The Story of a Life

2

My Grandfather Maxim Grigorievich

I remained at Gorodishche for a few days after my father’s funeral. Only the following day, after the water had gone down, could my mother cross the causeway. Mother looked haggard, her face dark, and though she had stopped crying, still she sat for hours at Father’s grave. It was too early for fresh flowers, so we’d decorated the grave with paper peonies. Girls from the neighbouring village had made them. They loved to braid these peonies into their hair together with silk ribbons of various colours.

Aunt Dozia tried to comfort and distract me. She dragged a trunk filled with old things out of the store room. The lid made a loud creak. Inside I found a yellowed hetman charter in Latin, a copper seal with a coat of arms, a St George’s medal from the Turkish War, a book of dream interpretations, a few smoked-out pipes and some incredibly fine black lace.

The charter and seal had remained in our family since the time of Hetman Sahaidachny, a distant ancestor. My father had laughed about our ‘hetman origins’ and loved to say that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers had tilled the soil and been the most ordinary and long-suffering of peasants, even though they believed themselves to be the descendants of Zaporozhian Cossacks. When the Zaporozhian Sichfn1 was disbanded by Catherine the Great, some of the Cossacks settled on the banks of the Ros, near Belaya Tserkov. The Cossacks reluctantly became farmers. Their wild past continued to simmer in their blood for a long time. Even I, born at the end of the nineteenth century, heard the old-timers’ tales of the bloody battles with the Poles, campaigns against the Turks, the ‘Uman Slaughter’ and the Chyhyryn Hetman.

Having filled ourselves with these stories, my brothers and I would fight our own Zaporozhian battles. We’d play in the ravine behind the farm, out by the fence that was densely overgrown with thistles. In the heat their red flowers and prickly leaves gave off a sickly sweet smell. The clouds would hover in the sky over the ravine – lazy and puffy, true Ukrainian clouds. So powerful are childhood impressions that ever since those days every battle against the Poles and Turks is linked in my imagination with that wild field, overgrown with thistles, and its dusty, intoxicating aroma. And the thistle flowers themselves reminded me of clots of Cossack blood.

With the years the Zaporozhians’ hot-bloodedness cooled. During my childhood it was only evident in the ruinous lawsuits that went on for years against Countess Branitskaya over every little piece of land, in the persistent poaching, and in the Cossack folk songs. Our grandfather Maxim Grigorievich would tell them to us, his grandchildren.

Small, grey-haired, with kind dull eyes, he lived every summer with his beehives out beyond the meadow to avoid the wrathful nature of my Turkish grandmother. Long ago my grandfather had been an oxcart driver. He had gone as far as Perekop and Armyansk for salt and dried fish. It was from him I first heard that somewhere beyond the light blue and golden steppes around Yekaterinoslav and Kherson lay the heavenly land of Crimea. Before becoming a driver he had served in Nicholas’s army, fought in the Turkish War, been captured and then returned from the town of Kazanlak in Thrace with a wife – a beautiful Turkish woman. Her name was Fatma. Upon marrying my grandfather, she adopted Christianity and a new name: Honorata.

We feared our Turkish grandmother no less than our grandfather did, and we tried to stay out of her sight. Sitting among the yellow pumpkin blossoms near his hut, Grandfather would sing in his trembling tenor the old Cossack songs and the ballads of the oxcart drivers or tell us all sorts of stories. I loved the drivers’ songs for their plaintive spirit. You could sing such songs for hours on end to the squeaking wheels, lying on your cart, staring at the heavens. The Cossack songs always evoked a strange sadness. To me they sounded either like the cry of captives in Turkish chains or valiant battle hymns to be sung to the sound of horses’ hooves.

