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days apart. Oksanka was already gone. She died three days before I was taken to prison. It was, by now, against the law to bury them in the orchard, as was the custom. My angels' bodies were thrown on a cart, piled on top of other bodies. An image haunts me—my little Marussia, Halynka, and Tarasko being tossed from the cart into a pit outside the village without even a prayer .. . My only reason for living was Fed'ko. We roamed the fields in search of fallen grains among the stubble in the harvested fields. We no longer feared being shot for this crime against the commu nist state. I was a fugitive and had to hide. But I had to work, and there was no other place for a peasant to work but the collective farm. Fed'ko was afraid and begged me not to go. I promised him that I would return. I promised ..." Mother always broke down when she reached this part. Anticipating this, I sobbed. When we had both calmed down a little, she continued: "I was standing in line with the other peas ants. When my turn came, the brigade leader asked my name without lifting his head. When I re sponded, he shifted his eyes to a list then stood up and pointed a finger at me, shouting, 'You, Evdokia Kononivna Boyko, are a fugitive from Soviet law! People like you are a threat to our state. You shall serve your term in full!' My whole world crumbled again. Oh, my dearest child. The Lord only knows where I got the strength to answer the man. I shouted at him, 'If your children were dying from starvation, wouldn't you have run away to save them?' He lowered his eyes in silence, and I was taken away to serve the remainder of my five-year sentence." In 1937, my mother was one of thousands of prisoners going to Siberia. She had volunteered to go for she had lost all hope. In Poltava, the prisoners were let out of the wagons and told to kneel in rows, facing the sunset. A few dozen prisoners were freed, my mother among them. Blinded by the sun, she heard, "Evdokia Kononivna Boyko, you are free." She did not move. She thought it was a dream. The voice repeated, "Evdokia Kononivna Boyko, you are free." At the prosecutor's office were two letters waiting for my mother, letters written by her former prison wardens, both recommending that she be freed because she was a hardworking, honest peas ant— indispensable for building the Soviet state. I can only image how she must have run, or rather, how she flew on wings of joy from Poltava to find my brother Fed'ko. Her happiness, however, was short lived. That same year, pregnant with my older sister, she was arrested again, accused this time of drowning a swine in a water tank while on her night watch shift at the state pig-breeding farm. The indictment stated that my mother, al ready a 'class enemy' of the Union of Soviet Social ist Republics, had drowned a swine and was work ing against progress in the planned economy of the state. The trial lasted two years, with my mother facing a 10-year sentence. She was saved by a cou rageous veterinarian who risked his life to testify on her behalf: The swine had died of natural causes. A necropsy revealed that there was no water in the swine's lungs. The communist system, however, did not allow livestock to die. Fearing dismissal or even imprisonment, the farm leader had dropped the dead swine into the tank, conveniently pointing at my mother as the guilty one. She was, after all, already an enemy of the state. * * * Poltava greeted me with a dense grayness that penetrated both faces and nature. In the heavy fog, the naked leaves resembled giant skeletons. One could feel and even smell despair in the air. So this was my Ukraine! Pounding in my head was a single thought, "What have they done to your soul and beauty?" A solemn Panakhyda was held in the tower, the only structure still standing among the ruins of what was once the historic Uspensky Cathedral dy namited by the Soviets. The angel voices of the children's choir echoed, "Vichnaya Pamiat' . . . Vichnaya Pamiat' . . . Vichnaya Pamiat'" in memory eternal of Marussia, Halynka, Tarasko, Oksanka, and Fed'ko: "May the Lord safeguard them where all the righteous rest." After the evening gloom, the morning was bright and crisp. I was on a mission to fulfill the most sacred part of the promise made to my mother, to stand on the ground where my ancestors lived
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