“They are going to give you their samovar!”
It’s my daughter-in-law Katharina speaking. She has just rushed from the kitchen to the living room of an apartment in the Belarussian village of Chaussy, where I am already struggling with feelings of discomfort around the culturally fraught issues of generosity and appreciation.
There is no time to collect my thoughts. Inga and Alexei are standing in front of me; he is holding the elaborately decorated family samovar in his arms.
This story began on an early July morning two and a half years earlier, when Jack and I first greeted a sleepy ten-year-old with an elfin face framed by dark hair and punctuated by protruding ears. He emerged with half a dozen other children from a van that had carried them 700 kilometers from the Toronto airport to the small northern Ontario city of Sault Ste. Marie. The children stumbled off the van into a circle of families who had gathered to greet them. Their group leader was the last one off, carrying a single page which assigned one child to each family.
“And your boy speaks a little English,” she said as she introduced us to the skinniest child of the group. “Viktor was with another Canadian family two years ago, but it didn’t work out.”
Two years before he had been eight, the age at which most of these children first left the security of their families to fly halfway around the world and spend the summer with strangers. Several of the children arriving on that early morning were returning for a second or third year; they knew their Canadian families and were welcomed with enthusiastic hugs. But Viktor hung back. I took a good look at him: a handsome child in shorts and a tee shirt, all ribs, knees, and elbows. He moved to stand with me and Jack, but it felt too soon for hugs.
These children were all from Chaussy, a small town in southern Belarus, which had the dubious distinction of finding itself directly under the cloud of radiation moving north from Ukraine after the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor. They were part of a program, Children of Chernobyl, run by the Canadian Relief Fund for Chernobyl Victims in Belarus, an organization that brought children from the affected area to participating countries for the summer, giving their immune systems a rest from the constant barrage of radiation. Communities all over Canada and in much of Europe offered summer homes to these young Belarusians, providing them with fresh air, fresh food, medical and dental care.
When Viktor arrived at our house on that early July morning in 1998, his first act was to unzip his tote bag and proudly present us with gifts from his family: traditional Russian nesting dolls, delicately crocheted doilies, a photo book about Belarus, and a bag of hard candies.
He was slow to use what little English he had. For the first few days, his only word was “wow!” The house itself: wow! His own bedroom: wow! The dishwasher: wow! Our golden retriever: wow! Two cars? Wow! I squirmed as I began to see our affluence through his eyes. One day, when I opened the door to an attic-like storage area above our kitchen, he peered into the dusty space, cluttered with accumulated, no-longer used possessions, and uttered a new word: Why? At that moment, I was grateful for the language barrier. It was a question I couldn’t answer.
He was a shy, solitary boy, rejecting most opportunities to join in with our friends’ children or even his peers from Chaussy. Was this why his first summer in Canada had gone badly? Or was he just too young? Whatever the reason, he fit well into our recently-emptied nest. He rode his bike, ate mountains of fresh fruit, avoided vegetables, built exotic structures from lego, played with the dog, and watched as much television as we would allow. He learned to drive the riding lawnmower—after asking why we had such a big lawn. We enrolled him in a two-week YMCA camp where he learned to swim and to paddle a kayak. We took him for medical and dental examinations—offered gratis by our family doctor and dentist. Although painfully skinny, he was deemed healthy. He endured a couple of small fillings without complaint.
Using his growing English vocabulary and stick figure drawings, he told us that he had an older sister, Anna, who was spending her summer with a family in Germany, that his mother worked in an office, and that the family had a “dacha”—a cabin in the country where they had a small vegetable garden. It was never clear what his father did.
By the time he left at the end of the summer, we had fallen in love with this little boy. We sent him home with vitamin pills for the whole family, garden seeds, gifts for his sister, and miscellaneous small kitchen gadgets that he coveted for his mother, as well as aluminum foil and zip lock bags.
