Olga Chaplin - The Man from Talalaivka - A Tale of Love, Life and Loss from Ukraine

“And look, Petro! Mykola’s photographs arrived! What a happy Easter it was for us all, this time!” She set out her two favourite photographs of the family’s celebration. Peter looked closely at the small sepia frames and smiled, despite himself. Mykola was so grown up, now almost his height. The many months apart made him appear different, somehow. At seventeen, he was no longer a youth but an adult, making his own decisions as best he could in this new country. His eyes moistened with pride, but he also felt the pang of responsibility as he looked from the photographs to Evdokia. He knew how much she yearned for her family to share a home together again one day, soon.

He stepped outside once more into the night, to calm his mind before succumbing to sleep. He looked to its heavens, as his soul’s mentor Taras Shevchenko must have done so long ago in his Tsarist exiles. The night embraced him, the stars mesmerising in the pitch dark. The constellations may have been different for that great Ukrainian philosopher poet, but the stars’ eternal glisten of hope had not changed. They followed each soul’s journey to its eventual destiny, its ultimate peaceful place.

He crossed himself before this darkened church of the universe, let the tears fall freely, as he made his way back to the shack. They loosened the emotions he could no longer hold in, but could not share, now, with his sleeping family.

Peter felt the horse’s rocking motion as its hooves slushed through virgin snow, felt the lightest flakes of melting snow touch his eyelids and cheeks. He was on his way to the safety of his home in Kylapchin, to his Hanya and Vanya. But then the horse began to stall: something had baulked it. He turned the reins this way and that, but to no avail. He put out his hand to steady himself, felt the cold and damp as he fell…

Suddenly he awoke, his splayed hand soaked on the window pane as droplets of water cascaded along the corrugated tin ceiling and down the walls. The shack seemed to be swaying. It was not yet dawn, the sounds around him unfamiliar and perplexing. He carefully stepped out of the bedroom, stepped down the deep single step to the kitchen’s concrete floor.

“Good God!” he cried as the water sucked at him, silty mud already sticking to his feet. He felt his way back, dressed quickly, shook Evdokia gently.

“Dyna! Dyna! Wake up! The water from the river!” He rolled up his trousers, fumbled in the kitchen for candles and brought one to her. He could not believe the Capertee River could rise in so short a time. The rains had eased, days ago, the river flowed normally. There were no suggestions in the township of any dangerous peaks.

There was no time to even think of saving their kitchen furniture. A foot of seething muddy water was pushing at him as he moved from kitchen to bedroom.

“Dyna! We only have minutes before this mud will reach the bedroom! Dress the girls… I’ll lift their beds onto ours… it will give us more time to save some of these belongings! Quick! Quick! I’ll wake Christov and his family… God only knows how much of this we can save!”

As dawn broke they moved as best as they could, muddy water swishing at their knees as they bundled perenas and clothing to higher ground at the back of the shack. Peter realised, at last, the ultimate purpose of the small mouldy wooden shed at the highest end of this allotment, among the gnarled but still surviving peach trees. Someone, all those years ago, must have experienced a similar fate, the Capertee River having broken its banks time and again as floodwaters rushed from surrounding mountains into the valley in unpredictable torrential rain.

“Dyna, these belongings will be wet, but they can be saved… it’s this mud that will destroy everything it seeps into… We must go now—we cannot save any of this, now!” He waved his hand in surrender at the sparse kitchen furniture that his wife had so proudly cleaned and polished. Already the white-washed walls had ugly brown mud stains two feet from the floor. He grabbed the tied-up tablecloth containing whatever Evdokia could remove in those minutes, hauled the heavy bundle to the higher ground, then returned to unlatch the gate of the duck-pen.

He looked across at the changed scenery, unrecognisable from the calm and beauty of the previous day. The river, the valley, had turned into a floodplain. Only a flapping cardboard poster of last week’s film atop the corrugated roof of the local cinema shed gave any hint of the depth of the water. He peered closer at their shack as muddy water sucked at its unsteady old brick piers. It seemed to be swaying with each surge of rushing water. He struggled back to the kitchen door, watched in dismay. The furniture was already damaged beyond repair and, as if a massive rogue machine was working underfoot, items were being dragged around and about, churning in the debris.

A sullen morning greeted them as people called across to each other, offering help. Already, the larrikin family above them had sent their adult son, offering accommodation to their foreign new friends.

Peter stood at the door of the dilapidated shed at the back of the allotment, looked back at the scene before him. He smiled wryly as he thought of life’s turn of events. He and Evdokia had waited all those years in Heidenau camp to find a place of safety, to eventually come to a place they could call home. Their single piece of furniture, the large wooden trunk, specially built for their sea voyage to another country, was squeezed into this shed, the only safe place now on their valley allotment. All that they could save of their belongings had gone into that shed and, except for the battered suitcase which he clung to, with its precious irreplaceable photographs and documents, all their remaining material possessions were again placed into that one large trunk.

He ran callused fingers along the edge of the well-worn trunk, observed the buckled and twisted iron strips of its lid, the result of the journey’s transits. He bit his lip, thoughtful, as he swallowed hard. These past weeks had pulled the emotional strings too well. The Glen Davis shale factory was to be closed, the workers to be paid off in paltry fashion. His family’s place of refuge was now three feet under water, with no prospect of returning to it before leaving the valley. He blinked away tears of dismay. He had prepared himself for the ravages of war, eventually, during the bombings. But not for this devastation, here, in far away peaceful Australia. He looked out again from this higher vantage point, and saw in the distance a church spire swaying precariously on its roof in the town’s centre. Neither singly, nor combined, could the three established churches of the valley divine a secure future for its inhabitants.

He looked up into the gloomy sky, which pretended to lighten with the morning. Jimmy had been right about his loyal darker-skinned Benny and Tom: they did see things that their relatively new arrivals in the valley could not. They may not have predicted the ‘sit in’ within the dark caverns of the mine by a group of miners, nor the arrival of the controversial visiting ‘Players’ from a sophisticated city who acted out scenarios for them within those caverns, just days before the flood. But their totems sensed with greater accuracy the disaster which was about to befall the valley.

It was as if there had been a visitation on this natural primeval haven: that somehow the valley had disinterred some of the ancient spirits that continued to remain a mystery to all within it. Living with nature had its dangers. But living with misapplied man-made laws, and ignoring the laws of nature, had even greater perils. The Glen Davis shale mines, the Capertee Valley and all its inhabitants, old and new, would suffer a fate, both economic and emotional. And Peter and Evdokia were a part of this.