The Rooster House by Victoria Belim

Author:Victoria Belim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

In April 2015, as I stepped off the train in Poltava, the familiar scents of pungent greenery, scorched rubber and poppy-seed rolls made me light-headed. I understood the exalted sentiment of people falling on their knees to kiss the ground of their homeland. I remembered the first time I returned to Ukraine and my inexplicable feeling of being an outsider, but now I was at home and the sense of returning to my land stirred a complex emotion in me. I followed my own version of the homecoming ritual. Upon reaching Bereh and hugging Valentina, I went into the garden and touched the rough bark of the cherry trees.

‘I used to do the same thing whenever I returned to Bereh,’ Valentina said, leaning on the garden gate and observing me. ‘Only then did it feel that I was truly back.’ The young cherry trees Valentina and I planted had survived the winter and their maroon-streaked buds were turning into blossoms.

Valentina once again drew up ambitious plans for the garden, but this time she delegated the main duties to Uncle Tolya, a short, wizened man on the other side of his eighties. Uncle Tolya wasn’t my uncle. In a Ukrainian village, anyone significantly older than you was called either Aunt or Uncle, blood relations notwithstanding. Uncle Tolya had a swarthy face and spiky hair thickly coated with brilliantine. His bushy eyebrows hanging over his beady eyes made him look like a hedgehog. I had seen him around Bereh on my previous visit, but that spring he became a permanent fixture in our lives.

Uncle Tolya always wore a grey suit, complete with a double-breasted jacket and peach-coloured shirt. The suit, like Uncle Tolya himself, belonged to another era, and its threadbare chic contributed to the aura of mystery surrounding its wearer. Out of an inner pocket Uncle Tolya would produce a screwdriver, a packet of roasted sunflower seeds, an embroidered handkerchief or a mottled apple, like a magician performing a trick.

‘When I was a schoolboy, they said that the Earth is held by four elephants and even showed us pictures. Later they said that it rotates around the Sun. Now they say that it’s moved off its axis. The end is coming,’ Uncle Tolya would announce in place of a greeting, as if continuing an interrupted conversation. ‘We might as well plant those cherry trees today.’

Uncle Tolya’s main occupation was digging graves in the cemetery, and his work around death gave him a philosophical attitude to life. He also served as a village oracle, offering people advice on all matters of life and love – how to hatch chickens, propose marriage or plan a new business venture. Since in Bereh people could be hired to cast spells on cucumbers to make them grow faster, it no longer surprised me that a grave digger worked as a fortune teller.

We could never predict when Uncle Tolya might appear, ringing the bell of his old bike and braking with a flourish in front of our house.

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