The second year, he brought us an ornamental doll made from flax threads, a bottle of vodka, and several crocheted antimacassars which he told us his grandmother had made especially for us. He also brought a letter from his mother—translated by one of the organization’s Canadian representatives—asking for an eye examination. Viktor was having trouble reading in school. And she wondered if we could send her moisturizing creams and cosmetics.
By the end of that second summer, Viktor’s English was close to fluent and we were beginning to see signs of a bright, inquisitive mind. He offered opinions about Russian aggression in Chechnya (“not good”), talked about the Mir space station’s name, “Peace”, and told us about the gigantic mushrooms growing on the radioactive forest floor near his home. We sent him home with a pair of glasses perched on his nose, vitamins, garden seeds, more foil, plastic wrap, used plastic grocery bags, and moisturizers, lipstick, and nail polish.
Not long after he left that year, we learned that our son, Galen, and his wife, Katharina, were planning to spend a year studying in Moscow, and I began to hatch a plan. I wanted to meet Viktor’s family and see this little village that sent its young away to live with strangers every summer, a painful migration forced by love and circumstance. I arranged to spend two weeks with Galen and Katharina in late October, with a side-trip for the three of us to Belarus.
#
On October 31, 1998, at five am, we arrived after a sleepless night on the train from Moscow to Mogilov, Belarus, where Viktor’s mother, Inga, met us along with a neighbour who had a car—a car that struggled to make the forty-minute drive through the still-dark Belarussian countryside to the family’s apartment building on the edge of Chaussy.
Despite evidence of recent construction and the smell of new plaster, the boxy building managed to seem run down. But the apartment itself was nicely finished and well furnished. I was shown directly to the master bedroom which was to be mine for two days. Inga and Anna, Viktor’s sister, would sleep in the living room; Galen and Katharina were given Viktor and Anna’s room; Viktor and his dad, Alexei, would sleep in the family’s “other apartment”—which I gathered was where they used to live and was somehow still theirs. It’s also where their phone was, which explained the difficulty we’d been having contacting them from Moscow.
Inga went straight to the kitchen and began preparing a feast. I followed her, offered help, but she shushed me out of the kitchen. No amount of protest was about to alter my status as guest of honour, so I sat with Galen in the living room waiting for Viktor to get up. Katharina was allowed to help, so she was chatting with Inga in the kitchen. She, whose cultural awareness was far greater than mine, assured me that I should feel honoured by all this activity on my behalf. It was, in effect, a gift. The first in a series of ill-conceived gifts.
I had been eager to see Viktor in his own home, to see his smile beam at seeing me. But when he finally got up, he was sullen and quiet. Of course. My imagination hadn’t taken into account that he was twelve years old and showing his Canadian “mom” a life I knew he considered inferior. No zip lock bags. No aluminum foil. He turned on the television which, throughout our visit, played an endless series of old American westerns with Russian voices dubbed over the still slightly audible English.
Inga served the feast around 9:30—salads, cold cuts, bread, cake, and champagne. Both Galen and Katharina could function in Russian, and conversation drifted around me on the wisps of Alexei’s cigarette smoke. Although guest of honour, I felt barely present. After the meal, I slipped back to the bedroom and brought out the gifts I’d brought for the family. I gave Alexei and Inga theirs, but something was wrong. I didn’t know what. They were not large gifts—more cosmetics, a small jack knife, a book about Canada—not unlike the gifts they sent to us, or that we sent back for them. But the air had become thick with excessive gratitude, bordering on rebuke.
As I began to hand Viktor his package, Inga spoke, and Katharina translated. “Later. You should sleep now.” I had been ordered out of the kitchen, banished to the living room where Viktor was ignoring me in favour of the television, my gifts were obviously somehow inappropriate, and now I was being ordered to bed. Nothing was going according to my plan.
I got up at noon to find the table set for yet another meal—this time chicken with all the salads and breads from earlier. And another bottle of champagne.
