by Anastasiia Zhuravlova, 2021
I started this piece a while ago, but the words refused to form. It laid untouched for more than two years; I lacked inspiration, or so I liked to think. In reality, though, I lacked the courage to step into the shoes of someone who lived through pain so grave that I had no right to mimic it. This character is fiction, but her horror is real; it was real in my great-grandmother’s memories who used to lull me with her past instead of fairytales. It was real for millions who survived and died in the Holodomor. This summer, Professor Grabowicz’s class showed me just how much real Ukrainian history lives outside of history books, inside of fiction—how much real history we learn from novels and poems. How much courage those authors had and how colossal their works were and still are. I am no Stus and certainly no Bazhan; I have not had the experience of Kosach or Dibrova, but if my fiction can transmit at least a small fraction of real Ukrainian history, then courage I must gather.
Black Soil
Static, I stood and watched the grass burn. I saw the eerie black masses of smoke collide with the sky and vanish slowly into thin air. I bid them farewell. I knew that the flames reflected in my eyes and turned their dark brown into red. The flames crawled underneath my skull, settled in places where I didn't invite them, and suffocated me. I coughed, forcing every cell in my body to sharpen and strike me with pain that I once considered unbearable. It killed my daydream. I had to move.
It was the spring of 1933. I was nineteen and alive. For the central Ukrainian village that the remaining members of my family lived in, it was a miracle; I, however, often wished I was spared this blessing, my despondent existence. I had been hungry for a year, starving for four months, and watching my family die for a period I couldn’t measure with time. The Soviet officials told us that the famine had something to do with the weather, the dying crops, and our bad farming. But we saw our harvests taken away to regions where people were more valuable—more deserving of food. I didn’t feel angry anymore, for, in that year of hunger and death, we had learned to accept our flesh evaporating and our bones thinning with little emotion. We had learned to let go of our dignity with as much ease. We had learned to forget that we were humans. Because we no longer were.
As I walked towards the fire—silencing my quiet reflex to run away—I realized that I was talking out loud. I vocalized my thoughts as if I were giving an interview, telling my story to one of those Western journalists my friend Katya had once told me about. They would never hear me, no one would. But there was something in the act of making myself audible that turned my actions less surreal, more humane, fragile.
I had been walking for almost a day before I found a field far enough from the village and small enough for me to contain the fire. It had to be far enough for people not to follow the smoke and come hunting for my catch and big enough for there to be any catch. Sometime after the snow had melted and small animals had woken up from their winter sleep we started burning dried grass on the fields. Dead as the grass was, it hid life beneath it. We were too weak and too helpless to hunt big wild animals, and the only thing our forest traps helped us capture was our fellow villagers who wandered the woods in desperate crusades for food. But a burnt field gave us hare nests, snakes, frogs, hedgehogs, and—if lucky enough—eggs of one of those birds everyone forgot the name of.
All the soil back in the village and everywhere around was black. Once we realized that the grass could burn, fire became our only source of food.
There was, quite literally, nothing alive left around the village. So I had to walk. Everyone tried to walk, too, but they weren’t desperate enough; they gave up too soon.
Having finished my imaginary interview, I thanked my imaginary interviewer—a bright blonde with teeth whiter than eggshell—and I waited for the fire to do its business. I held my matchbox with greed as if it were the biggest treasure I would ever possess. I was lucky: it had started to rain. Grateful for the help, I killed the remaining solitary tongues of flame with my numb bare feet. It didn't hurt anymore; nothing did.
I spread the colorful bag I stitched from our old clothing and prepared to pick up my burnt hunting prizes. The drizzle had stopped, but it left the sky gnawing, grey and empty. I closed my eyes and listened to the clouds’ haunting whisperings. They seemed so close that I raised my hands high and prayed to dissolve in the solitary vastness above. Oh, just how marvelous would it be never to see my little brothers dig earth searching for worms to eat, never to feel the agony of my sharp bones pricking my meatless skin from the inside. I prayed for my body to emancipate me from its prison. I prayed not to remember how my mother died. But most of all, I prayed not to have to be my mother anymore.
