I WANT to tell you about my grandmother. Her life, as in a mirror, reflected the fate of many people of the Soviet era.
Her real name was Anna Pogadaeva (maiden name Komleva). But, everyone in Sakmara, a district of the Orenburg region called her as Hamina: Anna Hamina, affectionately Anyusha Hamina.
And after her, they called me Victor Hamin or the grandson of Anna Hamina. My grandmother said that this street name comes from her grandfather, who had the biblical name Ham (that was the name of one of Noah's sons). There are many namesakes in Sakmara, so it is reasonable that in order to distinguish them, many people were given street names.
She was born in 1901. In addition to her, there were two more children: her sister Tatiana and brother Fyodor. Tatiana was married to Piotr Startsev, a Sakmara party functionary, but there is no information about her brother Fyodor, although my grandmother, perhaps, told me something about him. There are many Komlevs in Sakmara, so it is likely that one of them is our relative.
My grandmother's father died early, and the family lived in poverty. In any case, when a guy from a richer family proposed, the grandmother's mother forced her to accept the offer, although she, by her own admission, did not love him at all. Her husband and my grandfather was Alexander Pogadaev, a Sakmara Cossack. But, as they say, love comes with habit. They lived well, God gave them eight children, but almost immediately took six of them. Two survived: my mother Agrafena and my aunt Vera.
My grandfather's Cossack past is unknown to me - there is only one photograph left, in which he is depicted with a group of fellow Cossacks. Mom, in her autobiography, called him a middle peasant. A lot of Cossacks were against the communist regime and it was dangerous to mention belonging to them.
In 1929, my grandmother and grandfather joined the collective farm, but already in 1932 they left it. In 1933-1936 the grandfather worked as a forester, and then as a manager in a pioneer (scout) camp. Grandmother loved to remember how well they lived in the forest, where there were only a few houses. There my aunt Vera was born, who was named so at the insistence of a neighbor who otherwise refused to become her godmother.
Grandfather died early - in 1938, and after his death, grandmother went to work as a nurse in a hospital. She recalled more than once how hard it was during the war, when there was an influx of wounded from the front in the hospital. After the war, she left her job and lived off gardening and picking berries. My mother grew up and, after graduating from courses in Orenburg, began to work as an accountant in a state bank.
Grandmother, having lived in the forest at one time, knew berry places well. My friend Grisha Polyakov told me that his mother Anastasia sometimes complained that "Anna Hamina again beat me and robbed the whole strawberry meadow". My grandmother often took me to the forest with her, and then I knew very well where it is best to pick berries.
I remember that she hung a box around my neck and strictly ordered me to pick and put berries into it, and not eat them. But how could you resist when you see a large, juicy, bluish-colored blackberry! In the fall, in the season of pickling vegetables, grandmother gathered branches of cherry and currant in the forest, dug horseradish - all this was taken to the city for sale. A trip to the city was a coveted reward for all the efforts.
After selling, my grandmother gave me money for ice cream, which was then sold in waffle cups by weight and was breathtakingly tasty. And I ate five or six servings at a time. Sometimes she would go shopping and leave me behind the counter. I was overwhelmed with pride in this trust, and I tried to justify it by correctly weighing the goods and accepting payment for it.
Then, during one of the trips to the forest, my grandmother chilled her leg (she had to wade through streams and lakes), began to limp, could not keep up with her friends and, in the end, was forced to leave this job. But the passion for picking berries remained with her until the end of her life.
I remember how during the summer holidays, which I spent in Sakmara, I took her on a bicycle to the forest to collect viburnum. Then I worked part-time in a regional newspaper.
In the morning before work I took her to the forest, during the lunch break I came to pick up the first bag, and after work - the second. And, having delivered the bag home, returned for her. Despite her limp, she deftly jumped onto the trunk and got off it only during steep ascents of the road.
In last years of her life, while her legs were holding her, she went out with vegetables to a small market that then existed on the street. And, seeing me off after the holidays on the way back to Moscow, she always gave me some money she earned - rubles, carefully smoothed out by the mattress under which she kept them.
