I was a sickly child

I was a sickly child. Always sick, I mean. I was born slightly premature and it took a lot of years for me to recover from this bad beginning.

When the cold weather began in September I would turn pale, drop weight off my already impossibly spare ribs, and acquire an invalid’s cough. All night, against the walls of our little house, my ‘heh-heh’ child’s cough would converse with the exhaustion-breaths of Papa-Petr asleep on his back and the inaudible but unmistakable ghost of Mama’s dreams.

It would not cease through October or November, perhaps getting a little better once the freeze finalized itself mid-December. Some weeks after my third birthday though, in the middle of a terrific snow storm – with Papa-Petr and Mama stuck with young Petr and I together all day in our little house – my little ‘heh-heh’ sucked deeply back into my stomach, calling up phlegm and bile and I woke myself that morning with a whooping cough.

Mama picked me up out of my infants bed there beside Young Petr – a bed of old blankets made to mattress us stuffed with last summers’ hay. Mama draped me with her heavy dun smock and held me to her breast like hiding me from soldiers seeking for the Christ. She walked me to the corner of the room and rocked from her heels to the balls of her feet – leaning against the wall, then reeling back so I thought she would tumble to the floor dashing both our heads on the cemented soil.

It was early morning. The light that entered our room through cracks here and there and there was nearly green. I did not know that it came through a shell of freshly fallen snow. Papa-Petr broke through this shell and the door fell inwards before him. He carried in his arms an enormous armload of fire wood.

“Don’t know if I’ll be able to get to the wood shed at all if the snow keeps on falling like this,” he said. “Mama, I know you don’t like my bringing so much fire wood inside at once. Can you give me a hand putting this stack down so’s I don’t hit anything… it’s hard to move about.”

He looked up then at Mama and me in the corner. Mama didn’t say anything to him, just coo’d at me and massaged the pocket of my throat with the ball of her index finger.

“Is our little prince sick again?” Papa-Petr asked, the irritation like gravel embedded in the tar of his voice. “Mama, what are we going to do with this boy?”

Mama looked over her shoulder at him standing in the doorway with his load of wood. Her eyes glistened with the help of the light released into the house through the door and magnified off the snow.

“Your prince,” she said, “is becoming another Peter the Great here in this icebox. Can you build a fire now with your precious bundle there?”

Papa-Petr shifted his arms beneath the cord of wood he held against his chin but did not move to put it down. Like the coal nub eyes of a snowman, he glared at me with hatred there protected in Mama’s arms. “Maybe pneumonia is best for him and for all of us,” he said.

Mama said nothing and whispered “shhhh…” in my ear. I let loose with a terrible string of this cough, my face went red and my eyes even rolled back looking for oxygen in my own sloping brow that I inherited from Papa.

“You see?” said Papa as he dropped the wood against the floor. A ridge of soil broke away where the wood struck it by an edge and a wider berth of the floor scaled like the back of a garden snake.

“Damn it Petr, look what you’ve done,” said Mama.

And then she looked back at me in her arms. I was no longer coughing, but pecking the air for a breath in that would not go; like a falling man seeking something to grasp onto.

Outside the snow kept falling.

My first memory is of my third birthday

My first memory is of my third birthday. Before that… there’s imagery, colours, sounds, feelings, but I don’t trust in them. It could all as well be my imagining myself as an infant from seeing myself in infants as it could be actual memory.

I remember being held my Mama. I remember Papa-Petr as a series of entrances. Bursting through the door of our wooden house with cold or dry sun sashaying in a corner of a moment later like a smell. The glad feeling of an infant greeting his father.

But my first real memory is of my third birthday. My memory does not begin with waking up that day. It is not a sequential, fluid thing with a beginning like awakening and a conscious end. It is a flash – this memory – the sulfur flash of a match as it sparks.

This is all:

I am a small boy, exactly three years old. I am not yet aware of being young. My Mama is life and Papa-Petr is a looming god. I do not know that I will grow, or that the days pass because the earth encircles the sun, nor that I am one of billions alive on this planet enslaved by these days.

It is my birthday but I don’t know it. Mama is pregnant again with my sister Manya but I don’t know it. I am sitting under the table in the middle of the room. It is a heavy table. Papa-Petr made it. The underside of this table is unfinished wood. The grain runs wild; breaking out of their dual-dimension pattern with ragged splinters and frayed Swede saw planed boarding.

