Pictures of Galina

by Herb Randall

Forehead navel right shoulder left, three times, quickly, Olga’s lips move silently.

I look for the usual church through the fogged window. The late winter morning was cold and damp but the heat on the small bus was typically stifling. 

“Where’s the church?”

“What?”

“You crossed yourself, but I don’t see it.” 

“No, there’s no church here.” 

I wipe the window with the back of my hand and peer again. There is a pond with the last ragged fingers of ice gripping the edge as the bus rattles over a small bridge. I’m happy to see the guardrail freshly painted in blue and yellow. Even this slight display of Ukrainian feeling is heartening, considering how close we are to the border and an active war. 

We arrive at the improbably named village of Krushchevaya Nikitovka, once the home of a nobleman by that name, and now of Olga’s parents. She swears the village takes its name from that seventeenth-century boyar and not the Soviet leader of the 1950s, but I can’t help but wonder. 

The bus finally deposits us in front of a dreary market. It’s a short walk down the muddy street to Olga’s parents’ home. They greet us at the gate of the metal fence that surrounds their small house, a kitchen outbuilding, animal pens, latrine, and an entrancing jumble of tools, spare parts, beehives, improvised gadgets and jigs: junk, Olga calls it. She apologizes for the plainness of the village and for what I already affectionately call “our family compound.” 

Most of all she apologizes about her father, who has already shuffled into the living room to show me all the family photos, plying me with his homemade grape brandy, and rattling off something hilarious in Surzhyk, the mixture of Ukrainian and Russian spoken here. I don’t understand a thing. We both make do by talking louder and gesturing wildly. It’s great fun. 

All the while, Olga and her mother are piling the table in the next room with plates of garlicky soft rolls, breaded cutlets and thinly sliced tongue from their own recently slaughtered pig, salads without end, and an enormous steaming pot of borscht. It would be unimaginable not to serve borscht. Understanding that I must do my duty as the guest of honor and prospective son-in-law, I regret having eaten breakfast that morning. 

Olga and I slip away for a much-needed walk after this feast. The road ends at the edge of their property by the shore of another small pond. A narrower road turns to the right and leads through the woods. We pass a ruined farmhouse, splayed wide open like a perfect dissection of archetypal timber, thatch, and daub construction. 

The dirt road gently ascends a hill, and the woods give way to a small clearing. We’re suddenly greeted by a large Soviet soldier set on a plinth being reclaimed by the forest, one lichen colony at a time. Below and behind the statue are a series of plaques with name after name of soldiers who fought here in last century’s war. The soldier stares down the clearing and a small meadow: the mass grave for all those names. Further to the right are a few tidy headstones with flowers, most bordered by small fences, some with the customary table for visiting relatives. 

“I want to show you something.” Olga wanders through the grove of graves, surprisingly since she religiously avoids cemeteries when I suggest inspecting them during our travels. 

“What name are we looking for?” 

“Volodya and Kolya.” 

We’re about to give up when we see a solitary, squat marker with its inclined face slanting towards the trees. As we draw closer, we see layers of cement chipping away at the edges. A small bundle of plastic flowers lies at the base, covering one of the names, but in ascending diagonal block letters is the family name, Dvornik. Above that is Kolya, 1940, and moving the flowers aside, Volodya, 1942. Birth years apparently, but no death dates. 

“Were they relatives?” 

“No, just some small boys from the village. They fell through the ice in that pond we passed on the bus. Mama knew their mother. We can ask her. Later.” 

Gradually, after several more visits, we assemble the fragments of the story. It’s like the trove of dusty photos Olga’s father shares with me. Together we gingerly pull loose the ribbon bundling them together and inspect these faded images, sometimes finding a bit of inscrutable looping cursive on the back, occasionally prying out a long-forgotten detail with an outsider’s naïve questions. We try to transpose these images to our world, but in the end, we’re left pondering pointillist dots of truth, gossip, and speculation. 

Olga’s mother begins telling us her childhood memories, almost reverently, of the quiet, kindly, always helpful neighbor Galina, the village girl who married her sweetheart Ivan, their two sons, the war, and all that followed. 

“The first thing you must know is that the war was terrible, but the hunger that came after…. Many people know about the Holodomor, but it was the same thing after the war, and no one talks about that. But still today we never throw away bread. Never.”