Grandmother was a cheerful and sociable person, loved to "poke around", and easily got along with strangers. Arriving in 1966 to me, a student of Moscow State University, in Moscow (on the train, and dared to get back on the plane), she tirelessly got to know the capital and even watched Khachaturian's ballet "Spartacus" in three acts in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. We bought tickets right before the performance and sat far from each other.
We met at intermission, and I asked her about her impressions. She replied that she liked everything, but "one action would be enough." Nevertheless, she watched the performance to the end. The next day in the shopping center GUM I had to go somewhere alone, and left her near the fountain, the meeting place of the shop.
When he returned, I saw that she was animatedly talking with an American, repeating the words "we are from Sakmara" many times. Both did not understand each other. Everyone spoke own language and smiled.
Grandmother proudly called herself a kerzhachka (Kerzhak woman). Of course, as a child, it was not clear to me what it was. Only later did I learn that the Kerzhaks are a special ethno-confessional group of Russians, usually Old Believers, with their own traditions and distinctive culture.
It is enough to look at the festive costumes of the Kerzhaks in Sakmara to be sure of it. And quite recently I read somewhere that during the 2002 census, only 18 people indicated their belonging to the Kerzhaks. Are there really no more of them in Sakmara? I decided that next time the census takes place, I will definitely add my voice to them.
She attracted the people around her with her traditional Sakmara costume with an apron, which she constantly wore. Our neighbor Agrafena Cherdintseva, whom I visited during my recent stay in Sakmara, said that she remembers my grandmother well and added: "Anyusha Hamina always shone with bright, neatly sewn and beautiful clothes. She always was wearing a scarf and an elegant apron".
And indeed it was. Returning in 1971 from my study tour in Malaysia, I brought her a piece of Malay batik and was afraid that she would reject this exotic gift. Not at all. She made a skirt out of it and put it on, I suppose, to the envy of her older friends.
Grandma was a deeply religious person. She prayed a lot at home and went somewhere to pray, including during the religious celebrations (the church was closed and the believers gathered at somebody's house). She could neither read nor write, but she knew many prayers. From funeral dinners she always brought me gifts in a handkerchief (a piece of pie with viburnum, flatbread with jam, berries from a sweet soup).
But, she always said that these gifts were from the forest. She never went to the cinema or watched TV (as a result, we never had it in our house), and often I was not allowed to go to the cinema, especially before major religious holidays. I don't know how, but she resigned herself to the presence of the radio, which she turned off only during prayers. Her religiosity seemed to be the reason why I joined the pioneers (scouts) late. But nevertheless I joined: the influence of society turned out to be stronger than the influence of the family.
My grandmother did not like the Soviet regime and the communists and, to my horror, spoke about it openly. With pain she recalled the period of dispossession of prosperous peasants and their families in the 1929–1932, which, although did not affect her, but affected her neighbors, friends and acquaintances.
She said that she helped the dispossessed by hiding part of their property in her house before the confiscation of their property. From the standpoint of today, I understand it. Not all communists were honest and truthful.
I loved and love my grandmother. She's gone. But is she dead? A person lives as long as someone remembers him. Russian writer, a Nobel Prize Winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked on this:
"Parents have passed; peers now pass as well. Where go they? It seems unguessable, unfathomable, beyond our grasp. Yet as with some foreordained clarity, it dawns for us, it glimmers—no, they have not vanished.
"And no more shall we learn of it, while we live. But a prayer for their souls—it casts from us to them, from them to us, an impalpable arch of measureless breadth yet effortless proximity. Why, here they are, you can almost touch them. Both unknowable are they and, as ever, so familiar. Except, they have fallen back in years: Some were older than we, but now are younger.
"Focusing, you even inhale their answer, their hesitation, their warning. In exchange, you send them your own earthly warmth: Perhaps we too can help somehow? And a promise: We shall meet".
* The writer, writing from Russia, was a lecturer at Universiti Malaya