Tim & Tigon, page 18
I lost Dad for some time. Then, as we entered a tract of forest, he seemed to return. I slowed to a walk, breathing in the tang of rotting leaves that littered the ground. Dad walked to my left in his shorts and hiking boots, carrying one of his weathered old daypacks. We stopped momentarily as he leant over and lifted a plant from under a tree. Cradling it in his palm, he brought it over and held it up. I was back in the Australian bush, one of the many times when he’d turned to me and said, ‘Tim, isn’t life amazing?’ Back then I hadn’t understood what he meant, though I could see from the look in his eyes that he was right. Now he looked up at me in the saddle, his eyes alight. We rode on together.
So many times by phone and email we had talked about him joining me on this adventure. Since resigning from work he had taken an interest in the histories and cultures of the countries I travelled through, and read many books on the subject. But neither of us had committed to the idea. I had missed the opportunity, and as the edge of the forest drew near I began to sob.
The farm director in Kodyma agreed to take in my animals while I headed back to Australia. Just forty-eight hours later I walked out through Australian customs. Then they were there: Mum with her pale face and wet blue eyes, Jon behind her, nervously grinding his teeth. I was the eldest child, and Jon was my junior by two years, although as he leant over and hugged my skinny frame he felt like my elder.
Natalie and Cameron were there, too, but it wasn’t until we made the two-hour drive home that it felt like we were all finally reunited. Natalie had some good news: although neither she, Jon, nor I had answered Dad’s email, Cameron had.
It wasn’t long before I learnt the sad details of Dad’s passing. On the previous Thursday, the day of Dad’s accident, Mum hadn’t been expecting him home. He had spent the week helping out at a surf lifesaving camp at Sandy Point – a small beachside town a little more than an hour’s drive from home, where we had always holidayed as a family in the summer. He had promised to be back on Friday morning.
Sometime early Thursday evening there had been a knock at the front door. This was odd – anyone who had been to our home knew that the back door was the proper entrance.
It was the police. At about 4.30 pm that day there had been a head-on collision on a stretch of the South Gippsland Highway – the road we always travelled from home to Sandy Point. A man carrying Dad’s identification had died instantly at the scene.
In the afternoon I slipped away and had a nap in my old bedroom. I was badly jet-lagged, and woke feeling groggy and disoriented. I stumbled down the hallway into the living room. Surely if I sat there long enough, something would break the silence – perhaps Dad would talk to me, or walk through the door.
As I closed my eyes I heard the screen door open. In my mind I heard his work bags land on the floor and his shoes come off, but when I opened my eyes and looked up it was Mum. She had come running to hold me.
The house was filled with guests, and we spent much of our time organising the funeral. Finally, we had chosen a coffin and Dad had been returned from the coroner. On the eve of the funeral I lay awake, hearing the odd creak of a bed and the rustle of possums on the roof.
I was still struggling to adapt to Australian time, but more than that I craved the calm of night, which held me close to Dad.
The darkness moved slowly until a cack cack from a magpie finally sounded, then the warbling of a hatchling. Pale light cracked through the cypress trees, and a thrush hopped by the window.
I couldn’t lie there any longer.
From the back corner of the wooded yard I gazed out over the paddocks towards the emerald hills of the Strzelecki range. A fox and her cubs appeared, moving stealthily across the dew-laden grass.
To the east I fixed my eyes on large eucalypts that stood silhouetted against the blanket fog. Dad loved these ancient trees, so much so that they were somehow inseparable from him. How could they still be here, continuing to exist as if everything remained as it had always been?
The funeral passed, then the wake, then the memorial service at his university, and gradually the visitors and letters of sympathy slowed to a trickle.
Since receiving the news about Dad, there had only been room to deal with grief, but as time wore on the journey re-emerged. I received emails saying that Tigon was well, but missing me. The horses, however, had been hastily left at the farm, where they were tied up in a barn with dairy cows. I wasn’t sure if the men there had managed to remove their horseshoes, or how often they saw daylight. Fodder was scarce, and it was a big thing to ask strangers to feed three extra horses.
