the burden is light

There's a thread here in the DUmpster, about one thing, but which temporarily evolved into a discussion of degenerative neuro-muscular ailments, which provoked memories of something I saw while wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all, during the 1990s.

It was in Kiev, Ukraine, at the main railway station, and it was winter 1996, that I encountered a human monstrosity. I didn't actually encounter him; he was carried on a litter past me, over the heads of the teeming mobs milling through the station.

To say the station was jampacked is to say that sardines have plenty of elbow-room in cans, and it being winter, even more so. Ukrainians tended to be small people, and hunger was abroad in the land, but their unwashed padding gave the impression of roly-poly tumbling balls of cloth and fur, and fierce ones at that.

I was in the city on my own; I had gone, on a whim, to examine conditions under benevolent socialism, on my own dime, not being sponsored by anybody, allowing simple time and chance to dictate where I would go, and what I would see.

Because of my being deaf, and my unfamiliarity with the cultures and languages of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus (for some perverse reason now long ago forgotten, I had thought that just knowing the history of a people and a place was sufficient; it was in fact pretty good, but it in the end wasn't quite enough), I had a habit of "hiring" someone to "guide" me; some stranger who didn't look as if he was doing anything urgent, or in particular.

I had acquired a "guide," allegedly a student who looked in his early 20s, who agreed to take me to examine some industrial complex south of this Chicago-sized city; his third language (Russian and Ukrainian being his first two) was not English, but German, but that made no difference to me. