"Fairy tales do not give
the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already
because it is in the world already. What fairy tales give the child is his
first clear idea of the possible defeat of evil. The baby has known the dragon
intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for
him is a St. George to kill the dragon."
_ G. K. Chesterton
As uncertain as the time and
place of her own birth, Lubachka can trace her family history back only to
“Russia someplace,” where her grandparents were born. Every detail is somewhat nebulous.
Affectionate for Luba or
Lubov, Lubachka is what my mother was called by her parents’ friends and anyone
their age or older. Diminutives are ubiquitous among Russians and nobody is
known by just one variant of their given name. To my mother’s elders, most long
dead, she is forever a child, a little girl who emerged from the darkest world
and triumphed over death.
When my mother made her first
confession at the age of 6 or 7 to a Russian Orthodox priest, she clenched her
hands in prayer, tears stinging her innocent face and admitted to every sin
she’d heard of, including murder and adultery. (Her very confession was a sin, to
those who observe the most stringent interpretation of Orthodox faith, which regards
listing the sins you have not committed or things you have not done as likening
yourself to the Pharisee of the Gospel. It would be considered a form of boasting,
though thankfully this priest was not a fanatic.)
The priest must have
struggled to not giggle. “Why my dear, Lubachka,” he said, “when did you find
all the time to commit these sins?”
Like her first confession,
Lubachka’s early childhood encompasses the laundry list of tropes found in
Russian folk tales as outlined by Russian formalist Vladimir Propp.
1. The Initial Situation (the setup) is a backdrop of war, attacks on
all fronts by multiple enemies.
2. Though her parents
survived, Lubachka lost many others, including authority figures, making The Absentations (someone leaves or
dies) central to her tale.
3. Lubachka’s father made
several Violations, including
leaving the Soviet Army in fury.
4. In a series of small
villages comprised of dueling ethnic and political groups, Reconnaissance was rampant, and often it’s unclear if someone is
the villain or the hero.
5. There were countless
instances of Delivery (the searching
party discovers information), often by those disguised as friends and working
for an enemy.
Lubachka’s first few years
encompass most of the more than 30 tropes, which haven’t lost their universal
appeal. These are woven through everything from The Odyssey to modern works such as Star Wars, Labyrinth and Pan’s
Labyrinth.
Let’s stick with what is
known.
My mother’s mother, Alexandra
Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a
village in Vitebsk Oblast. My mother’s father, Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, was
born Nov. 18, 1907, in Lagi, also Vitebsk Oblast. Both villages are located
near the Russian border, and my maternal grandmother would walk to miles to
attend services at the closest Russian Orthodox Church. The oblast (which means
administrative region) borders Russia, Latvia and Lithuania, and is a major
railway center with stations for lines between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and
Poland, and Russia and Lithuania. Her maternal grandparents were Dimitri and
Matrona, and her paternal grandparents were Ustin (Justin) and Natalia. She
only recalls that they were born “in Russia someplace.”
My mother was the oldest
sibling, the only girl and the only survivor. Her brothers all died as infants,
and are still remembered as such in her daily prayers. She doesn’t recall
exactly when or where her brothers were born.
In her words: “One of my
brothers was born a year or so later than me. His name was Pyotr, which is
Peter in English. And my mother had twins; they were probably like two or three
years younger than me. One of them was Michael (Mikhail) and one was Ivan,
which is John. And actually one of them didn’t live that long. And I, for some
reason at that time, liked the name John better. And when they were lying on a
bed or something I used to switch them because I thought my mother and father
wouldn’t know the difference. [laughter] (My parents) said something that one of them was weaker,
and probably wouldn’t live too long, but they knew (I was switching the
babies).”
Lubachka’s attempt to save
her “favorite” baby brother echoes one of the four types of classic Russian
folk tales: magic tales with a female hero, usually a girl, and focused around her
ability to perform certain tasks. The others are: magic tales with a male hero;
animal tales and magic tales about everyday life. Heroines in Russian folklore
are held to higher ethical standards than their male counterparts. But the
rules aren’t quite carved in stone. Girl heroes aren’t allowed to lie, but “half-truths”
may be permitted. They can’t steal, but taking something from an evil character
may be admissible.
