She has suffered all her life because she does not want to be poor, scorns drunks, and hates loafers
Khyma Ostapchuk lives in the center of Holenyshcheve, a village in Khmelnytsky oblast where the living standard has always remained at the traditional village level. Unlike the rest of the homes, hers has no electricity and is not likely to have, not in her lifetime. That bright July day the sun shone into the room through the thick treetops, casting a beam on the bench by the wall with all sorts of things on it: old jugs and more modern milk pitchers, wood spoons, jars, candle ends, a kerosene lamp.
The ceiling is like a clean sheet of paper, not even a hook from which to suspend a cradle. Epochal and ordinary events of the past century passed by this home, leaving no trace. “After the war the whole village was electrified,” says Petro Khrystyk, chairman of Holenyshcheve’s village council. He cannot explain why Baba Khymka (Khyma Ostapchuk’s village nickname) has none, assuming that “it’s all because of that illiterate woman’s incredible greed.”
“I don’t need Illich or his light here,” the old woman angrily pointed her walking stick at the bare ceiling.
We had been warned in the village about her character: “She is tough and can just push you out of the house with her stick.”
She did not, but the interview had some less than pleasant moments. “What do you want? Haven’t you seen a poor old woman before? Who are you?” In any case, we struck up a conversation somehow, and when it came to her youth the old woman’s voice softened, and her squinting eye (the other one was dark and blind; she had lost it falling off a trailer) suddenly opened, showing warmth.
We discussed Lenin’s electrification plan dating from her youth. “I don’t need electricity. In fact, it’s bad for me. Every time I visit my relative and sit under the lamp I have a terrible headache afterward and my eye goes dark.”
It was a very hot day, yet she had lit the stove early in the morning. “I baked Easter bread, so now I put it in milk, warm it on the stove, and eat it.” She collects and dries herbs in the summertime. Her relative, a woman she now visits only during the day, lest her head ache and her only eye go dark, brings her milk. And she pays for this daily product in her meager diet. “I get 58 hryvnias as pension from the collective farm.” Sometimes she makes barter deals, paying for milk with her vegetable garden’s produce.
In a word, Baba Khymka lives on 58 hryvnias (about $10.50) a month, feeding a dozen hens herded by a proud rooster and paying for kerosene for the lamp. Previously she used only candles, but then decided on a kerosene lamp, for reasons of economy.
On hearing this, village head Petro Khrystyk was finally convinced that his assumption about the absence of electricity in Baba Khymka’s home was perfectly correct. “I told you, the old woman is so greedy. She won’t give you snow in winter.”
The old woman would not close the subject, “Like I said, I don’t care for Illich or his light bulb, I don’t need them.” Maybe she really can see better with the kerosene lamp. And she has a heavy burden on her heart. She resents the whole world. She is as old as the Russian Revolution, yet she never figured in any newspaper articles lauding the Soviet way of life. Not because “that drunk registrar made me two years younger than I really was,” but because “I’ve lived all my life as a kulak’s daughter.”
She knows from her mother and older sisters (long since dead) that she was born “in 1917, two weeks before Pokrova [the church feast of St. Mary the Protectress, October 1].” No, she doesn’t remember her father, she has not even seen him in a dream. He vanished the year she was born. Maybe he was killed or died somewhere, God knows. He was a thrifty farmer, had a plot of five desiatinas (13.5 acres), horses, oxen, a milling machine.
In 1931, the Ostapchuks were blacklisted as a kulak family. “They took away the house, the land, the horses, oxen, and the milling machine.” Marfa Ostapchuk, her three daughters, and son left the village like beggars, which they now were, and wandered God knows where. Baba Khymka does not remember where they met the hungry year 1933. “My brother died and the sisters envied him; he no longer suffered. We had nothing to eat and couldn’t die.” This is the price they had to pay to make Lenin’s dream about electrification, collectivization, and 100,000 tractors come true.
