Woman in Exile

The long lines of freight trains continued to stand parallel to Horodetska Street at the Lviv Railroad depot all night as trucks kept pulling up to the trains, hauling in people to be deported. An elderly lady, brought into the boxcar almost simultaneously with us, was carried in on an armchair. Another woman followed her, weeping and carrying old-fashioned bags and suitcases. These two became our neighbors on this road to hell. How this semi-paralyzed little old lady could possibly have posed any threat to the Soviet Union was surely beyond anyone’s comprehension. Maybe someone wanted her living quarters or perhaps she was related to someone who had been arrested. No one cared whether she was young or old, frail or healthy. She was simply something on some list that had to be attended to—and checked off. But the woman who was brought in together with the elderly lady was another matter altogether. She was a nurse. It was her job to care for the old lady. When the Red Army soldiers, armed with clubs and guns, entered the apartment of the "countess" (that’s the name we gave her during our journey, so that’s how I will refer to her), it was the nurse who came out to meet them. But they noticed that her name was not on their list. She was not their concern. They needed only that enemy of the people, the countess. This was the first wave of deportations and no one knew where we were being taken, whether to prison or elsewhere. The “nurse” (this is how the countess referred to her, so I will too), tried to convince the soldiers that the countess was frail and ill, that there could be no possible reason for them to take her. But her arguments met a stone wall of indifference. She then declared that she would not let the old lady go alone and began packing things into the countess's old-fashioned black bags. It then dawned on the Red Army guards that she intended to go with her charge. At first they were completely dumbfounded and then they began to protest. But the nurse paid no attention at all to them. She began to dress the countess and prepare her for travel. A few telephone calls were made to the "powers that be" but the Red Army guards were in a hurry because dawn was breaking and they had to complete their "work" while it was still dark. They grew tired of trying to explain everything and so they took both women. Difficulties arose when they tried to move the countess as she was too feeble even to stand on her own. Finally, they seated her in the armchair and together with the weeping nurse took them, chair and all, to the station. Once again they asked the nurse, if she really intended to go. She confirmed that she did. "Well, if you want to—then to hell with you!" they said and with a rumble they slammed the door shut. All day the elderly woman sat in her armchair, but some arrangement had to be made for her to rest at night. My mother decided not to use the pallet we had made for her from the wicker trunk and the smaller bundles. She insisted that the old invalid needed some sort of "bed" more than she herself did. And so my mother spent the entire three week trip in a sitting position while the old countess either sat in her armchair or lay on our basket. Toward the end of our journey she almost never rose. She was not only physically ill. Apparently she had been housebound for quite some time. She had grown accustomed to the confined space of her room, to its familiar objects, to the same people, the same habits, the same atmosphere, and the same way of life, settled now for years. Suddenly finding herself in a boxcar, amid a crowd of strangers, and under the most primitive circumstances it was not surprising that her state of mind became unbalanced. Perhaps at first, she was aware of her unusual surroundings, but soon everything became jumbled in her aged brain. The present and the past became entwined and fused into one. Her only link to reality was the nurse. The countess was sufficiently aware to know that we were all going somewhere by train and she kept giving the nurse such pathetically comic instructions as, “Be sure to reserve two hotel rooms," or "Hire a porter, don't carry the bags yourself, they're heavy..." Whenever we managed to read the name of a station that we passed along the way, and the name would reach her ears, the countess would ask who owned this village. Sometimes she would supply the name herself. "Oh yes," she would say, "This belongs to the Liubomirsky family," or "This group of villages belongs to the Vesolovskys. I've been here!" And then she would recall the names and events—the balls, the weddings, the funerals—that had brought her there. The nurse sometimes became a bit impatient, sometimes a bit embarrassed by the elderly woman’s incoherence. At first she attempted to explain our predicament to her. Then she gave up. She must have come to the conclusion that a clear sense of reality wouldn’t be helpful to the countess anyway. The train remained slightly longer in Kyiv. The countess demanded from the nurse that they disembark. She had been here before. She knew that it was a lovely city. She recalled some hotels where they could stay. She did not want to travel any further. In her mind, of course, this was pre-Revolutionary Kyiv. From her comments it was apparent that she had once lived in this part of Ukraine and her married name testified to her husband's Ukrainian ancestry. The countess' semi-coherent speech, her confusion of the past with the dark present of the crowded boxcar, lent her words a curiously tragic, surreal quality. Days passed. The countess became increasingly weaker. Lying on the hard basket, her thin frail body developed bed sores. Very little water was available. We were allowed, occasionally, to draw water from wells at the train stations, but the small bottles and pots which we used were hardly adequate containers for drinking water, much less so for washing. So the old body of the poor lady began to waste away. Each time we lifted her, the smell of her festering wounds filled the boxcar. Then we had to clear the way to the little window, to open it and let in some fresh air. The poor old dear began to ask, with increasing regularity, to be lifted. With childlike cunning, she would announce that she needed "to go." Then the nurse, with someone’s help (frequently, my brother’s), would seat her on the toilet which we had improvised from a chair, More often than not, the need turned out to be a false alarm. Then they would carry her back to her "bed." More and more, she wanted to make this trip from trunk to toilet and then back again. At the same time it seemed as if she was growing increasingly heavier, and the task became more and more difficult. Primarily it was because the nurse herself was losing strength. Only her kindness and gentleness never waned.