The Russian Album (27 page)

Opposite the church, behind some ragged picket fences, were three small brick cottages, with lights on through curtained windows, but we stood there in the dark, by the churchyard, not knowing which one to approach. Then a flatbed truck clattered down the hill and drew up and stopped, spilling saucers of light on the trees and the graves in the churchyard. The driver looked the three of us over, me, my translator, Lena, and my driver, and told us to jump in. We clambered up into his cab and he drove us slowly through the narrow, unpaved track that meandered through the village, the sides of the truck brushing heavily against the vegetation which hung over the low wooden fences on either side. He stopped in front of a blue and white brick house, almost covered with vines, and banged on the door. After many minutes, a burly priest with a full grey beard unbolted the door and stood under the single bulb at his doorway, irritably wiping crumbs from his cassock. What did we want? Lena kissed his hand and explained. The priest looked surprised, then suspicious: one of the family? In the middle of the night? Lena said, indeed it was. He stood there, not quite knowing what to do with us, until his wife, in kerchief, carpet slippers and a coat thrown over her house dress led us back down the path through the village to a cottage, where, she said, we would sleep. She led us in, lit candles, pointed Lena in one room, me and the driver in the other room, plumping pillows, dragging furniture about, blowing on the coal fire, until the Dutch oven heated up and began to take the chill from the room. She lit the lamps in front of the icons in the corner, as well as the coal lamps on the tables, and bustled about in the kitchen, while we sat and felt the warmth rising in the room. Tea and a soup tureen full of potatoes, jars of pickled tomatoes, onions and cucumbers, several bottles of vodka and some cognac appeared on the red-and-white-checked oil skin table-cloth. She laughed and chuckled and showed her bright-silver false teeth and acted as if she had been waiting for us to show up one day.

When her husband appeared, he had combed his hair, brushed away the crumbs and was wearing his silver cross over his cassock. He blessed the feast now assembled on the trestle table and his wife joined in, crossing herself, bowing and warbling the responses in an old lady's quaver. We bowed too and sat down at the table. You must eat, you must eat, she kept saying, stabbing the gherkins in the jar with a fork and shaking them onto our plates. Her husband, with his silver cross now around his neck, was circumspect, watching me closely through small eyes, moving his fingers around his lips beneath his beard. Was this really the Count's grandson?

I explained, through Lena, that my father had been a believer all his life, and an elder of his church. They were reassured by the thought that there were islands of faith in Manning Avenue, Toronto and other unimaginable places. They were too polite to ask about my own beliefs, but it seemed clear to them – from the fact that I had no Russian, that I didn't cross myself properly at grace, merely bowed my head – that in the spiritual department I was something, of a disappointment. And this was not the place to rehearse the evident contradiction between having sought out this village while, at the same time, keeping a psychological distance from Russian traditions. Now that I had found the village at last, I felt a comical desire to lie: to drink more vodka than I ordinarily like, to tell Russian stories (with Lena's help, of course), to cross myself with ostentatious correctness and in every respect conceal the fact that I was not really very Russian at all. In planning this sentimental journey, I had prepared myself to be disappointed; what I had not prepared myself for was the possibility that
they
might be disappointed in me. The priest's wife looked at me commiseratingly. So why hadn't I learned Russian? Because, I said, my father married a Canadian woman. But it's the language of your father, the priest said. Which was exactly why I never learned it. But how could I tell him that?

Fortunately there was Lena. They couldn't make out what she was to me exactly, but her Russian was expressive and faultless and she obviously had a warm heart and was respectful too, and they began to unwind in our company. Vodka was poured into tumblers from a large fruit jar in which were floating several green peppers and a gherkin or two. While his wife kept piling the potatoes and sausage on our plates, and joining in with asides, commentary and corrections, Father Sergei told his story. When they arrived to take over the parish, in the early years after Stalin's death, the church was boarded up and the machine shop for the collective farm stood in the churchyard. ‘There was a butcher shop in the crypt,' his wife added, ‘can you imagine?' They pulled the boards off the windows and swept out the cobwebs, dust and animal droppings on the mosaic floor and re-lit the candles and began holding services, and the old widows began coming again and brought their daughters and their sons. And soon there were baptisms, as well as burials, and a choir to sing in the loft. The priest and his wife had sons, and the boys joined the choir and then left for the seminary to train for the priesthood. But it had never been easy. The priest had been arrested more than once, but he didn't want to talk about it. ‘We are still here,' he said phlegmatically, chewing on a piece of black bread, looking down at the table. ‘We have kept your graves,' she said and smiled, her silver false teeth flashing, while her husband looked sharply at me, wondering, it seemed to me, why I was worthy of such unrewarded devotion.