I had to make a decision. If I left it much longer, I might not have horses to return to. But I was the eldest of four children and it didn’t feel right to abandon everyone so soon. I knew that Dad would have wanted me to continue, however, and I simply couldn’t abandon my animals.
So in March, four months after arriving in Australia, I was back at Melbourne Airport, feeling as if I had left my horses too long but was leaving too soon.
17
Road to Recovery
On a brisk, early spring morning in Kodyma, Ukraine, a small crowd of farm workers gathered to see me off. Among them were the many generous people who had looked after my animals while I was gone. For the four and a half months that I had been in Australia the farm’s owner had not charged me a cent. I shook his hand and presented him with an Australian Akubra hat and oilskin coat. In return he raised three toasts of vodka for a safe and successful journey to Hungary.
It was at that point, compass around my neck, that I hauled myself up onto Taskonir, shouldered my backpack and, with Tigon out the front pulling hard on his lead, set off once more.
At first I rode slowly and carefully beyond the town, struck by the rather drab surroundings. Although winter had ended, the land was yet to spring back into life. Grass lay flattened and bleached of colour, furrowed fields were thawing into mud, and trees were mostly bare. The land seemed at its lowest of spirits – which was also the way I felt. It wasn’t a pleasant time of year to re-start my journey, but it wouldn’t have felt right to return to the bloom of spring or the gaiety of summer either.
If my condition mirrored that of the land, then the condition of the horses was a worrying sign of where my journey was at. I had arrived in Ukraine to find Kok, Taskonir and Ogonyok in a cow barn where they had been tied up for the better part of four and a half months. Their muscles had withered away, their hooves had grown out, and their winter coats were matted with muck. When I saw them, I realised that reaching Hungary would not be a simple matter. Though I had already travelled around 8000 kilometres, the momentum had vanished, and I was still more than 1000 kilometres from the Danube River. These next few weeks would be a journey of spiritual and physical recovery.
There was one last important moment before I could truly get moving. Not far beyond Kodyma I turned onto a muddy trail and pulled the horses into a familiar meadow. Winter had preserved the ghostly footprint of my tent from the previous year. I dismounted and lay on the earth. It was the last place where I had slept and woken while Dad was alive. Beyond this point lay horizons to which I had never been, and which, without Dad, seemed more fraught with danger than ever.
Before remounting I noticed the yellow of a solitary dandelion that had blossomed. With it firmly pressed into my pocket, I moved on.
That night a spring snowstorm swooped, and raged on into the next day. I decided to stay put, and spent the day listening to the snow rap against the tent, and the rise and fall of Tigon’s chest. I had sorely missed the sound of Tigon’s breathing. His breath brought a comfort that was hard to describe. It was as if Tigon’s presence turned the hostile world into a warm and friendly home. For hours I gently caressed his body, from his toes to his ears. Every time I stopped, even for a nanosecond, he would paw me and let out a kind of impatient growl. He was long overdue for my attention, and he was letting me know it.
The storm had given us just enough time to gather some energy, and come the following morning, anticipation of the new day had built. Tigon lay next to me, with one ear cocked and an eye half open, biding his time until I moved. When I rose, he leapt feverishly to his feet, and together we jammed our heads through the tent entrance. The sun was nudging its way into a solid blue sky and sending golden fragments of light splintering through the snow-covered grass.
After packing up I rode quietly through empty meadows before cresting a hill overlooking the village of Horodkovka. The onion-shaped cupolas of an Orthodox church rose gracefully above a huddle of timber homes, like a priest towering over his flock.
As I rode down the hill we met a funeral procession going in the opposite direction. Leading the march was an elderly man carrying a heavy wooden cross. His face was a landscape of shadowy ruts draining tears from glassy blue eyes. Beyond him and a crowd of mourners rumbled an old truck with an open coffin in the back. The person who had died – presumably the man’s wife – was an elderly woman, her pale, uncovered face lightly warmed by the sun. Two children sat in the back, holding her in place as the truck wobbled its way up the road to the grave.
