Bryansk captive

Half a century ago, Frenchwoman Georgette Pasquier fell in love with Soviet soldier Ivan Pichevsky. Their fate turned out to be similar to the fate of the heroes of the film “East - West”
Only those who had never seen a real village could call Kholmechi a village. This is a large village: strong wooden houses, carts at the gates, mountains of firewood in the courtyards and well-fed, ubiquitous chickens. Passers-by are rare, the road is explained in simple terms: go there, turn there, and from there turn left. The distance can only be understood by the width of the gestures - the wider, the further. This is probably how the Frenchwoman Georgette Pasquier navigated Kholmechi until she spoke Russian.
“This marriage is not necessary,” said the mayor’s office of Saint-Servan
When most of the local residents were born, there was already a French woman in Kholmechi. Georgette Victoire Eugenie Pasquier arrived in the Bryansk region in October 1945 - straight from France. She was born and raised on the seashore, in the peninsular province of Brittany. She studied at a Catholic school, where strict nuns taught, and then worked at a local textile factory. The war passed through her hometown with heavy tread. Years later, Georgette could still hear in her dreams the roar of German planes flying over Saint-Servan. Her father, Eugene Pasquier, was shell-shocked and died in German captivity.
In the spring of '45, Soviet soldiers appeared in Saint-Servan. Everything was amazing to them - the ancient fortress walls, the local food, and the elegant French speech from all sides. Georgette still doesn’t know where the Soviet soldier Ivan Pichevsky learned French. He didn't like to talk about it. With great difficulty, his youngest son Ivan managed to extract some details from his father:
“It was almost impossible to talk to my father about this topic. He was captured at the very beginning of the war, still in the Bryansk region, and transported to a concentration camp in France. It was an island on which prisoners built fortifications. That's where my father probably learned French. He and two other prisoners managed to escape from this island. Then, at the end of the war, my father ended up in Saint-Servan, where he one day met his mother.
Georgette then seemed to Ivan the most beautiful of all. Probably, at that moment, somewhere in the heavenly office, the fate of Georgette Pasquier was finally decided: if she had not met Ivan, everything would have turned out differently for her. Maybe happier.
But it turned out like in the film “East-West” - a Russian and a French woman fell in love with each other and decided to leave for the USSR together. In May of '45, Mademoiselle Pasquier turned twenty-one, and by law she could already decide for herself whether to marry a Russian or not. Only Georgette’s mother, Constance, opposed the marriage to Pichevsky.
“Mom knew Ivan, she treated him normally, but she didn’t want this marriage,” says Georgette. — She was against me leaving. She was afraid. When I came to the city hall of Saint-Servan, they also told me: “This marriage is not necessary.” Then we went to Paris, to the Soviet consulate. They signed us up there.
The French side did not recognize the marriage. Constance Pasquier did not put up with him either. Seeing Georgette off at the station, she cried bitterly. It was not in vain that the mother’s heart ached—mother and daughter never saw each other again.
I learned Russian from my daughter’s textbook
As soon as the Pichevskys found themselves in the USSR, the door slammed behind them. Back in Saint-Servan, Ivan promised Georgette that they would live in France - they would just go to the Union and return soon. He didn't cheat. It never occurred to him that someone would take upon themselves the right to decide where and how they should live. Of course, we were not allowed to return to France. Because Ivan was in captivity, because this was the policy of the USSR, because... Georgette and Ivan would later submit petitions to leave more than once, but each time with the same result - “refuse.” Now, 56 years later, Georgette speaks about this dryly and briefly: “No... they didn’t let me out... they weren’t allowed...”
Life in the Union was not easy. Ivan Pichevsky, himself originally from near Chernigov, brought his wife to the war-ravaged Bryansk region. First, to the Semyonovsky district, where he got a job as a driver, then, three years later, the Pichevskys moved to the Suzemsky district - to the same Kholmechi, where we went to visit Georgette Pasquier. By the time of the move, the family already had a child - daughter Anna. The Pichevskys gave her a name that would not have needed to be changed in France - then, in the late forties, they still hoped for the mercy of the Soviet authorities. In the meantime, they were waiting for the right moment to ask to leave again, Georgette was getting used to her new life - in a post-war Soviet village.
