15.

Who’ll cut the link between the Good and Evil?

Who can do it without sin?

 

                In his letters and talks, he will tell me: “You, my sister, was born not in your century. Either too late. Or too early. …But you have to believe that your prince will find you, my dear princess.”

                …Learning how changeable this wonderful World is lies still in wait for me. How steeply Life can change – the same as our meandering Belarusan creeks; how irresistible, the same as in our deep rivers, whirlpools abound It… How Love, folded in the arms of a Lie, turns into Ice. How Coercion can disguise itself in the dress of Good…

                And never can you get to be accustomed to the freaks of Life nor be ready to It’s turns…

 

There will be no my part

in solving Being’s riddle…  

 

               In the middle school, suddenly, it will become clear that Sasha has suspicious inclinations to the unforgivable sin: he decidedly won’t be interested in the “public life of the school” and try to avoid the Pioneer and Komsomol work. Which is irrefutably must be rectified.

                Joining the Pioneer organization isn’t a choice for ten-year child, but not accepting for the Komsomol plays role of an awful censure and punishment for a 14-year teen. You must deserve to be accepted!

                Sasha won’t even apply for the Komsomol…  

                Slowly, the war against the willful boy will come downright not funny. Sasha will display unheard illicit stubbornness. Special front of the war will lie through the issue of the bourgeois-inadmissible length of hair, width of pants and the depraving music of “The Beatles”. Whereas other boys will have gotten calm and, at least, try to hide their interests, this pig-headed “bad boy” didn’t. They will not let him in the class in a wide pants – he will have his new paints sewn yet wider. They will cut his heir completely, to be bald, – he, really ashamed, will shirk the school…

                By the high school, he will have turned into an absolutely wayward, intolerable, snarling “difficult teenager”. He will regularly be absent from the school, lag behind and disobey any rules.

                Although, I’ll be a tolerably active member of the Komsomol, but the spirit of contradiction will not be alien to me, either. Often, even after my brother finishes school, I’ll hear in reply to my inadmissible objection to teachers, “A-ah, that’s you, the worthy sister of your impudent brother!”

 

 I should have been born a crane.

But by mistake – or by a smirk! –

Appeared I in my image to the world

to vex myself, a thorny fish.

   

                When he is in the last grade of high school, some awful scandal will take a place there. The District Komsomol Committee and School Board will conduct a survey among the students in the order to learn the level of their “political literacy and moral stability”. The students will complete a questionnaire. After the survey, both Sasha and our mother will be summoned to the Pedagogical Soviet of the School in the District Komsomol Committee members’ presence. There, the issue of Sasha’s exclusion from the School will be questioned. (What is filled in Sasha’s questionnaire will not be dared to be discussed even “at home at the kitchen”.)

               My poor Mama… my reckless till imprudence Mama will say to them:

               “Do you forget WHAT a pupil I brought to your school to the first grade ten years ago? Don’t you? …And what have you DONE to him?”…

              Sasha will hardly finish the school and graduate. Mama will have persuaded him to join the Komsomol so as to become eligible to apply for the Math faculty: universities don’t even consider non-members’ applications. Never will he pay the member fee, though. At the University, he’ll have some problems with the dean, and at the end of the third year, they will expel him, after he simply doesn’t come to the exams in the Scientific Communism and CPSU’s History and all the others of that ilk.

              Immediately he’ll be drafted to the Army. …He will tell me in his letters and afterward, how he has troubles struggling for beating the haze blossoming in the Army. Yes, he won’t get calm here as well, but will begin some sort of revolution to change the subnormal, antihuman usages in that unit. Among the officers, he’ll simply pass for either an arrant idler or insolent fellow. But his amazed fellows will be glad to keep in touch with him and ask some advices even long after his serving term. “Let the command be complaining and afraid of me as a rioter, yet I am glad the ice has been broken and there is my merit to that as well because of my unwilling to reconcile myself with all of such things.”

 

The war is waged around.

I fought with all my strength against...

 

               He will have problems with any command for whole his life. Tough, he will make a perfect builder with the highest qualification in all build trades. His milieu will still love him: he will be a cultured, indulgent, merry, easy-going lad.

               Although, as time is passing, he’ll become more and more reticent and aloof.

 

Whom should I, terrified, ask

why I’ve been coming cold to life,

and through how many sieves was

my unfathomable freedom dragged?

 

               …”You know,” will he say me years later, “actually, I wrote nothing special in that questionnaire. I simply said the same as what everybody ever thinks. I just told the truth.  …Well, I wrote, “Communism is a ‘game into one goal’ between liars and fools”, “The Program of the Communist Party is the rubbish written by someone”, that “The Moral Code of a Young Builder of Communism is a mantra of a politically matured idiot” and so on. Actually, it was a joke. I wasn’t going to give them this copy: I don’t know how they got it. Anyway, I don’t regret it: it turned out funny. You remember?” will he laugh, “– they, frightened, rushed about then like rats on a going down ship…”

                Oh, Lord!

                Frank till stubbornness! Naive till imprudence…

                How are you going to live in this dismal, frost-biting, bristling World?..

 

Are you crying? Don’t cry.

Better look up at this

heavy and tenebrous sky.

The cold icy rain is turning snow there,

might, joyful and festively white.

