The Human Experience by Quaker U.S. Staff

Author:Quaker U.S. Staff [Staff, Quaker U.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82651-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

A GREETING FROM AFAR

Boris Yekimov

1

Bread wasn’t delivered to the village every day. So people stocked up on it: extra for themselves, and for their privately owned cattle when they were short of grain in their storage bins. On delivery days, people came early to avoid being last in line at the store and having to plead for leftovers. They sat around the entrance, the women with their knitting, discussing the village news and everything else.

Now they were talking about Manya Kharitonova. Her sons had come for Manya and her husband the previous autumn, and taken them to live in the central settlement of the large collective farm, which included several scattered villages.

“I look around the bus station, and there’s Manya. ‘Hello, how are you!’ And we chatted about this and that,” recounted Arkhip, a lively, garrulous old man. Practically every week he was at the bus station, going off somewhere, on business or not, to Uryupinsk, sometimes even to the city, to visit relatives. “I say to her, ‘I’m hurrying home to my old lady. The gardens are all in bloom now in the village. It’s really beautiful!’ And she, would you believe it, started to cry. ‘I’ll never see my village again,’ she says. ‘They’ve taken me off to some kind of barren steppe: not a garden, not a bush,’ tears running right down here.” Arkhip pointed with his nicotine-stained fingernail.

Someone sighed: “Sure, you’d cry, too. After all, she lived here all her life.”

From the knoll where the store stood, the Kharitonov house, with its red tin roof, was clearly visible. It overlooked the river, like all the houses belonging to the old village families: the Inyakins, Fetisovs, Kleimenovs, Tarasovs. The houses, inhabited for centuries past, were near the water, stood on good plots, and had spacious vegetable and flower gardens. When houses and barns fell apart, they built new ones. The old folks died off: Mitron, Kolyaka, the legendary Fetis, whose bones were already dust but whom the whole village remembered, Nadyurka Kleimenova, Nadyozha—they were gone, but young people took their place, tended the old graves, and covered them with flowers on Parents’ Saturday. So it was perfectly natural for Manya Kharitonova to weep, living on alien soil. They all understood her.

For a minute or two everyone waiting at the store was silent. A radio played loudly at the edge of the village, in the yard of the good-for-nothing Yurka Sapov. It brayed day and night in his yard.

Arkhip broke the silence. Sighing and rolling a cigarette, he said: “Well, why are we grieving for her? Like at a wake. They live with their own children, they don’t go hungry. Don’t have to think about anything. While here,” he said, waving his hand, “just looking after our livestock is enough to wear us down.”

“You’re absolutely right,” others chimed in. “It’s good to live with your children. They do the washing, supply the food. What’s so bad about that?”

They chatted about getting old, about illness, about everything under the sun.

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