“I had to get used to everything,” she admits now. Georgette does not like to remember that time - her shock was too great. - Plant potatoes, dig soil... We lived in a city in Brittany, we don’t have a garden there. Or you buy a bag of flour, and they give you another kilogram of rotten herring to add to your load. Of course, we don’t have that. And here in the stores there was nothing but rot.
In the village, Ivan's French wife was looked at as a curiosity. What was being said around her, Georgette could only understand by tone—she didn’t know a single Russian word. The language was not given to her: Georgette began to study it seriously only when her daughter went to school - she taught like a first-grader, using Anya’s school textbooks. And before that, Georgette had to express herself with gestures and individual phrases. Even now she does not speak Russian purely - she does not inflect some words, puts the emphasis on the last syllable, and her French “r” and “l” have never succumbed to the great and powerful. With the same elegant pronunciation, Georgette pronounces the word “mother-in-law”, who knows how it got into her vocabulary.
She never made any friends. Ignorance of the language affected the suspicion of fellow villagers, and also the mentality - polite in French, but reserved and strict, Georgette looked like a black sheep against the backdrop of rural chatterboxes and laughers. And there was nowhere to make them, these friends, because Georgette’s world was limited to the house and the yard. Ivan didn't want her to work. Over half a century of living in Russia, she earned only ten years of work experience (she was listed as a watchman), almost all the time being on maternity leave.
“If I worked, I would now receive a normal pension,” Georgette purses her lips offendedly. “I really wanted to, but my husband wouldn’t allow it.” He said: you have children, take care of them and the housework.
There was indeed a lot of housework. Ivan did not like to mess around with cattle, so Georgette had to take on this too. But she didn’t know anything about chickens, or pigs, or cows - except that she saw them in pictures in children’s books. A compassionate neighbor's old lady taught Georgette how to milk a cow, and she dealt with the rest of the animals herself when she stopped being afraid of them. There was nowhere to go, and she didn’t know how to make a scandal and had no intention of learning. The French girl made a good Russian wife.
I went home as a tourist
Georgette finally escaped to France, but only twenty years later. There are almost no relatives left. Constance Pasquier was no longer alive, her brother Eugene died in Indochina, her younger brother Jean went missing - of all her relatives, she found only her sister Marie-Françoise.
Georgette's trip was framed as a tourist trip. The authorities knew what they were doing - the Frenchwoman would probably have returned to the country. Only she and her youngest son Ivan received permission to leave, while Ivan Sr., Anya and Yura (he was born in 1952) remained in the USSR. The risk that Georgette would run away, leaving her husband and older children, was minimal - she could not do it.
Although they actually had no right to keep Georgette in the Union - she was still French. The Pichevskys knew this very well, but they were afraid to go into open confrontation with the authorities - a former prisoner of war, Ivan had miraculously escaped the Soviet camp, and besides, there were already three children growing up in the family. It was dangerous to tease the authorities.
Georgette was constantly checked for lice. At one time, even a certain German language teacher visited the Pichevskys - pretending to be a family friend, he found out the Frenchwoman’s attitude towards the local authorities. “Everyone was looking for spies!” - Georgette grins. The feeling with which the Pichevskys treated all these “checks” was more disgust than fear.
“They didn’t openly monitor my mother, but they still controlled her. But when my aunt came to us from France in 1973, she was constantly under surveillance - for the entire month while she was staying with us in Kholmechi,” says Ivan.
Georgette had another option for returning to her homeland - only with children, without a husband. Anna, Yuri and the younger Ivan, in fact, could be considered French by birth and qualify for citizenship. But even here fate tripped her up: only the head of the family worked in the family, so the Pichevskys would not have scraped together the money for tickets for four. And Georgette would not have left without her husband. In 1976, she visited France again as a tourist - for the second time. And the last one.