While she survived, my
mother’s early childhood is a tragic tale.
Says my mother: “I don’t know
how my brother Peter died. I don’t know anything about that. He was an infant.
And John died when the war was almost to start, it was like 19 … I don’t know …
when the Second World War was starting. And John died soon after that. And
Michael … we did not have any, hardly any food, to eat, and he got very sick.
There were no doctors. He had pneumonia. And he was 2 ½ when he died.”
My mother says her brothers
were buried in the tiny of village of Lemnitsa in Vitebsk Oblast, some 158
miles northeast of Minsk. There is nothing online but serial maps of Lemnitsa,
searching in English or in Russian. It’s as if it exists only as a tiny
pinprick on the massive expanse of a geographic region and only in the memory
of the few survivors like my mother.
For my mother, Lemnitsa
serves literally and figuratively as a giant grave, where nearly all members of
her family perished along with all its other inhabitants. “That's where also my
father's mother and sister were harshly killed, and his sister was 16 at that
time,” my mother says. “That's where they are buried, too.”
Quests for Russian folk
heroines can be as mundane as gathering firewood, mushrooms or berries in the
forest or more like that of a male hero, a journey to a far-away magical land.
Even the everyday was magical
for Lubachka, when it involved the rare appearance of a mushroom or a berry.
Lubachka’s first happy memory
comes from when she was about three years old.
“Afterwards, when we moved
into this house that was built, and I was very little, we didn’t really have
that much food, usually, always, you know. And the people across the street,
they had these … they made them for me… it was like hamburger meat or meatballs. Just a little bit of meat and
potatoes. And they gave me some. I thought that was the best thing I ever had.”
“And the other thing that I
remember myself -- I really don’t remember too much of my childhood at all -- I
do remember someone giving me candy one time, and ironically, I must've really
wanted the candy for some reason, but I really don’t think I remember much of
my childhood except a horrible war. And when the war sort of ended, but it
wasn't ended yet, the Germans were still there and had let open some churches,
and my brother Michael was still alive at that time, and that's when he was
baptized in the church when it opened.”
She doesn’t recall the name
of the church or the priest, but she speaks of a mystical experience, which
punctuates her lifelong passion for Russian Orthodoxy and guilt, even now, over
her tardiness to liturgy, even when she’s ill. The girlhood hunger for faith
was as intense as the need for food to survive. My mother still thinks this
way. It’s an inescapable passion.
“Oh, it was beautiful, big
church. And I think, in my opinion, I saw angels singing on top of the church,
but when I was telling someone they said I probably just heard people singing,
and because there were probably paintings (of angels), so it was like a very
large church. Yeah, to me it looked very good.”
She doesn’t remember anything
about the cupolas, or onion domes, whether they were wooden or gilded.
“I don’t remember the
outside. I just remember the inside of it. And, oh yes, there were a lot of
people!” Most were strangers, bonded only by faith in Orthodoxy or at least a
transfixion with the church itself, finally erected, open and serving a safe
place to seek refuge for the soul or body. “I was too little. I didn’t really
know anyone there. The church was full.”
My mother’s memory shifts
suddenly to retrieve another visceral early childhood experience, one she’d
likely repressed.
“And then I do remember
something which I'm very upset about. When my little brother was sick, Michael,
I was a little bit older, and well, actually, before he got sick, the reason he
got sick is because there was this one room where four or five families of us lived
because we all lost our houses and everything. But it was not where I was born
or where I lived, it was somewhere farther. (Possibly closer to what is now the
Polish border.) And what happened is, my mother, she was in quarantine because
she had typhoid fever, and my little brother was still breast-fed at that time,
and because she wasn’t with us and the two of us were left there, and this one
woman that had a cat in there, and it was a cold, a very, very cold autumn day.
