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.