As soon as we finished eating, Galen and Viktor prepared to go with Alexei to get our return tickets to Moscow. I began putting on my shoes to walk along, but was “not allowed.” Too far.” Katharina assured me again that I was being shown respect—for the role I’d played for Viktor and, um, and as an elder. Really? I was a bit over fifty. Probably ten years older than Inga.
The men left the four of us — Inga, Katharina, Anna (who had arrived home from her German school in Mogilov) and I —sitting in the living room with cups of tea. And now the mood shifted. We had three languages to work with, and Katharina spoke all of them. As she juggled Russian, German, and English, we all relaxed, laughed together, and the visit I’d imagined began to take shape.
I wanted to talk about the Chernobyl disaster, which had occurred when Anna was a small child and a few months before Viktor was born. Katharina, who grew up in Germany, talked about being kept inside for days as the radioactive cloud drifted over Europe.
Anna’s response to that story spoke volumes. “In Germany, they weren’t allowed to play outside, and here they didn’t even tell us.”
Inga talked about the fear and helplessness when they finally learned what they had been exposed to, about her fear for her unborn child—Viktor. She obviously had little hesitation about blaming the Soviet government of the time.
And how did it feel, I asked, to send so many of the town’s children away every summer?
“Of course, it’s very hard,” Inga said. But worth it if it helps them stay healthy. She was glad to see Viktor happy with us because his first placement was not good.
“He was too young,” she said.
I tried to imagine putting an eight-year-old in a van, en route to an airport in a city I had never visited, to fly halfway around the world to a country I couldn’t imagine, to live two months with a family whose names and living arrangements were completely unknown. Yes. Too young.
The conversation moved to my plans, and Inga asked if I would be going to St. Petersburg. When I explained that there wasn’t time for both Chaussy and St. Petersburg, she laughed out loud—and for the next two days, she shared this with everybody we saw—that I had chosen Chaussy over St. Petersburg.
When the men returned, I brought out my gifts for Anna and Viktor and immediately the camaraderie of minutes before evaporated. Why had I brought such expensive gifts, asked Alexei. But they were not. Some nail polish, fancy socks and a tee shirt for Anna. A watch—not an expensive one—for Viktor which was, as I insisted Katharina explain more than once, also a birthday gift.
As Inga, Galen, Katharina, and I prepared to explore the town, the tangled cultural expectations of giving, receiving, and gratitude weighed on my mind.
Over the next day and a half, I time-travelled to a century ago. It was not unlike my image of small Pennsylvania towns in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries where my grandparents were raised. Chaussy was certainly shabby, but I didn’t find it depressing. The houses were small, frequently in bad repair, most with garden plots completely surrounding them.
(I tried not to think about the radiation, the giant mushrooms in the forest.) But they were brightly painted, many with window boxes containing newly frost-bitten geraniums—it was almost November. Most had outhouses and wood piles.
There were a few paved streets, a few cars, some tractors, bicycles, some horses and wagons, a motorcycle with a sidecar. A tractor passed us, displaying a Canadian flag. Almost every family in this town had sent their children to Canada. Whenever we encountered someone on our walks, Inga introduced us as “Viktor’s family”, and then explained that I had chosen Chaussy over St. Petersburg!
The downtown was a mix of traditional and Soviet-style architecture. Inga, who worked as an accountant for the city, took us to her workplace. Here, the twentieth century had crept in. Several workstations were set up with computers—but no internet. The young office workers were so eager for its arrival that they insisted on taking our email addresses, promising to write.
The grocery store’s mostly-bare shelves contained some meat, milk and cheese, a few bags of dry staples, lots of bread; the department store offered a small selection of housewares, clothes, and souvenirs. It was clear I was expected to shop, so I bought a bread board with an inlaid straw design that still hangs on my pantry wall. The small outdoor farmers market featured late fall produce— a few squash, onions, turnips—and not much of it.