It will be such brilliant, delighting all us,

Making now joyful, now gentle.

And your tears – they’ll melt into laugh.

Just wait a little, my tender.

 

 

               16.

               Sunday morning.

               Two merry, sprightly ladies, Aunt Ania and Aunt Mania, are visiting our home.

                Aunt Mania is Mama’s older sister. She got in Minsk when in 1944; after the liberation of the city, she, as a member of Komsomol, being 17, was drafted for securing the construction of the Minsk Track Factory (a tank factory). Here, she met a former partisan commandeer and got married to him. They will have worked for the Factory for the whole of their lives. Aunt Ania is their cousin; she is married their brother Mikalai, the “eternal partisan”.

                Aunts are visiting our home for Advedki, a day for relatives’ observing a baby (but mostly for drinking for it). After proper drinking they feel yet more cheerful and bold.

                “Piatró! How do you dare not to baptize your child?” tease they their coy party brother who would, should, ought, must be an atheist… Instead of my father, I burst out answering in my own course language.

                “Wow! How loud she is!”

                “Yeah…Howls all the time. Unlike anyone,” sighs Mama.

                “Piatró, that’s faulty. Eh? …You should get her tidied. Shouldn’t you?”

                 Now they put me into a shopping bag, acting playfully and laughing. Sasha is confused of such change turn and stands embarrassed.

                “Well, you know, boy… if she is such a squaller, we’ll take her away…” – Sasha springs like a wild cat and seize the bag’s handle with his hands and legs, then bites Aunt’s hand.

                “Irynka! Our little daughter! Mama, they are taking her away! Don’t let her away!”

                “Common, honey. She is bad! She cries days and nights! I’m tired of her. I can’t get along with her anymore! Let them take her away!”

                “Me!.. I!.. I will raise her!”

 

                17.

                Through the whole of frozen city, by bus, hidden in the common shopping bag, am I brought to the Church of Saint Symon and Alena, next to the Government House at the Lenin Square.               

                Our beloved charming little old castle, of the red brick, commonly named the Red Church, was saved by a miracle at the war. It had been funded originally as a Catholic church by a wealth man and named in memory of his young dead children. After the Revolution, the Catholic service was prohibited, and now, here is the Orthodox service. Later, it will be occupied by the Cinema Union, which will ever save it from “revolutionary-remaking” complete destruction. 

​

                …I am sitting on the hands of my both aunts at once. Getting kind and languid from strange warm odor, I am observing curiously a strange room, burning candles, beautiful icons covered with white embroidered in red towels. A priest in a goldish cloth speaks something in strange way in unintelligible words and waves with some smoking item in front of us. Then he crosses, sprinkles water on me and wear a tiny cross on my neck…

                I have been named Iryna. The name, which my brother has chosen for me.

 

                …Years later, when people tell me I am so tolerant and patient, and wonder at my especial endurance (resistance) to frost – I will answer that is because I have even two godmothers, and as for frost… frost is simply – my “milk brother”.

 

 

*     *     *

 

One isn’t in jest with such things.

but with every crease in my fade,

I ween I have been bequeathed

namely to you on this earth.

 

So, take the love and keep no doubts

in your flustered sorrowful soul…

Like a fire, have I been passed

to your blundering gentle arms.

 

               Sasha passed away on the dull November’s day in 1996 when he was 40. He died of the social illness, which has become a rampant epidemic in our country. He proved weak in front of the disease that replaced Love with Anger and Pain for long time in our home.       

               That one who should have been born a crane wanted to see this World to be perfect …and chose the long and agonizing way of leaving It.

               Mama didn’t see his death: she died 2 years before he did.  Our father had left the family much previously: graduating from two universities, he could have never supported the family with his salary. The separation had been so turbulent, that he hadn’t even visited us again and saw his son first after 23-year part only in his coffin. One year later, I buried him also.

               After Sasha’s death, among his items, I found two notebooks, finished with writing with his beautiful small hand. Two notebooks of collected poems, written in Proper Language without any grammar mistake, which I had had no idea about.

               His beautiful, astonishing, unfathomable, strikingly prophetic verses.

 

A way has lasted beyond the line

                                                   of the end of Way –

Paradox, variance, or defiance of abyss…

 

               And only these verses and the tiny cross that I found by chance among old family’s documents when I was packing up for leaving for Canada warm my soul here frozen in my distant, wonderful, fragile, intractable country.

               That Winter was very cold…

 

I hate all kinds of force.

But the worst one is the force of good:

somebody’s wings are crunching under heels,

but then a game is played by rules.

 

I don’t play life – let my mistakes                                           

be taken into my account – not you will judge.                                  

You say the violin’s in fashion nowadays?                             

But I’ve preferred a trumpet since my youth!                         

                                                                                   

To love?! – I love.                                                                   

To hope?! – I hope.

Let it be easy to offend and break me down,             

but one can’t ever do knock out this heresy                           

from that one, who is not afraid to die.                                   

                                                                                   

I’m not. I believe in the revival.                                   

Not over there, but here. And fathomless worlds,                              

people, will  unite for  the salvation.

And to the hell – your rules of game.

 

​

Toronto, 2003

​

*Here and above: the verses from Alexander Varabei's poetry book