Инна Иванова Saturday, March 21, 2020
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Stories from practice: dust to dust, love to love

Ashes to ashes

Her father beat her since childhood. He got drunk, took a soldier's belt and bullied his daughter. For any offense. He also beat his mother. Then they both rushed to protect their younger brother. When his father became particularly violent, they ran outside, hid behind garages and sat very quietly until he fell asleep. Sometimes the police were called. The police filmed the beatings. The mother wrote a statement, but then took it away. My father was an industry leader, and they lived on his salary in a small, small village.

Then the mother withered and died. Life became unbearable. There's nowhere to go. Grandparents died a long time ago...

The teenage girl defended her brother as best she could. The children barricaded themselves in the bathhouse for the night. After drinking, my father went to them and banged on the door. Sometimes he got tired of it and went into the house, sometimes he broke through and they ran away to spend the night with compassionate neighbors. In the morning, he remembered little, gloomily ate what his daughter cooked, gave money for groceries and left.

One day my father was drinking with friends. When everyone was drunk and scattered, and someone's wife was taken away, he came. He broke down the door with an axe. The children were screaming: "Help!", but no one called the police. All the neighbors were already used to it.

He grinned, standing in the doorway. He said he missed you. He turned on the radio loudly. He started fighting. The girl defended herself, shouting for her brother to run outside to call for help. But my brother was only 5 years old. The man easily threw him into a corner, hit his daughter on the head, put her on her knees, bent her to the floor with his hand and raped her. Then he said that she was already "an adult cow, she can" and if she did not obey him, he would do it all the time.

There were several times when he grabbed his son, held a cigarette to his face and blackmailed his daughter so that she would not resist. The girl plucked up the courage and complained to the district police officer, but her father often drank with him and went fishing. They didn't believe her: "Your father is a normal man. Everyone in the village knows this. Well, the fact that he drinks is such a life. And the fact that his hand is heavy is an educational moment. It's hard for him to lift you two. Your father told me that you didn't help your mother and drove her to her grave, and now you're pouring slop on your father so that you can get the house when you come of age. Shame on you, slut, to say that to your father, or I'll tell him, he'll arrange it for you. It won't seem enough."

The girl came to her mother's grave. ...In a couple of months, it will be a year since she's gone.

She took a knife with her, lay on top of the grave, talked and cried. Then I decided to do it the way I saw it in the movies. I really wanted pain. And to be seen. A large kitchen knife sliced through his arm. The tissues parted, and blood began to drip onto the ground. She was screaming:

— Mom, mom, what am I doing? What should I do?

Then another cut. The pain and blood sobered the girl a little. She pressed her hand to her stomach, curled up, and fell asleep. She dreamed about her mom. She was young in the dream. Mommy took her face in her hands, kissed her and said she loved her. He loves it very much.

It was a very beautiful bright dream, from which I did not want to return.

My father still drank, but he no longer went to the children's bathhouse. Now they could hear him screaming in his sleep in the early morning in the house. Once he said angrily to a girl at breakfast: "Your mother is coming. Life doesn't give me a chance."

On the anniversary of his mother's death, his father hanged himself. No one saw it. He was alone in the house...

The priest forbade the funeral and burial of the suicide in the village cemetery. And when the grown-up uncles from the factory where her father worked decided what to do with the funeral, the girl said that her father always wanted him to be cremated. Like, I told them and my brother about it. The brother held his sister's hand and nodded. The coffin was taken to the city and burned. The girl was given an urn with ashes to be buried at her mother's grave. The girl took the ashes and poured them into the trash, and then buried the empty urn so that no one would think anything superfluous.

The children were sent to an orphanage.

When the girl reached adulthood, she entered into inheritance rights. She got a job in the city, took custody of her brother and took him in. I sold the house. Now he works in an atelier and is preparing to enter the seamstress-mechanic.


A happy mother often comes to her in her dreams. Hugs and smiles. Once a girl asked her mother:

— Was it possible to do that? With your father? With the ashes?

— Don't worry: "this" will never bother anyone again. Neither here nor there. Dust to dust. Love for love.

The one who was called her "father" had never been in her dreams.



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©2020–2024 Individual Entrepreneur Inna Yurievna Ivanova, Taxpayer Identification Number (UNP) 193419490 registered by the Minsk City Executive Committee on 05/14/2020 and entered into the Trade Register of the Republic of Belarus on 10/23/2020 with the No 494817. Business address: Frolikova str., 1-35, 220037, Minsk, Republic of Belarus.