Stepan Kovalchuk spent 57 years in attic

A mud house on the outskirts of the village of Monchyntsy. A vegetable garden outside the house. Over there, in the garden, feeble old women are digging up the potatoes planted by Melanka Kovalchuk. One of the old women is the late Melanka’s cousin, 80-year-old Antonina Petrushenko, who says: “Melanka was very sad, she said she should not die. I told her that we are all are mortal, we all have to do die. Why, are you leaving behind small kids? Only then did she tell me about her brother who had been in an attic for 57 years...”

Paraska Shakhoval and Mariya Kravets listened. They added how they visited Melanka Kovalchuk in her final moments, giving her something to eat and drink, then closed her eyes without knowing or guessing anything: “But he, Stepan, came out into the yard, as if he’d fallen from the sky, on the tenth day after she died.”

Deserter

Here he is, Kovalchuk. White-haired, disheveled. Crouched almost to the ground, for he never straightened up for so many years! Pale like a whitewashed wall. He is hard of hearing, so I have to shout to address him. No reaction. “I’d had a document about six classes of school, but I lost it somewhere back in those times,” he recalls. I don’t know why. A document, unlike a life, can be rewritten.

Then he, S. Kovalchuk, remembers going with his pious mother to Pochayiv Monastery to pray. “There were endless graves along the road. And the Germans warned they would kill a hundred of our people for each of theirs killed,” says he. This plunged Stepan into panic: would they kill him, too? They came back home to Monchyntsy just as the Germans were “recruiting workers for the Reich.” Then he told his mother, “Tell them I’ve stayed behind in Pochayiv.”

And he hid in the attic.

During the occupation Stepan would leave his shelter now and then; he recalled during our conversation that “from the Tereshchevets Forest he saw smoke in Monchyntsy: somebody’s house was being burned.” When “ours came back to the village, I had severe pain in my right side due to a cold, and, of course, they won’t give you a coat in the army. So I decided to wait until spring. I hoped to justify myself by having been in Pochayiv.”

Almost all the Monchyntsy boys, who joined then the Red Army, died near Ternopil. It was a horrible and mind-boggling slaughter. They fell on the battlefield, still unarmed and wearing no uniforms. The bitter wailing of mothers and widows reached Kovalchuk in the attic: “I became even more frightened.”

He had a choice: a horrible end or never-ending horror? He chose the latter: “My sister Melanka told me to go with all the others because, if I was found, the whole family would be punished.” Fear sucks you in like quicksand. If you once surrender to fear, you will find it more difficult to overcome it next time. Soon, Stepan lost his last chance.

Without passport

It is an old and shabby house with a ladder leaning on the attic. The anteroom leads to a stove on which he sat and lay for so many years. From the attic to the stove, then from the stove to the attic. This is the whole 57-year-long itinerary of the doomed man. His peers would shed their blood at the front, come back if lucky, take heroic part in the postwar reconstruction and building developed socialism, love, quarrel, sow, plow, harvest, choose between bad and worse, bury their dead, die, and attend the wake. But his fate was different. It is impossible to imagine the life he chose even in one’s wildest imagination.

He lay low like a mouse. The late Melanka was a seamstress in her own village and a church deacon in a neighboring one. “Hardly a day passed without three or four men stepping over our threshold. But I stayed still, not to give myself away,” he recalls.

Of course, he did not sit with his arms folded. “Sister did the machine-sewing, while I did all manual work,” this is what he says about his daily routine. Then he shows some religious texts he personally copied and deftly bound: “I never sat still, never. That is my pride and joy.” People would bring over things wrapped in newspapers. Once he came across a newspaper reporting “on a guy like me, who turned up after forty-five years of hiding, so he wasn’t put inside for desertion.” Why didn’t he make his own conclusion after reading it? Why did he not take it as an example? He cannot explain. Did he get used to this kind of existence, or was he still in the grip of fear?

