I was followed in summer. All these pine trees which held the frozen sky were no less than hundred years. I knew them since childhood and recognized each of them. Their old podacgric legs were carefully covered with puffy snow featherbeds, silver glitter in the air changed on the sun, luring to follow – deeper and deeper… And this rustle behind the back… I stopped and abruptly turned around – at that very moment someone also came to a standstill, deafening silence… It was the third time when I realized that I was alone in the forest – none of the footprints was on that featherbeds except for mine. It was pine trees… There were whisperings behind the back…
After many years of absence, I appeared there out of blue. The snow was everywhere! Perhaps, like it used to be… My grandpa, Dmytro Nykyforovych who served as a telegrapher at the royal navy and then at our railway station, had an inclination to sweet dreams. Either at the daytime or at night he fell asleep happily. He woke up only at the sound of telegraph which beat the Morse code with small nails… Every morning he didn’t open his eyes until grandma came, “Mitya, the steam train is honking!” Then he got up and ran to the station. And in the evening, coming back to Pryluky from Pyryatyn, he slept soundly in the warm carriage and he has wakened up already in Hrebinka. From there, he returned home on foot through these puffy and high snowdrifts. They were so much then that once, catching his breath on the top of a huge snowdrift, he saw that he was standing on the roof of someone’s house.
I remembered this favorite story because I had heard the Morse code from the sky! How to unscramble the code which had been beaten with tiny nails high in the crown of the old pine tree. Why hadn’t I remembered that grandpa’s alphabet – I would have understood what my Dmytro Nykyforovych was telling me…
Above, the woodpecker was fiercely pounding rataplans and syncope, sprinkling me with fresh pine tree sawdust…
Why had I come here? Perhaps, it’s time. I had been traveling around the world all my life – it was easy and cheerful to write about it. As soon as you start telling something about your home, a shot skull turns up all of a sudden, a tape with a torn plait, a scarecrow built on the place of the former palace, someone’s interrupted story, a dismantled cobble in a godforsaken village and a photo in which people with their straight backs are sitting in a landscaped garden – with books in hands, near the flowers, where, judging by the inscriptions, a godforsaken village is there now… And all these immediately stirs the story about the way home, an aching strive to find what happened there nags, the text changes into tragedy and you abandon traveling the world and take a trip to the somber ossuary… And it is so unfair… Hence you drop off that writing…
A couple of old photos decided everything. In the first – the cavalry lined up on Cathedral Square of my Pyriatyn, then the town of regional significance. It lined up in 1912 – and I had no idea why. Behind the cavalrymen, I saw the cathedral which part is still standing… In the second – the line of young naval officers, the hats with ribbons on – Mine School, and second to the right – my grandpa Dmytro Nykyforovych, Mitya… Same 1912 year. I knew nothing about it. Nobody knew… I had to tear myself apart and seek because the mystery burnt my chests… But most importantly… In that photo, all young officers were very strict and serious as the shadows of distant past were supposed to be… But Mitya was the only one who smiled! The way the shadows were not supposed to be! That’s not how it was supposed to take pictures 107 years ago!
And finally, I saw it.
We were big friends with him – and he was sending me “telegraphic air cordless code”… I wish I could have read Morse… He could have written what he told me, a schoolgirl, before passing away, “Musya (he called me this way because I was buzzing like a fly all the time), – always make sure that flowers on my grave grow…”. I got furious then – I didn’t want to hear about death. And now I got it – it was said so that I came back. And he was smiling from the unsmiling photos of the past century… So that I loved and didn’t dread walking in sad places, so that there were flowers all the time, so that I looked for an answer and – importantly! – so that I smiled where it seemed impossible…
Falling in up to the knees, – I would gladly agree for that wonderful white boots which grandpa whitened with chalk! – I wondered to the lawn where an incredible and beautiful in our environs pine grew: her two trunks twisted in the shape of a perfect eight. It was a sign of infinity. Some time ago, it had decorated the cover of the famous magazine Ohonyok – our Soviet province swelled with proud… But it was a sign! And now I was spitting with snow and triumphed: the sign was in its place! And when viewed at a certain angle, it was not clear that eight had been carefully cut out… It might have been rotten… I must have guessed earlier – maybe, I would have noticed that the infinity is under threat of oblivion…
Grandpa Mitya smiled at me. And I would go to that cathedral now! The whole cavalry lined up in front of it… I hadn’t been there for ages!
It was not long to go from the Masalskyi island where I had seen all these to the central street – now it was Soborna. To close the eyes not to hush the vision… I looked at the high windows of an old sturdy house which survived at the corner – three swallow nests clung to it as if forever! Once there was a dairy shop downstairs. I went there with a jar, waited in a queue and inhaled amazing smell of the yellow butter cube which the seller’s giant knife cut in – all smelled of butter. Then I placed a jar under the liter ladle which poured a cream baked, adored for the lifetime milk.
