May 6 is Eugen Doga’s mom’s birthday

May 6 is Eugen Doga’s mom’s birthday. The Maestro wrote this text a year ago, on May 6, 2015, about his mom.

On May 6, my mom would turn one hundred. She passed away prematurely due to a silly coincidence. The rural clinic’s paramedic couldn’t give her a tetanus shot on time since she was singing in the village choir at that moment. And while she was singing, my mom was transferred to the regional hospital. Meanwhile, tetanus successfully took over a significant part of her arm. There was a horrible blizzard on March 1! On top of that, it was my birthday. Tanks had to clear away cars that were snowed in on the road. I had flown in from Moscow and the next day, with difficulty, set off to my native village Mokra which is situated on the left bank of Dniester. With God’s help I was able to spend two nights next to my breathless mom. I kept thinking that she was sleeping and would wake up at any moment. Prior to that, while desperately waiting for the train to take off, I had written with tears in my eyes a requiem song based on poems that had mysteriously ended up on the piano and none of my family members had known about. They had been written in honor of a mother’s death, probably not mine. Soon, Anastasia Lazaryuk would brilliantly perform this song.

Poor mom. She was only 29 when she became a widow, not having experienced the happiness of love and the joy of life. I remember the day when we received a small telegram saying that our father had died, almost at the very end of the war. Years later, I found his grave in a Hungarian city called Székesfehérvár. My mom cried day and night and only pillows soaked with tears witnessed this horrible drama, this terrible injustice and grief. And when I would come up to her, she would drown me in tears and kiss my head, my face and hands, hugging me tight to her chest, as if wishing to merge with me. “You are my little orphan, my only hope and solace,” she used to say. Or, sometimes, she would grab my little shoulder tenderly with both hands and silently stare into my eyes for a long while. I found this gaze of hers in one of the old group photos which I retouched with great effort and hung above my desk in the living room. I think that on this day, when the whole family gets together at her grave in our native village, having come from different places, her dark brown eyes will shine at us through the veil of time. These eyes used to be so full of tenderness, love, questions and, sometimes, reproach, that this whole world will seem small and otherworldly, since it was taken in by our mom, our parent, our universe.

I will come there with a garrison cap with a red star on it, which I have recently received as a gift from the veterans of that terrible war. When we, kids, after the end of the war, came out to the outskirts of the village to meet our fellow villagers returning from the war front, fathers and elder brothers would put garrison caps with a star on their kids’ heads. Oh, what a joy it was! I didn’t get one. I had nobody to put one on my head. Mine rested forever with my father in a war cemetery in a foreign land.

Mom took my little hand and slowly, stumbling once in a while, as if in a fog, we slowly walked home.  To our orphaned home. There, at the border of the village, the baritone of our famous lautar, the blind Mosh-Fedot, mixed with the beat of a raggedy drum, high-pitched voices of joy and desperate cries of grief could be heard for a long time.

Oh, what trials fate had in store for my mom! She labored in a collective farm from morning till late night since the standards were immeasurably high and not meeting them meant prison. On top of it all, starvation, typhus, robberies and humiliation. In this struggle against harsh life, she saved and nurtured me and my grandmother Nadia, her mom. The things she had to come up with in order send me off to study music. Years later, she would listen (or maybe not really listen but rather get lost in distant memories) to my music at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, at the Big Theater, in Kishinev. Even in our native village where I had brought the Leningrad concert orchestra led by the famous conductor Anatoliy Badhen. Once, she saw me come to visit her in a helicopter. She raised her arms excitedly and said, “Zhenechka, it’s as if you fell down from the sky!” Poor hens, dogs, goats, pigs and various other animals! They all scrammed when the helicopter landed behind our house.

And we will reminisce about all of this, bringing back the bright image of our dearest and most beloved mother, who dreamed of happiness and always said she wished for us to live better. It seems that the world works like that. All parents think that way, especially mothers. They dream about their children’s happiness.

Today I planted a plant that had grown roots from a small branch, called “ivan-the-wet” in the local vernacular or busuyok as we called it at home. It will grow next to the other planters and bloom with red flowers. My mom always had plants around that she used to put on the windowsill to save them from direct sunlight. She used to love flowers, especially this one. It reminds me of my old but dear home in the village of Mokra and of my MOM.

Eugen Doga, May 5, 2015.