The Happy Housewife (Samantha Sherman Book 1) (11 page)

Clint paused for a minute, then continued when no one else spoke up, “I don’t think you need to mention us or Pete being at your house Sunday. That woman might be right about your situation but it makes no sense to bring us all in to it. After all, it’s more likely that if it wasn’t a burglar it was someone on the other side of things who found out about us and wanted to punish us. Some self-righteous prig like your friend upstairs—what do you think she’s ever fought for? Little bourgeois housewife.”

“Yeah right, it’s not like any of us had a reason to hate Dan, right, Clint?” Marjorie’s tone was … was that sarcasm?

“Shut up, Marjorie, this isn’t the time,” Clint hissed.

“Oh come on, Clint, Helen knows. Right, Helen?”

Helen’s response was too low to hear. Sam strained, pressing her ear to the vent, “… can’t turn on each other. We’re family … we’re all we’ve got … what’s past is past. I think you’re right, I’ll tell them about my past only. I’m sure it won’t be an issue.”

“Yeah, but he was leaving us …” Marjorie whined softly.

“He just moved to Chicago. He was still our friend and always would be. Moving doesn’t mean he wasn’t family.” Finally, Helen was speaking up! “So I think …”
Argh,
spoke too soon, come on Helen
.
Sam couldn’t make out the last of what she said.

“All right, all right. Do you want us to stay and explain to the little miss what we are going to do or can you handle it yourself?” Clint’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

“She’s a good person and she’s been nice to me. I think she means well. The past couple of days have been hard on her. She knew the child who was killed out in Loudoun this weekend. Plus this …” Helen trailed off.

“Well, aren’t you just turning into Suzy Citizen on us? Are you going to the funeral, weep with all the ants? Got yourself a good dose of opiate in one day, haven’t you?”

“Clint, let’s not do this,” Marjorie pleaded. “Helen’s right. We’re in this together.”

“Fine. Update us as soon as you talk to the police. I’ll let Pete know what’s going on. What a mess.” As Clint finished, Sam could hear chairs being pushed back. She rolled over on her back and contemplated what to do. Now she had a whole bunch more questions. Should she push more or let go? She waited until she heard the door close and then walked into Lindsey’s room to watch their car drive off. She made sure she saw Clint and Marjorie in it. She was surprised at her relief at having them out of the house.
Ugh
, now she was getting a headache. She decided relax for a couple of minutes, close her eyes and just mull all this over. Helen could wait until
she
was ready to talk.

Sam could hear movement downstairs so she slipped back into her bedroom and shut her door. She moved back to lock it. This was becoming quite a habit. Sam kicked off her shoes and lay down. The bedspread felt cool on her bare legs. The temperature in the house was perfect. She didn’t even need a sheet to cover her. She set her alarm for a backup but was sure she wouldn’t sleep.

S
am jerked awake as her alarm buzzed.
Oh that seemed loud!
She whacked the off button and then fell back on the bed. So fuzzy. How on earth did she just sleep after all that had happened this morning? Maybe she was more stressed about the state of things than she admitted to herself. It was time to deal with Helen. At least her headache was gone.

She pulled herself out of bed and padded to her bathroom. She splashed some water on her face and patted it dry. Sam quickly brushed out her hair and used a hair band to put her hair in a ponytail and then pulled her hair part way through the band loop to form a loose bun. She dabbed some chapstick on her lips and pinched her cheeks.
It’s time, Helen
, she thought.
Man, I sound like a cheesy movie
. She smiled and shook her head at herself in the mirror.

Sam adjusted her loose shorts and T-shirt. She wished she had put on something more formal that morning—she looked kind of young and she wanted Helen to see her as an equal. She decided not to change though. After all, she didn’t want to be too obvious.

Sam quickly used mouthwash and headed for her door. She paused before unlocking it and, not hearing any noise, cautiously opened it up. Helen’s bedroom door was closed.
Well, I guess she’s more a chicken than I am
, Sam decided. She stood outside Helen’s door and paused. Should she knock? No, she had some things she wanted to look up anyway. She would wait for Helen to come out of her room. Sam turned and headed for her study.

Doug had taken Russian in college; he could still speak it roughly. She thought he might have some Soviet history books. After what had happened today she wanted to confirm something, anything of what Helen had said. Besides, she wanted to be close by when Helen decided to leave her room so the study was a good place to hang out.

She checked the shelves which had Doug’s academic books on them. She found the Russian language books and then the Soviet history books. She found a couple on early Soviet history and brought them over to the desk.

Sam settled into her chair and flipped through the first book by Robert Conquest. She found the section on the Ukraine famine and could quickly see that what Helen said about the famine was not quite true. It was much worse. About fourteen million people were killed in the late 20s and early 30s in an attempt to rid Ukraine of capitalists and to collectivize the remaining peasants. That’s more people than were killed by the Nazis in the holocaust, Sam realized.
Amazing, I never heard about this growing up
.

As Sam flipped through the first book, she saw some quotes about peasants in the Soviet Union, and what the Soviet leaders and thinkers had to say about them. Karl Marx was quoted as referring to “the idiocy of rural life.” Lenin said that the peasant, “far from being an instinctive or traditional collectivist, is in fact fiercely and meanly individualistic.” And Stalin, according to Khrushchev, said that “peasants were scum.” Sam had always thought the Soviets were for poor workers; maybe it was only factory workers.

Sam read on. It seemed that the Soviets were particularly opposed to those they labeled ‘kulaks’ who were successful, rich peasants. ‘Rich’ was a relative term, however, and this definition changed over time, as more and more people starved, to encompass enemies of the state and farmers “with two or three cows, or even of a poorer farmer friendly to the first.”

