LITMIR.BIZ

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to endure the pitching and tossing. He tattooed a blue anchor on the back of his left hand, and on his right arm a swift outline of a swallow in the flight—from the elbow to the wrist—pinching in his beak a tiny letter envelope (“fly with greetings…”); and he furrowed on his bitty minesweeper the vast expanses of the Black Sea, clearing it from the minefields which, actually, is what minesweepers are designed for.

      The main difference of naval mines with their land counterparts is that the sea species must be tethered or else they would scatter drifting astray to destroy any ship met on the way without checking whether she was “theirs” or “ours”. That’s why a cocked up sea mine is fixed with a steel cable to an anchor that grabs at the seabed. The mines—iron balloons filled with air and TNT—soar up in the water not reaching the surface though restricted by the cable length correlated to the depth on the sea route dealt with. And there the naval mines hover, a couple of meters below the surface, waiting for a passing ship to hit any of its spike-like detonators poked out the mine-shell in different directions like in a babyish sketch of the sun.

      Thanks to its shallow immersion, the Navy minesweeper passes over the minefield clear of being caught by detonator spikes. In its wake, the boat drags the long loop of thick steel cable over the bottom so as to cut the mines anchorage at the seabed and destroy the loose mines popping up to the surface. For that end a manned rowboat leaves the minesweeper heading towards the mine. The team's task is to fix a dynamite cartridge with the Bickford fuse onto the huge iron ball of the mine. (Which is performed not in a placid park pond but midst unsteady waves in the open sea with the mine's spherical skull heaving up above the rowboat and then falling under it, striving to ram with the horn of a detonator.)

      The final step is done by the boatswain from the stern board, a lit cigarette in the firm bite of his disclosed teeth not as a means to show off his daredevilry, it’s as a tool readied to set the fuse off. Now it’s caught fire and – Hup! Hup! Ho! Everyone pulls on with might and main, no shirkers at the oars. Away as far as possible from the hiss of the fuse dwindling to the final “BOOM!”—the TNT charge in a naval mine is meant to tear up the hulls of line battleships…

      When broken down into constituent elements, romantic heroism just melts away and maritime mine clearance starts to resemble the prosaic job of a tractor bumbling in a kolkhoz field. The minesweeper gets to the assigned water area and furrows it all day long, back and forth, with the cable released behind the stern; and on the following day – to the next area. On the whole, the minesweeper crew’s heroism consists in being a good team, and the fact that my father stayed alive resulted from their forthright cooperation.

      For example, at the end of a typical working day, Nikolai Ogoltsoff watched over the stern winch when he noticed a mine approaching the boat because its anchorage line got entangled with the minesweeper’s loop cable when it crawled over the sea bottom. Now it was being reeled back to the windlass drum. Too late to switch off the winch which would spin on by inertia for a short, yet sufficient, time to drag and slap the mine against the boat. Dad’s shirt stood off away from his body like the hide of a beast at the moment of utmost danger, and his roar, “Full Ahead!”, was full of such animal force that Captain on the bridge lightning-haste duplicated his order on E. O. T. sending the bell signal to the engine room, the mechanic, Dad’s shift-man, did his job promptly, the boat propeller churned up the wave whose pressure pushed the nearing mine off. So the team saved each other…

      Five years later there remained no unswept areas in the sea routes and my father was transferred from the minesweeper to a coastguard ship, again in charge of the diesel engine. The following year saw the end of his second term in the Navy service (because of the heavy losses in WWII, before new generations of draftees cropped up, the service term in the Soviet Army was doubled: 6 years in the Army, 8 in the Navy—yes, 2 years more and the only consolation that no other servicemen sport so spiffy breathtaking uniform, golden anchors and stuff) and they offered my father a job in a “mailbox”.

      ~ ~ ~

      At those times the USSR had lots of secret institutions, secret factories, and even secret cities, none of which had an ordinary postal address so as to fool enemy spies and leave them clueless about all those secret objects location. As a result, the addressee stopped living in any street or city, he lived in no region neither district and he was referred to in a pretty short way: “N. Ogoltsoff, Mail Box №***.”

      Since on his last furlough before the demobilization Red Navy man Ogoltsoff N. M. registered his marriage with Citizen Vakimova G. J., she landed up at the same “mailbox” in the Carpathian mountains.

      The “box” was not fixed up with a maternity hospital and for bringing me forth my mother had to visit the town of Nadveerna, thirty kilometers from the regional center, the city of Stanislavl (later renamed into Ivano-Frankivsk after the end-of-the-century Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko). Going out the "box" gave her the frightful jitters because vehicles on the roads were often shot at by the Bandera men.

      (…for a long time I considered the Bandera men bloody bandits and Nazi accomplices. What else to think of them if a full-scale military division named “Galichina” was manned by Western Ukrainians to fight against the Red Army? Then, gradually, it dawned on me that two years before the German invasion it was the Red Army who occupied Western Ukraine and assisted the Soviet secret police, aka NKVD, in executions and deportation of potential opponents to the Soviet system. Killed just in case, as a preventive measure, in thousands.

      Besides, what is a division when compared to an army? Among the German Wehrmacht’s comrades-in-arms, there also was the Russian Liberation Army (RLA) of almost one million servicemen fighting against the USSR.

      And last but not least, the rank-and-file Red Army men, participants in the events of that period, let me know that the Bandera men fought fiercely against both Soviet and German troops. They were Carpathian guerrillas defending their land against successive liberators, aka enslavers.

      Still, my parents all their life long considered the Bandera men savage bandits…)

      And even two years later, when my mother again was in need of the help by maternity hospital, the dogged machine-gun rounds still rumbled on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, but she could not hear them anymore because her husband had been transferred from one “mailbox” to another and left the Transcarpathia for the Valdai Upland…

      The change in the life circumstances of my parents resulted from a snitch-on letter sent to the Special Division of the previous “mailbox” from Konotop. It was composed by the people living in the same house with Galina Vakimova before her marriage.

      The house (in Konotop parlance “khutta”) of 12 by 12 meters was a divided property, half of which belonged to citizen Ignat Pilluta. The other half was equally divided between citizen Katerinna Vakimova with her children and citizens Duzenko with their daughter, so each of the two mentioned families owned an entrance hall, a kitchen, and a room.

      The daughter of citizens Duzenko married citizen Starikov who moved into her father’s part of the khutta. Seems, one kitchen and one room were not enough for all: both the young family and the in-laws. In order to increase their living space, Duzenko and Starikov learned the number of the mailbox where the demobilized Mariner took their former neighbor to and they composed their snitch-on letter for the box’s Special Division, whose foremost duty was catching spies, to inform SD that the father of Galina Vakimova (presently Ogoltsova) was arrested by the NKVD as people’s enemy but just before the war he somehow managed to return to Ukraine. Besides, during the years of German occupation, his house served the headquarters of the German troops. (Which was true in part, a Wehrmacht company headquarters was stationed in the Pilluta’s half of the khutta.) And with the approach of the Soviet Army, Joseph Vakimov fled together with the retreating fascists.

      Special Divisions at “mailboxes” were notoriously vigilant and merciless, so the relatives of Joseph, who disappeared in so treacherous anti-Soviet way, would certainly be arrested and—the informers were quite sure—at least, deported. Too bad, in their logical calculations or, sooner, aping a commonplace trick of the period, they neglected the time factor. By that moment Great Leader and Teacher of Peoples, Comrade Stalin, rested in peace already. The nuts tightened under his rule

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