Perhaps if my mother’s fate had been less dramatic, she would not have turned to the Lord so often. But she could not live even a day without repeated communication with her Heavenly Father. It was a significant, necessary, extremely important part of her life. Starting from early childhood.
In the 1920s, her father was arrested for his religious beliefs under some “plausible” pretext, traditional for that time. The entire large family prayed earnestly, and God brought the father out of prison. This deliverance confirmed her, still a girl, in the power of prayer.
In the early 30s - dispossession. As those in power believed, two cows and a horse were too much luxury for a large family. And again the parents and ten children, with fasting and prayer, appealed to the Defender. The animals, of course, were taken away, but they were not sent to Siberia. In return they gave 15 acres of land: “Spin, survive!”
What is written about here is only a small part of what my mother experienced in full. Is it possible to tell about everything she experienced in a short essay? About the Holodomor, about the difficulties of the occupation, about the hard fate of the family of the “enemy of the people” in their native fatherland. About the custom-made newspaper lampoon-feuilletons, which depicted her husband, our father, as a malicious organizer of savage sects (we still keep the newspapers as a terrible memory). About the constant control of the KGB, about the constant threat of re-imprisonment. Yes, a book is not enough to tell about all this! And, nevertheless, I will describe in more detail several episodes from my mother’s life that are connected with her parents, with the conditions in which she grew up.
Mom’s parents lived in Ocheretino. Now it is an urban-type settlement in the Yasinovatsky district of the Donetsk region. And at that time there was simply a not very significant railway station twenty kilometers from Avdeevka. On the other side of the tracks, where my grandparents and my mother’s parents lived, there was only one street, which was traditionally called “Zheleznodorozhnaya”. Residential buildings were located on one side of the street, and the other was planted with vegetable gardens. The vegetable gardens abutted a sparsely forested belt, behind which three railway tracks ran towards the horizon. And at night, quite often, passing trains kept us awake, bursting into the thick, viscous winter silence. With the clanging, roaring and shaking of the floor in the hut, they inspired incredible horror of the Second Coming, which a tender child’s heart was anxiously awaiting. After all, I had to listen to so many sermons in the congregation, where parents took their ten children, less than a few, and among them my future mother.
The house where the meetings were held was on the other side of the tracks, and it took about forty minutes to get to it. Services were held five times a week, and in the spring and autumn the evening meetings began after dark and ended at midnight. Usually they sang together, read poetry, prayed and listened to sermons. The topics of the sermons were intertwined, but almost always were in the same direction - they warned about constant readiness and expectation of something important. And this something was supposed to come soon, but no one knows when. It had to be expected constantly, but it had to happen spectacularly unexpectedly. That is why the sound of passing trains, especially at night, when the first sleep was just setting in, reminded the children of the imminent, as they said in the meeting, the onset of the sudden Second Coming.
On the days of communion, or, as they said in the family, the Breaking of Bread, the congregation observed fasting. As my mother said, fasting at the station was special for them, the few conservative Baptists, the “Shtunds.” We prayed more often than usual. No one ate or drank anything. Livestock were not allowed to eat, barn dogs were not fed, chickens and ducks were not allowed out of the barn. On such days, the modest households of the “non-christ” believers were filled with mooing, bleating and barking, which began closer to lunch and stopped after dark. We didn’t eat during the day and sat down to eat only around nine in the evening. It was breakfast, lunch, and dinner of that day at once. An exception was made only for infants. Mother's milk nourished babies, and only that.
My mother's father, my grandfather, was quite strict. His name was Pavlo. Not Pavel, but precisely Pavlo - in the Ukrainian way. By the way, most of the residents of Ocheretino station spoke Ukrainian. Grandmother Maria was from the Kursk province, and therefore in my mother’s parents’ house they mostly spoke Russian.
This is probably why my mother taught me to pray to God in Russian, the first Bible (I remember it was a small “Evangelical”) was given to me in Russian. And Christ, in my then still childish understanding, knew the Russian language very well.
My older brother Slavik, with whom I share the authorship of this essay, told me that during the years of his father’s imprisonment he had to visit his grandparents for weeks at a time. Mom, saving Slavik from the influence of the street, forcibly took him there, to her parents. And it was there that Slavik had to do everything: dig, paint, carry, and load...
Grandfather Pavlo was adamant in his desire to educate and “read morals.” And he taught. Taught wit. He instructed and convinced with a black leather belt when verbal arguments became powerless. My brother, then a twelve-year-old teenager, developed a complex of logical injustice towards himself as a person. He later looked back on these events with aggression but gratitude.
In fact, Grandfather Pavlo had an amazing ability to explain clearly and figuratively. Mom told me that one Thursday, on the eve of Easter, dad gathered all his children and told them about the suffering of Jesus Christ and His death. How then everyone, including my mother, was impressed by this story! It’s amazing how an unlearned, simple roadman could convey the picture of suffering so colorfully. Where did you get the words, where did you find the epithets? All my life my mother was impressed by what she heard then, such a bright, living story of the Great Event! I often thought about her.