On the left next to the road a puppy was peeing at the empty pedestal. Bust of hairy and beaded Karl Marks, whom I took for Beethoven in childhood, had been removed from this concrete rise… And now this empty rectangular monument on the flowerbed was like a workpiece of a local cubist, just a pedestal, just a piece of stuff, you could just pee at it – and nobody would whack your tail with a scarp. On the road a rusty red Zhiguli cheerfully galloped, from the open window someone exhaled cigarette smoke which thickened in the cold and followed Zhiguli like a twisted rope… In Zhiguli it was singing to the entire Soborna “she cried and again – the violet blossomed” and the sign “Mad horse” jumped and alarmed on the back bumper. On the roadside, between the cars, parked in front of shops clogged up with colorful signboards, someone was reading lectures in beautiful French with insertions like “warehouse”, “ditch”, “dog”… I decided not to wonder and saw that it was a woman in a white coat who was reproached by a black, blacker than soil, man in ushanka. A hairy black ushanka ideally repeated the color of his skin, this incredible Pyryatyn man was angry and was saying something like “je encore un coup toi rappelle, que de la sorte non selon un règlements!”. Since I, unfortunately, speak a little French, I could be mistaken in what I had heard… I was thinking about different – once, on these streets, French definitely sounded because here, in a sheltered spot, under the neat poplar crowns could walk those whose names today are only in encyclopedias… But now the pedestrians were hurrying in their daily routine. They went for bread and cheese, bought SIM cards, opened the doors on which was written “French perfumes”… Two friends were standing there – the one was the owner of these ragweeds, another smelled her groomed face, “Oh, do you smell of this?”. Towards me, a cute girl drove two Pekingese dressed in bright vests – and we all ceremoniously helloed each other.
It was a wonderful and fresh day. One of the living trees was still decorated on the square as if for Christmas – why not?
And I half-opened the heavy doors of Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin and stepped inside, casting a scarf over my head just in case… Ukrainian Barocco, eighteen century, local architectural traditions united with European, it had been ordered by a regimental captain… Of course – this is no longer the whole cathedral, this is what remained of it… I had never been here. When I was studying – it was standing closed, some stuff was kept there, then it was a museum. Later, the museum was relocated and robbed…
Inside it was murky, dump and very cold. A red-hot air heater was standing next to the crucifixion – and a painted suffered naked Jesus might have been warmer… Here the candles for the repose were placed – the most visited corner. In another corner, something moved and the eyes of an old woman looked at me. She was wiping and displacing something there. She was utterly surprised:
“What do you want?” she asked silently and glanced back at Jesus as if looking for the safe side.
“I what to pray for health”
“You can do it here and there”
I put a candle for the repose – for all those whom I loved in this life and for health… And I asked the woman’s name.
“Alla,” she said.
“I hear that you are talking Russian, non-local, where are you from, Alla?”
“I’m from Pyryatyn”
“But it seems to me that you weren’t born here. You are talking otherways”
Seventy-year-old Alla, probably, has never been asked about this, and she suddenly stuck out of surprise… Alla was born in Kemerovo. And here she came being an eighteen-year-old girl. To uncle. And she stayed here. She got married, gave birth to a son but couldn’t learn Ukrainian… But I saw it wasn’t the whole story… Where was her uncle from? Alla fixed the mount of candles two of which she gave to me, straighten up and told: they had been dekulakizated and ostracized. There she was born – but she was ours. It was just that she couldn’t have learned to talk our way to old age.
“And I have nearly forgotten how to do it my way…”
The son was a tailor, he sewed for monasteries but now he was sick and Alla had to work, she was a breadwinner…
We stayed together, talked to each other. The icons froze and kept silence…
The square, where the cavalry lined up, seemed smaller. That cavalry was seen off somewhere – the crowds stood opposite… There, where these people in the photo forever froze, are the remains of Rodina cinema. Chiefly its skeleton, firmly closed windows and doors of the pay office. I stood there in the queue for a ticket, as well as my grandpa Mitya together with grandma, my mom and dad… Somewhere inside, our laughter and our tears over the characters of motion pictures were locked up… The words Rodina fell down from the roof and now it was crookedly and askew written “C..ne..M..Thea”. But the entire building was covered with a huge panel with a smiling girl in a military uniform who called on the volunteers to join the army – “defend your country!”. And I did saw the cavalry… I stood seeing it off…
Grandpa Mitya smiled with his eyes from 1912 even for cheerfully – he always knew that I would get the message and come back. And I love.
Olga Gerasymyuk