As I turned to move on, the land ahead seemed touched by beauty and sorrow. It felt as if we, too, were passing through the gates into another dimension.
From Horodkovka I tracked west, rising to high plains and dipping into deep river valleys. Passing through a string of villages helped draw me away from sad thoughts. Most were nestled on the steep valley sides and on riverbanks, tucked away from the cold wind. I seldom stopped, registering only the greetings as I went.
In Dakhtaliya an old man yelled, ‘Hey, sell me your horses.’
In the next village, Netrebivka: ‘Hey, Gypsy, where are you going?’
On the cobbled, windy streets of Hnatkiv: ‘What’s this caravan?’
In Stina, a lady pointed in horror at my packhorses: ‘Hey, stop! You have lost your passengers! They must have fallen off!’
It took a couple of weeks before I began to feel the stirrings of life returning – both inside me, and in the land around. I smiled for the first time in months one clear morning when I opened the tent door to see the horses making the most of their rediscovered freedom.
Ogonyok was irrepressible – erupting in fly kicks, shaking his neck, and teasing the others into play fights. Kok was more than happy to join in, rearing on his hind legs and softly biting at Ogonyok’s neck.
When the sun rose a little higher and the air turned warm and friendly, Taskonir dropped to the ground with a sigh, then stretched out on his side and closed his eyes. Kok joined him, lying opposite, followed by Ogonyok. Together they lay there, breathing in the promise of spring. The snow and rain had washed away all traces of their ordeal in the barn, and their bodies rippled and shone with vitality.
Tigon took the opportunity to get up close and sniff around the horses. Then he wriggled around on his back, paws punching at the air, chewing lazily on grass. When he was done with that he sprinted circles around camp and cocked his leg on everything in sight. Eventually he lay upside down, playing dead – legs in a tangle, tongue hanging slack, back legs wide apart, proudly displaying his jewels to the sky.
My animals weren’t the only ones who had rediscovered their vigour. Not long after setting off that day, a wiry little man pulled up in his car and surveyed me with astonishment. ‘What’s this? It’s my dream! I’ve always wanted to travel like a free Cossack!’ he exclaimed, grabbing my hand with both of his and shaking like a madman. ‘You are coming to my village! To Rovnoye! Follow me!’
In the evening I sat at a long wooden table jammed with burly farmers. ‘Pork fat is life! Sport is your grave!’ they chuckled, slapping their bellies and pouring vodka. ‘Eat and drink! This isn’t Russia, where they drink a lot and eat little. We eat a lot and drink a lot!’
My time in the village was marked by a visit to the local primary school. The principal – a fiery lady with red permed hair – ordered the children out into the front yard. There, as she shook my hand and kissed me on the cheek, Tigon proceeded to stick his snout under her dress, then flicked his nose up, lifting the dress up for all to see. Everyone erupted in laughter, then descended on Tigon. While numerous pairs of hands reached out to stroke him, he sat like a prince, then surrendered to a lying position, spreading his back legs in an effort to direct scratches to his belly.
When things had settled down I was ushered into a classroom, where the students divided their attention between this funny Australian and the dog.
‘How many kilometres a day do you travel?’ they asked, before someone else piped up: ‘What do you eat?’ ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ ‘When do you wash?’ ‘Is Tigon a father?’
Their questions were simple and the right ones to ask, unlike adults, who were full of astonishment that I hadn’t been killed along the way. Before setting off, I had never worried about death, bureaucracy, conflict, drunkards, or robbers. I had come here to have an adventure, and live the kind of dream that most forget when they grow up.
I left the school feeling light and happy in a way that I could barely remember. And yet, the most uplifting of encounters on this road to recovery was yet to come.
