RIMKA 4 - REPOST

RIMKA

Zoya
Kosmodemyanskaya

Rimka didn't know that the wolves still lived in the forests, so close to Moscow. She lied about her age and managed to enlist in a women's brigade, who were sent to a farm to save the badly needed potato harvest, before the invading German Army would lay siege to Moscow. She lived to regret it.     How could she be so stupid as to run into the forest so late at night? She went to this farm to do something meaningful, to matter. The women in the brigade, however, immediately recognized a spoiled city girl, who in her life didn't do a day's work, and a Jewish one at that! They picked and picked on her, especially, that crazy Zoya. Today, Rimka couldn't stand it anymore. She lashed out, and she and Zoya had a terrific cat-fight, ending with Rimka running out of the hut, where the gleaners lived, and into the forest. She got lost immediately, poked here and there into the black prickly bushes, then found a clearing and decided to wait there until the morning. That's when she saw three pairs of glowing red eyed peering at her from the darkness. 
To say, she was scared, was not enough!

 

She felt sick with dread. She couldn't breathe or move. Then she heard her name shouted by several voices. The glowing eyes abruptly disappeared. After a few moments, Rimka found her own voice and called back. Zoya burst into the clearing. The beam of her flash light danced crazily around the trees, then settled on Rimka. "Come on, you, stupid city brat", - she said - "you cost us a whole night's rest!".                    Sobbing, Rimka clung to her enemy for dear life. She didn't know, - how could she, - that a year and a half later, while on a recon mission for the forest partisans (the Russian resistance movement), nineteen years old Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya will be captured by the Germans. She will be tortured and hung. She'll become one of the most revered Russian heroes.   

T

   MEYER


     "Well, if I get blown to pieces, at least it'll be in paradise!". Meyer looked around him in wonder. The approaching dark of the Moldovan evening has thrown blue haze on the hills and the valleys. The tiny silver ponds shivered in the breeze. The alabaster lilies danced on their surface under the clouds of gnats. The heather and the grasses gave off a head turning aroma. The frogs, the cicadas just began their nightly song. And thousands of stars looked down at the Earth with consternation. Even the mud on the road, where the soldiers walked, was glistening with unerring beauty.
     The two soldiers plodded on, Meyer carrying the spool of telephone wire, about four feet in diameter; his comrade, Wolfzon walked loaded with the tent, tools, wooden poles and the cooking utensils. He was also unreeling the wire from the spool on Meyer's back, laying a communication line for the approaching army. Usually, Lt. Serov would stride unburdened in front of them, giving instructions and feeling important. Today he walked a quarter of a mile back, and the soldiers knew why.

Red Army soldier

     Meyer heard the crash behind him and instinctively stooped down, covering his head with his hands and dropping the spool. Wolfzon swore, and Meyer rose up, to see his comrade take a joint out of his pocket and light it up with shaking hands. For once, Meyer didn't blame him.Three days ago he was shining Serov's boots, while the lieutenant sat in the chair and tried to sharpen a pencil with his pocket knife. The knife slipped and cut into Serov's thumb. Spitting curses, Serov jammed the thumb into Meyer's cheek, smearing blood all over his face. That was too much even for a meek Jewish boy. He punched Serov and sent him to the floor. Serov flew at Meyer, shouting that he'll see him court-martialed for striking the superior officer. Nothing came out of it, though, because Serov was known as someone who abused his soldiers and a raving anti-Semite. Today Serov chose Meyer and Wolfzon, the only two Jews in his unit, for this mission. They figured out why, when he refused to walk with them. The Germans had time to lay mines somewhere in the vicinity, and Serov tried to use this opportunity to get rid of the hated men.

     Meyer and Wolfzon helped each other to pick up their loads and set off walking again, Meyer praying to God in whom he didn't believe, and Wolfzon getting quietly high. In addition to smoking pot, he also dug out a bottle of hooch, and Meyer heard the musical sounds of the alcohol pouring into Wolfzon's mouth. No one could find drugs or booze better than Wolfzon. No matter, where the telephone unit was: how far in the countryside or in the most ransacked city; Wolfzon would lay his hands on anything that he could sniff, snort, take, drink or cook that would bring him the desired oblivion! It was a testament to the desperation of the Soviet government that a known drug addict and a flat-footed 18 year old boy were drafted at all!

