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The same blade creates a different wound in each muscle. The same cut heals differently in each body. For some, the memory of a pain is salt that reopens the wound. For others, this memory is a balm in the endurance of the marathon, a certificate of a proudly surpassed test. Been there, done that! Almost entirely Portuguese, Alina is a young happy woman, with no hint of trauma. She owes this serenity to her mother, Olena, who carries the social genetics of Soviet communism and displays scars that she doesn’t always remember... Some are more visible than others. They all added to her resilience.

                                   

Olena Mishtur

Born in Zaparóshe, Ukraine

44 years old

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Olena Mishtur is so focused on making her satisfaction at living in Portugal clear that she almost forgets to tell us the story of some of the most difficult moments she lived in Ukraine, even before the dissolution of the USSR. She speaks with a special glow, the one that surrounds people who cannot contain the joy implied in a particular overcoming of obstacles, and then she begins her story by explaining that she was educated in Communism and Protestant Christianity, both with very strict rules. “I always had to wear a long skirt, I couldn't cut my hair or pierce my ears, I couldn't use makeup or nail polish, and the worst of all was that we couldn't have friends outside of our religion,” she says, in a Portuguese where only certain words suggests an Eastern European accent. “Only when we were 19 did we have the right to comment on what we thought was good or bad and, so you have an idea, if someone was caught drunk on the street, he would be imprisoned for three days, without trial or anything, and that was the least that could happen to him”. Religious conduct and civil legislation would get confused, but Olena took the best lessons from one and the other, and clarifies: “Many people think the worst of communism, but I do not agree. Now, at this age, I can make a comparison with totally liberal countries and I think that, unfortunately, society gets a little lost when there are no rules. It's not that everyone gets to do whatever they want to, but people are less responsible and I see a lot of youngster getting lost because of that. Communism forced people to follow rules and that also gave them an opportunity to become better”.

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Set on a constant personal evolution, this philosophy explains the commitment that the Mishtur family put into education. In an era when all homes had a piano, Olena started taking classes with her grandmother at the age of three, at 10 she was already part of the church choir because the family believed that they should “put this talent at the service of God”, at 13 she became the main organist of the temple and at 15 she was conducting a choir with more than 100 members. She was "fully programmed to develop everything needed in music" and the Kiev Conservatory was the last step in a training process that soon led her to teach at the No. 4 Zaporóshe School.

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In order for Olena's life to be perfect at age 19, her parents thought that all that was missing was for her to get married and they tried to find her a husband. “He lived 1,200 kilometers away, but he came to Zaparóshe to see his parents on vacation and, when he entered our church, my family looked at him and thought he was the one,” says the Ukrainian. In about a year, they were married and he moved permanently to the hometown of his wife, who, as she herself admits, had always been “raised to be a leader” and gave him no alternative. Everything went well? No. "In practical terms, it's like I was forced to get married," she says. "In my country you couldn’t date and meet people as you do today, and our parents tried to get us married quickly, because the idea was 'you either marry now, or later you’re be too old and nobody will want you'". The social conditions of the times didn’t help the romance either. With the job market in recession, the couple only lived together in the same house for a few months because Olena's husband lost his job shortly after she became pregnant and only in Siberia could he find a job, as a heavy-duty construction driver. "I was alone the whole pregnancy and he only returned five days before I delivered, because I told him 'you come right now or never again'". Soon after they had little Alina in their arms, but a certain distance, a certain coldness had already begun to settle in for the couple... “It's normal. At age 22, married? What did we know about life?”.

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Soon, also Olena lost her job. As “the great crisis” settled on the country, the school dismissed 80% of its staff, since families were no longer able to afford music lessons. Job alternatives were increasingly scarce and, one day, while reading newspaper ads that promoted work abroad, the decision was inevitable. Leaving their baby in the care of her maternal grandparents, the two young Ukrainians decided to head for Spain and, in order to obtain the necessary documentation and proper transport, paid 2,000 dollars each, 600 of those to secure employment upon arrival at the country. “But, in Spain, we saw a very violent robbery at a gas station and we thought it best to continue the trip”, says the only woman in that travelling group of eight Ukrainians. “It was a dark night, I didn't even know where that happened, but we came to Portugal without any papers and ended up between Vila Real and Peso da Régua, the men working in the vineyards and I as a domestic”.