To release myself from his stare, I asked him – through Lena – how things had fared for them and for the church since the Ukrainians had declared independence in 1991. They both exchanged a worried glance. It was like this, the priest said. A new Ukrainian Church, with support from the state, was demanding to take over all the Russian churches and substitute a Ukrainian order of service. Though he himself spoke Ukrainian with his parishioners, the priest had trained in a Russian seminary and his services were in Church Slavonic. Faith was faith: he had been ordained to give the service in the ancient language and to give his obedience to the patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople. The new patriarch in Kiev was an upstart. It was all politics, he said, and it would all end badly. His son was choirmaster in the cathedral at Vinnitsa, the biggest town nearby, and the Ukrainians were demanding that the church be handed over to them. Their son was prepared to fight at the church door, if need be. ‘People will be killed,' the priest's wife said gloomily. After some silence together, companionable and thoughtful, they stood and bowed to the icons, blessed themselves and us and walked home through the dark to their house.

Next morning, I got my first daylight view of the village. I was at the well outside, winding up water to wash in and make tea. A small group of children passed by with satchels on their way to school. In the vegetable garden of the cottage opposite, an old woman in bedroom slippers cut off the head of a cabbage for soup and before turning back indoors stared silently at me. An old man drove past in a cart, flicking his whip against the withered flanks of his old horse. On the back of the cart sat two farmworkers in tattered blue suits and muddy boots. They stared at me too. An ancient woman, bent and crooked, struggled by leaning heavily on a stick. A damp fog clung close to the ground.

I walked down the track to the river, coiling between the fields, hazy with the fog. It was how Lena and I had located Kroupodernitsa on the map in Kiev, by tracing our fingers along the River Ross until we found the village by name. I have a photograph of my grandfather as a teenager, in a naval cap rowing his sisters in long print dresses, out beneath the railroad bridge, on a summer afternoon in the early 1890s. The railway bridge was nowhere to be seen. A few geese pecked about amid the discarded bottles and scraps of sodden paper on the water-bank. I stared out across the river and thought of my grandmother, how she hated this place.

Walking along the bank, I came across an old two-story brick building, with machinery whirring and grinding inside. Farmwomen in kerchiefs were shouldering grain out of sacks into a tin shute: the grain sluiced down into the mill and a white cone of flour spilled out at the other end. Other women were scooping it into sacks. Dust, cobwebs and flour coated the beams, windows and machines. Flour drifted down through the air onto my shoes. The shutes were of recent hammered tin, but the mill machinery itself was much older. When I rubbed the flour off from the name-plates on the old iron stanchions, the words ‘Dresden 1886' and ‘Leipzig 1887' came up beneath my fingers. This was my great-grandfather's flour mill, once powered by the dams and millraces on the river, and now by electricity from a Soviet-era power plant. The machines he had purchased in Germany and brought back by rail, at what must have been astronomical expense, were still milling the village's grain a century later.

All of the land around the village, once owned by my great-grandfather and farmed by my grandfather, was now farmed by the kolkhoz, the collective farm. The hedgerows and trees which in the photographs of the family album crisscrossed the fields a century ago had been cut down to consolidate the arable land and make way for large-scale machinery. Now, on the other side of the river bank, the black soil fields rolled away to the horizon, bare and empty. The manager of the collective farm, a young man in shirtsleeves, with smooth hands and the white unweathered face of a city person, was watching the milling of the grain. Through Lena, who by then had joined me, I asked him why, now that the Ukraine was independent and nominally committed to free enterprise, he didn't turn the land over to the local people. He shrugged amiably. Who do I give it to? Who is there? He gestured at the huge bare fields across the river. Who would have the capital to farm such large fields? The women shouldering the sacks of flour off the shutes listened and concurred. Most of their sons had moved to the city. It was a village of old women, they said, though most of them seemed robust enough to run a farm on their own, if they could be given a tractor, tools, seed and a line of credit to some bank.