WWII field
radio

     Twenty minutes later, and Wolfzon crushed to the ground again. He sat in the middle of the road, laughing and slapping mud on his face and uniform. Meyer sighed and dropped the spool. He yelled to Serov to catch up with them quickly. Serov approached, swearing. He calmed down though and his eyes took on a sly expression, when Meyer explained his idea. He would walk ahead by himself, laying the wire on the ground, and come back for them after he reached their destination and left the empty spool there. They would then be able to manage Wolfzon and the things he carried, as well as set the poles for the wire, which Meyer had laid earlier, so that it would be out of the way of the traffic. The lieutenant, obviously, thought, Meyer might get blown up anyway, and, if otherwise, they'll be able to complete their task.
     As Meyer walked off, he heard the thuds of the lieutenant's fists smacking into Wolfzon. Wolfzon just grunted and giggled in response to the blows.

     The night became darker. Walking backwards with a heavy spool and unreeling the wire was hard work. Even so, from time to time Meyer looked up at the stars and mouthed prayers that his grandfather taught him.

Yakov and Hannah,
Meyer's parents

     His mind went from praying to thinking of his family. His parents emigrated to Russia from Poland sometime after the World War I. His mother was an orphan, but she made a life for herself by taking on the cleaning and the sewing jobs. She had more money than her groom and even bought him a suit for the wedding! He was a happy man once, a loving husband and father. Yakov often played violin for his family and the guests. Anyone in need, even if they were complete strangers, were always welcome at his home for a meal or the shelter. Life beat the happiness out of him, but could not take away his charitable heart or the unique creativity with which he approached every task. Meyer moaned, thinking of how he wasn't allowed to go home to say goodbye to his dying father. A few months after that he received a notice: his brother, Samuel, was missing in action. Meyer shuddered to think, what his starry-eyed poet and a bookworm

brother went through in the war, before he disappeared somewhere in the bogs near Leningrad. At least Liev, his other sibling, was out of danger. He had a cushy posting in the supply corps. Meyer's mother lived in Moscow with her only daughter and the grandchildren. Meyer's mind flinched away from thinking about them. He couldn't do anything to protect them. 

        
     As he worked, the fear gradually dissipated. The spool was getting lighter. Meyer saw a crumbling wall of the abandoned village. He took a short rest in the club building, left everything there that he wouldn't need on the way back and set out to help Wolfzon and Serov. They had to drug Wolfzon between them, while Serov kept on a steady stream of dire threats and racial slurs. He insisted on putting unconscious Wolfzon in a separate hut for the few hours before the dawn.
    Usually, after drinking and doing drugs Wolfzon would be miserable in withdrawal and limp as a noodle, but on that morning he disappeared! They went out of the hut and looked around. The morning was quiet and ordinary. They saw Wolfzon, moseying toward them through a small apple orchard, chewing on an apple. He was weak but unharmed. Wolfzon finished the apple, spat the seeds and made a show of throwing the uneaten core back into the trees. 
     The blast of the explosion flung all of them to the ground. The earth clods and the pieces of the tree pelted them, as they writhed in mortal fear. Afterwards, they sat there, digging the dirt from their eyes and trying to hear through the ringing in their ears. Wolfzon, stone sober now, was pointing at what used to be an orchard and stuttering: "I w-w-walked through there j-just n-now!" Serov's pants were wet and sagging in the back.

The Soviet Army walking through Europe

RIMKA 3 -REPOST

RIMKA

At first, the stepmother treated Rimka really well; she taught and encouraged her. Rimka craved this kind of influence in her life. She especially liked their trips to the clothing shops or to the bazaar. After her step-sister was born, however, things started to change. It turned out, the step-mother didn't have enough room in her heart for a girl, who wasn't her own. She started to quietly mistreat Rimka and slowly turned her father against her.


RIMKA

     It's funny, how everything can come to a crushing end in a span of just a few minutes. On a warm autumn day, Rimka was coming home from school with a boy from her class. They stopped at the corner of her house, where the shade, filtered through the leaves of the old tree, was soft, cool and green. The boy suddenly kissed Rimka on the cheek and ran away. She was still looking after him, smiling, when she felt her father's hand on her shoulder. The next thing she felt was a slap on the face, 