She returned to Holenyshcheve after World War II. “I couldn’t recognize father’s home — collective farm stables on one side and a cartwright’s workshop on the other.” Her kulak spirit survived all ordeals. Khyma Ostapchuk started building a home which would be crossed out from the state electrification plan. “I brought six cart loads of oak from the forest. Everybody envied me and I felt proud. See, everything’s made of oak here, the pillars, the jambs, and the ceiling. The house is as strong as rock. First, the roof was of reeds, now it’s tiles. I’d saved every kopeck to buy the tiles.”
She built her home herself. Marriage? “Whom should I marry here? All the good farmers were sent begging. Or should I marry one of those drunks and have the children live in misery?” Baba Khymka is sure that the village is made up of drunks and will stay like that for a long time. “I was young and strong, so I could and did earn and save money. I made sour cream and cheese and sold them at the market, and left the serum for myself. I worked on the collective farm and at home like somebody accursed.” She did, because she wanted to be rich. “When spinning hemp in winter, I’d count every thread.” And she was properly rewarded for her toil. “I’d put on a new kerchief and go to church, and all those good-for-nothing women would be ready to burst with envy, for none would have one as fine as mine. And the kind of linen I made! Sheets white as snow. Six of them!”
The old wound still hurts. “I was harvesting rye when I heard the field team leader ride up. The horse hit me with a hoof in the back of my jersey and shoved its mug into the back of my head. And the man said go plaster the smithy. I felt so hurt. But what could I do? So I went and did it. Although I’m not one to bow and scrape, not like all those others. I’ve never been the first to say hello.”
Baba Khymka is not exactly popular in Holenyshcheve and her age and hard-working nature do not seem to impress anyone. People still avoid her the way the nationwide electrification process once avoided her home. “Let them visit others, so they can eat and get drunk. I’m not that stupid.” And she is at war with those living next door. She is on the losing side. “They keep cutting from my plot every plowing time. I used to have 35 sotkas [sotka, a popular unit of length consisting of 100 meters], now it’s just 28.”
She complained to the village council (orally). Nothing happened. “There’s no justice here,” she says with resignation. A month ago she lost all faith in her fellow human beings after “some bastards rode their motorcycles right into me.” It happened just as she stepped out of her house in the afternoon. She suspects the drunks. As it was, she fainted from the shock. “All I remember is someone dragging me inside the house, putting me on the couch, and then walking out, leaving me to the mercy of fate. See this here felt boot? It was full of blood and if I didn’t take it off real fast the foot would have been stuck in it. They called the first-aid station and that nurse came and said I need ointment and it cost three hryvnias. I had only two, so no ointment. Well, I managed. I used Vaseline.”
The old woman has suffered all her long life because of her character, because she does not want to be poor, scorns drunks, and hates loafers and thieves. It is in her blood. Her father Khtoma would have lived long after the revolution in Holenyshcheve, had not he become prosperous by his own backbreaking toil or if he had squandered everything on drink. Anyway, the old woman got the family plot back after reforms started in Ukraine. She learned about them on the radio. “They were installing radio lines when I took a tenant, and he had a radio installed. The thing has gone nuts. Now it speaks, then is silent, and then growls like a dog.” She is not sorry she had no tenants when they were installing the electricity lines.
Shortly after she heard that broadcast, Baba Khymka was told she was a landowner now. At long last she has a land share. What is she to do with it, considering her age and everything else? She leased it out to a local farming collective titled Prohres [Progress] and received in rent a sack of oats. “What kind of deal was that? My hens aren’t horses. They don’t need oats,” she complains.
The chairman of the council of Holenyshcheve, with its typically historical village living standard remaining unchanged, says he did not lease out his share to Prohres. “Why should I? What can they give me in return? Last year they harvested 14 centners of grain per hectare; 10 centners of barley, and there was so little sugar beet they wouldn’t even supply it to the refinery, just gave it to the peasants, so they could feed their livestock.”
Petro Khrystyk, village council chairman and individual peasant at the same time, points out that many at the village who followed suit. “If you work hard, eat and sleep less, you can be master of your plot,” he says. Gradually, he became sympathetic to Baba Khymka’s concerns. “Some think of nothing but stealing other peoples’ property; they don’t care that the property they’re stealing was earned the hard way.”
“See, not all the light we see comes from that Illich lamp,” 84-year-old Khyma Ostapchuk offers sagely.
