Her Great-Grandfather Was a Communist

It’s the twenty-first century, and she comes here, to the lush northern forests and dry swamps on the border with Belarus crawling with frogs, snakes, and vuzhalkas (in Belarusian folklore, half women, half serpents, daughters of the Serpent king — R.). She wants to talk about her communist great-grandfather. He was one of those communists responsible for the deaths of the local people.

The day before, she tells them: “My great-grandfather was a communist; so communist that he was even guilty of the deaths of his fellow villagers.” Saying this calms her down. This is her way of apologizing for those dark times, of trying and somehow reducing the pain that he, her ancestor, had inflicted on others. Sometimes, she would light a candle in a church. Although, she does not believe in God, they apparently do, and so must have their dead.

She came to talk about their dead.

There are two hundred houses left here. Fewer have their roofs, floors and stoves intact and not used for slate, brick and firewood. That is, few of them have a man inside. Her great-grandfather—and therefore, she supposes, herself—are to blame for the death of at least two people here.

Mykhailo Maxymovych, 38 years old, refused to join the kolkhoz (Soviet collective farm — R.) and was marched out of his home in November 1937 to be executed four days later for campaigning against the collective farm and spreading incendiary rumors.

A year after Mykhailo Maxymovych, in the young and fragrant month of May, the illiterate collective farm worker Andrii Yakymovych was also executed. For anti-Soviet agitation.

There is no way of knowing what happened to Uvar Lohvynovych, who had barely turned forty and only had primary school under his belt, but was undermining the Party affairs.

She comes to the women with the last names of these men: Derzhun, Andrushchenko, Yermolenko. “Was it your father, brother, grandfather who I—that is, my great-grandfather—killed?” she asks. “Forgive us,” she says.

“You might know that they were rehabilitated, I believe, in 1989. Maybe it will comfort you somehow, heal the pain of the past, pain of growing up without a grandfather, a father, a brother. Your dead were innocent; mine were guilty.”

Small blurred eyes, once sallow, now sun-bleached, look at her in disbelief.

“Huh, child, rebilatated? What does that mean? Oh, cleared their names? What on earth for? Why did they have to go against Lenin, why sabotage? I wish they’d shoot all these… blood-suckers now,” says Katria Andrushchenko, a woman so old that all the wrinkles can’t fit on her face.

Right. The conversation is apparently doomed to fail. It’s just that the last shop here is to be closed down in a month, they say. This is the topic the locals are more ready to talk about.

After the shop is closed, there will be no work left, nor will there be anywhere to meet for the locals. In the beginning was the collective farm, and the collective farm was with the communists, and it closed down first. Then fell the garage, the barn-floor, the museum, the school, the post office, the club, and two shops. A month ago, they closed down the library.

The whole village rushed there to return the books that they had borrowed and did not return all these years. Her mother took back the Anthology of Women’s Prose, which had been lying around for ages: it’s a miracle that this book even got to this two-hundred-house village. The wooden floorboards creaked tirelessly on closing days. Older women brought back novels about gentle highlanders and magazines with torn-out samples of creams and shampoos that were sometimes attached to the advertising pages. Men returned sci-fi novels that had already come to pass. In the library, they talked of everything and nothing: who was sick, who died, who was running in the field yesterday, trying to escape her husband with an axe.

Today, everyone goes to the last shop and talks at length with the shopkeeper about the country, pensions, war, this wretched day, fasting. The shopkeeper hurries to weigh out the sweets, the semolina, some more sugar. “Order two more loaves of white bread when they bring the goods, sweetie, for the godparents are coming.” “Be a dear and show me that blue bubble gum for my granddaughter and that men’s cologne in a box. How long has it been here? A decade? I remember thinking of buying it for my husband for some occasion.”

The shop is the last place still operating in the village other than the cemetery, where there isn’t enough space for all the houses, anyway. “This whole place is beyond hope. A veritable cemetery where we are all buried,” they say in the shop.

There is no one to even read a funeral service, for it is, in fact, not the collective farm that fell first, but the church. The communists blew it up in the sixties, and the place where it stood has overgrown with weeds since then. Nor is there an undertaker, as the last good one fell asleep somewhere in the woods in the snow and must have been taken apart by wolves.

“Those who dug the ground for the water pumping station, when the village was connected to the main water supply, will dig a grave just as well,” the saying here goes.

She still wants to talk about herself, that is, about her great-grandfather. She goes to the oldest woman in the village. “Child, you know better: maybe we should join Russia as well?” asks the woman.

She understands her: the oldest woman in the village confuses Russia with the Soviet Union. She desperately needs the Soviet times back, because she was young there, and it’s been thirty years since she’s old here.

Right. Never mind. So she goes to yet another woman. But this one wants Lukashenko. To Belarus, that is, but Lukashenko’s one. Well, at least not Russia, she thinks, but some strange old man, sitting beside them on the bench, coughs and intervenes.

“Whatever,” he says. “Shoot everyone.”

The dead are dead here.

[This publication was created with support of the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Ukraine. The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Norwegian government.]