Ukrainian woman returns from guest work with Italian husband
A true sensation has rocked remote Slobidka Satanivska. Three months have passed since an international couple (she is Ukrainian, he Italian) came to the village, bought a ramshackle house with an orchard and a vegetable garden, but the predominantly pension-age inhabitants still untiringly discuss this extraordinary event and the way the spouses have settled and adjusted to their new conditions.
A dark-complexioned woman of Balzacian age looks fondly at her 57-year-old Franco. She is happy that her husband does not suffer from nostalgia the way she did in the once faraway but now close Italy. “I wish you’d seen him falling on his knees when he heard this was our land. He burst into tears like a small child. My dear Franco broke down, he really did.” And Franco likes everything here. He has already begun to speak and even write a little in Ukrainian. Thus he understood what his wife said and readily nodded in agreement.
Halyna is a trained teacher of biology and chemistry. Her private life was a failure: “I was a single mother with two children to look after for twelve years. My daughter and son-in-law were already clinical interns; my son was a student... I had to help them somehow. But all I had was my pension.” She decided finally and irreversibly to look for a job abroad, “I planned to go to Greece where a cousin of mine had settled. I learned Greek but was denied a visa.” Now she is sincerely glad she was barred from visiting that country. She thinks that was the decree of her womanly fate, “Otherwise I wouldn’t have met my Franco.” And in general, as it were, Halyna was destined to go through troubles, deprivations, despair, insults, disappointment, and mistrust to finally find her fortune. She recalls, “Once a long time ago a fortuneteller prophesied a wedding and a death would occur on the same day. It all came true.”
Individuals seem to be guided more by fate than to wander on their own. As to death (nothing to be done: man is born to die), on the same day when Franco proposed and got engaged to Halyna, his mother Maria, whom Halyna attended for $400 a month, passed away. She remembers very well the elderly Maria pining for her son Franco, “He remained a widower, and it is very hard to live single in Italy. But Maria witnessed our engagement. She lived to see this, appeased her heart, and then went on to the next world.”
Only later, when the shore of time is awash with both well-considered and ill-considered decisions, does one recall circumstances, happy and not, accidental and planned. “It did not immediately fall to my lot to attend Maria... A minibus was taking eleven passengers, including my poor self, from Khmelnytsky to Italy via Poland, Germany, and Austria. We arrived at a town I don’t even remember the name of. All were going farther on to Naples. When I heard Naples was nine hundred kilometers away, I thought I’d never get there because I was tired and my nerves were frayed. It was nine p.m. I went to the railway station. I had the telephone number of Halia from Ternopil. She works at Mestre. I bought a ticket to Mestre. On arrival, I rang her. But she says, ‘Sorry, I can’t go out, I’m on the job. Here’s the phone number of Larysa. She’ll help you.’ But Larysa too said she couldn’t go out because she was working. I turned again to Halia from Ternopil...”
Still in Khmelnytsky, she borrowed some money for transportation and employment. Consider the price list: “In Italy our people get employed for $400. Halia said: give me the money, you’ll be tending to an old man for the same four hundred dollars. In the town of Trelise. The patient is an eighty-year-old widower. And can you fancy that? He began to make passes at me. You know what kind. I complained to his daughter. She seemed to support me. But the next morning all his three children got together and said I was fired. I left. It was five a.m. It was pouring rain. Where could I possibly go? What was I to do in a foreign land? I wept like Yaroslavna. Maybe, you remember, ‘She is sad, weeping and sobbing in the morn...’ I also recalled Gorbachev and his perestroika, as well as Yushchenko, Kuchma, Tymoshenko, and the whole rotten capitalism. You ask in what way I recalled them? In foul words, of course! I had a mere $400, just enough to buy a job again. The railway station is full of unfortunates like me. I heard everybody talking about some caritas in Venice. I asked a woman what all this caritas meant. She replied it was a soup kitchen for the poor. So I went there with all the rest. We were met by the prioress followed by a nun. There were all kinds of people there: Albanians, Turks, Bulgarians, Russians, Belarusians, Serbs, Croats, but most were Ukrainians.”
Venice made an indelible impression on Halyna. She remembers, “It was a quiet and tender evening, but I was full of tears which flowed like a river reflecting a bright moon. I had so much sadness come over and almost choke me. I broke into loud singing, ‘The moon passes over the gate...’ You know, I’d never sung so well at home as in Italy.” The moon is a folklore symbol of sadness, “Oh, my clear moon, how beautiful you are, how unhappy my fate...” And this song is also from Halyna’s Italian repertoire: “A bright moon flows by... Why is the sun not peeking through my window?”
Franco de Marchi listened attentively to his wife’s breathtaking story. He understood everything, both the words and feelings. Short and lean, he readily answers her questions how to correctly pronounce the cities and towns Halyna had to visit before she met him. Although Franco knows the whole story, he still shows a lively and inimitable interest in the path that led Halyna precisely to him. Veering left and right, losing her way in the thick of megalopolises, she was still on the right way to meeting him, standing solemnly next to him at a Khmelnytsky marriage registration office, and reassuring him of everlasting love and care. They would share joy and sadness where “the moon passes over the gate.”
