The Marlene Stottsberry Award Winner for 2009:
Caroline Totten for The Politics of Famine
The Stottsberry Award honors a former Guild president, an inspiring and generous writer, who is remembered with affection. Guidelines are fiction, 2000 words or less. Open to all.
The Politics of Famine
by Caroline TottenThe Ivanoff family had a highly developed talent for secrecy. In 1964 at a family get-together at a cottage in Sugar Creek, Ohio, they sat in a rustic kitchen and discussed the secret that no one would ever extract from their Russian souls. Thirty years had passed since they emigrated from the Ukraine, but the memory of journey was still vivid. While they ate cabbage soup with potatoes, the son Fedor, said, “There is a reason for keeping our secret. It is a revolting story.”
Fedor was now forty-two, a mathematical genius with hardly a trace of an accent. The fever of hard work glowed in his dark eyes, and if he smiled, it was quickly, as if he had trained his reactions not to interfere with concentration. Having loved and supported his parents through the Cold War years when any Russian, except a rocket scientist like himself, was suspect, his facial expression was tense, his athletic body straight in the ladder-back chair as if he were poised for a dash rather than dinner.
His sister, Tasha, thirty-eight, a nurse, had devoted herself to the service of human agony, yet she had not succeeded in stamping out her past although she never said anything to her sister nurses or patients that brought attention to it. When asked, she said simply, “I was born in the Ukraine, and my family came to America when I was a child.” She painted a romantic picture of fields of grain and the white horse that had been her pet.
“…Why did you leave?”
She replied quietly, “My parents didn’t like Stalin.”
Tasha was not about to confess how they had escaped the Great Famine of 1933. She was tall, solidly built, dark-haired, her face was without expression–a large, smooth mask that no one, however ill and agonized had ever seen disturbed.
Only with her family did she let her hair down. Now she was alarmed by the condition of her father. His eyes were sunken and circled with brown skin; and the strength of his voice had diminished to a hoarse purr. His retirement from the cheese factory hadn’t made him feel the way he wanted to feel.
“The doctor said it is old age,” explained her mother. “The truth is your father thinks too much. It would be a blessing if he would forget.”
“How can he forget,” said Tasha. “How can any of us forget?”
The old man nodded. “I can’t forget that I suffocated Emil Pushchenki. I did it for a horse and cart.”
“We know that,” said Fedor. “But you had the decency to get him drunk first. Emil was old, sick, and starving. He would have died anyway.”
“That horse and cart was no chariot,” said Mother. She recalled the cargo of bloated bodies as a source of shame. Her brown eyes looked as though they were made of glass. She spent whole days and nights knitting and weaving for comfort and relief.
“Every time I see a funeral procession, I think of that cart,” said Tasha. “And all the days we spent under the blanket with the dead.”
“The stench almost killed me,” said her mother.
Then her father said, “When the soldiers stopped me, I was afraid they would ignore the stench, look under the blanket and Fedor would blink.”
With a wicked grin, Fedor confessed, “I was so hungry that if I had smelled bread, I would have jumped from the cart.”
It was hunger that drove Fedor, then twelve, to forage in the fields by day while his parents and sister slept in the brush, hidden from the patrol. They had walked for two nights with nothing to eat but an onion. The soldiers had stripped the farms of crops and livestock and left the people to starve. The black flag waving over the village of Sehiyvka announced that every resident was dead. Emil Pushchenki had the job of collecting the emaciated bodies.
“When I saw the death cart,” said Fedor, “all I wanted to do was eat the horse.”
He had roused his father to steal the horse, but Yuro Ivanoff had foreseen complications. Eating the horse was a temporary solution. What would they do after they ate the horse? The meat would not get them through the winter.
Yuro had a quart of vodka that he had stolen from the Communist compound and saved as a pain killer. It and the clothes on his back were the last of his possessions. Carefully, he approached the cart and upon seeing Emil resting his weary bones in the shade near an abandoned house, he pulled the vodka from his pocket, took a sip and offered to share it. The two of them sat, talked, and drank.
Emil had a permit to travel the roads, collect the dead, and bury them in the pits dug by the soldiers. Emil, a simple man, hated the politics of famine and was grateful for the vodka. He talked about the pain of hauling bodies to the cemeteries, and with blundering innocence, described his routine. He didn’t resist when Yuro Ivanoff helped him to the bed in the abandoned farmhouse.
At first it didn’t occur to Yuro to suffocate the drunken Emil. He thought to steal the horse and cart while Emil slept. But when he realized that Emil’s travel permit was essential to get past the soldiers, he did it. He pressed the pillow hard on the old man’s face and thought only of saving his family. He surmised it might be days or weeks before someone found and identified Emil’s body.
The Communists had given the farmers a choice: Turn their land over to the government, submit to collectivized agriculture, or starve. Ten million resisted. Their crops and livestock were confiscated in a military sweep that spawned desperation. In 1932-33 as starvation spread, cannibalism became part of the desperation.
Tasha wiped the sweat from her forehead with two fingers. “To this day,” she said, “I can smell death. I know which of my patients is going to die before it happens.”
Her mother’s voice crackled softly, “You should find a good man and get married.”
“Don’t start, Mother. I can’t marry. How could I tell any man that I slept for thirty days with dead and decaying bodies.”
Fedor reached and took his sister’s hand. “We have each other,” he said as if acknowledging an indescribable treasure.
“We have something else too,” said her father. He got up from the table and opened the cupboard. He returned to the table with a bottle of vodka and a small ornate box. He poured the vodka and then opened the box. “It is something I saved for thirty years,” he said.
Tasha and Fedor stared at the black dirt in the box.
“It is the soil of our farm in the Ukraine,” he said.
A few minutes passed, and then they raised their glasses in the hope of a better world. Publicly they never admitted the gruesome details of their escape to Poland. They said they went to visit an uncle, who was a priest in Poland; and he arranged for them to travel to America, but privately, they spoke in hushed whispers of the desperation. They would have starved, but their father would not allow them to die. He boiled wild herbs for tea. He boiled rabbit with bitter sage. At the time, the source of the rabbit was not a question open for discussion. He would not permit the children or his wife to look in the pot. In recent years, he admitted that the rabbit had actually been boiled fingers.
When dinner was finished, Tasha cleared the table. She was washing dishes when her brother began collecting the garbage. He stuffed the damaged cabbage leaves, the potato skins, and the ham bone into a sack while his mother looked on.
The old woman with a million wrinkles cleared her throat to say something, but lately her thoughts drained away as quickly as water. She had trouble remembering the day of the week.
“If it’s Tuesday, it must be the night we put out the trash,” she said.
Fedor nodded and headed for the door. He hauled the trash can to the curb, thinking of the day when garbage would have been a feast. With his eyes stinging, he returned to the kitchen and washed his hands twice as if to rid himself of an invisible infection.
For a long time, the family sat on the back porch and gazed at the little vegetable garden enclosed with rows of tall zinnias and strawflowers. It was a plot of great beauty. Despite all they had been through or perhaps because of it, there was profound emotional power in sitting together, gazing at the garden, and warming one another with intermingled hearts.