Now he sat in his chair, breathing heavily, and looking intently at me, a lone tear running down his dry cheek. It stuck on his beard, and Aunt Dozia wiped it away with a clean handkerchief. My father couldn’t speak. He was dying of throat cancer. I sat by my father all night. Everyone else slept. The rain stopped. The stars shone sullenly outside the windows. The river raged ever louder. The water kept rising. Bregman and the priest could not get back and were now trapped on the island. My father stirred in the middle of the night and opened his eyes. I leaned over him. He tried to put his arms around my neck but couldn’t and then said in a raspy whisper: ‘I fear … your lack of character … will be the ruin of you.’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘That won’t happen.’
‘When you see your mama,’ he whispered. ‘I failed her … May she forgive me …’
He grew quiet and weakly squeezed my hand. At the time I did not understand his words, and only much later, after many years, did their bitter meaning become clear to me. I also came to understand much later that my father had never really been a statistician at all, but a poet. He died towards dawn, but at first I didn’t realise this. It seemed to me that he had quietly fallen asleep.
An old man named Nechipor lived with us on the island. We called him to come and read the psalms over Father. Nechipor frequently broke off his readings to go out into the front hall and smoke his cheap tobacco. There in a whisper he’d tell me the simple stories that stirred his imagination – about a bottle of wine he’d drunk the previous summer at Belaya Tserkov, about how he’d seen Skobelev himself,fn5 so close in fact ‘as that hedge right there’, at Plevna, about an amazing American threshing machine powered by a lightning rod. Old man Nechipor was, as they said on the island, ‘a simple man’ – a liar and a gasbag. He read the psalms all day and throughout the following night, picking wax off the sides of the candles with his black fingernails, falling asleep where he stood, snorting himself awake, and then carrying on with his mumbled prayers.
That night someone on the other side of the river began yelling and waving a lantern. I went to the riverbank with Uncle Ilko. The river was raging. The water raced over the causeway in an icy cascade. It was late and dark, not a single star shone over our heads. The wind blew the raw freshness of the flood and thawing earth into our faces. And the whole time someone on the far bank kept shouting and waving a lantern, but not a word could be made out over the noise of the river.
‘That must be Mama,’ I said to Uncle Ilko, but he did not respond.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, and then was quiet. ‘It’s cold out here on the banks. You’ll catch cold.’
I didn’t want to go back to the house. Uncle Ilko was silent for a while and then left, but I stayed and kept watching the lantern in the distance. The wind blew ever stronger, bending the poplars, and carrying the slightly sweet smoke of burning straw from somewhere far off. We buried Father in the morning. Nechipor and Uncle Ilko dug a grave in the grove on the edge of the ravine. From there one could make out the woods beyond the Ros in the distance and the whitish March sky. We carried the coffin from the house on wide, embroidered straps. The priest walked in front. He looked straight ahead with his calm, grey eyes and murmured Latin prayers.
Once we got the coffin out onto the steps, I caught sight on the far side of the river of an old carriage with some untethered horses and a small woman in black – Mama. She was standing motionless on the riverbank. She saw that we were carrying Father from the house. She dropped to her knees and her head fell to the ground. The tall, gaunt driver went up and leaned over her. He said something, but she just lay there, not moving. Then she jumped up and began running along the bank towards the causeway. The driver grabbed her. She sank helplessly to the ground and covered her face with her hands.
We carried Father along the road to the grave. At the bend, I turned to look. Mama was still sitting with her face buried in her hands. We were all silent, but Bregman kept slapping his whip against the side of his boot. By the graveside the priest lifted his eyes to the cold sky and then said clearly and slowly in Latin: ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis!’ Grant unto him eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.
Then the priest fell silent and listened. The river roared and overhead the tomtits called to each other in the branches of the old elms. The priest sighed and began to speak again about man’s eternal longing for happiness and the valley of tears. These words were remarkably fitting for my father’s life. They made my heart ache. Ever since I have often felt that same pain when confronting this thirst for happiness and the imperfection of human relations. The river kept on roaring, the birds whistled cautiously, and as the coffin was slowly lowered on its straps into the grave it knocked loose clods of damp earth. I was then seventeen.
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.