Light at Lavelle, page 27
“I’m going to ask my mother to help me keep my own home?” Vanessa’s voice rose in pitch. “Yes, humiliate me more, why don’t you? No,” she said firmly. “Isabelle can clean it.”
“Isabelle can’t clean it,” Finn said quietly but no less firmly. “Unless you and your mother and sister agree to do all the shopping and the cooking and the heating. Then she can clean it.” He softened his tone but only slightly. “My mother said she will look after our girls. She said she will school her grandchildren herself. So that’s one less thing to worry about.”
“Frankly, it sounds like one more thing to worry about.”
“Then you’re welcome to do it. Or we can send them to public school.”
Vanessa gasped. “Why can’t Isabelle do it?” she said. “You said she would help with whatever I needed. That’s what you said when you brought her home to me, remember?”
“I brought her home for us,” Finn said. “Not just you. And I was paying her then. But our life has changed, can’t you see that?”
Vanessa’s life certainly changed. Within a month, three moving trucks of other people’s things—other people’s dirt, chaos, dust—and other people barged into her quiet house. The commotion was unbearable. Eleanor and Monty moved to the attic rooms. Olivia and Earl and Walter and Lucy took over the entire third floor, which used to be Finn’s study, library, and game room. Isabelle had the run of the lower floor.
Vanessa confined herself to her room—to give everyone time to settle in without her intrusion, she said. But even after the messy ruckus had died down, there was no avoiding the daily cries of, “Vanessa, are you coming downstairs for morning coffee?” “Vanessa, we’re going to the park, are you coming?” “Vanessa, what would you like for dinner?”
As the days, weeks, and months dragged on and flew by, Vanessa went into a fugue state. She was living, yet not living, functioning, yet not functioning, awake, yet not awake. The only room in the house that stayed spotless was her bedroom. That was where she could lock herself in and clean, scrub, scrape, dust, and polish nonstop. She didn’t attend to the rest of the house because the only way she knew how to clean was room by room. That’s what she told her family. When one room was clean, she moved on to the next. It was no use leaving a place until it was flawless. Best to finish one job well instead of having the whole house half-done.
And that one room was never clean enough.
Dust kept falling, windows kept getting smudged, the birds kept dirtying her window ledges. The bedspreads were wrinkled, water spots dried all over the cabinets near the washbasins because her husband cared nothing for such things and would leave the water where it fell without wiping it away. The cornices, floorboards, and corners of every single man-made thing were hosts for crud. In nature there were no corners; everything was rounded. If only they could build Vanessa a house with rounded walls and doors and windows, rounded furniture, everything round, nowhere for dirt and bugs to hide. Just circles and circles of order.
Sometimes, when she was in her room, Vanessa didn’t get to any cleaning at all, busy as she was assiduously sanding down the infernal corners of her extra-large dressers with emery paper. She spent countless hours smoothing out every enormous sharp point in her furniture, edges that jutted out just like those Lovell’s Island rocks Isabelle’s ship had thrown itself against in the violent harbor.
Vanessa couldn’t say for sure how long she continued this way. It was cold, then less cold, then cold again. It rained, there was wind. She was always cold. She wore her sweaters in layers. Sometimes she took off one of the layers. Sometimes she cracked open a window to let in some fresh air. During family dinners, Vanessa paid no attention to talk of politics or the economy or Prohibition or markets—as always. It was easy to tune out. She sat there, nodding like a marquee star, pretending she was listening.
Finn was out all hours working. The only one Vanessa had regular contact with was Isabelle. She came in every day to air out the room, to bring fresh water and sometimes even fresh flowers. She said Ukrainians loved flowers because they brought a smile to every face. She brought Vanessa books, and she turned on the radio that Vanessa turned off as soon as Isabelle left.
To Vanessa, this non-existent existence seemed to continue for infinity.
But one Saturday morning, there was an insistent, loud knock on the door that alerted even Vanessa to her external circumstances. She cursed herself for leaving her room and sneaking downstairs to get a cup of tea. Finn was either out or with his parents upstairs. Isabelle was down on the lower level. There was no longer a maid or a housekeeper to open the door for visitors. Vanessa was forced to answer it herself.
She regretted it as soon as the door inched open because there on her top step stood Lucas. She had seen Lucas only once, five years ago when he brought her husband back home to her, late and unforgivably drunk. She never forgot his stupid good-looking face or forgave him.
Vanessa made to shut the door quickly, but Lucas threw his foot forward to stop her. “Wait,” he said. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I really need to speak to your husband. It’s an emergency. Please.”
“What kind of emergency could you possibly have that you need my husband for?” said Vanessa. “You’re not in the drunk tank. I see no police with you. You’re not bleeding.”
“My mother is sick,” Lucas said, and his wretched face bore witness to the truth of his struggle. “I think she’s dying.”
“What does that have to do with my husband?” said Vanessa. “He’s not a doctor.”
“Please can I talk to him.” It wasn’t a question.
“No, you cannot,” Vanessa said superciliously. “Please leave—”
A voice sounded behind her. “Vanessa.” It was Isabelle.
“This is none of your concern, Isabelle,” Vanessa said. “Step away.”
“Hello, Isabelle,” said Lucas and started to cry.
“Finn is coming, Lucas,” Isabelle said. “Wait.”
“You know Lucas?” said Vanessa. Why didn’t you ever tell me about him, she wanted to ask. But she wasn’t entirely certain she had ever mentioned the lowly Lucas to Isabelle, had ever made clear how much she despised him.
A moment later, Finn was at the door. “I’ll take it from here, Vee,” he said, from behind her. Vanessa didn’t move. “Will you excuse me?”
“Finn, you promised me,” Vanessa said. “You promised you would never see him again.”
“Vanessa, will you excuse me,” Finn repeated, pushing past her and shutting the door behind him.
Vanessa stood with the closed door between them, struggling for breath. When she turned around, Isabelle had her coat on and was carrying Finn’s coat in her hands. “Forgive him, Vanessa,” said Isabelle. “His mother must be very sick.”
“Forgive who? And whose mother?” Vanessa muttered, flummoxed off her axis.
“Will you excuse me, Vanessa,” said Isabelle, repeating Finn’s words but in her own voice, not his. “The girls are upstairs. They’ll probably need some breakfast soon.” Opening the door, she slipped outside.
Vanessa was motionless for a few moments. Slowly, she turned around and, grasping the railing tightly, went to her bedroom without addressing her family or checking on her daughters.
47
Oksana
Ukraine, May 1929
ISABELLE LEFT HER HOUSE at five in the morning and walked down to the fields. The ground was hard. It hadn’t rained in seventeen days, a historical record for April and May in Ukraine.
When she told Mirik this, he laughed it off, because he bred and milked cows, and as long as there was enough forage, rain meant nothing to him. But Isabelle knew: the seedling crops couldn’t last much longer in the dry earth without water. The crops needed relief from the skies, and none came, for seventeen days. The desperate earth needed rain. The skies were silent.
“Isa, don’t you have enough to worry about?” Mirik said.
“No,” she said. “This is it. This is all fate and all hope.”
“Say the prayer words,” Mirik said. “Say them like your mother taught you, from Agamemnon.”
“Rain rain beloved Zeus,” said Isabelle, “rain on the cornfields and the plains of Attica.” She crossed herself and made the sign of the cross on Mirik too.
Over a decade ago, famine came during the Civil War between the Bolsheviks and everyone else, wiping out half the farms. Many left to fight; some escaped the country altogether, like Schumann. Though all sides in the conflict were starving, they still had enough energy to blame the Jews for the entirety of their ills: for the Revolution, for the famine, for the war, for the carnage. The countryside was ravaged, a hundred thousand Jews destroyed, Martyn Lazar murdered, and then came a few years of a fragile truce, when they were left more or less alone to grow what they wanted, to live as they wished.
Ispas was so far southwest that had Kaiser Wilhelm and the Germans been more demanding and Lenin more accommodating during their separate peace talks in 1918, Ispas could have easily been handed to Austria-Hungary instead of remaining in Russian hands. What would that have been like, Isabelle wondered, to be a Ukrainian in Austria?