I am sitting naked on a clean wool blanket on the dirt floor. We have two rooms in our house and the dirt floor extends through the whole thing. This floor is pounded hard and almost clean, but hell rains upon us from the flailing arms of Mama if we spill water on this floor.

Young Petr is only one and a half years older than me. He is standing near Mama who is cooking. She is humming a sweet song too quietly for me to hear what it is. Young Petr looks up at Mama who occasionally asks him to hold a spoon that she is using to stir the broth in the mutton soup she is slow-boiling. When he gets ahold of this whittled wooden spoon in his little knuckle-less fist, he turns his head to me lips pursed, eyes smiling, brow piqued, spoon aloft.

I don’t know that mutton stew is a special supper. I know that Young Petr is an РЕБЕНОК and I want to hit him.

Papa-Petr comes in the door with a blast of dark frigid air. Mama turns to him, wiping her hands on her apron and smiling. Papa’s eyes are set back deep in his face. “What МЕД?” Mama said.

Papa would not say. He would not speak. He sat at the table with his boots on. Reached down and patted me on the head. I moved closer to him, leaned against the table leg nearest him, but did not touch him – his boots and pants cold cold cold.

"I don't need you here..."

Her brother remained unspectacular and Mama’s parents gave up pushing him forward once Mama herself quieted down. Mikar’s uncle said that Mama settled for Papa-Petr as part of this defeat years later, but I think that he was in love with Mama and hated Papa-Petr for it.

How could Mama complain? The blisters, the planting and harvesting without return, the drought, the children’s demands and the loneliness, Petr’s neglect… dents in a car that’s already had its wheels stripped. If she opened her mouth, where would it end?

There was always something about her that you couldn’t put your finger on. It was always as though she had done something new to her hair or that she was wearing some lipstick, or jewelry that was only for special occasions, or even that maybe she was wearing lingerie under her dress. But her hair was always covered with a clean kerchief, her ears, neck, wrists, fingers, and dresser drawers completely free of jewelry, and of course she had no lingerie – I doubt that she knew it existed anywhere, but that could be my child’s ignorant adoring vision.

It was in her eyes. Mama was not a beautiful woman. She was short and heavy, with the long arms of someone who carries too much weight too often. Her face was short, her mouth disappeared between her cheeks, nose and chin… though no feature stood out from her face. Except her eyes. Glancing around a room you would not notice, but catching her gaze… she looked through you. ‘Catching her gaze’ is not quite correct. You couldn’t catch it, you got hit by it. When Mama looked through you and spoke you knew she was right. If she was wrong today, it was today that was mistaken; she’d be right tomorrow.

The time that I started to be born and she cried out Young Petr hid there in the two room house somewhere. Outside Papa-Petr dropped his sledge of potatoes and he ran. Stiff legged through the snow, he ran. With the sun shining through a ribcage of trees on the horizon he ran. “Mary hold on there!” he shouted out. The wind was blowing against him so his voice came back to him. He grunted under his breath.

When he came through the door into our little house he dropped clods of snow across the stoop. Mama was sitting in a birthing chair. “Don’t let the snow melt into the floor,” she said, her eyes shut tight enough that they created their own spots of light inside against the lids. “And don’t leave the potatoes to get ruined out in the field, I don’t need you here.”

And Papa-Petr just stood there breathing. I was coming.

How to calculate mathematic equations while carrying water

The first and only time I ever heard Mama cry out was over my birth.

Not when the barn burnt down taking the whole winter store of horse-hay. Not when she was pregnant with Manya or Natasha, or when young Petr was killed. She could have cried out when young Petr was born he came before me so I couldn’t know – but from how Papa-Petr reacted to her crying out I don’t think he’d heard her cry out before neither.

Mama is not based on a Slav cartoon, not an Oily Bo Hunk, not a Goon. But she was not a Parisian or Milanese or a sophisticated Muscovite. She was not a city-girl from Brest that fell in love with a backwards peasant and had a hard time adjusting. Mama was not ‘independent’ like she was trying to prove anything to anyone. She was stronger than Papa-Petr and she knew it, and he knew it and it scared both of them a little. Mama was sharper than she should have been; grew up overtop of the world somehow. The problem though was that she was born a woman in a village in Belarus.