The first goal of the Soviets, led by Stalin, with respect to the Ukraine, was to “liquidate” the kulak class. This was accomplished in the late 1920s through arrests and executions, deportations to concentration camps and to the northern regions where there were almost no settlements because of the extreme cold. About 6.5 million people died from this first step. The next step was to collectivize the remaining peasants, to move them from farming for themselves to farming for the government. The majority of peasants viewed this as a new serfdom, which they had escaped in the 1860s. Their resistance was broken using some of the same techniques as were used to get rid of the kulaks. Additionally, harsh grain quotas were instituted and repeatedly raised beyond the point of what could be produced. This eventually led to all grain being confiscated and once that was done Party officials searched from home to home for more. The raging famine that resulted caused the deaths of seven to eight million people. The worst year of the famine was from 1932–1933 when there was no grain left and the people starved to death, desperately trying to stay alive by eating animal bones, horse feces, and, for some, resorting to cannibalism.

Sam wondered if the famine was deliberate, as Helen’s parents believed it was. She continued to read about the question of intent. The book she had said that the answer was yes, and not an ambiguous yes like Helen implied. After all, the leadership spoke openly of “liquidating” the kulaks and about what horrible people they were. As for the famine, the cause was the grain confiscation. There was ample written and oral evidence that Ukrainian Party officials told the Soviet leadership that the quotas were too high and that starvation would result. Ukrainian officials also reported when actual starvation set in. The fact that the quotas were instituted and kept in place during the famine, as well as Stalin’s personal comments about the need to break Ukrainian nationalism and force the people of that region to collectivize, was also proof of the intent and awareness of the Soviet leadership as to what their actions would and did produce.

Time passed quickly as Sam pored over quote after quote, horrible descriptions across the board from survivors, Communist officials, local activists, and foreign visitors. A quote from a Party activist who worked during the worst year of famine, 1932–1933, was particularly illuminating. He said:

With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible – to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work… That was how I had reasoned, and everyone like me, even when…I saw what ‘total collectivization’ meant – how they ‘kulakized’ and ‘dekulakized,’ how they mercilessly striped the peasants in the winter of 1932-3. I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails…I myself knew better than the peasants how they should live, what they should sow and when they should plough. In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses – corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov…I saw all this and did not go out of mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me out to take away the peasants’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking, skeleton-thin or sickly-swollen people to go into the fields in order to ‘fulfill the Bolshevik sowing plan in shock-worker style.’ Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe.

A letter Sam saw that was sent to a writer for the Soviet government paper
Pravda
was also heartbreaking. It was from the writer’s Jewish father in the Ukraine to tell his Communist son of his mother’s death. He wrote:

My Beloved Son, This is to let you know that your mother is dead. She died from starvation after months of pain. I, too, am on the way, like many other in our town. Occasionally we manage to snatch some crumbs, but not enough to keep us alive much longer, unless they send in food from the centre. There is none for hundreds of miles around here. Your mother’s last wish was that you, our only son, say
Kadish
for her. Like your mother, I, too, hope and pray that you may forget your atheism now when the godless have brought down heaven’s wrath on Russia. Would it be too much to hope for a letter from you, telling me that you have said
Kadish
for your mother – at least once – and that you will do the same for me? That would make it so much easier to die.

Sam put down the first book and picked up the other one by Miron Dolot. It was a personal tale of a boy who survived the famine. She flipped through, skimming certain parts of the book about people in this boy’s village who were driven to cannibalism, villagers eating horse manure in the hopes of finding grain in it, and mass graves in ditches because the living were too weak to properly bury the dead.

It was all so depressing
. Sam heard the guest room door opening and was happy to be distracted from what she was reading. She gave Helen a half smile as she shuffled into the room. Helen’s face was downcast and she was clasping and unclasping her hands. Sam a stab of guilt for making Helen wait on her to talk. She needed to remember Helen’s age and infirmities.

“Hi,” Helen said. “Do you want to talk?”

“Sure, let’s get lunch.” They headed downstairs and Sam put together some sandwiches, grapes, and pretzels.

When they were seated at the table, Helen started the conversation right away, “If you still think I should, I’ll contact the police.”

“That’s up to you, Helen. My opinion is that you should tell them.”

Helen nodded again, “Look, I know I’ve put you in a strange position and brought people you don’t trust into your home. I’m so sorry about that. I can leave if you want. The thing is, even though Clint is rough and Marjorie has her issues, they are my family, in fact they are all the family I have.”

“Helen,” Sam paused and focused for a minute so she would not have an aggravated tone as she spoke. Helen did not look like she could take much more stress. Sam took a deep breath and started again with a small smile, “Helen, I understand that these people are your family but you have to understand what kind of position you are in. I don’t know everything about police work but I’m pretty sure they will run prints on Dan as part of an autopsy. They are going to figure out what his real name was. And Helen, when they figure that out, you are the first person they are going to want to talk to. They are going to want to know if you knew he went by a different last name. That will lead to them to ask more questions about you, which will lead them to your new last name and your past, if they haven’t already figured that out. Even if what happened was a horrible burglary gone wrong, I think the investigation could get real tough for you. What if the community finds out about your past? Again, I really do not know anything about police work, but it seems like, from television shows, that it’s better to come clean right away. If you wait and let the police unravel things slowly over time it might make them angry and more aggressive in their investigation. Right now you can go back to them and explain that you didn’t tell them everything right in the beginning because of shock or that you had forgotten because Dan changed his name so long ago. You have a chance to make things right with no consequences if you do it now.”