For one, her father would not have been at the forefront of the Peasant Rebellion of 1919. To be a Ukrainian in Austria might have meant her father would still be alive—though who could say for how long? As soon as Austria lost the war in November 1918, Russia grabbed back what they had ceded to Germany six months earlier. Isabelle would’ve been in the same place, dreading each step of the dry ground as she walked with the jug to bring milk to the gestating Yana, who was weeks away from giving birth.
Isabelle’s worry about the drought was confirmed by Cici, who upon seeing her all glum said that maybe Mirik was right. “Soon, the milk from his cows will be the only food left for us to eat.”
“Stop, Cici, why do you say this?”
“Because it’s time for us to go. Look at our poor potatoes.” They were shriveled in the parched earth, the roots barely sprouting. “Two of our chickens have died,” Cici said. “Forget about Soviet chickens laying six eggs a day. We can’t even keep alive our mangy Ukrainian chickens, who are so hungry they’ve stopped laying eggs.”
“How many chickens do we have left?”
“Four. Maybe we should eat the chickens, Isa?”
Slowed by the chilling grip of her fear of the rising sun and the future, Isabelle trudged back down to the barn, the empty canister heavy on her shoulder.
“What are we going to do, Mama?” Isabelle said to her mother in the covered shed.
“Stop wringing your hands like you’re a child,” Oksana said. “You know what you must do.” Her back was turned. She reeked of petroleum. She was filling dozens of small containers with kerosene from the spout of one of their 200-liter drums. Every year, Roman traded one of his horses to Ilya Petrov in Kammenets for a giant cask of kerosene. This year, Roman traded for two casks.
“Mama, what are you doing?”
“God’s work. What are you doing? Stop interrogating me and go oil the saddles, make sure they’re in working order.”
“I have to make breakfast.”
“Fine. Go do that. Anything, really. Go do it.”
“Mama, it hasn’t rained.”
“You don’t have to tell me about it. We have almost no well water left. Ration it carefully. Tell the boys not to play in the mud.”
“What mud? There’s no water.”
“In the dust, then. You don’t want grimy children. It reflects poorly on you.” Straightening up, Oksana wiped her brow with her dirty field gloves.
“You’re going to need a bath yourself, Mama,” Isabelle said. “Does a filthy mother reflect poorly on her daughter?”
“Stop being sassy,” Oksana said. “Send the boys to the brook with two buckets each. If it hasn’t dried up.”
“It has dried up,” said Isabelle, “and you didn’t answer my question.”
“You can’t stay, Isa,” Oksana said. “For many reasons all of which you know. Seventeen days of no rain is God telling you for the final time.”
Isabelle had walked her fields.
She knew.
You could not reap what you didn’t sow.
“And when Zhuk sees nothing growing in our fields in May, he will know it too,” said Oksana. “What do you think he’ll do then?”
“Him taking our farm isn’t going to produce more grain,” said Isabelle.
“It doesn’t matter. They’ve already decided on a course for us. The rest is pretense.” The dust-soiled woman gazed at her daughter with love and sadness. “Ten years ago, your father died because they tried to make him into what he wasn’t.”
“What was that, a Russian?”
“A slave,” said Oksana.
“Oh, Mama.”
“So much blather out here,” Oksana said softly. “I thought your children needed breakfast?”
“If we run, what are we going to do with all our things?”
“Leave them behind,” said Oksana.
“What, everything? The things you collected for three decades with Papa? The priceless precious things you brought with you from Krakow? Your mother’s linens and tablecloths? The pewter silverware and drinkware? The art you painted, the books you read, that I read, that my children are reading now? All our embroidered blankets, our silk shawls, passed from generation to generation—you can’t be serious! Are you really suggesting we leave it all behind?”
“Yes,” said Oksana. “You carry your sons on your horse and your life on your back. Every last scrap of life will be ripped from your fingers. Especially anything that looks Ukrainian. The Soviet purpose is to stamp out our nation, Isabelle, not to preserve it through family heirlooms.”