Lev Davidovich – I don’t care that he was a Jew and don’t care what the Kobas say about him – was born in a village in Ukraine right around the same time that Mama was popped out probably only around 100km away. Difference was: 1) she was born a poor peasant and he was born rich, and; 2) she was born she and he, he. I’m not trying to say that Mama could’ve been a Trotsky but she could’ve been in the party. She would’ve been Bolshevik through and through everything. I wouldn’t have been born then for sure, but that’s not important, my life hasn’t been worth such a sacrifice.

This was the pain of my generation – that it was the end of the epoch of absolute suppression of women. What I have seen in my life… Mama was born too early.

That was the clothing Mama wore. She was strong, not tough. Her strength came from a deep knowing that she was born too early, that she belonged to another time. I have heard about her as a child from Mikar’s uncle who lived in Rataychitsy. She was like a sun here on earth. She spoke before she walked, and hounded adults to teach her to read… neglected play and always she was smiling or crying. Mikar’s uncle said that her Mama and Papa came down on her hard, forced upon her the heaviest duties around the farm and refused her schooling, they would take her books away and destroy her sketches and child’s letters in front of her. They placed her dull brother in school, even though they couldn’t afford it. They forced him to read to the family in the evenings by flickering candlelight. He read clumsy, slow, skipping paragraphs. Mama cried with her face turned away to the dark parts of the room.

Day after day she resisted the bounds they tied on her. She recited poetry from the bible in her head while she fed chickens and weeded the tomato plants, calculated simple mathematics while carrying water from the creek on the far side of the farm.

But as she grew used to not speaking her thoughts became less and less conscious until the shine was scuffed off stone – kicked into a shallow grave alongside the dirt road from Brest to Dremlyovo.

Provincial places do provincial minds make

I was born just outside of Brest (famous for the treaty of Brest-Litovsk) in Belarus in 1906. I know I’ve said that before but I need to begin this story clearly.

In 1906 the Tsar’s kingdom did not host a comfortable time for poor peasants like my family. But somehow, perhaps inspired by the news of the 1905 revolution in Russia, my parents produced me. More likely they produced me as a way of busying themselves besides plowing or harvesting or still-ing moonshine.

It was the middle of November by the old calendar, but cold enough. My father – Petr – was dragging his feet back to the house, pulling a load of late-harvest potatoes behind him on a sledge. It’s not in our family to grow a decent beard and it was not in Petr either, but he, as so many of the men in our line did, grew a great moustache. Anyway, he was a great man besides the beard; great like an ox. He was nearly three feet across from shoulder to shoulder; with bear claw hands and skin like rawhide.

Papa-Petr was drawn straight from the comic book Slav model. He preferred to grunt than speak, his mouth was never without his pipe, his lips never exposed beneath their Grey-Whale-screen moustache. From top to bottom he was built for potato farming. His hair was black and greasy enough that it appeared always wet, and each strand had to have been at least one centimeter in diameter. His forehead overhung his eyes with a built-in sun-visor that squared off even with the broken crook at the bridge of his nose. Across his face was etched permanently a look that could easily be mistaken for meanness. But it was worry.

But you had to see Papa-Petr walk in order to understand him. Pulling a sledge piled high with frozen potatoes just exaggerated his earned stumble-walk. He walked like a monster, this man with no neck and no joints that operated beyond five and three-quarters degrees. Boom. Boom. Through the frozen mud of the potato field. Boom. Boom. His boots pummeling the low rows of potato plants in hibernation.

Papa-Peter was like the potatoes he grew. Like the sun that lives in a heavy wooden box, the rains that tear the dry, planted soils apart, the cold that arrives like a hammer to an anvil; the snow sparks a fire that stacks – flake by flake – razing the ground of life. He was not short tempered either, but like the weather that tempered him, unpredictable.

My life began with the journey of Papa-Petr over that field. I held my breath and smiled there inside my mother while my father pounded through the fields not knowing I was inside the little candle-lit room inside my mother who absorbed the candlelight and filtered it to me… rose coloured. Her heart too… Boom. Boom. Then faster.

Outside the sun creaked as it fell beneath the line of skeleton trees. Boom. Boom. My fathers steps closer.