His mother died twenty-four years ago. That night, he opened the door for the first time, went out into the yard, walked around the house: “It was interesting for me, I hadn’t seen all this before.” Fifteen years ago, on Christmas, “I decided to confess in church.” But the church was in Maly Yunachky. He recalls: “My sister and I left the house at night. We walked to Chernelivka. Over there, we got on a bus at dawn. I stood by the door, and a woman warned me not to get my fingers caught. My hair stood on end...” He thought he heard a different caution, not the one the women meant. For this was the first time he was on a bus among people.

Copying religious texts, he recalled, “Seven saints had slept for 179 years, when they woke up, even their clothes had not decayed.” Mr. Kovalchuk “slept” less, 57 years, but his life did decay. He agrees: “I committed a deadly sin.” For, unlike those mourned in the spring of 1944, he did not burn his life out. He remembers the prophesies of St. Seraphim about the Antichrist and Judgment Day.

Out of the blue

The small village of Monchyntsy does not believe Stepan Kovalchuk has been hiding in the attic for 57 years. People say he came from somewhere on the tenth day after Melanka’s death. Monchyntsy residents would rather believe he came out of the blue or even rose from the dead. They neither resent nor condemn him. Perhaps they could trying to understand what happened to him. Kovalchuk punished himself very strictly — this is how a sound mind accepts it.

Some people think he went crazy, either when he doomed himself to his foul destiny or later. But in fact everything is all right. “I have documents testifying that I’ve been sitting all these years in the attic and on the stove,” he claims. Then he explains what kind of documents these are. He would draw up, instead of Melanka, financial statements for the diocese. He is surprised: “The priest would accept all these statements, never doubting it was written by Melanka’s hand, for she was illiterate!”

When Melanka became bedridden, Stepan understood that things were bad. “I carried water and dried bread into the attic. It was all I needed,” says he, telling how he lived during quite a long period while his sister was dying. And the hapless Melanka thanked her peers who could not allow her to leave this world in loneliness, and asked and begged them to leave her alone as soon as possible. She died as she had lived.

People are no angels... Or that life can be more terrible than fear

On the tenth day after Melanka’s death, Stepan went out into the courtyard grown over with corn and weeds, with apples fallen from the trees and hens cackling. How did he accept this world which had not, of course, been at a standstill for these 57 years? He doesn’t hear the question. He says he has already visited a neighbor with whom he “used to run barefoot in childhood.” He is already sick and confined to bed. “Barely alive, feeble. He can’t speak loudly, and I can’t hear well,” so they failed to talk. And even if they did, what could Stepan hear from a peer who had not asked in long ago 1944 if the army would give him a coat.

Stepan has remained as he was 57 years ago. Life passed him by. Or maybe he passed by life. I decided not to ask him whether he would do the same all over again, for he would not have heard me. It is only the saints who could sleep for 179 years with their clothes still intact. No one has so far managed to reverse the flow of time. One has to make a firm choice, knowing what endless horror is. Or is it perhaps better to rely on fate as people do and act like a human being?

Stepan Kovalchuk did not rely on fate. He took his destiny into his hands. He sits, peaceful at last, on a chair and tells his story. Now he does not have to eavesdrop, fear, run from the stove to the attic or, vice versa, from the attic to the stove. There is a portrait of his father, Tykhon Kovalchuk, on the wall. He recalls: “My sister went to his funeral. She heard people say Tykhon Kovalchuk was a kind-hearted person.” Tykhon Kovalchuk died in Kalynivka, a district center in Vinnytsia oblast. And his life must have reflected on the destiny of Stepan. Listen to a recluse with 57 years of experience: “We were not considered kurkuls (rich peasants –Ed.), we were middle peasants. Father paid the tax once, somehow avoided it the next time, but he failed to pay it the third... He was walking from the woods, carrying a log, and heard people saying that his family had been evicted. This meant the house was confiscated for failure to pay the tax. So he rushed to the collective farm’s herd, took away and sold his cow, and left.”

The wise and experienced Monchyntsy residents know the commandment, judge not, lest ye be judged. People neither judge nor condemn the hero of this almost incredible story, they only try to understand at least something.