A week later I willed the horses into the village of Dumaniv in search of food supplies. I had only just dismounted when yet another invite came my way: ‘Don’t even think about it! Sleep here! You will eat what we eat! Sleep where we sleep! We won’t offer more, we won’t offer less,’ said a man before I even had a chance to introduce myself.
My host, Valeri, led me home and doled out hay and grain. By nightfall I had scrubbed myself clean and sat reborn at the dinner table. Across from me sat Valeri and his father, Volodomor. But it was his grandmother, Ferona, who really fascinated me.
She sat at the table practically jumping out of her skin. ‘I might be ninety-three, but I can still thread the eye of a needle, no sweat! And every day I go barefoot to the hills with my goats!’
Her body was miniature and shrunken, but her eyes held the sparkle of youth. She opened a Bible. ‘I only learnt to read at the age of eighty-three! My son taught me so that I could read the Bible before I die.’ With a giant magnifying glass trembling in her hand, she read aloud. I listened intently, astonished to have met a woman who had survived every violent event of Ukraine’s past century. By the time she turned thirty, Ferona had witnessed a revolution, and the horrors of World War II.
Like most survivors of her generation, however, Ferona told me the event that had most affected her was what was known in Ukraine as Holodomor – a tragic famine that many historians still consider the genocide of the Ukrainian people at the hands of Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Mass starvation had begun in the Ukraine during the winter of 1931–32 after poor weather conditions caused the failure of crops. Rather than helping, Soviet authorities continued to demand unrealistic quotas of grain production from farms. When these quotas could not be met, rural Ukrainians were accused of thieving the harvests. While the meagre supplies of grain were locked in storage and shipped away, authorities punished anyone found with bread, wheat, or any other grain that was in their home.
Ferona told her story almost as if it were yesterday: ‘To keep us alive my father hid a bag of wheat in between the stones in the wall of our house. One day the authorities found it, and Papa was sent away to a labour camp in Russia. We never heard from him again. I survived on grass and the old leaves of sugar beets,’ she said.
As tragic as the first winter had been, it paled in comparison to what followed. By the middle of the winter of 1932–33, people were dropping dead in the fields, on the roads, in their homes. Even then, Ferona explained, the authorities ‘came to ask for taxes on everything – the trees in our yard, our animals, all our possessions’. When her family could pay no more, they were evicted and locked in jail. The authorities stole everything remaining in their house.
The government, it seemed, tried to ensure that people could not survive. Food aid from outside the country was blocked at the border, and when villagers resorted to eating cats and dogs, quotas for dog and cat skins were suddenly invented. When people began eating wild birds, rodents and fish, Stalin proclaimed that all living things were owned by the state. By the summer of 1933, an estimated seven million Ukrainians had starved to death.
In the morning Ferona took me down to the velvety grass by the riverbank with her four goats. She had promised to sing for me, and after tethering her little crew she put her hands together in prayer and wet her lips.
I was born in Ukraine
I lived here a long, long time
Now they are sending me away
What is happening to me?
They will send me out of Ukraine
They will send me away
Oh, oi oi oi
I am leaving small children behind
And adults go away with me
My small children are not ill
Other people will feed them
And I will be in Siberia
Remembering my children.
From her crumpled, shrunken body came a deep, gravelly voice. It wavered a little at first, but soon strengthened.
And who’s going to feed him
When he’ll be on his deathbed?
And who’s going to feed him?
How is he going to live?
She brought her hands to her face and tears ran over her fragile eyelids and down the worn, eroded gullies of her cheeks.
Avoiding villages, I camped in hidden valleys and cut through fields and forests. At night I sat by the campfire, feeling the cool air on my back and the glow of coals on my face. I listened to the horses grazing and watched the moon rise into clear, starry skies.
I walked a knife-edge of emotions. While Ferona would probably pass away peacefully, Dad, who had lived in one of the safest countries on earth, had met a violent end. Was it destiny? Luck? Or was life just random? How was it that Ferona seemed to have the happiness of a child even though she had seen the very worst of humankind?
