Stories

     As the days grow dark and winter returns, I think of my ancestors, hunkering down for their long winter’s nap: barns full of grain, flour in barrels, sweet, dry grass neatly stacked. Chickens for eggs, hogs and sausages, cows with milk, soure schmound and cottage cheese.

Self-contained on their farms, their communities were autonomous from Russia; they were in the world, but not of it. Their lives were well-ordered, either from spiritual or ritual, they worshipped on Sundays and worked hard the rest of the week. Not only farmers, but industrialists—around the turn of the 19^th century these people produced 10% of Russia’s metal farm and agricultural implements. Tithing created reserves of money that they used to build, after the church was raised, mills, schools, hospitals, institutions for the mentally and physically challenged, and even colleges to train their teachers.

There were 100,000 of these people in south Russia and what is now Ukraine, connected by a culture and language and beliefs and customs quite separate from the land in which they lived and practiced. They’d been granted these privileges by the Empress herself, Katharine the Great, almost a hundred fifty years before, when Russia annexed Ukraine and welcomed settlement by the Mennonites, who were seeking land and religious freedoms. They’d had enough security and freedom to quibble over religious details: should they be Mennonites in custom only, or did they have a bigger responsibility to live daily pious lives?

Two generations earlier many had left when the Russian government demanded stronger nationalistic allegiance and military service. They formed and reformed congregations and drew lines amongst themselves: some maintained strictly pacifist ideals; others were more lenient. And of course, early in the 1900s Russia entered a period of evolution whose crises interrupted and changed forever the lives of its citizens, including my relatives.

In fact the migration to Canada by both my parents’ families stems from these historical events. My DNA is nested in these people and that place and those happenings. It’s not surprising that I am fascinated and need to examine and understand this time and the impacts on me.

            My mom is the keeper of stories, and teller. She is eighty and carries this legacy. All my life I have listened and imagined: now in mid-life I feel urgency to record and relate.

In this story my father’s grandfather disappears. He was last seen heading away, out of the village, in a horse and buggy, with another, unnamed (to us) man. He was last seen crossing a bridge over the river. He didn’t say where he was going, or why; at least no one knew, or at the very least, the person who knew didn’t say, and nobody surviving has a clue.

It seems like I’ve always known this story. This particular story always intrigued me. It has played out on a shadowed screen in my imagination, stilted, scratchy sepia images of the handsome Colonist horse pulling a wagon more wheels than buggy. Two men sit behind the roan horse, in felted hats and woolen coats, one holding the reins. In my mind I see this from behind: they are not trotting but walking, rising up the axis of symmetry to the vertex of the bridge’s arc, and gently down the other slope of the parabola, becoming smaller as they ride along the rutted, dirt road, and finally disappearing into nothingness, blending invisibly into the stubbled steppe.

And as I focus, I see more, much more. It’s November, no snow yet. The day is short, like today, and when darkness comes it is natural and complete; of course the stars twinkle fiercely and frost sparkles in the luminescence of moon-glow. But the night sky provides neither comfort nor inspiration; desperation likely, for survival in this vast, empty space is not guaranteed. And the stars may guide them, but where are they going? What is their mission? There is not much room in the un-topped wagon, certainly not room to sleep. They must have been heading for shelter and a bed that first night.             

The year was 1920. The last person to see him crossing the bridge is the man I knew as my great-grandfather: that is, he married the widow of the man who disappeared. (But not before she spent ten years as a single mother of four during revolution, insurgence, and the imposition of communism, with all that entailed.) People, at that time, particularly men, did disappear. Like Chile in the 1970s, disappearing was a result of political machinations, including a deliberate policy to remove men, thus starving families off the land as prelude to collectivization. Everyone was looking out for themselves: self-serving petty officials, regional warlords, factory owners, farmers, all with vying inter-personal interests playing out in this ever-shifting landscape whose geography was vast and communication was limited.

In fact, village records maintained during that time reveal births, marriages, deaths, banishments, and executions. My great-grandfather’s disappearance is not recorded officially, only anecdotally. In one place. 

            Where was he going? What was he doing? What were his motivations? Did he tell anyone? And what happened to him? Why is there no trace? Surely, there must be answers. The most gruesome details have been recorded and revealed; what was officially told has been honestly retold, particularly during glasnost. Do I really want to know?