I begin to understand these generational echoes from the famines, for indeed the only thing we brought from the city for Olga’s parents was a small bag of stale crusts and kitchen scraps that she refused to throw away. Now they will feed the chickens roaming around the yard. And after every visit, we bring overstuffed bags of food back home with us, including every bit of our leftover lunch, as if departing for an uncertain journey ourselves. 

Leave-taking

Ivan was to march out the next morning. Galina rushed about the cramped house, set on a small hill next to a wood and the barest trickle of a summer-parched stream.

How and what to send with her husband? Ivan didn’t know where they were being sent to meet the rapidly advancing Germans. She glided between the kitchen, where every pot and pan gurgled with some life-preserving elixir, and the one other room where Galina had laid out every last garment. 

The aromas followed Galina: borscht and the pillowy potato-stuffed hand pies, whose main advantage was that they could be tucked into every spare coat pocket and crevice of a rucksack. In the room, Kolya squealed with unrestrained toddler glee as he climbed the soft pile of clothes. The scent of Papa and the musty wardrobe that had disgorged these treasures mingled with that of his favorite pirozhki. The heap of trousers, rugged work shirts, the greatcoat that had once been beautiful when Ivan’s father wore it in the last war, seemed to Galina an insurmountable peak of washing and mending. 

Whenever Galina tried to conjure up further memories of those last hours together, it was no use. The final embraces, promises, tears all but lost in a dull, aching fog.

Except for her clear decision not to tell Ivan about the baby. 

Two Ivans

“The steel of those German tanks is better than our own, so be very careful, Ivan Dmitrievich.” 

Ivan leads his new charge, the freshly arrived Ivan, through the dangers of the brutal tank warfare as the enemy advances across their Motherland. 

Younger Ivan, not long ago still one of Lenin’s teenaged Young Pioneers, follows and nods, but marks well these words, for he knows how to handle such suspicious elements. Of course, only a traitor would claim that the enemy’s weapons were superior.

These simple words swirl freely, lightly over and around them, but when they settle, one Ivan is spirited away to the hinterland isles of rock, ice, and crushing labor, while the other is free for another day, another battle, a heroic death. 

Sugar on Snow

“Kuma! Kuma! Throw us something!” Kolya and Volodya call out to their godmother who waves and smiles down from the kolkhoz truck as it passes them. The tired women packed into the freezing, tarp-covered truck bed are returning from another grueling day at the collective farm that surrounds the village and employs nearly everyone in it. 

The brothers lunge to catch the sugar beets their godmother, Nina, surreptitiously flings as the truck shambles violently across the little bridge. Intended for livestock feed, she would face the severest consequences if caught or reported. But Nina so pitied Volodya and Kolya, just five and seven years old, starving like all of them in the famine that still gripped the Ukrainian countryside that early spring of 1947. Added to that, their father had not come home from the war and was presumed dead. Often left on their own while the harried Galina worked or tended the house, the boys frequently played here at the pond and waited for the trucks to pass. 

The handful of beets slide from where they land on the road, tumbling down onto the ice. Nina waves frantically to the boys, shouting after a second’s hesitation, but they are already scrambling after their loot. In an instant the ice cracks and the boys slip under. Nina screams, and joined by the other women, the driver is forced to stop. They scramble to the shore but it’s too late. The ice, the beets, the boys are gone. 

Interlude

“Galina Yukhimivna! Come to your senses finally! There’s nothing for you here. Volodya and Kolya, Ivan, they aren’t coming back.” 

Galina paced nervously in front of her husband’s sister and aunt. She mumbled under her breath, then began to fold and unfold a stack of linens on the table that stood between them. 

“His name is Vasily Vasilevich. His last relative was taken by the hunger.” Her in-laws exchanged a glance then quickly added, “He has no wife and no one in this world left to take care of him.” Vasily had returned from the war crippled and the famine had further weakened him. 

“Go to him, take care of him in his last days.” 

“He won’t live long. He needs someone and he’ll be grateful. Maybe he’ll even leave the house to you.”

Galina didn’t remember agreeing but one brisk autumn morning she found herself standing in front of a stranger’s house in the neighboring village of Karlovka. She carried with her only a tiny bundle of clothes and the hope that here in this new place, the old voices would stop haunting her. 

Unexpectedly, Vasily steadily grew stronger under Galina’s care. He never walked again but after a few months with Galina, he was no longer in danger of dying. 

One especially cold night after the New Year, Galina prepared her bedding on the bench of the enormous masonry kitchen stove. She settled in to sleep, the heat of the receding fire easing the dull ache of her lower back. She shut her eyes, trying to drive all thoughts away and let the warm darkness swallow her. 

