In 2014, Victoria Belim came across a strange entry in her great-grandfather Sergiy’s notebook: “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.” Who was Nikodim? She had never heard the family talk of him. And why had he vanished? The mystery was made more urgent by Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the renewed fight for a free Ukraine. Having left the country at the age of 15, first for the US, then to settle in Brussels, Belim desperately missed it. And now she had a reason to go back: not just to visit her grandmother Valentina but to discover the truth about Nikodim.
Valentina lived in a village in central Ukraine, where Belim had spent happy years as a child, and was delighted to have her granddaughter back. But whenever she was asked about the past, she shrugged it off: “Now we must think about the future.” She avoided mention of the current war, too, except to complain that it had pushed up food prices. Her one preoccupation was her garden, in particular her cherry orchard, and she harassed Belim to help out.
Between gardening stints, Belim began inquiries about Nikodim. But the regional archives in nearby Poltava hadn’t survived the various upheavals of the 20th century: “It was as if they never existed.” She might have gone to the Rooster House, a mansion originally built to house a bank, later a home for the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police: the Cheka, NKVD and KGB. But she’d had a dread of it since childhood and its criminal files were closed to the public. Dismayed, she consoled herself by making friends with a woman called Pani Olga, whose archive was textural rather than textual: a collection of beautifully embroidered cloths. The secret of embroidering, she was told, was to do it “stitch by stitch”. It was the same with family research – Belim must be patient and take it step by step.
Part memoir, part detective story, the book records her stuttering progress. Valentina continued to be obstructive, resenting her granddaughter’s escapes to local towns (“We have potatoes to plant”) and ticking her off for weeding the strawberries too slowly. But while Nikodim remained a blank, Belim was learning about the persistence of Soviet ideology; even in the house there were portraits of Lenin that hadn’t been thrown away. Valentina, for her part, felt no nostalgia for the old regime. But Uncle Vladimir, the brother of Belim’s father, was a passionate admirer of Putin and believed the family “must be grateful to the Soviet Union for all the opportunities it gave us”; he dismissed Belim as a pathetic democrat who’d been “brainwashed” by the US. Before her trip the two of them had been arguing by email and Skype – about the 1930s Holodomor famine, Stalin, Chernobyl and the Maidan uprising – and fell out so badly that they broke off contact. Angry though she was, Belim could not deny the complexities of her identity. Her father was Russian. She used to say she came from Russia. Russia was inescapable – in 2014, horrendously so.
Slowly her visits to nearby settlements yielded more: she found her great-grandfather’s grave and met a distant relative. But when she mentioned Nikodim again, Valentina was stony-faced: “I forbid you to disturb the past.” Dazed and seemingly defeated, Belim discarded the research notes she’d taken in the hollow of a cherry tree. She might have walked out but for her mother arriving, after which Valentina loosened up and joined Belim on one of her local trips. The expedition stirred her to reminisce a little – she was a wonderful memory-keeper, if only those memories could be unlocked. Back in Brussels for the winter with her husband, Belim felt “bitter and angry”, begrudging “the elegant indolence of well-attired ladies walking their poodles in Parc Royal”. She longed to be back in Ukraine but her US passport meant waiting six months. More patience was required.
Patience is required of the reader, too. The ostensible setup for the book is a search to find the truth about Nikodim. But two-thirds in all we’ve had is a set of dead ends. The interest lies elsewhere, beyond narrative: in the intimate picture of life in rural Ukraine, the snapshots of its brutal history and, above all, the portrait of Valentina and her neighbours, whose planting schedules, “world crises notwithstanding”, make good sense, as if keeping their heads down and tending the land are a means of survival.
Just as it looks as if Belim is destined to fail, the breakthrough comes. After a trip to the city of Kharkiv, where she studied as a young woman, Valentina relents, promises to help and retrieves from a secret drawer an extensive dossier on another family member, Belim’s “law-abiding, flower-loving” great-grandmother Asya, who was released after questioning by the NKVD but lived in fear of the Rooster House for the rest of her life. An aside in the folder gives the date of Nikodim’s arrest: 1937. With that Belim can access his file in the archive division of the municipal jail in Poltava.
To anyone who knows even a little about Stalinism the charges against him won’t be at all surprising (“agitator of the population”, “anti-Soviet views”, “counter-revolutionary conspiracy”, etc), though the circumstances that brought his downfall are pertinent to the current context: he’d been a Ukrainian language teacher until “aggressive Russification” outlawed all manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism. Suspected of Trotskyism, he was interrogated and “confessed”. The torture that brought about the confession isn’t mentioned in the file. Nor is Moscow’s demand for a huge quota of arrests.
If the file leaves Belim numb, that’s not just from pity for Nikodim but because she has been repressing awareness of a more recent death: that of her father, who shot himself in California and didn’t leave a note. Nikodim, it turns out, is only part of the mystery she needs to solve, and finding the truth about this death means contacting Uncle Vladimir again, whose views she detests. It’s a bold sleight-of-hand in the final pages: the real story under the headline, with Belim also searching “for pieces of myself”.
By the end, reconciled to her family’s troubled past, she is no longer terrified of the Rooster House. Her internal war is over, though conflict between Ukraine and Russia has broken out anew. Looking back, she wonders “if we would be in this situation in 2022 had the world cared about my country more in 2014”. She knows which side she’s on but her picture of a divided Ukrainian family shows how deep the divisions can be – and how to heal them means overcoming decades of silence, secrecy and denial.
• The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Memoir is published by Virago (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
