Householders

My phone rang one ordinary November evening. Judging by the ringing, it was a long-distance call. I picked up the receiver and heard a male voice speaking German, then heavily accented English. The man was calling from the territory of the former East Germany. He had seen a feature on the ARD First Channel of the Federal Republic of Germany, a documentary made that summer by their Moscow correspondent Udo Lilischkiz in Honchy Brid, a village in Volyn oblast. He said he wanted to help the heroes, two brothers named Yuri and Sashko Chul. After their grandparents died, they refused to be enrolled in a boarding school and decided to look after the house themselves. The Day carried a feature about them last year, entitled “Survival Experience of Orphaned Brothers” (#17, 2004). After that events developed quickly. The feature was read in Kyiv and a copy was given to a German journalist in Moscow. Reporters from various local and mainstream periodicals and television channels visited the Chul brothers. Yet almost none of the adults considered the simple truth that all publicity is short-lived and that the boys had to live the way almost everyone lived in that small backwater village — the hard way.

The boys planned to slaughter Sashko’s hog on Saturday. Both brothers have their own hogs; it’s easier to take care of them this way. They get up at six o’clock and do the chores, and at 7:45 they board a bus to get to school on time. Yurko’s sow will farrow in March, so she has a chance to last until Easter. The brothers long ago emptied the last can of pork that was stewed with the help of Aunt Halia, their father’s sister. She lives in Rivne, has her family and work and can’t visit them often. So they have to rely mostly on neighbors’ help. That time, for example, the raw meat would be processed by Aunt Nyusia (Onysia Yukhymivna Maksymova, a relative of the boys’ late grandmother Olha) or by her sister from Kovel. As fate would have it, Yurko, the village’s 15-year-old number-one slaughterer (disposing of the neighborhood’s doomed livestock), fell ill on Thursday night. He was running a high fever and breaking out in a cold sweat. When Sashko told her about this, Larysa Pavlivna Tsiura, Drozdniv’s village council chairperson, sent a paramedic to Honchy Brid to the Chuls.

“Could be the flu. My 28-year-old son has it and I don’t know how often I look into his room to see if he needs anything. And here the boy is all by himself,” Yurko’s class monitor Valentyna Yevhenivna Holovachova says with genuine concern.

“Does this mean we won’t be able to slaughter the hog?” the farmer in Sashko can’t deal with this turn of events and kisses the long-awaited feast goodbye. (Later Yurko will tell his brother in their cold house, “We have to slaughter it because you want to eat meat.” To which his brother will reply that yes, he does, very much, that he can even see the carcass being turned over an open fire and how he cuts off some brisket and places it on a sizzling frying pan).

People in Honchy Brid and Drozdni still ironically discuss all those weird questions the film crew asked, like “Can you afford to buy candies?” The boys like candies, of course, the way all kids do at such age, and they bought and ate candies, but.

“We can’t afford any luxuries,” says 11-year-old Sashko, sounding like a grownup. The boys prefer to discuss their farming, how they have planted winter wheat and that their livestock will be considerably enlarged after the sow farrows and the cow and Aliona the mare follow suit.

“What will we do? We’ll look after them, we’ll keep the calf and feed it, and the piglets, and the foal,” Sashko replies when he’s asked what the boys will do with the litter; he is surprised that adults don’t understand such simple things.

“When I asked the class if the Chul brothers needed a cow, because tending a cow is so much trouble, the 25 students said in one voice, ‘What do you mean? A cow means milk and money!’ That’s the kind of values children have in the countryside,” the schoolteacher comments.

“When I look out the window into the darkness, I often find myself thinking about the boys, that they’re already up and tending their livestock,” says Yurko’s class monitor Valentyna Yevhenivna Holovachova. “In the summer cattle must be herded to the pasture even before dawn, meaning you have to get up at four or four-thirty.”

“How do the other children feel about the brothers’ adult work?”

“They treat Yurko with respect and sympathy; they understand him. They are always willing to fill in for him when it’s his turn to be on classroom duty. My ninth- graders also calmly received the news that the Chul brothers will be the heroes of a German television documentary. They know what’s behind that publicity: truly hard work. As for Sashko’s peers, some are jealous, of course. Now he is starring in a German documentary and then they see him on the television. And then the brothers are taken to Kyiv. A visit to the capital is only a dream for many children in the countryside.”

* * *

When their father took the rap for their mother (she was facing time in jail for selling “poppy straw”) and was sentenced to several years, no one could have predicted that this would spell the end of a solid and thriving family. The woman didn’t care much about her children afterwards and eventually disappeared, leaving her seven- and four-year-old sons with her husband’s parents. This family drama broke down their father, who returned from the prison camp weak in spirit and body. He took to the bottle and tuberculosis took care of the rest.