Galina dozed, then startled, rose suddenly from her nest, adjusted her nightgown and hair as best she could on this moonless night. She slipped quietly into Vasily’s room. 

Document

“This is your document, Ivan Andreevich. Keep it safe. Do you understand??

He said nothing.

“Our Iosif Vissarionovich is no more.” 

Ivan was silent, as always.

“Go! Keep it safe, you fool!”

Days later, in the foul, fetid train car, he furtively unfolded and peeked at the paper tucked into his boot. He mouthed the word uncomprehendingly: rehabilitated. 

Still Life

The hand-carved wooden shutters still frame the windows, and the fence seems recently mended. 

Should he knock? Call out to Galina or Kolya? Before he can decide, the door, his door, suddenly opens and his sister stands there, speechless.

Ivan feels no need to explain and his sister knows better than to ask. 

“Galya isn’t here now.” 

“And Kolya??

“Come in, sit, you must be tired.” 

“Kolya?” He looks past his sister and the entryway. The familiar table stands there with the remains of a recent meal. Ivan doesn’t recognize the plates or the earthenware vase holding freshly picked mallows in shades of pink and lavender.

“Listen, there was an accident. Both boys –“

“Both?”

Images

We visit Kolya and Volodya’s grave each time we go to Olga’s parents. Her mother tells us it was a tragedy felt deeply by everyone in the village at the time. When the boys perished, with no news otherwise, everyone assumed they were sons of a glorious martyr of the Motherland. That’s why these poor peasant boys were given the unusual honor of burial among war heroes. 

I want to bring flowers for the boys but there’s not much point. We seem to be the only ones visiting them. The village is emptying out, dying. The village school has few children. In a decade, I wonder if anyone will come to this memorial grove or tend the graves. The boys who sleep here will be forgotten along with all those names on the plaques, and the path here will be overgrown and impassible. 

Olga’s mother tries to find answers to a few final questions for me. I desperately want to see photos of Galina, Ivan, and the boys, if any exist. It turns out she knows the man, a local politician, living in Galina’s old house. A former lodger with Galina, he now owns the house, but he’s too busy with his re-election campaign to help much when she asks to see the photo of the boys that once hung on the wall. But he does say he has Ivan’s letter of rehabilitation. I hope to eventually visit him and see what might be preserved, but for now I’m stuck on the wrong continent during the pandemic, so the only photos are these memories, our visits to the village sights, and the visions they inspire. 

I think I’ve heard as much of the story as is possible to reconstruct, when Olga’s mother remembers one last thing. “Galina,” Olga relays off-handedly, “worked for many years in our village preschool after her sons died.” 

As a father, it’s this final detail that shatters me, and for once, I’m grateful that I learn this in a phone call, not seated around the table with my Ukrainian family.  


Icon

Coming home from our most recent visit to the village, the bus trundles slowly across the fated bridge. Again, Olga crosses herself, but she seems surprised when I say how sorry I am for Kolya and Volodya. 

“It’s terrible, of course, but those boys might have died from starvation if they hadn’t fallen through the ice first,” she offers, and I’m a little taken aback by her matter-of-factness. “Children died all the time then, it’s life. What to do?” 

Olga looks at me while nervously folding and unfolding the scarf she’s half finished knitting.  

“Galina suffered through war, famine, her husband being taken away, loss of her children, and depression too, though no one called it that then. But still she lived, was loved and needed, and for just an ordinary person in a simple village like this, well, her reward was a miracle.”

Olga bows her head and crosses herself again, and it’s only then I understand she’s not mourning the children but saying a prayer to Galina. Although an outsider both to Olga’s faith and Khrushchev’s village, I too close my eyes and make a promise to Galina and her boys, that even if this place is forgotten, I will tell their story. 

Benediction

Galina retrieves the linens from the sagging line, replacing them with freshly washed clothes to dry in the afternoon sun. She turns back quickly, so doesn’t notice the gaunt man approaching the gate. His shirt in tatters, pants too large but held in place with a string for a belt, wearing boots far too warm for the heat, and dusty from the long walk from Krushchevaya Nikitovka, he watches Galina slowly retrace the path to the house. 

“Galya!”

She freezes for a moment, then turns slowly. 

“Galochka, come home with me!”

And, with nothing but the summer house dress she’s wearing, dropping the basket of fresh linens on the step, Galina walks home silently with her Ivan.