“Comrade Boris, tell us exactly what you had in mind,” several voices demanded, one after the other.
An uncanny smile settled on Boris Petrenkov’s face and he puffed several times as if trying to shake it off. “I was about to delineate my descent.”
“Let’s see how much of a mongrel you are,” Mikhail Pugo chirped.
“Much more than you can even imagine,” Boris said with an amused glint in his eyes, “It is rumored in my family that we are partly descended from Ivan Mazepa, the Zaporozhian Cossack hetman or ataman who defied Catherine the Great and sought to bring down the monarchy. I know he was against Russian imperialist chauvinism at the time, but I think he was also irrationally and superfluously nationalistic. He wanted Kiev and other lands in present-day Ukraine out of the control of Russia while failing to pay attention to the foreign occupiers in the West. He didn’t have destiny on his side because he did not dwell on the mutual compatibility of the Eastern Slavic peoples.”
“For once, God was on our side,” joked Andreas Kulanov, an ethnic Greek. He was pleased with himself and even flashed a smile from the laughter that his words stirred.
“That’s how it was, My Dear Comrades! As I was saying, another of my ancestors was a Cossack from the Astrakhan grouping. He was overtly Russo-maniacal, so much so that he put himself at the service of his motherland at the tender age of sixteen. As a soldier, he participated in most of the expeditions in his time that ended in the acquisition of new lands for his czar and czarina. I have a portion of Kazakh blood too. My Astrakhan forefather had a son with a Kazakh woman, a son who became an outstanding soldier. I was told he fought gallantly in the latter acquisition of the Uzbek khanates of Tashkent, Fergana, Bukhara, and Samarkand. But there was another side to this outstanding soldier. He was also amorous in nature and caught the eye of a Kyrgyz woman who accepted to become his wife. They had two sons and four daughters from a marriage that defied the norms of that time.”
“Could she have been a Yenisei Kyrgyz or a Tien-Shan Kyrgyz? Or was she from the south or the north?” interjected Nasirdin Duishebaev, an ethnic Kyrgyz who was born in Uzbekistan.
“She was Kyrgyz for all I know. Now, the sharp wits and versatility of one of her sons caught the eye of a colonel from Yaroslavl. Just before he turned thirty, the colonel took him to Moscow, introduced him to the right circles there, and helped him become a soldier of great value. His outstanding qualities as a leader of men can be explained as the reason why the Czar’s government transferred him to the Baltic region. He was a family man too, one of those rare types with a tendency to shun the beautiful city women who flung themselves at his feet to satisfy their boredom or loneliness or whatever fanciful impulses or ideas that were causing turmoil in their souls. He loved his three sons and one daughter too. In fact, he stayed a widower for three years after his Uzbek wife died, that is, until his children prodded him to marry again. He succumbed to their good intentions and found a second wife, a blonde Lithuanian woman twenty-three years his junior. She bore him an only son called Vladimir as if they already had a purpose for this child from the moment he was born. The son also became a soldier, and honored his Czar by taking up a post in the Caucasus where he sought to bring peace among the nationalities on both sides of the mountain. He married a Georgian woman of Tabasaran mother in Tbilisi. Ah, comrades, that family mushroomed in the Caucasus for several decades and celebrated the day one of its daughters married a Don Cossack from Rostov-on-the-Don.”
“Comrade Boris has Georgian blood too,” cheered Bulat Saaskavilli, a third-year Mathematics student at the National University.
“Mingrelian blood to be precise,” Boris offered.
“Mingrelians and Georgians are the same people,” the student reiterated, “My point is that they are a sub-ethnic group of the Georgian people,” he added.
“I won’t digress any further with my story. Where was I again? Okay! Now I remember. The Don Cossack I was talking about also happened to be my maternal great-grandfather. He had a son who became known for his revolutionary fervor—a brilliant son who mastered the works of Karl Marx like his father had mastered the Bible. My great-grandfather wept in displeasure when Kazan University expelled this remarkable son for being a revolutionary. The strange thing is that the father did nothing to stop the authorities from imprisoning my maternal grandfather, even though he brooded in silence when the authorities subjected this brilliant son to a gruesome fate of exile in Siberia. When he escaped from exile and lived abroad afterward, nobody was surprised about it. But that was after his father disowned him publicly to show his loyalty to the Czar. My great-grandfather had his promotion to the rank of General five months after that. Now, my maternal grandfather was a man of courage and purpose. He returned from exile and settled in Tiraspol, in Moldavia, where he married a Russo-Latvian woman. Their only daughter married my father, a Russian Cossack from the Astrakhan grouping. That is the man you call Boris Kukinovich Petrenkov, my Dear Comrades. My father, too, traces his lineage to the Don Cossack Matvei Platov, as well as to other diverse blood. He has blood ties to Central and Eastern Turanian peoples as well. So, based on the heterogeneity of my nature, it grieves me much to see that blood is being made to spill in the different lands of the former Soviet Union.”
“Comrade Boris, you are virtually all of us,” a Mongol from Tuva said, stepped forward, and placed another bottle of kvass in front of Boris on the table.
“Comrade Khanarov, your generosity puzzles me. Do you have a stock of this stuff hanging around somewhere?” Boris said, raising the beer in the air to show his gratitude, and then putting it back on the table. “I will deal with yours after I finish with this one,” he added and raised his half-empty bottle of kvass.
No comments:
Post a Comment