As much as I craved to disappear, I knew that it was as improbable as my brothers’ survival if I didn’t come back with food. So I began to patrol the burnt grass, trying to identify the silhouettes of those animals that were too slow to escape the fire. I found a turtle that wandered from the river and was a random, unfortunate victim of my massacre. I had no clear idea of what to do with it, but I put the turtle in my ramshackle parody of a bag where it joined four misshapen baby hares and nine eggs of different sizes, forms, and substances. I also stumbled on a big hedgehog, whose shield cut into my transparent fingers and who was the toughest to cook, but I was in no place to follow a list of favorites. My crusade was an enormous success: if I were to allocate these ill-fated resources properly, the substance of my bag would feed us for a month. As I walked away, I decided not to tell that American reporter about the baby hares. Too soft and innocent.
Twilight came earlier than I expected. I cursed at myself for having spent so much time voicing my nonsense instead of moving my feet. Both were tiring to perform, but at least the latter took me somewhere. The clouds surrendered and revealed myriad luminous beads of the Milky Way. I would call them beautiful, but it had become hard for me to define and identify beauty. The moonlight was cold but bright, which meant I could walk without falling into a pit, but I was too exhausted. I collapsed by an ageless oak tree and fell asleep with my mind shut. Still, I dreamt of my mother.
Sleeping, I could taste the sour sweetness of sugar-sprinkled cherry dumplings; I tasted childhood. When I woke the next morning, I tried to replicate the dough’s soft texture while I chewed rough rubberlike roots that I dug up to fill my empty stomach. I shivered and failed. It was a cold April day, which gave me a rare chance to feed my brothers something that wasn't rotten. As I looked up, I saw the same omniscient grey vastness and scolded it for not taking me—just like I did every morning. I picked up my treasure bag, wet from dew, and started walking in the direction of home.
After two hours or so, I felt thirsty and consumed by an annoying state of mental swoon, so I went a kilometer off my route to get water from the river. The river’s name was Vorskla, and rumor had it the name somehow connected to something that Peter the Great did. People liked to deceive each other imagining that everything had to do with something some great people did. I didn't. Vorskla’s banks were steep and sandy. The river was an abyss disguised by the oak forest around it. I climbed down, making sure not to let the sand carry my feet to places I didn’t want them to. I was doing the job well until I wasn’t. The sand slipped and I fell on my back, sliding down the cliff-like bank. There was nothing to hold on to—no plant, no root—so I slid until I floated.
Nourished by the melted snow, the current was so strong I didn't have time to realize what was happening before it took me twenty meters away from my original point of failure. The bag was still on my shoulder, but I saw the turtle float out and I let the current take her. Maybe it was the river’s revenge, I thought, and if I gave the turtle back the water would spare me. All my other victims were intact, and I held onto the bag with as much power and determination as I could master. Holding the bag, I couldn't move my arms to swim, but the river’s direction coincided with mine, so it would take me closer to the village. Eventually. I felt piercing cold absorb me, and I let it take me. Damn the turtle, I thought before I lost consciousness.
Or I thought I did. Perhaps in conditions so severe, people’s bodies act in ways mysterious and strange to help the brains stay sane. Or perhaps the brains shut off to let the bodies do their business of healing and coming back to life. In either case, after a period of time I could not measure, I was back in my head; I ordered my eyes to open and, to my grand surprise, I wasn’t dead. My limbs trembled, my ribcage pulsated with waves of heat, the hair on my head was wet and on the verge of freezing, but alive I was.
When I felt that my treasure bag was still attached to my crushed body, I let go of the pain. The pain didn't matter anymore; it still had purpose and worth. I detached my head and my back from the ground, sat up, and tried to defeat my horrendous case of disorientation. I had no idea where I was. The river had delivered my body to one of its tiny sandy banks, which looked perfectly familiar and perfectly indistinct. I inhaled the humid, but crisp air and begged my body to help me climb up, away from the water.