Yakov

strong enough to send her to the ground. She looked up, uncomprehending: her father was looming over her, his face - livid with rage and disgust. He spat some words at her that she didn't understand, kicked her, and went away. The girl lay there, crying. The lady neighbor, who saw everything from her window, helped her up, 

and brought her to her house. For two days Rimka stayed there. In the misery of her mind, she slowly began to believe: all her insecurities and fears were, in fact, the reality. When she went home, her father wouldn't face her.
     What possessed Yakov to act that way? Was it because the boy who kissed Rimka was an Uzbeki, and she and her family were Jewish? No, Rimka's father and his wife were atheists and didn't adhere to any Jewish traditions. Was he still that hateful toward the people whom he fought in the war? Or, maybe, subconsciously, he was looking for an excuse to punish the girl, whose birth cost him his first love? In any case, it was her stepmother who informed Rimka, she was to go to Moscow to live with her Grandmother.
     The train trip back took forever. Near the city of Kazan, on the Volga-River, Rimka got sick and was taken off the train. She had malaria. When she, finally, made it to Moscow, she was a different person. Where before the adults saw a reticent child, now they found her fighting for attention and control. When she didn't get them, she became abrasive, especially with her Grandma, who wouldn't stand up for herself. People thought, it was just some normal teenage behavior.

MEYER


     Around 1938 Meyer's dad decided, they've had enough of the bitter Russian cold, and moved his family to Samarkand, the chaotic and wonderful Southern city. He couldn't find a job there, though, and went back to Moscow. The money he sent kept his wife and children fed, but his wife was not satisfied with that. She started to sell the blue laundry additive, that gave washed sheets the look of freshness. She sold it by tea-spoons and her family never wanted for nothing. Jacob and Liev soon rejoined them.
     Whatever the adults' worries were, the children had a grand time in Samarkand! Liev, true to his nature, found the way to sweeten up their lives. He taught his younger siblings to make little holes in the bags of dried figs or apricots carried to the bazaar by some Uzbeki merchants. Then Meyer or Samuel would just follow the fellows, picking up the delicious treats from the road, to be shared later with Liev and Rachel.               
      After they received punishment, when their next victim dragged them to their father by the ears, they decided, crimes against outsiders were too risky, and switched attention to their own house. Their mother kept a large chest filled with all kinds of treats: dried fruit, dried cakes and cookies, even just dried bread for a rainy day - in the living room. The kids managed to break the lock on one side of the chest and, little by little, began stealing from it. Unfortunately, they couldn't see so well, what they were taking, because the opening between the chest and the lid was too small. So, time to time, they would hurriedly stick something in their mouths and find that their greed was rewarded by some moldy item!
     The World War II arrived in the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Here it was called the Great Patriotic War. Samuel volunteered for the army on the morning after his High School Graduation and the Prom. They never saw him again.

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RIMKA 2 - REPOST

RIMKA

Yakov, Rimka and
Rita, her
step-mother

     When Rimka was ten, Yakov returned to Moscow with his new wife. Rimka was fascinated by her newly discovered parents. They were such a handsome couple, and they wanted to take her to live with them in Tashkent, the city in the Asian part of the country. She would've followed them to the Moon!
     

     
     Tashkent was like nothing she ever experienced, yet she loved all of it: the heat of the streets and the lush abundance of the gardens; the fruit growing everywhere. There were always people and music playing at her parents' house. Her dad and step-mother would hug her between them and dance to the latest record.


MEYER

    They lived in a small house in Moscow, sharing the yard with a few other families, as well as with their pets and flocks of fowl. Meyer had two brothers, Liev and Samuel, and one sister, Rachel, the undisputed leader of them all! The Grandfather was a grouchy, coughing, old man, ever with his nose in the Talmud.

            
     Once Jacob told him, he couldn't catch his boys, when he wanted to punish them. Grandfather consulted the rabbi. The next morning he and Jacob put the rabbi's advice to a test. Before the kids woke up, the grown-ups tiptoed to their beds, yanked the blankets off and started to whip them with the belts. The mother, hearing the children's screams and the adults' shouts, flew to her brood's defense. She put herself between the belts and the boys, catching the blows on her back and yelling at her husband, who adored her, to stop the punishment. In a few minutes the boys were sitting in their sheets, still wiping tears and watching their father first hugging his wife in remorse, then admonishing her. She called him a crazy Pollack and kissed his cheeks and shoulders.


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RIMKA 1 - REPOST

I am trying to determine, whether to repost Moriko or Rimka. I guess, I'll find out for sure, when I see the number of people, who "tune in" for either of the stories!                                                                     


CHAPTER 1

RIMKA

     He  awkwardly held a warm bundle, clutching his Red Army cap under the baby's bottom. He didn't see the wrinkled, red-faced child in front of him. In his mind, over and over again, he kept seeing his young wife, struggling to stay alive. Her beautiful face was swollen and inflamed, her body arching desperately as the seizures overtook her. And then, she lay lost, pale and empty. Yakov searched his heart for any tenderness toward the child in his arms, but all he could master, were the feelings of guilt and anger. The tall, handsome officer handed the baby to the nurse and quickly strode out of the maternity ward, his long army overcoat almost tripping him in the doorway. Three months later, still reeling from grief and all the blood he had shed, he'll write to his mother from the great Asian steppes, where he fought the enemies of the Soviet Union. He'll tell her about the death of his wife and about the baby who lay waiting in a small town hospital. 
Yakov couldn't know what the 

Grandmother Velya

abandonment of his daughter will cost her or her family.
     Grandmother Velya came to claim the little girl and took her back to Moscow. She called her Rimka and Rimka called her Momma. For a long while they were happy just to be together.


