Leaving is scarier than returning, but it should be the other way around.
In this changing part of the world, like a strange liquid, I grew up, spreading across the white and blue limestone corners of my grandfather’s old house with a thatched roof. I want to make a statement right away: the mice lived like kings under the thatch, I am a witness to this, I heard their happy songs.
The real, or rather the first owners of my grandfather’s house were a German family of immigrants from Baden-Württemberg. The Germans who built the colony settled near Odesa in the first half of the 19th century, and their settlement was named Güldendorf (literally “Golden Village”). It is believed that the village got its name thanks to the fertility of the land, on which mainly bread and grapes were grown. According to another version, the colony was named after Yegor Yegorovich Güldenshanz, a senior member of the Odesa Board of Trustees. Researchers from Germany adhere to the second version of the origin of the name, but I prefer the first. Circular No. 55 of October 15, 1914, renamed colonies and settlements bearing German names, and the name of the village was changed to Kutuzove, but the residents continued to call the village Güldendorf. During the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–1933¹, at least 47 residents of the village died. I do not know the fate of the Germans who survived the Holodomor and lived to see World War II. But even after Pandora broke Zeus’s taboo by opening the box he had given her, and all the misfortunes and calamities flew out of it into the world, hope remained at the bottom of the box, under the lid. My grandmother told me that shortly after they settled in the German house, one night she woke up and saw through the window in the brightly lit courtyard a man who was half in a well and emerged from it holding a small package in his hands. After doing this, the stranger quietly climbed over the fence and disappeared forever. She deliberately did not wake my grandfather. She was sure that it was one of the former owners of their house who had returned to the hiding place for his money to try to make his way through the voracious belly of war and get to his new life.
In 1945, the village was renamed Krasnosilka (literally Beautiful Village).
This name has survived to this day.
My mother’s father, Tetenko Oleksandr Moiseyovych, was a very good combine harvester operator in his youth. By some miracle, he was not called up to fight in World War II, and he and my grandmother were given a German house in Gildendorf for his work achievements.
I walk through my grandmother’s vegetable garden up the path between the ghosts of grape rows, among which my mother grew up, and my grandmother planted potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, beets, and peas that never ripened because I ate them while they were still green, along with the pods. Leaving the ghosts behind, I head for the house my parents built and along the cracks in the street, whose name is so cunning from the very beginning that it is unlikely to be renamed into oblivion. Novoseliv Street. Literally, New Settlers Street. It seems that this name could survive many wars.
Further, along the arms of the village in any direction, along the slopes of the estuary, from which only the edge of the large city is visible, to which the remnants of me flow and burn.
Wandering along the Milky Way², I transform from an arteriole into a large artery, whose branches have no end visible to the eye, some of them flow straight from the Odesa beach into the Black Sea and spread under the dark, mysterious water, only to reappear years later somewhere in a distant land that is completely unlike my homeland, and yet at the same time similar to it.
Every time I break away from the All-Giving Goddess³, I have to follow certain instructions: the main thing is to escape on a journey as early as possible in the morning, or better yet at night, tiptoe around the house, glance at my favorite trinkets, books, paintings by my brilliant friends, hug my cat on the street to the sound of animal cries, and say to him in a grown-up voice, looking into his confused, beloved face: “Be a man, stop licking your balls every five minutes. You’re in charge while I’m gone,” and let him go, thinking all sorts of cat-like, unattainable, intelligent thoughts about me.
And here is the gate, covered with numerous layers of green, sometimes blue paint. Painting a fence in the village is a ritual, a matter of honor. In front of the fence are mature birch trees planted by my sister while I was on another trip. Near the birches, neighbors who, after the rain, have bent over with their backsides facing the mountain, are plucking blades of grass visible only to them from among the daffodils with their rough fingers. Now, on the left, you have to walk quickly to the first turn, then left again (faster!), you can’t go slowly, if you stop for a moment, you’ll go back to where the golden warm moss of the All-Giving One, like a coveted southern poison, slows down time, thoughts, and movements, covering your whole being. You run, and some scoundrel in the sky has broken a glass with a blinding light, it pierces you, eats you, makes love to you, you burn but you run.
At the turn to the center of the village lived old Hanna, who had had diabetes for the last five years and had her right leg amputated, but she sat diligently at the gate in a wheelchair in all weather conditions. She sincerely wished everyone, including me, who constantly ran past her with my suitcase, great happiness, and she wished this until she left her place. Do you want to know where she went without her leg? She went to heaven, of course; they take you to heaven even without a leg. I was always terribly annoyed by these stupid, confused attempts to comfort me: “Don’t be sad, she’s in heaven now!” or even worse: “Don’t cry, he’s in Rainbow now!”
I run with all my might.
- Hello, Hanna, how are you there in Rainbow? I hope they gave you a new leg. Sorry to bother you, I just want to know if there are singing mice on Rainbow? Or any mice at all, I need to know for sure, I have a cat there now. Hello! Hello! Damn it. I can’t hear you! Can you hear me?!
¹ A mass artificial famine organized by the USSR government in the Ukrainian SSR in 1932–1933. The Holodomor was a genocide of the Ukrainian people. The Holodomor occurred due to large-scale collectivization in Ukraine and Kuban: from hundreds of thousands of deaths in 1932 to millions in 1933.
² A trade and transport route used by chumaks from the 16th to the 19th centuries to transport salt from the Black Sea coast of Crimea and bread and other agricultural products from Ukraine.
³ Pandora, from the ancient Greek Pandora, meaning “she who sends up gifts” was the first woman, created by Zeus to punish humans for Prometheus stealing fire for them. Unable to resist her curiosity, she opened the vessel (Pandora’s box) she had received from Zeus, from which all the evils and misfortunes of the world flew out; closing the box, she left only hope inside.