None of the Pichevsky children speak French. Anna learned the language as a child and even spoke a little with her mother, but then she abandoned everything and forgot. There were few people in the Union with whom Georgette could quench her longing for her native words. But she was lucky. Not far from Kholmechi, in Smolensk, the Frenchwoman Augustine was miraculously found.
“We met often, I went to see her, she stayed with me. She was married to a Russian, but very unhappily. The husband drank heavily and beat her. This is life... My husband has never offended me.
Ivan, although a simple village man, was a decent person. He understood how terribly fate had set him up. Georgette always regretted that she came to the USSR, and it was impossible to hide her despair even behind natural French secrecy. Ivan blamed himself for everything. It was so hard for him that for the rest of his life he avoided talking about France and about the, as it turned out, impossible promise he made to Georgette in Saint-Servan.
This was the only problem that came between them. Otherwise, Georgette and Ivan lived to the envy of all their neighbors.
“They had a wonderful relationship,” says Ivan Jr. “They never fought, I don’t remember a single time.” So, there were disagreements about small things around the house, but there were no serious quarrels. Father loved mother very much.
Did she love him? Probably yes. But with age, when sleepless nights came and days became tediously long, Georgette had a lot of time to think about her life.
“Of course, I did something stupid,” she says unexpectedly. “When I was young, it seemed to me that I was in love, but then I realized that I wasn’t...
However, the Pichevskys lived in harmony for half a century. Six years ago, Georgette buried her husband and lives in Kholmechi with her eldest son. Yuri, having suffered from meningitis in childhood, remained disabled for the rest of his life (his arms and legs do not obey him, and his speech is impaired), but the whole house is now on him - he does the laundry, irons, cooks food, and cleans the yard. The Pichevskys have such cleanliness that you won’t find not only in village houses but also in city apartments. You can feel Georgette's French taste: simple but elegant furniture, paintings on the walls hanging correctly, tilted, a striking clock on the chest of drawers and snow-white window sills that look like they were just painted. The yard is poured with concrete and swept clean, and Georgette's house itself stands strong, even though it was built fifty years ago. In Kholmechi they call it “Pichevsky Castle”.
Only old letters remained from France
Georgette never became a Russian. She has a French passport and a residence permit in Russia. Due to well-known Russian carelessness, the name Pasquier turned into Pasker - someone misheard, and apparently was too lazy to ask again. Georgette didn’t want to become a Russian either fifty years ago, or thirty, and she doesn’t want to now. He says proudly:
“I was born a French woman, and I will die as a French woman.”
She did not forgive our country, this innocent victim of political absurdity. But she never reproached me, which makes my soul even heavier.
She has not even outwardly become Russified - it is not clear whether to call this neat, fragile woman Georgette, or to add the absurd middle name “Evzhenievna”, concocted from her father’s name. There is not even a hint that grief, age and illness have broken her. “You have a strong character,” the photographer says quietly. Georgette raises her eyes, dark as cherries, at him in agreement:
“I’m from Brittany, Bretons are all like that.”
Her voice is as hard as the rocks on the seashore. True, it’s hard for her to speak, she doesn’t have enough air all the time. Georgette pauses every now and then to catch her breath. Yuri and Ivan say that their mother has asthma.
She no longer milks the cow or digs potatoes. She sits on the edge of the sofa, resting her tired hands on it - this is the only way it feels better. Watches rare news about France, catches snippets of native speech in reports and interviews. All that was left to her from her homeland were photographs and old letters that her relatives sent many years ago. Sometimes she dreams of France. And on warm days, Georgette gets out on a bench in front of the house, sits in the sun and looks for a long time towards the forest.
“We don’t have anything like that in Brittany, only the sea.” And I like the forest. I've loved him for a long time.
Irina Lipovets. Kholmechi - Bryansk - Moscow.