MEYER

Dad's father's real name was also Yakov. 
I changed the name to its English version of
Jacob to keep from confusing my readers. He is
here with his wife, Hannah.

        Meyer's dad heard a strange sound behind him. Standing on the ladder, he turned to look. Meyer gazed at his father's work with shining eyes and grinning from ear to ear. Ever since he was small, they noticed that he couldn't keep back this strangled laughter, whenever he encountered something beautiful. Right now, he watched his father, Jacob, painting the apartment and couldn't help admiring it. Instead of using just one flat color, Jacob made it look like the walls were draped in silk, by shading the tops and bottoms of the walls slightly darker and putting vertical lighter stripes and a pattern though the whole perimeter of the room, from top of the wall to the bottom, which made the effect of the light playing on silk even more pronounced.              Jacob smiled and returned to work. Meyer  was a lanky pre-teen, who always seemed to have a cold. His eyes were tiny and red rimmed, his ears stuck out of his head like huge mushrooms. Even so, he looked so amiable that almost everyone liked him immediately. His older brother, Lev, was the handsomest of the bunch: tall, with dark wavy hair and crinkly eyes, but he worried his parents the most.
     About a year ago, the family's 25 year old Russian helper, Daria, dropped a bomb: she was pregnant by 16 year old Lev. He confessed, in tears, but insisted that she seduced him. The family was

Here is my dad's whole family in
later years (excluding his brother, Samuel,
who disappeared in the WWII and father, who already died),
many years later. Dad is the third from the
left in the back raw.

mortified. Jacob wore out his belt, punishing Lev, then sent him to live with some relatives in Minsk. For many years after, he sent Daria money to support his grandchild, only to find out much later that Lev's daughter died in infancy. Daria tried to meet Lev again, but he's had enough of her. Neither Lev nor Jacob were ever the same after that affair.

Lev as an adult

MORIKO - repost

MORIKO

     Are you lonesome for some good story? A few months ago I wrote one about the events that could've happened in the Japanese side of my family. I called it

Moriko

      Bunsa saw the movement from the corner of his eye. Although there was nothing in these woods to harm him, an occasional highwayman could catch an unaware traveler. The forest was quiet and cool, and the sun beat on the path where Bunsa walked. He was not usually given to fancy imagining, but it seemed to him, that path was like his future: sometimes clear and sunny, sometimes disappearing around the shadowy bend of the mountain.
      Here it was again! Bunsa turned quickly and just managed to see a small fox lightly running among the trees. It was more gray than orange, the tail with it's white tip held cheerfully straight out.      As pragmatic as Bunsa was, "Kitsune", as the fox is called in Japan, was too strong of an omen to ignore, especially, taking into consideration the task for which Bunsa traveled to Nagano. A bride was waiting for him there, and the foxes were rumored to have an ability to assist in the matters of love. Was it a good spirit? Did he mean to trick Bunsa, or to become a faithful companion? Bunsa walked off the road, sat in the shade behind an ancient tree, took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He untied the kerchief from around his neck. Folded in it was all the food that he had left: three rice balls. He called out into the forest: "Kitsune-san, kitsune-san, come and have a meal with me!" Nothing happened. Bunsa saw some movement in the greenery to one side. He broke a piece off a rice ball and threw it there. Judging by the rapid scramble in the bush, he understood that, the fox accepted his offering.  Bunsa thought of a poet Issa's verse:"peeking out from the willow tree... face of a fox". He threw some more food to it, then ate one rice ball himself. It was so pleasant to sit there, with the rough bark of the tree at his aching back. Eventually, he slid down and closed his eyes. 
     When he came to, the birds were picking what was left of his last rice ball. He sighed and got up. What was he thinking? A fox was not going to help with his problems! Before Bunsa went around the bend, he looked back: the fox was nosing around in the place where he slept. Then it sat up and watched Bunsa go. The fox's small open mouth and crafty, squinted eyes made it look like it was smiling.

My husband's ancestor,
Bunsa Toyoda, on whose
life I based (more like made up) this story

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