But at that time Halyna did not think she would meet Franco, for she was looking for a job. “Over there, at the C aritas, a woman turned to me. She came from Kryvy Rih. She said that she was denied a job but I might perhaps be taken on. The situation was like this: Maria, Franco’s mother, was attended by a woman who was soon going to fly back home. This was at Villagio Fiori, Italian for Village of Flowers. It is twenty kilometers from Venice. Right, Franco? I got on the No. 7 bus which took me to Villagio Fiori.”
Halyna de Marchi remembers all the details of that decisive stage in her previous life, “I was met by a blonde named Oksana on the sixth floor of a tenement. She came from Lviv. I said I was the Halyna that wanted to buy a job. And she says, ‘Give me the money quick: my plane is leaving in twenty minutes, I don’t want to lose my ticket.’ She took the $400 and vanished into thin air. I’ve never seen her since. In the apartment, I was met by Carla, a sister of Franco’s. She said I would tend to her mother, Maria, with a week’s probation. I followed Carla to the bedroom. There were two wooden beds there. An elderly white-haired lady lay on one of them. She had had a stroke.”
It took quite a time for Halyna to make friends with Franco. Yet, she would not have been employed but for him. Halyna said, “Maria had four sons and two daughters. To stay on, I was to be liked by them all. Good Lord, the youngest son Aligi didn’t like me. I don’t know why! But they all waited for Franco to come. I did everything they told me to, for I am a prompt worker. Four women had attended Maria before me, I was the fifth. They were all different. One would give her enough sleeping aids for a horse not to bother her, another would do some other harm. I am often asked why some of our people are being beaten up and even killed there. Because not all of them seek foreign jobs with good intentions. So the whole family waited for Franco to come back. He always came at eleven by bus from Bologna, two hundred kilometers away from Villago Fiori. At that moment, I was out buying some milk for Maria. I was back as quick as lightning. When I came back, he was at home, sitting at the kitchen. I had fancied Robinson Crusoe like him. My God, how he needed a haircut and a shave!”
Then Halyna suddenly recalls not Franco but his mother, “Maria often asked me to sing ‘A raging river snakes along.’ She was interested in everything. She would ask about the collective farms and socialism... Franco? Well, he came three times but said nothing to me. Only when he came for the third time did he invite me on a tour of Venice.”
Together with Franco, she saw a Venice different from the one she had seen in her time of despair and indescribable sadness, “Venice is a gem, a fairy tale untold. Water and ancient sculptures everywhere.” In a word, everything was different this time, everything prompted her to love the place. “It is here that he proposed. And I? It was so unexpected! I said I’d come to earn a living, not to get married. Well, he says, it’s a pity... Then he came another time and pressed again his point. By that time I had sized everything up and said: if you go with me to Ukraine, I’ll accept your proposal.”
For in Italy, too, she remembered the song “I’ll return to Ukraine...” Reminiscing about Venice, Halyna also added she and Franco had gone to see a Lenin monument, “Of course, we laid the flowers of gratitude to Lenin’s monument. For your information, they’ve even got a Lenin Street.” Franco had served in the police for twelve years, “He controlled traffic in Venice – from a boat, not a car, for there are no cars in Venice.” Yet, the retired guardian of law and order still remains a devout Marxist-Leninist. “All his family are C ommunists,” Halyna said proudly.
She never turns her tender eyes away from her Italian. It looks like ideological considerations also caused their destinies to unite, because both she and he tell why they dislike capitalism. They say: you are driving down an Italian road and see an ocean of poplars as if there were no other trees in nature. Noticing this, she asked her Franco why it was so. She heard in reply that those trees were used as raw materials for paper production. She also recalls a mass strike in Rome, in which they took part.
That is the point. Franco and Halyna went to see the ruins of socialism, where his pension was enough to make one’s life happy. They bought an old house on the steep bank of the Zbruch. They would often come on the threshold to feast their eyes on the beautiful landscape. They can see and hear a relict forest from their courtyard. They own a solid 66 sotka plot of land behind the house. The land here has not yet quoted its true price. So Franco does not believe this is his. He toils enthusiastically in his garden from dawn to dusk. He has uprooted old and planted new trees in the orchard, expecting to reap a harvest of peaches, apricots, pears, and apples. “He keeps digging, weeding, and tending to plants in the vegetable garden,” Halyna praises her dear husband for his enterprise and industry.
That the village in which they are building their family nest is still short of so-called social infrastructure has in no way frightened or disappointed the Italian. “I took the car and went to the district center, where I bought all the commercial and household items,” the Italian says optimistically. Franco plans to have a house with gas and running water built on the place of an old one whence two elderly sisters had left for their heavenly abode. He also has a way with Halyna’s grownup children who have stayed behind in Khmelnytsky. Sometimes he phones his own children in Italy.
***
As The Day was told by Valentyna Orlova, a department chief at the marriage registration office, there are many marriages like this made in Khmelnytsky, “Our women bewitch everybody – Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, Czechs, Austrians, Belgians, Hungarians... They marry here in Khmelnytsky because it is cheaper here than there. But then they go back, following their husbands. Halyna de Marchi is the first woman who has returned home with her foreign husband.”
But Halyna herself thinks the reverse process is only in its infancy, “I am quick to start!”