Our favourite of Grandfather’s stories was the tale of Ostap the lyrist. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen a Ukrainian lyre. Now you can probably only find them in museums, but in those days you would see blind lyre players not only at small-town markets but even in Kiev itself. They’d walk with their hand on the shoulder of their guide, a barefoot boy in a sackcloth shirt. On their backs they’d carry a canvas sack with bread, onions and salt in a clean rag, and a lyre hung across their chests. It looked like a violin, but had a handle attached to it and a wooden rod with a small wheel. The lyre player would turn the handle round and round, the wheel would spin, rubbing against the strings that would vibrate in different keys, as if he were being accompanied by a swarm of friendly bumblebees buzzing around him.

The lyrists almost never sang. Rather, they performed their folk songs, ballads and psalms in a sing-song recitative. Then they stopped and would listen to the buzzing sound of the lyre as it slowly died away, after which, looking about with their unseeing eyes, they begged for alms. They didn’t beg like most paupers. I recall one lyre player in Cherkassy. ‘Toss us, a poor blind man and his little boy, a half-kopeck,’ he’d say, ‘for without him the blind man will lose his way and won’t find the path to God’s Kingdom when the time comes.’

I can’t recall a single market without a lyre player. He’d sit leaning up against a dusty poplar. Compassionate women would crowd around and sigh as they dropped their greenish copper coins in his wooden bowl. The image of the lyre players has remained forever linked for me with the memory of the Ukrainian markets – markets held early in the morning, when the dew still glistens on the grass, cold shadows lie across the dusty roads, and bluish smoke wafts over the earth, already lit by the sun.

Misty stoneware jugs of ice-cold milk, wet marigolds in pails of water, pots of buckwheat honey, hot cheesecakes with raisins, sieves with cherries, the smell of sea roach, the languid ringing of church bells, the impetuous haggling of the market women, the lacy parasols of the young provincial ladies of fashion, and the sudden bang of a copper kettle carried on the shoulders of some Romanian with wild eyes – every old man considered it his duty to knock on the kettle with the handle of his whip to see whether Romanian copper really was any good.

I know the story of Ostap the lyrist practically by heart. ‘It happened in the village of Zamoshye near the town of Vasilkov,’ Grandfather told us. ‘Ostap was the village blacksmith. His smithy was at the edge of the village under some dark, brooding willows overhanging the river. Ostap could make anything – horseshoes, nails, axles for oxcarts. One summer evening Ostap was stoking the coals in his smithy when a thunderstorm broke, scattering leaves into the puddles and blowing down an old willow. Ostap stoked the coals and suddenly he heard the heavy pounding of horses’ hooves coming to a stop by his forge. A voice – young and female – called the blacksmith.

‘Ostap went out and froze – at the very doors of the smithy pranced a black steed, and on it sat a woman of heavenly beauty, in a black velvet dress, with a switch, and a veil over her face. Her eyes were laughing behind the veil. Her teeth were laughing too. The velvet of her dress was soft and dark, and upon it sparkled raindrops that had fallen onto the woman from the dark willows after the rain. And next to her on another steed sat a young officer. At the time a regiment of uhlans was quartered at Vasilkov.

‘“My dear blacksmith,” said the woman, “shoe my horse, he’s lost a shoe. The road is terribly slippery after the storm.”

‘The woman got down from the saddle and sat on a log, and Ostap began to shoe the horse. As he worked, he couldn’t stop stealing glances at the woman, and then suddenly she became agitated, threw off her veil and returned Ostap’s glances.

‘“I’ve never met you before,” Ostap said to her. “Maybe you’re not from around here?”

‘“I am from St Petersburg,” answered the woman. “You’re very good at your work.”

‘“Shoeing a horse is nothing!” Ostap said to her softly. “I can forge something out of iron for you finer than anything any empress has.”

‘“What sort of thing?” the woman asked.

‘“Whatever you want. Well, for example, I can make you the most delicate rose with leaves and thorns.”

‘“Wonderful!” replied the woman just as softly. “Thank you, blacksmith. I shall come for it in a week.”

‘Ostap helped her back up into the saddle. She gave him a gloved hand to steady herself, and Ostap was overcome by emotion. He clung to her hand fervently. Before she could pull her hand away, the officer struck Ostap across the face with his switch and yelled: “Know your place, peasant!”

