Excerpt
Prologue
“How can I possibly fit thirty-five years of my life into ten pieces of luggage?” This thought pulses in my head as I stare at a bunch of suitcases and bags piled up on the bench in our compartment. The train is parked at Odessa’s station, and in a few minutes it’ll take me on the longest trip of my life. Today is June 12, 1979, and my family is about to cross the Soviet border. I try not to think about who and what I’m leaving behind, but my mother’s and brother’s images flash in front of my eyes.
Two weeks ago, my husband, children and I traveled six thousand miles to see my family for the last time. My noble-looking mother appeared small, as she stood quietly next to my older brother on the train platform after kissing us good-bye. Her imperturbable face suddenly seemed aged and helpless. There were no tears in her eyes; instead, she seemed bewildered and confused. When the train took off, I could see her standing still on the platform until our train disappeared. I knew this image of my mother would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Part I: The foundation
Chapter 1: Childhood
It was too early for anyone to be here, in our dvor (a common yard enclosed by three apartment buildings), but it didn’t really matter. I never felt lonely in the dvor. I was busy building sand houses or creating a new ice cream machine from an empty metal shoe-polish box and then making the ice cream with a mixture of sand and water. Sometimes, I sat on the bench just looking up at the sky and fantasizing about the white fluffy clouds brightened by the gentle rising sun.
My parents allowed me to play alone because the dvor was the safest place in our neighborhood. Since we moved to the city, this became my daily routine: every morning at 6:00 a.m., I would get dressed, comb my strawberry-blond curly hair, open the door lock standing on my tiptoes, and quietly leave our apartment. I didn’t want to disturb my parents and older brother; they would sleep for another half hour. Then my mother got up to fix breakfast for us: eggs for my brother and me, and homemade french-fries with sausage and fried eggs for dad. Dad told us that you could tell how well a man worked based on his ability to eat, and he demonstrated this theory by example. Dad practiced what he preached.
In a couple of hours, many other people from the three buildings would come to the dvor, and fill it with laughter, screams, and other sounds of life. During the day, the entire dvor belonged to the women and children: mothers hung their laundry on the clotheslines or sat on the benches rocking baby carriages; we ran around playing war games or football. In the evening, our fathers came to the dvor. They played dominoes, banging pieces against the table and mock screaming at the winners. The women watched them from a distance, having their own endless discussions about the latest gossip in the neighborhood and about their husbands and children. We children, after finishing our games, sat on the stairs of one of the buildings and listened to the older kids’ scary stories. The dvor was the place where I played alone while everyone else was sleeping, and during these early morning hours, the whole world belonged to me.
I was born on a cold morning on October 18, 1943 in Bessonovka, a Russian village. A young midwife helped my mother with the birth process. The girl had no previous experience in delivery, and my mother had a lot of after-birth complications. She suffered from them all her life.
The village was located on the peaceful river Sura, a tributary of Volga, with only the buzzing of mosquitoes disturbing the silence. From these mosquitoes living at the huge swamps surrounding Bessonovka, pregnant Riva caught malaria. When I was born, she passed it on to me through breastfeeding. The distinct bitter taste of yellow pills mixed with my salty tears was my first conscious recollection and is forever imprinted in my memory.
I remembered quite a few moments of my childhood, but they were like the clips from an old movie, slightly dimmed and distorted, and, as I found out later, most of them didn’t represent a real picture of the events.
When I was twenty-three-year-old, I came back to Bessonovka with a child of my own to show him the place where I grew up. All these years, I kept the image of the large, beautiful house and everything in it in my memory and I had told my young son the endless stories about the place. To my surprise, I couldn’t find the house on the street where it was supposed to be located. Finally, I asked an old man, who was smoking a self-made cigarette on his porch, to help me. Without taking the cigarette from his toothless mouth, the man pointed to a small run-down house on the corner and mumbled, “Over there.” My mouth dropped open. This shack was so different from the amazing palace I pictured in my mind. As with all my other childhood memories, this one was exaggerated by my young age.
The rural living shielded our family from hardships that many other Russian families went through after the war. Mom told me that we had our own small garden. During the fall, she used to convert our kitchen into a production factory so that we could enjoy the homemade canned vegetables year-around. Also, we had few domestic animals–a sheep named Borjka, a goat named Katjka, and a few nameless chickens. Thanks to this little farm, we always had fresh goat milk and eggs on the table.
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