors smelled of snow and were filled with fresh winter air, clean and cool. Letting our grandma doing her business around the house, my sister and I would stay outside and play in the snow. We delayed coming in till grandma would put the fire in the stove and the house would fill with the smells, that indescribable aroma of burned wood, freshly backed bread and rich flavoured, healthy peasant food.

The living area of the house consisted of a big room, a smaller one - my aunt’s room, and a big space between them with its enormous brick stove meant to hit the house and to be used as a winter kitchen.
The main room with a double metal bed by the wall, a dining table and a dressing table was multifunctional; it was used as a sitting room and a dining room. The bed, a magnificent featherbed, occupied almost one third of the room, it was high and looked very pompous with its big eider-down that was covered by a white embroidered bedcover. On the top of this fluffy chantilly-looking mound rested snow white pillows. The whole thing looked like a wedding cake. It was so tempting to climb up and sink in that soft mass and hide behind those big pillows. But we were not allowed even to approach the bed. It was the main piece of decoration, something like the king’s bed in a gala sleeping room in Versailles palace where kings never slept actually but used it only to show to their guests and slept in another one, a bit more simple bed in their private suite.

Unlike French kings, we had no other bedroom, so grandma and us were sleeping in the kitchen on a huge “lezhanka”, so big that there was enough space for three, four people to sleep on it. My aunt, a schoolgirl at that time, would never accept to sleep with us; according to her this warm, boxlike sleeping space was good enough “for little ones and old ones”.
The “lezhanka” was a spacious brick bed that prolonged the big stove. That was the warmest place in the house; the stove was burning during the day and bricks kept the warms the whole night. It was the darkest place in the room as well; the open space, sort of entrance to the “lezhanka”, was screened by a colourful curtain that one could part in the middle and slide into the dark warmth of this cosy box.

In winter time it was our favourite game space. We were sitting in the darkness telling the fairy tales and horror stories. It was frightful and fun. We were screaming and laughing till grandma would open the curtains to let some light in and check what the noise was about. Interrupted by this undesired intrusion and grandma’s famous “shosh-shosh…”, our game would quiet down; filled with light our fearful, prehistoric cavern would loose all its excitement. The game would continue later in the afternoon, the “lezhanka” being hardly lit by the opal light of a dying winter day was so inviting again. We would wait for grandma to lit the oil lamp, take out from the depth of the oven big, black jars and call us to come down for dinner that took place in the sitting room.

In those days there was no electricity in the house. The sitting room lit only by the yellowish light of an oil lamp was half dark and looked mysterious. In the “red corner” hang an icon decorated with an embroidered white cloth; a little icon-lamp spotlighted the dark face of a lady with a little baby in her arms. The flame was dancing with the air movement and lady’s face with its big eyes seemed alive. I didn’t know much about St. Mary at that time, I was a typical soviet child. My granny who used to go to the church every Sunday never took me with her and never talked to me about God, Jesus Christ or his mother. I liked the face of the lady, even though she looked sad.

Usually in winter time the temperatures would go fifteen or twenty degrees below zero. In those days no one even heard about the planet global warming and winters were still real winters, in the full meaning of this word, cold and with plenty of snow. The unpaved road in front of the house, the yard and the garden were covered by snow. There was so much snow that it was coming up as high as the frames of the windows. The window glasses were completely frozen and had beautiful elaborate drawings on them - trees, faces, castles, animals. I liked to go out in the yard and keep my warm finger against the cold glass observing how the little round spot on the icy picture melted slowly and became transparent. Sometimes I would put my hand and keep it as long as I could tolerate it; my skin was burning as if I’ve put my hand on fire. I was happy with the new design on the window where one could clearly see my hand. But couple days after the unknown painter would sweep off my creation and the windows were covered with a Lalique-style milky drawings again. The frost was much more imaginative and prolific artist than I was.