Olga's Cat

Sydney Aquarium, Sydney, Australia.
March 29, 2004

Several years ago I vowed to try writing some short stories. Several years later I've only the following to show for myself. (It also sits, horribly formatted, here.)

Olga's Cat
©2001, Tom Haythornthwaite





In January, 1958, Olga Khmelnytsky had been an energetic journalist for Pravda. She normally worked the East Berlin beat but suddenly she was dispatched far to the east of her native Ukraine, to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in central Kazakhstan. She noted as she rode the frozen Moscow - Tashkent line that the special train was heading hundreds of kilometres from the actual town of Baikonur. This she put to Soviet secrecy, and gave it little further attention. She knew not to refer to the fact in her stories.

Andrei led Frank up the stairs to Valentina's apartment in the eastern suburbs of Kiev. Valentina worked for Andrei but was away and had allowed Frank to crash there. Valentina shared her apartment with Olga, an elderly woman. Frank would be living with Olga for two weeks. This was in 1996, and Olga now spent her days washing and cooking for Valentina in return for reduced rent, reading the poetry of Taras Shevchenko, and trying to share vodka with her cat. The cat kept sniffing and withdrawing from the chipped 'Brandenburg Gate' coffee mug she offered, so Olga would drink the vodka herself. Frank had come to visit Andrei because when business had brought them together the year before, Andrei had said that Ottawa was pretty but Kiev was more beautiful.

If things had occurred differently in that Cold War winter, Frank would never have met old Olga, so many lonely years later, because she would have become quite famous. But this was the way it was and over the next few days Frank observed that she drank more vodka than he would ever have believed possible. Each day, when he returned from photographing Kiev, she would greet him with her handful of English words - 'Darling', 'Vodka', 'Poetry'. He would sip vodka with her and she would urge him to read her Shevchenko from an English translation she treasured. Sometimes she would also read along in Ukrainian, and once he was fairly sure (he found he could recognize a lot of spoken Ukrainian vocabulary because of its similarity to French) that they weren't on the same poem.

Frank's Ukrainian was worse than Olga's English. And even worse than he thought, because although he had learned a few polite words which he would use around Andrei and his friends, after a few days Andrei took him aside and said "Words you use - you are very kind to try to learn - but these are Russian words. Ukrainians now proud of Ukrainian history, Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian language." When he was a schoolboy in Kiev, Ukrainian had been banned. Schools only taught Russian, and Andrei and his twin brother were teased by their mother about not being able to speak good Ukrainian until they were twenty. Now Kiev was bilingual. Pairs of Cyrillic signs on the Metro doors looked almost the same to Frank, but Andrei pointed out which characters were not shared in the two languages.



Olga had grown up before Stalin's suppression of Ukrainian culture. She was fluent in Ukrainian, Russian, and German. Part of the reason she was sent to Baikonur in 1958 had been so she could immediately report the lift-off in those languages. But the Politburo had another motive in mind - out of a mixture of kindness and propaganda, they pulled her from Berlin because of the identity of the cosmonaut on top of the Vostok rocket: Sergey Shaborin, her husband.

A week after Frank arrived in Kiev, Valentina returned unexpectedly. She had been on vacation, buying canned goods in Moldavia to sell outside the Kiev Metro stations. Through some urgent telephone translations via Andrei, she told Frank he must still stay in her apartment, and would sleep on a folding camp bed. Now the apartment was even more crowded. Olga and her cat occupied one tiny room, Valentina and Frank the other, and when they were peeling potatoes in the kitchen there was hardly room for the cat to spin itself around. But they would play the radio and laugh at the difficulties Frank had with the language. There were many phone calls to Andrei but they managed quite well with sign language.




Valentina did not return straight to work. The next day she took Frank to the hydropark on an island in the Dnepr River. Along with hundreds of others, they swam in one of the world's most polluted rivers - scarcely a hundred kilometres downstream from Chornobyl. Andrei had explained that Valentina would love Frank to photograph her. She posed on the beach, hooking her sunglasses through the string of her thong. Then she lead him across the island, past the bodybuilders working machines made from tank parts, to a quieter beach. They met a boy with a tethered hawk, and she posed for more photographs. Andrei had said that it was Valantina's dream to be a model instead of a programmer.

That night, after some vodka, Frank signed that he wanted to sleep with Valentina. Olga grinned and nodded vigorously. Valentina looked doubtful and opened up the camp bed, but before she turned out the light she beckoned him into her single bed. She would jerk away from even the gentlest touch of his tongue, but then grab his hair and pull his head back into her. The next day she prepared him and Andrei a feast of lobster.

Olga had arrived at the Cosmodrome and met the other journalists. She would only have one hour with Sergey before he went into isolation; and they hadn't been together for three months. They held each other tightly, but could not say what they really felt because of the others around them. They spoke only in Russian. She wished her Comrade good luck. The rest isn't history, because she never reported from Baikonur. Sergey's rocket blasted off four days later, reached an altitude of about seven hundred metres, and then fell back to earth. Smoke still rose from the wreckage in the snow when the journalists were told that there would be no reports of the fate, crew or existence of the mission. In April, after she and the world learned of Gagarin's success, she tried to meet Valentina Goryacheva, his wife, but it was not approved.




Olga lives on her pension from Pravda. She had donated Sergey's pension to an orphanage. She let her party membership lapse but had kept reporting from Berlin. Eventually, when she retired back to Kiev she was put at the top of the waiting list for a two-bedroom apartment, where she lived in relative luxury for 25 more years until a friend asked if she would share with Valentina. She found the cat at the food distribution centre where she bought her vodka. She found solace in Shevchenko.