I though of the peasants in the family album, of the estate steward Rudnitsky, with his weather-beaten face, full grey beard and three-quarter-length frock coat over high-topped boots, posing for Peggy Meadowcroft's Box Brownie with his son and his family in front of a white-washed thatched cottage. Or of the Sessoueff family, grouped beneath a tree in front of their cottage, mother in black kerchief and full skirts, children in white Ukrainian embroidered dresses, wealthy enough to give their girls necklaces; wealthy enough for Mr Sessoueff to wear well-shined boots. Peggy had inscribed their names in white ink beneath their pictures in the album. They could have taken over the land after my great-grandmother died in the winter of 1917; through Lena, I began asking what had happened to the Rudnitskys, to the Sessoueffs. One old lady told us bleakly to go look in the village graveyard. There, near the green fence was the tomb of old Sessoueff, with the date of his death chiselled in: 1924. But what about Rudnitsky and his able-bodied son, with a bronzed face and a full splay of whiskers? ‘Repressed,' the school-teacher was to tell me. ‘All repressed.' And when, I wanted to know? Thirty-one, thirty-two. The priest confirmed it too. He hadn't been there then, but the old women who came to his church remembered it only too well. Teams came down from Kiev, looking for the people they called the grainhoarders, the bloodsuckers, the vampires; they requisitioned all the available local food for the towns and turned the poorest labourers against the small holders, or kulaks as they were known; then they arrested the kulaks and took them away. The hedgerows were plowed under; the big fields were laid out and the land was fully collectivized. The kulaks who stood in the way – the Rudnitskys, the Sessoueffs, especially, because they had once worked for the old master – were driven away, imprisoned or shot.

Historians estimate that something like three million Ukrainians died of hunger, when the land was collectivized, between 1931 and 1933. A further million were killed during the purges of intellectuals and party officials. An additional 2–3 million kulaks were deported to Siberia. The peasant culture of small farmers and labourers which my grandfather grew up among was exterminated. This was when fear came to the village. And it has never left. Walking along the sandy tracks towards the big house on the hill, past the low cottages, behind the rickety picket fences, some in wattle and daub, some still thatched, as they were in an English Nanny's photographs at Easter 1915, I began to see the old women bent over their cabbage patches in the back gardens, tossing onion skins and cabbage tops onto their compost, as survivors of a man-made catastrophe.

After breakfast, Lena and I headed off in search of the family house. Great-grandfather built it in the 1860s as a summer place for his family, when he was Czar Alexander II's Ambassador in Constantinople. When his sons married, he added wings to house them and their children. Vast family gatherings were held here at Easter and in the summer months, when the brothers and sisters would make the journey south from Moscow and Petersburg. In the pictures, it was a capacious, plain two-story stuccoed and whitewashed mansion, with a ceremonial front porch and balconies on the first-floor bedrooms carved in the ornate Ukrainian style. There were ornamental gardens with fish-ponds, and gravel paths through woods and benches where the old man and his wife could sit and rest on their walks during his long and embittered retirement from office after being dismissed by the Czar in 1882.

The gardens were nowhere to be seen; the high stone wall which marked if off from the village had been torn down or pillaged for bricks; one of the wings built for the sons had burnt down, and the other was in ruins. But the main house still stood: recognizably the same, though the Ukrainian gingerbread balconies and roof decorations were gone. I walked up the drive towards the covered front porch. Was this really the courtyard where Mitro, the bearded coachman, used to draw up the family
sharaban
– the charabanc – the old man used to take when he went on afternoon tours of his farms? Seventy-five years ago, my father's brothers – Dima, Alec, Lionel – were photographed, just here, half-kneeling in the driveway, wearing their sailor-suits and squinting at Peggy's camera, their heads shaved close for the summer.