The Memory Keeper of Kyiv (16)

Alina nodded, and they made their way down the path back home, picking up the bread and broken jar of soup along the way and stepping over the streak of spilled red borscht that stained the snow, just like Serhiy’s blood had.

Katya squeezed her eyes shut as the possibilities of what Sasha and her family would endure flashed through her mind. The tears she had done so well to contain now dripped down her face and froze into frosty crystals on her cheeks. The sharp report of the gun had finally stopped ringing in her ears, but the image of Serhiy and the red snow still burned in her eyes as they entered their yard.

Small but pleasant, their home was typical for the village. Wattle constructed walls hugged the ground under a thatched roof. An entry area served as a storage space and led into an open main room that housed a large, whitewashed pich stove. Decorated with painted flowers, the pich served as the heart of their home. The thick brick walls kept the whole house warm in the winter and jutted out into the room with ledges and alcoves.

Katya stepped into her home and looked at it with new eyes. The kitchen sat on the far side of the room where the oven opened up and a shelf held spots for kettles and pots. On the other side of the pich, tucked on a long bench, was Katya and Alina’s bed. The rest of the open space held a bed for her parents and a table and chairs. Fragrant dried flowers and herbs hung in bunches from the ceiling, and brightly colored embroidered pictures decorated the walls. Before today, she’d felt safe here.

Mama sank into a chair as they relayed their story, then buried her face in a handkerchief. “My sweet sister. And those poor children.”

“Did the activists think they were kulaks?” Katya fought to keep her voice steady.

“Probably.” Tato rubbed his jaw. “The bar is low these days.”

“But they did nothing wrong!” Katya cried. “Where does this end? People are disappearing in the middle of the night. Families deported. Where do they go? Are they even still alive?”

“Katya, lower your voice,” Tato said. “Stalin wants kulaks to be eliminated by any means necessary. It doesn’t matter how. He just wants them gone.”

Mama gave a strangled cry as Katya paced angrily.

“What can we do now? We can’t sit here while they’re taken away.” Katya clapped a hand over her mouth as the words spewed from it. Her faced flamed with her own hypocrisy. She had done just that, only a few minutes ago.

Tato put his arm around Mama’s heaving shoulders. “It’s not that simple. What do you expect? I march down to the state headquarters and demand their freedom? I would be arrested with them. I have seen it happen several times over. Nothing we do can bring them back.”

The activists had made it very clear that helping a kulak was a crime. People brave enough to try to fight back or help family and friends hide had been caught and deported right alongside the ones they’d tried to save.

Katya clenched her fists. “But what can they do to all of us? If we all stand up for our friends, for our family, together, then what can they do to our whole village?”

Tato grimaced. ”Don’t you see? They are already doing it to our whole village. How many empty houses are there? How many families deported? Would you chance me being arrested or shot to appease your need to do something? Or do you ask that I let my wife or daughters go and risk being arrested? I’m left with no choice here, Katya. You must see that!”

His words deflated her, and she drooped into the chair in front of the warm pich. She tried to imagine Tato powerless to protect his family. The thought terrified her, yet when she looked at the stoop in his shoulders and the dullness of his eyes, it seemed he already felt that way. Stalin’s plan to terrify the remaining Ukrainians into subservience so they would join his regime was working just as he’d hoped.

Mama dabbed at her eyes with her damp handkerchief. She went over to the eastern facing wall where she kept her holy icons and dropped to her knees in front of the images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mother holding the Holy Child. A white rushnyk cloth with two intricately embroidered red trees of life—one on each end—hung down either side of the pictures and framed the area where the family prayed. She lit the blessed candle, closed her eyes, and folded her hands.

Katya bit back an exasperated sigh. Praying wouldn’t do Sasha or the rest of her family any good now. She turned to her father. “We’re not going to sign up for the collective, are we?”

“We will do everything we can to avoid it,” Tato said, but his voice lacked its usual vigor.





As Katya lay with her back pressed against Alina’s in their tiny bed later that night, sleep eluded her. She couldn’t stop replaying the day’s events in her mind. Serhiy’s blood, Sasha’s screams, Aunt Oksana’s anguished cry. They were gone now, probably forever, and Katya had done nothing. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed the images to leave her brain, but it was useless. She reached under the pillow and pulled out the bundle of scrap papers she kept wrapped around the stub of an old pencil and, with only the moonlight that crept in through the window illuminating the page, began to write what she’d seen until her eyes grew heavy and sleep finally came.

The next day, she hurried through her morning chores of milking the cow, feeding the livestock, and gathering the eggs, then made her way across the snowy field separating her farm from Pavlo’s.

She found Pavlo outside, heading toward the barn, and fell into step with him. “Can we talk?”