It listened. Several minutes and a dozen spinous bushes and branches later, I was back on flatland. The part of the river that I surfaced on was farther down—away from the dense oak forest whence I descended—so what I now saw in front of me was a field. Black, burnt, lifeless. A thin needle of smoke pierced through the gray darkening horizon. A sound. My throat tightened. I was not alone. Instinct made my hands move as if I were its marionette; they grabbed the treasure bag in fear. I scanned the smoldering vastness in front, and, my eyes unable to report any human presence or movement, I walked downstream. I knew I was close. If only the night stopped taking the light hostage, I would be home in no time.
“What are you doing here? The field’s mine,” a rusty voice attacked me from somewhere in the shadows.
I jumped.
“I…I don't know,” I couldn’t form an answer and stepped back.
I directed all of my body’s energy and all of its resources at my physical survival; trivial things like cognitive and linguistic functioning I moved to the bottom of my mind’s priority list. Surprised by my reply, the voice stayed silent.
“It’s dark,” he spoke again and stepped towards me.
“I know,” I replied, still unsure if I had any right to move.
“I’m making a fire. You should join. It’s too dark, you can’t walk.”
The world around had already turned black and white, consumed by twilight, but I could still distinguish the man’s features. Under the shell of utter deprivation that thinned his face to the point of a corpse, he was young. His eyes were light green and huge, the remains of his pale lips were thin. There was no hostility or poor intention in his glance; of that I was sure. If there was anything that starvation had taught me and if there was anything that my brain could still process, it was deciphering human intention.
“All right,” I nodded.
I walked towards the spot where he stood with my fists still locked around the bag. There was no need for long dialogues and explanations. We valued our bodies’ energy too much to waste it on useless conversation, and in this hell we lived in, all conversation had lost its use. But we did exchange our stories, briefly. We gave each other the basics: name, age, village, surviving family, none of which my weary brain would remember. He boiled a soup of river water, acorns, and some leaves with a thin hint of taste. I offered him the hedgehog, which he refused with politeness I couldn’t believe still existed.
"You better save that for your family. That’s why you went through all this trouble anyway. I’ll be fine,” he curved his lips attempting to smile, but in the dim light of the fire, his face’s edgy bones chilled my blood.
“I don’t know if there’s anyone left to bring it to. I was supposed to be back yesterday. And I don’t know if I can walk fast enough now. Might have all been for nothing,” I stated with no particular emotion.
The night was already deep and silent.
“Sleep,” he said emptily, and I did.
When I woke up the next morning, he was gone. I felt the panic of emptiness in my hands and realized that my treasure bag was gone, too. A cascade of anger and desperation demolished the numbness in my heart and infected it with emotions so strong I thought my chest would explode. I screamed and cried until I felt suffocated; until acceptance built back the wall of complete apathy. This time, the wall was twice as thick.
I gathered the remains of my shattered freezing body and paced in the direction of home. There was no excuse and forgiveness for my stupidity and naivety, but I hoped to find a substitute for my treasures on the way. The hope was cracked and aching—it was too close to the village and most of the ground I walked on was already black from burning. The gravity of my physical condition was unlike anything that I had experienced before. As I walked, I fell four times, stopped to catch my breath more than ten times, and even lost consciousness once. I begged for that momentary darkness to be death, but even if it was, I came back to the world of the living all too fast. It felt like my body was made of dry clay that someone soaked in water: there was no use in it anymore.
Daylight assisted my painful journey up until there was about half an hour of walking left. Those I spent in the dark. I hobbled through the village like a ghost: there was no one outside after dark. Some of the tiny house windows were filled with dim orange candlelight—those who still had wax—and some were completely dark. The dark windows were the most frightening; no one was ever sure if the darkness came from lack of light or lack of life. When I saw a faint shade of yellow in my mother’s bedroom window, I felt relief. I approached and opened the door. Inside, I heard my brother’s weak voice produce sounds that I couldn’t decipher.
“It’s me. I’m okay. Are you?” I asked.
I heard my second brother’s coughing, a confirmation. I walked into the room where the two remaining members of my family lay in bed covered with a red woolen blanket, shivering.
“Come to bed, we were so worried,” the older of my brothers whispered, “I, we, didn’t know if you were even still alive. There was this man,” he continued, but I no longer heard his words.
On the little bedside table was my treasure bag, its contents untouched.