“He was a good fellow, decent and hard-working, always ready to help. His wife destroyed him and the rest of the family,” sighs Valentyna Yevhenivna who had taught Chul, Sr., before became his sons’ teacher.

“Their grandmother Olha must know no rest even in the afterworld; she’s worried about her grandsons. When the tragedy happened, she said, ‘I’ll put them on their feet!’ She and her elderly husband instilled in them something that kept them afloat; too bad their grandparents died so soon. They passed away the same year. She was the first to go. By the way, the boys looked after him for a month when he was bedridden; they would spoon-feed and clean him and change the sheets. The kids are very conscientious. Sashko always wants to do something useful. Other children from good and solid families, with solicitous parents, are quite different,” says Sashko’s class monitor Valentyna Mykolayivna Nechyporuk.

* * *

One ordinary December evening my phone rang again in that long-distance way and I heard a man speaking in heavily accented Russian. He asked if this was the Chul brothers’ residence, and when he learned that I was the author of the newspaper article that had inspired a German journalist to make a documentary, he identified himself. The man was calling from Szekesfehervar, a city in [central] Hungary. He was a businessman, the owner of a good- sized company that manufactured boxes for candies and nuts, shipping them all over Hungary and abroad. He was also excited about the ARD feature about the young brothers, “heroes of life” from Ukraine. His interpreter Gennady told me his boss “wants to help the boys and can afford it.” He hadn’t called earlier because he was waiting for Ukraine to settle down and for the outcome of the presidential campaign.

The interpreter wanted to know if the city where the boys lived was a big one; what they needed to make their life happier; what the domestic situation was like without a new president for so long. If his boss couldn’t visit the Chul brothers, would I please come to Lviv or Kyiv to meet with his company official, who had a present for the boys?

Yurko and Sashko laughed when I relayed the question about the size of the city they lived in.

“Half the village homes are empty. Honchy Brid will soon become a hamlet.”

When they were asked what they needed to make their lives happier, both simply shrugged. Their most cherished dream seemed to have come true. Now they were true farmers. They had wanted a cow and Vitaly Karpiuk, the head of the Kovel district state administration, had helped them buy one (incidentally, making their dream come true cost the district budget UAH 1,300).

Otherwise the children had received material assistance only from the Ukrainian television talk show Bez Tabu (Without Taboo) — a small television set. When the German television journalist Udo Lilischkiz saw the boys’ living conditions, he raced to Kovel and brought back a good washing machine and an electric kettle. On the day we visited Honchy Brid the boys were supposed to receive a wardrobe and a couple of mattresses from Ihor Yurchenko, representative of the district administration’s juvenile affairs department (who is now playing a paternal role in their lives). We met the village council chairperson, Larysa Pavlivna Tsiura (she cares for the boys as though they were her own sons) on the way from Kovel. She was bringing eighty hryvnias for the boys, a gift from an anonymous philanthropist, in the aftermath of the television program. Larysa Pavlivna added social assistance to this amount and together with the village council secretary bought the boys a second-hand refrigerator at a local bazaar (a brand new one costs too much), an electric oven, and two warm sweaters. If more money comes their way, she will buy them fresh linen.

Twice a week one of the brothers walks to a van that sells bread. They have credit at the village store and can buy things with their social assistance on account. Larysa Pavlivna keeps strict control over all the hard cash, but the kids are allowed to make purchases of things they need and like. They also herd their neighbors’ cattle and this is another source of income. This summer the local authorities arranged for Yurko to be in charge of milk procurements (another addition to the family budget). Now and then they head for the forest to pick whortleberries (they also make jam). They dried some mushrooms for Christmas. They have chickens and rabbits, so there is always fresh meat to stew, so they aren’t overly dependent on the outside world, which is now so eager to glimpse their inner life.

“I often wonder what will become of the kids. Sometimes I talk about it with Yurko. He says, ‘I know it won’t be always like this.’ While they are still young people will care for them,” muses Valentyna Yevhenivna Holovachova. “If he finds a girl who’ll make a good wife, who’ll appreciate his kind heart and hard-working hands, they’ll have a good family and they’ll live a good life even in the village. I wouldn’t want other people to pester them with their curiosity. Sashko is tougher and surer of himself (he is so young), but Yurko is soft, kind, and vulnerable. Did you notice that he smiles only with his lips, never with his eyes?”