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Thus began in 1999 Olena's greatest adventure and also the worst phase of her life as a migrant. In the first month, everything went well, until it was time for the group to receive theirs salaries: the boss reneged on the agreed deal and shortened their pay by 33%, arguing that the cut was to pay for accommodation and food, and leaving each Ukrainian with what would correspond today to just 200 euros. “The men started pressuring him, saying that they wanted to legalize their contracts and the answer always was that, if we weren’t pleased, we could leave. But where would we go, without contacts and without speaking the language?”, recalls Olena. Denouncing the businessman to the police authorities wasn’t an option. "There were a lot of Ukrainians and Russians charging money to emigrants for getting them jobs, we had to pay for ours too and, if we’d open our mouths, we’d either disappear or that mafia would take revenge on our family – the one that remained in Ukraine".

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The group of migrants tried to persuade their boss through dialogue, but the following month he ordered everyone to pack up and left them at the train station with orders to go away. “It was total despair,” admits Olena, in the face of her daughter's surprise. Alina had been silent beside her mother, listening to her with those clear, intense eyes, and then confessed: “I didn't know any of this. I’m hearing it all for the first time”. Olena then says that, at that time, she already had a sister living in Faro, in the south of Portugal, and asked her for help. “She was a cleaning lady for powerful, well-connected people, and immediately said that she was going to talk to Dona Isabel – which I hope is well in life, because she deserves it”. In the time it took the train to get from Régua to Porto, the lady from the Algarve took care of everything and, on the group’s arrival at the so-called Invicta city, a van was already waiting for the Ukrainians to take them to Ovar and install them in a hotel. The following day all of them were working in a ceramics factory. After a week, they moved to a house that their new boss had given them, at the end of the month their salary was higher and paid in full, and everything seemed to have improved. But, after half a year, the company continued to deny them an employment contract and Olena still listened to a whole speech each time she appealed for legalization. “The boss said that in Portugal I had to learn to listen and to be silent. For a while I thought he was right, but now I don't agree. We live in democracy, we have freedom of expression. This is the kind of thing in which Portugal still seems to be as closed as in the time of Salazar. Here and in Ukraine, many people still think that women have to be submissive. Why?". Olena gets agitated over her analysis and Alina joins her: “And it's not just about women! There are also many problems if a person likes someone of the same sex. I have a friend who is homosexual and he suffers a lot because his family doesn’t accept him!”.

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It’s at this stage that the history of the Mishtur family enters happier chapters. Olena's husband moves from ceramics into the metallurgy industry and she starts to work in a reference restaurant in Ovar, known as “Casinha Júlio Dinis”, whose owner still has her gratitude for everything he taught her about Portuguese culture. “The first thing Mr. Carlos did was ask a maid to take me to a store nearby to buy me some pants, because there was really no way I could work with a skirt going from waist to toe. He and Mrs. Armanda gave me a contract, paid my Social Security, got me a Portuguese teacher and, two or three times a week, I met her at a café or rode a bike to her house. He gave us all the meals at the restaurant – even my husband’s, who worked in another place, but met us there for dinner – and that's how we saved money to bring Alina, at age 3, from Ukraine. And it was also Mr. Carlos who taught me to eat with a knife and fork. In Ukraine we only used a spoon and, years later, when I went to visit my mother and asked her for cutlery, she even got offended! She thought I had gotten snobbish!”.