‘The horses reared and galloped off. Ostap grabbed his hammer to throw at the officer but had to put it down. So much blood was running down his face that he couldn’t see a thing. The officer had injured one of his eyes. But Ostap didn’t let this stop him, and he worked on the rose for six days. Various people came to see it and they all agreed that even in the land of Italy you couldn’t find such craftsmanship. On the night of the seventh day, someone quietly rode up to the smithy, dismounted and tied their horse to the fence. Ostap was afraid to go out or to even show his face – he covered his eyes with his hands and waited. He heard light footsteps and breathing, and someone’s warm arms embraced him, and a single warm tear fell on his shoulders.

‘“I know, I know everything,” the woman said. “My heart has been aching these past days. Forgive me, Ostap. I am the cause of your great misfortune. I’ve driven my fiancé away and am now leaving for St Petersburg.”

‘“But why?” Ostap asked.

‘“My dear, my love,” said the woman, “no matter what, people will never let us live in peace.”

‘“As you wish,” Ostap replied. “I’m a simple man, a blacksmith. Just thinking of you brings me joy.”

‘The woman took the rose, kissed Ostap and slowly rode off. Ostap went to his door, watched her go and listened. Twice the woman stopped her horse. Twice she wanted to turn round and go back. But she did not. The stars in the sky danced over the valleys and fell upon the steppe, as if the night sky itself were weeping over their love. So it was, my boy!’

Grandfather always fell silent at this point in the story. I sat afraid to move. Then I’d ask in a whisper: ‘And they never saw each other again?’

‘No,’ Grandfather would answer. ‘That’s right, never again. Ostap began to lose his sight. He thought about going all the way to St Petersburg to see this woman before going blind. And he did walk all the way to the tsar’s capital, only to learn that she had died – possibly because she couldn’t bear their separation. Ostap found her tombstone of white marble in a graveyard there. He looked and then his heart broke – on the marble lay his iron rose. The woman had instructed that it be placed on her grave. Ostap took up the lyre and most likely died out on the high road or perhaps under his cart in some market town. Amen!’

Listening to Grandfather’s story, Ryabchik, a shaggy dog with burrs stuck to his muzzle, yawned loudly. I gave him an angry nudge in the side, but far from taking offence, Ryabchik nuzzled up looking to be patted and licking me with his hot tongue. Ryabchik had only a few broken teeth left in his mouth. Last autumn, as we were leaving Gorodishche, he bit down on one of the wheels – he wanted to stop our carriage – and broke all his teeth.

Oh, Grandfather Maxim Grigorievich! I owe some of my excessive impressionability and romanticism to him. They turned my youth into a series of collisions with reality. This caused me suffering, but still I knew my grandfather was right, and that a life based on soberness and common sense might be good for others, but for me would be burdensome and fruitless. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison,’ Grandfather liked to say. Maybe that’s why my grandfather could not get along with my grandmother or, more accurately, hid from her. Her Turkish blood did not give her one attractive trait, except for her beautiful yet formidable physical appearance.

My grandmother was a tyrant and a nag. She smoked at least a pound of the strongest tobacco a day in her small, scorching-hot pipes. She ran the household, and her black eyes noticed the slightest disorder in the house. On holidays she’d put on a satin dress fringed with black lace, go out and sit on the small earthen mound by the house, smoke her pipe, and watch the rapid waters of the Ros. Now and then, deep in thought, she’d let out a loud laugh, but no one ever dared to ask what she was laughing at.

The only thing we liked about her was a hard, pink bar that looked like soap. She kept it hidden in her chest of drawers. Once in a while she’d proudly take it out and let us smell it. The bar gave off the faintest smell of roses. My father told me that a valley near Kazanlak, Grandmother’s hometown, was called the ‘Valley of Roses’, and that this miraculous bar was impregnated with attar of roses from there. A Valley of Roses! The words alone stirred my imagination. I could not understand how such poetic places could produce a soul as stern as my grandmother.