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.