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Olena has this phase in Portugal still fresh in her memory, recognizing it as a period of change and acceptance. “All of it was learning,” she explains. “I suffered a lot because of the Ukrainians who screwed up here and there, and I was afraid to be considered as crooked as they were. It was very difficult to gain people's trust, but we weren’t all the same. As in Ukraine and Russia, in Portugal there are also very bad people and my luck, with Mr. Carlos, was that he gave us everything we needed: the documents, the language, the notion of how it was to live in Portuguese society…. He taught us how to speak, to know how to present ourselves. He gave me the first trousers that I had in Portugal and, for many people, that may not matter, but it touched me deeply because I had never been taught like that, with that sincerity. It is very important to be honest with people and tell them the truth, so they can adapt”.

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In the meantime, her skills in Portuguese were also evolving. Olena had grown up speaking Russian, but in her academic career she also learned English and Spanish, which would later help her to master the language of Camões. She knows it much better than Ukrainian itself, which was only adopted as the official language of Ukraine after the territory became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. Now it is in Portuguese that Olena thinks, it is in Portuguese that she reconstructs scenarios of her daily life, that she registers her memories, that she makes decisions, that she fantasizes…

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Another good thing about Ovar is that it was there that music returned to the Mishturs’ life, thanks to Mrs. Rosa, who, in addition to offering them a home in Furadouro, also employed Olena as the conductor of the local church’s choir, until Catholics resented not seeing the Ukrainian Protestant sharing the same Eucharistic rituals and discharged her from the position. At that time, the pianist was already trying to see her musical training recognized in Portugal, but the national process of validating foreign academic qualifications has always proved to be “difficult, expensive and impractical”, by requiring documentation issued “at a time when there were no computers” and files that were lost in Ukraine’s transition from the USSR to nationhood. The solution was to continue working in other areas and that was how Olena arrived at the old Lunik shoe factory, in Santa Maria da Feira, where she moved with Alina after separating from her husband. "We then started to have a normal life," she says. "We met good people, we discovered good neighbors, we had emotional and even financial support from everyone". The bosses, Joaquim and António Almeida, taught her everything there was to know about footwear and, for nine years, until the company closed due to bankruptcy in 2015, she attended several courses in connection with the industry, which allowed her to reach the position of quality controller at a company with 215 employees – and helps explain how she still works from 8:00 am to 5:30 pm at another firm of the same business. “If today I know how to make a shoe from beginning to end, I owe it to them,” she acknowledges.

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In her list of reasons for gratitude, Olena could add this one: “If I teach piano lessons at Orfeão da Feira today, I owe it to a Toyota Yaris”. Alina's mother won that car in a competition run by Oporto’s trade association and the prize was presented at the Café Majestic, whose grand piano dazzled the Ukrainian, who, from age 16 to 23, exercised daily on the black and white keyboard, sometimes for more than 10 consecutive hours. When she again pressed the piano keys, she withdrew from the instrument some compositions still printed by heart in her memory and did so with such grace and flair that she impressed one of the Majestic’s customers, who, hearing that she resided in Feira, invited her to visit the choir society of that city. That was how the migrant pianist started to collaborate with the institution where she has already taught dozens of students, from 6 to 82 years old, many of them accustomed to sharing the practice room with Alina, who, after leaving school, joined her mother's classes and, sitting somewhere around, would lay silently doing her homework, eating or just waiting. The piano room remains simple and clean, but the young woman has a special affection for it: “I spent my childhood here”. She saw hyperactive children who jumped up and down on the bench all the time they were at the piano, she met others who arrived stressed from school and lay on the floor to decompress before the class, she also listened to those who shared with her mother some stories about a new boyfriend or, in tears, about a broken relationship. Olena confirms all of this. She knows that, in addition to being a teacher, she needed “to be a psychologist, a friend and a little bit of a confidant as well".

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This never prevented her, however, from having the reputation of “being very demanding and rigid, and of never giving the students time off”. Alina almost feels avenged when she hears her mother recognize that and exclaims: “It's true! She is never satisfied, she always asks for more and, as I was afraid of her, I always wanted to get good grades!”. The mother listens to her and doesn’t spare her either: “Wasn’t I right? You got good grades because I demanded it! Would you have joined the Faculty of Architecture with an average of 18 [in 20] if I hadn’t done so?”.

