I have already written earlier about my grandmother Polina Vasilyevna (papa’s mother), who lived her whole life in a village in the Smolensk region. Apparently my grandmother lived so poorly after the war that nothing lodged in my memory, only the last trip to her, when I was already 10 years old, in 1964, in summer.
Papa was then a serviceman and used the privilege of a free ticket once a year for leave in a compartment carriage. Before the trip we bought presents: bagel rings strung on a string (that is how they sold them then), biscuits, lump sugar, tea, and many caramel sweets. Papa decided to take the ticket at the station, not long before the train’s departure. We ended up in a general carriage “packed to the brim” with people. I can suppose that papa decided to get there more quickly; the journey took several hours in the evening. I had to sit on a suitcase, laying my head on papa’s knees, and I fell asleep.
We got off at night at some station, and distant relatives who lived near the station took us in. Papa was seated at the table to drink and have supper, and the hostess put me to bed. To the village of Akulovo, where my grandmother lived, we still had 18 km of roadlessness ahead, by a passing vehicle. They woke me in the dead of night, put me in the cab of a lorry, and I fell asleep again.
After some time they woke me and transferred me into the cab of a tracked tractor (I suspect the vehicle had got stuck somewhere on the way). Although this tractor rumbled unbelievably, I fell asleep again and woke from the silence. The tractor “stood motionless”; papa and the tractor driver were not in the cab. I screamed, began calling papa in the dark. It turned out he had been walking around the tractor with the tractor driver and they were trying to find something. They were looking for a bottle of vodka that had fallen out during the ride. They found it! Whole, unbroken! The mud into which the bottle had fallen turned out to be soft and boggy after the rains.
At dawn we arrived at grandmother’s house. Did I think then that now, living in Norway, I would remember her with warmth and respect, she who had lived a long and incredibly hard life. Having lost her husband in 1937 and two sons at the beginning of the war, herself almost perishing at the hands of the fascists. “Yes! There were people in our time!” Bright memory to them!