Trafford Publishing: To the Horizon and Beyond

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To the Horizon and Beyond

by Valentina Filina-Pattison

279 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0399; ISBN 1-4120-0036-X; US$24.00, C$27.50, EUR20.00, £14.00

A lot of inconcievable stories come from Russia. One of these is the survival of an average family caught in the whirlwind of history from the Revolution to the present.

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about the book about the author sample excerpts or Table of Contents catalogue info

About the Book

Six chapters in the book, like six stars in one constellation, contain the names Maria, Emma, Valentina, Gennady, Larissa and John. Maria, a Russian beauty, is a symbol of love, determination and devotion to the family- a stronghold and a real survivor through the Russian turmoil. Emma, Maria's eldest daughter, wounded during the second World War at age 7, carried her grief through her whole life. Valentina, Maria's second daughter, optimistic by nature, made her life roads in her own way. Gennady, Maria's only son, was her favourite and beloved most of all. Larissa, Maria's grandaughter, is described from a parental point of view. John's true story was to be the conclusion of this book but became the beginning of a new chapter of the author's life: it has become another story for another time.

About the Author

Born on March 17, 1940 in Russia, Valentina grew up in an ordinary family and graduated from Orel University in 1962. For the first five years following graduation she taught English and German, then worked for 35 years as an interpreter and translator at the Russian Enterprises and as a free-lance interpreter. She continues her career in Canada.
History and Linguistics were Valentina's passion throughout her life. She is especially inspired by the stories of Queen Bodacia of Roman England, whose times also insprired Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
Valentina's Russian ancestry is part of her cultural and spiritual self, and that's what contributes to the peculiarity of her essay, To the Horizon and Beyond - Mitzvoth, as it is expressed in Yiddish.
Written from her heart, the feelings and sensations in the book reflect what it is to have a Russian soul: spiritual and mysterious.

Sample Excerpts and Table of Contents

TO A READER
PREFACE
PART ONE....... MARIA
PART TWO .......EMMA
PART THREE .......VALENTINA
PART FOUR .......GENNADY
PART FIVE....... LARISSA
PART SIX .......JOHN

PART ONE

MARIA

"Oh, that bloody damned bastard has gone! He will never return. I loved him so much. I want to die. Life without him lost all meaning. "Maria thought putting a great deal of pills in front of her, intending to commit suicide.

"I am going to die", she said aloud.

She felt no relief, no despair, no fear. The moment of her end would not grant her even the dignity of seriousness. It was an anonymous moment; a few minutes ago, she had held a toothbrush in her hand, now she held medicine with the same casual indifference.

One must not die like this, she thought. One must feel a great joy or a healthy terror. One must salute one's own end. Let her feel a spasm of dread, and she'll swallow some pills. Then she felt nothing.

"Who are you?" she asked herself.

After a while she answered, "Maria Yakovlevna Bakunova, an average simple woman, born in 1907, from the Pochep village of the Orel region. An ordinary cashier from the railway station."

Who was he? A graduate of the Bryansk Forest-Technical Institute, a mechanical engineer, a handsome man with higher education and perspectives for the future. I am nothing compared to him. I did not graduate from either high schools or academies. My parents did not allow me to attend school.

They used to say, "You can read and write. That's enough for girls. Go to work. Do the weaving of ropes. It's more important."

But him. It's another deal. He wanted to study and he was a brilliant student. I used to be proud of him as if I were his mother. Really - we were the same age. Of no great importance it was that I had to work days and nights helping him to learn subjects and earning money for living, he was attending classes in the early morning, preparing for lectures in the daytime and late evenings. There he met a new girlfriend, who was a student. It was of no importance for him that I was pregnant and about to bear a baby. He is in love with a new woman, the same education as himself, an equal pair for him, so she thought.

A bitter offence struck her sharply, tears rolled on her cheeks. Maria did not know how long she cried as if she were unconscious. She was alone now. The curtains were open. There was only one window in a tiny, one bedroom and living room flat, above the sixth floor of a great residential hotel-like house, in the city of Bryansk about of six hundred kilometers from the city of Moscow.

Dust-blue suede curtains to be pulled across the walls enclose the room when she wished; there was nothing to cover the ceiling. Lying in bed with her Boris she could see the stars over her head through the window, or flashes of lightning, or watch the rain smashing into furious, glittering sunbursts in mid-air above her, against the unseen protection. She liked to extinguish the lights and pull the curtains open, when she lay in bed with him.

She was fantastically sexy. Her imagination worked with great forces. In front of her eyes there arose different images of their intimate relations: he lay on her body motionless, after half an hour sexual love, whispering the only words to her: "Oh, Maria, Maria, Maria!" in delight. It was sounded as if a prayer was being uttered. Everything had melted at that moment. There remained exclusively the desire, the love, nothing more. Or, she lay on him, cuddling and kissing his young, strong body. Without words, tingling his sex, his balls, space between legs and above, looking for every time new and new sexual spots.