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The piano alumni don’t seem to condemn Olena for being demanding. Some of them are already adults, they graduated in the most diverse areas and, when they meet her, they pamper her with privileged service and discounts in their new careers. This is what happened with a pianist who, now a plastic surgeon, offered his former teacher a chance to eliminate the scar that she has below her jawline, on the left side of her neck. She told that story in a light-hearted mood, displaying evident pride in the success of her former student and on the affection he still feels for her, and she wouldn’t have revealed anything further if not asked about the origin of this irregularity in her skin. She then replies that the scar is the result of radiation emitted by Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster and only then do we fully understand why she made a point of telling us, at our arrival, that “a very important thing in the Ukrainian tradition” is the way in which, at any time of the day, people greet each other with the expression “Zdravstvuyte – health to you”.

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Then we go back in time. Olena was 10 years old when, on April 26th, 1986, there was the explosion at the nuclear plant reactor near the city of Pripyat, in northern Soviet Ukraine, 300 kilometers north of Zaparóshe. The real effects of the chemicals released into the atmosphere were immediately concealed from the population and, for years, their consequences continued to be omitted or distorted in the official versions of the accident. That’s why, although the radiochemical repercussions of the disaster are now well-known and expected to continue to affect thousands of people over centuries, causing congenital malformations and a high incidence of cancers in many former Soviet territories, life in 1986 proceeded without special precautions in the region south of Chernobyl.

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“During the three months of summer, we spent our lives in the river. We were children and that was natural”, recalls Olena. “What we didn't know was that the explosion contaminated the waters, which were always lapping the banks where we used to bathe, and I was one of the first to be affected in my area: a huge bubble appeared in my face and it hurt a lot, but I thought it was a toothache”. The girl who already played the piano was subjected to surgery for the first time at the age of 11 and lived “with an open wound for two months", while the doctors tried to find a justification for the problem that wouldn’t embarrass the Soviet government. “I was taken, without exaggeration, to about 10 cities – Moscow, Saint Petersburg, those with better-known hospitals – and, still a child, I had radiotherapy and chemotherapy pills. But I lost two teeth, my jaw bone had already become rotten and they had to replace it with a plaque. Maybe I already had cancer cells and that’s why the consequences evolved so fast… But every 10 years I continue to have X-rays and send them to Ukraine”, for a medical evaluation that doesn’t appear in the official records of victims associated with the largest civilian nuclear catastrophe in the history of mankind – one whose radioactivity equaled more than 200 atomic bombs like the one that devastated Hiroshima. Some say that ignorance is a bliss and maybe that explains why Olena doesn’t have psychological scars from that stage of her life: “At the time, the government hid everything from us because they didn’t want to admit that this was the effect of radiation. Only in 2019, when I saw the show 'Chernobyl' on television, did I truly understand what happened”.

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Alina listens to everything in silence, observing Olena very seriously and agreeing that the scar is to be maintained. She says she can only thank her mother for leaving Ukraine at the same age as she, her daughter, is now, and for doing so in a time so different from today, which required such bravery without the comfort of the internet, mobile phones or GPS. “It was worth it and she did well to come here. If for nothing else, at least because I'm still not married at age 20”, she shoots out, with a laugh.

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For everything to be perfect for the Mishturs, they just need to try a Portuguese Christmas. There have been several invitations over the years, but Olena has always refused them because she thinks that their presence at someone else’s home would be a heavy burden at a time meant for a strictly family reunion. She has learned so much about Portugal and the Lusitanian eloquence, but she still has to understand that this intrusion would be genuinely welcomed... Alina seems more aware of that national hospitality trait, insists that she would rather have a Portuguese Christmas than a trip through Europe and grabs her mother’s arm trying to convince her, just as if she had gone back to being a little girl asking her mom for a new toy. Halfway between a threat and a plea, she leaves it in the air: if Mrs. Eduarda invites them again, this year they’ll say yes. ■

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