When we return to the house on the second day, another meal was being prepared — surprisingly by Alexei. Once again, I was banished to the living room.
And that’s where I was when the samovar appeared.
“Because of all you’ve done for Viktor. We want you to have it.”
“It’s too much. So kind. But really, I can’t.” Katharina translated.
I knew I was walking a narrow line between ingratitude and insensitivity. Was this because I had brought gifts? But of course, there was no way I was taking their samovar. I was sure they didn’t really expect me to. No, not true. I was not sure of anything having to do with gifts.
They persisted, but I sensed weakly, and in the end, when I explained that I couldn’t possibly get it on the plane, they offered a bottle of vodka for Jack instead—which I happily accepted.
The samovar was on my mind the following July when the van pulled into the Sault Ste. Marie parking lot with the children from Chaussy. This would be Viktor’s third and final summer with us. I watched anxiously as he retrieved his bags from the back of the van, assessing their capacity for carrying a samovar, and sighed with relief as I judged them too small. He brought us six crystal glasses and more crochet work from his grandmother. For which I expressed appropriate gratitude. Or so I hoped.
All this was more than twenty years ago, and looking back I have no regrets about my personal experience. I came to love a little boy from another world, and I got a tiny glimpse of that world myself. I came away enriched. But it wasn’t supposed to be about me, and I have to wonder whether we gave these children the gift we intended to give.
If the medical theory did, in fact, prove true—and I don’t think anyone knows—then most people would judge the program worthwhile. But even then, in addition to strengthened immune systems, did we also send them home with unrealistic expectations and a predisposition to overvalue our privileged North American lives? Zip lock bags and aluminium foil were the tip of the ice berg. How can a ten-year-old understand the geopolitical, economic factors that allow him to ride in a new car in Canada, while in his entire home town there are no new cars, and the prospects of owning one are nil? How does he make sense of a table laden with fresh fruits and vegetables in Canada when the market shelves at home are bare? What are the social and emotional costs of emptying homes and entire towns of their children for several months a year? After several summers—and many children participated in the program well into adolescence—did the children find themselves lost between two cultures at the very time when they were trying to figure out who they are?
I’ve wondered for years. I don’t have answers. I’d like to believe that every opportunity to experience another culture leads to both a saner world and greater self-understanding. I hope we didn’t use Viktor as a way of burnishing our credentials as doers of good.
I wonder if these were some of the questions the government of Belarus was asking when the program to Canada was cancelled. It seems a number of Canadian host families made informal arrangements for their Belarussian children to stay indefinitely and attend school in Canada—never the program’s intent. No surprise that the Belarusian government objected, and asked for a formal agreement with the Canadian government to prevent this from happening. Unfortunately, it insisted on including in that agreement a commitment that children would not be placed with gay couples. The agreement was never struck, and the last children from Belarus came to Canada in 2008. [These details are based on a not-very-satisfactory google search to find out what became of the program…subject to correction.]
We still hear from Viktor—now a man in his thirties— every few years. He completed a graduate degree in physics and is living and working in Minsk.
In an email three years ago, he decided to come clean about something that had obviously been on his mind these many years: “You remember that swimming pool that was broken and I told you that it was the big dog, Peso, did it? So, I broke it and I’m sorry for that.”
I laughed until I cried. I don’t remember the swimming pool incident at all, but I recognize the serious little boy who told a fib—and grew up to be a man who felt obliged to set the record straight.
A few months ago, as I was writing this essay, I wrote to him again and reminded him of my visit to Chaussy. His reply warmed my heart and went a long way toward reassuring me.
“I remember too when you came to Chaussy and all those summers that I spent in Canada. They’re very warm memories. You gave me a lot and pushed the boundaries of my mind and showed me another world which was drastically different from what I saw in Belarus in those days. It really encouraged me to develop myself.”
Thank you Viktor. Better—far better—than a samovar.