On the twentieth day of no rain, in the middle of the night, Yefim Efros, with a posse of armed OGPU chekists, drove up in a military truck and arrested Oksana and Bogda, who was Mirik and Petka’s mother.
Roman and Cici, Ostap with a livid Yana by his side, Nikora, Petka, Isabelle, and Mirik could do nothing but stand helplessly as they watched the guards drag their mothers in their nightgowns across the clearing.
But even as they pulled a struggling Oksana away, they were pulling her away unbowed. “Isa, don’t you dare give them your father’s farm!” she cried. “Forget me, I don’t matter! Only the land matters!”
A guard hit her over the head with the butt of his rifle to silence her and then stuffed her unconscious into the back of the wagon.
“Don’t move, Roman,” Isabelle said, grabbing her brother’s arm and yanking him behind her. “Don’t talk. Please. Let me handle it.” She stepped forward. “Why are you taking them?” she said to Efros, not even bothering to address him. “What have they done?”
“You are hiding food from us,” Efros replied. “The nation is starving, and you are hoarding what’s not yours.”
“It’s not hoarding,” she said. “It’s called storing.”
“It’s against the law!”
“You want to take our wrinkled potatoes, comrade?” said Isabelle. “Be my guest. They’re right in the pantry. But what would I fry up for you when you came to visit me?”
“Next time we come, we’re not coming to eat, I promise you,” Efros said.
“We are starving like everyone else, I promise you,” Isabelle said. “After a poor harvest, spring is the most difficult time. We are buying what meager food we can find on the market. The few fresh potatoes we have, we dug up from Stan and Vitaly’s potato farm. There is no hoarding.”
“And we see the future! The ten acres you’ve allotted us are not enough. We need all fifteen from you. It’s been decreed.”
“The future will have a very good harvest,” said Isabelle. “Why are you really taking my mother?”
“Because Comrade Zhuk has been too generous with you. He is soft-hearted.”
“You gave us a requirement,” Isabelle said. “We planted what we agreed to. You inspect our fields every day. You know this to be true.”
“Fifteen acres will grow more than ten acres, we also know that to be true,” Efros said.
“That’s not what we agreed to,” said Isabelle, elbowing her brother to stay back and stay silent but failing to keep the loathing out of her own voice.
“We are done negotiating with you, Lazars,” Efros said, sliding into the passenger seat of the truck and slamming the door. “It’s simple. Sign over your farm to the collective and you will save your mothers.”
Petka stood crying, flailing his arms, pulling on his beard, ripping out tufts of his hair.
“You are my wife,” Mirik said to Isabelle, as she listened to the departing truck huff down the hill. “I am ordering you to sign over the farm. This has gone far enough. Petka! Calm down, come on.”
“Mirik,” Isabelle said, “you should really start to worry when you sound like them and not like us.” But she was drained of bravery. While the rest of the family dispersed, she and her brothers stayed outside in the clearing between their houses, pacing and arguing, shouting even, planning for their vanishing future. Afterward, she didn’t lie down with Mirik in their bed but instead squeezed between her two little boys in theirs, where she tossed and turned until sunrise when Maxim woke up and snuggled against her.
In big city prisons, the Bolsheviks fed the incarcerated, which was one of the reasons that when times were hard, the farmers strived to get arrested—because they knew they’d at least be fed. But in the villages, the prisoners’ families had to bring them their daily meal; otherwise, they wouldn’t eat.
Isabelle brought food for her mother and the frail shivering Bogda. The two women were being kept in a single dwarf-sized cell in the hastily constructed jail. To get extra time with her mother, Isabelle brought some low-quality homemade rotgut for the guards. She almost had no decent zapivka left. The Communists were consuming copious amounts of liquor whenever they came to assess her fields, draining her supplies of alcohol just as they drained her of everything else.
Isabelle doubted Efros had informed Oksana or Mirik’s wheezing, rheumatic mother Bogda of the charges against them, but he had. They were being accused of criminal hoarding, sympathizing with saboteurs, sabotage of collectivization efforts, and collaborating with anti-Soviet elements.