It was very cold outside. And of course, he wasn't dressed, he only had a
shirt. Like a T-shirt, some kind of an undershirt on, and she threw him
outside, and I wasn’t able to pick him up or anything because I was too small
yet, too. And then that's when he got very sick. And he had to leave late in
the night. I don’t know if it was like a crib or something like that, for a
long time he was very sick, and there was another girl that was my age that
lived in that house, and we were playing cards with her, and my little brother
would cry, and I would get very angry at him because he was disturbing me, and
so that actually to this day tortures me. That I did that.”
“The woman with the cat, she
was actually in the other room, but she was Polish, and her daughter had affairs
with the German soldiers, so they had everything. We didn’t have anything.”
“Well, I don’t know. She was
a woman at that time because she did have a daughter, I think. She was not a
young girl. She was probably in her twenties. No. No, I don’t remember that
woman's name. And then at the same time, when my little brother Michael died, that's
when my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister were very brutally
killed.”
Michael died in “either
October or November. I don’t know. I don’t know what year it was. Maybe 1944,
probably 44. And the thing is, we were actually living at that time where the
German soldiers were, but my grandmother, my father's mother and his sister
that were killed, they were in a killed (by the Partisans) in a place that in
the daytime, the Germans would be there at night. The Partisans were there, or
vice versa, I don’t remember. But anyway, somehow, I remember, I do sort of
remember going to the cemetery, and they were all, as far as I know, all killed
and just buried in one grave. And but it was the cemetery, where we lived
before the war started.”
My mother says they were
killed by the Belarusian Partisans, resistance fighters who fought the Nazis
and collaborationism during World War II.
“My aunt, at that time, was
in school in Russia where they had to learn German. The German soldiers took
her and another 16-year old, and they were asking who is living in this house
and this house, and they had a list of people who they were told to burn down
the houses. She was 16, so of course, she's going to say whose house it was.
She was lucky because her father was also a Partisan, and of course he wasn't
there at that time, but he was in their party. And my father was against the
Bolsheviks and everything else, and he was in a German zone. And so when the
Partisans came after them they told him whose house it was, they came to get my
aunt, they wanted just her. My grandmother, she ran after her daughter. And
then they would go and take them a few miles away from there, but they had to
cross some kind of a river, and they were going to be interrogated there by the
Partisans, where their headquarters were. But what happened, it became close to
nighttime, and they had to get out of that region because I guess that's when
the Germans were coming or something, so the Partisans said that we know what's
going to happen with them, so they didn’t want to waste the bullets, I guess.”
“And so they used the other
part of the gun (rifle), the wooden part, and they beat their heads open.
That's how they were killed, and when my father saw that, it really affected
his mental state for the rest of his life. And so – [sobbing] then we had to
just, I guess, put them in ground and we had to leave there because the
fighting between the Germans and Russians would start. And then when we got
back to the place where we lived, and the second day or I don’t know maybe it
was the same day, I don’t really remember, I was outside. And I saw my brother
who was all in white, that's not the way he was buried. I guess I don’t know
what he was buried in, that I don’t remember, but I saw him outside and to me
he had represented an angel. That, I think, I just made up. No one was able to
tell me that. I think that I remember myself.”
“I think I do remember, I saw
when the fighting was going on between the Germans and Russians -- I'm not sure
if it was Partisans or the or the, Russian Army. I don’t know, I never asked my
parents what army it was. But I know at that point I just saw the Germans
afterwards because they're the ones that took us as prisoners after, so I
really didn’t see any Russian soldiers after that. And there was a wagon full
of stuff and we were walking on one side, and this other girl, about my age,
was walking on the other side, and the grenade was thrown, and she was very
close to me, and she got killed, and I didn’t. And of course there were other
people that were killed but I remember her because she was a friend of mine,
you know? And that was very, very tragic.”
“And then, after that,
Germans were moving us from one place to the other. And I remember we lived in
Poland for almost like nine months. In Lublin, which was going back from the
Russians to Poland.”