From those remembrances she felt her head dizzying. She looked at herself at the mirror. Out of it peeped at her a face, not belonging to modern civilization, but to ancient Russia; the face of an eternal beauty. Her hair, pitch-black and straight, was pleated into a long thick plait. Her skin was pulled tight over the high sharp bones of her face; her mouth was long and thick, her eyes, under slanting eyebrows were pale blue and photographed like two sardonic white ovals. An artist had asked her once to sit for a "painting of a Russian collective farm worker", she had laughed, refusing, and the artist had watched sadly, because the laughter made the face perfect for his purpose. Her small short-raised nose, as called among the regular people'kartoshka'-type, gave to her face an unusual expression of defenselessness and simplicity. She had a face which cannot offend or insult, opposite, it can protect and realize. As an addition to everything, her complexion was so fresh, even after a flood of tears, that natural essence of a living being, being suppressed; the moment could not destroy her. It was because of her pregnancy, her natural pride of maturity, the female celebration of carrying a baby inside. All of a sudden she felt somebody pushing in her tummy. One time, another, then once more. She leaped on her feet, leaning against the wall, feeling the cold paint through the thin, dark cotton of her night gown. A tiny living creature asked insistently to come into the world. She shrugged and lowered the arms; she stood tapping a fingertip against the top of her stomach. People always speak of a black death or a red death, she thought; yours, Maria, will be a grey death. Why hasn't anyone ever said that this is the ultimate horror? Not screams, pleas, or convulsions. Not the indifference of a clean emptiness, disinfected by the fire of same great disaster. But this -a mean, smutty little horror, impotent even to frighten, you can't do it like that, she told herself, smiling coldly; you forgot about another person in you, Shame on you! To hell, that bastard Boris! Let's bear the lovely child, yours the only connection to the ugly, contradictive, mad world around you.

In a while the birth convulsions repeated, Maria knocked on the neighbor's door, she was called Emma, begging her to help with the birth. She responded immediately starting to spread the pills on the table, Maria's exciting voice exclaimed, "Doctor, please, Emma!"

The ambulance came soon. That happened on the fifth day of March in nineteen thirty five. Maria was twenty eight; it was her primary birth-baby, named after a friend, which helped her in a very difficult moments of her life. Beyond the window the spring burst into blossom, the country entered the next five-year plan of the economical development, in all the corners of the town streets, in every flat or a village house there were pronounced the boastings, proud words of the certain successes, records of the industry and agriculture. From every radio-set the political propagandists held speeches about the congress of the Soviet Comnunist Party - "Congress of the Winners". Everywhere, everyone was infused with a contagious enthusiasm for the country's agricultural and economic expansion. Each young person wanted to be a national hero, like Stakhanov, pilots Chkalov, Gaidukov. The examples in labor existed in all branches of life. Maria was a cashier and followed the Aladin's method of selling the railroad tickets. It meant that she had to work days and nights and sell as many tickets as possible, and at last she was awarded with the three Labor medals of the Third degree.

Maria, do you hear big vague words "Universal Harmony"-"Eternal Spirit"-"Divine Purpose"-"Nirvana"-"Paradise"-"Racial Supremacy"-"The Dictatorship of the Proletariat"?

Internal corruption, Maria. If you listen to any prophet speaking of sacrifice, run faster than from a plague. Because where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings.

Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. And there was the only master in Russia, "the father of all nations and peoples", Joseph Stalin.

All newspapers, all mass media at those times spoke of what a great personality Comrade Stalin possessed, how long Comrade Stalin's working day had lasted, how clever Comrade Stalin was thinking only about the troubles and cares of the ordinary people. Everybody was obliged to work hard and that was considered to be the greatest happiness in the world. It was disgraceful to speak aloud about the personal, private life. The main principal in a person's life was to sacrifice in the name of the good of the Communist society. The propagandists promised that in the future everybody would live better. "AII of us must live for a better future," they used to say.

Maria, as everyone in this society believed, hoped and expected the better future and wondered when it would begin.

Soon she was to meet a young man who captured her heart. He was not only handsome, a quality she admired. But he was also gentle and kind, and she got married to him. He was twenty eight, she - thirty three, the age when the sexual health was something of an enigma for them.

Really, it is taken for granted when we have it and sorely missed when we don't. Sexual health is assumed to be automatic that we pay little attention to how it can be maintained.

The name of Maria's new husband was Nickolay Alexeyevich Filin, a brilliant partner, the new sexual response cycle. For her, the first excitation phase was relatively slow, the muscles grow increasingly tense, the vagina began to lubricate, normally, about ten to thirty seconds after stimulation began; its interior started to dilate, and the clitoris and nipples began to swell with dammed-up blood. Phase two, the plateau, was a continuation of this shivering buildup of tension -heart rate and respiration increased, the skin started to flush, and the outer third of the vagina began to swell dramatically.

All this came to a fantastic climax at orgasm, when all that muscular tension and engorged blood were suddenly, ecstatically released.

"What is an orgasm anyway?" thought Maria to herself.

"So which is it, the body or the mind?"

"For me," she answered, "it is as if it were a journey into an alternative state of consciousness, complete with an almost psychedelic warping of her sense of time and space. The French call it 'le petit mort' (the little death) - a lovely allusion to that ineffable sense of having been transported to another, perhaps higher realm and state of mind."

Who knows how often she had been submerging into the heavens with her Nickolay, body leaned back against her. It was a body of long straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes.

He stood rigid, his hands hanging at his sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together, the curve of his neck, and the weight of the blood in his hands. He felt the wind behind him, in the hollow of his spine. The wind waved his hair against the sky seen through the open window. His hair was neither blond nor brown but exact colour of ripe walnut rind. He smiled at the things which had happened to him and Maria this morning and at the things that now lay ahead.

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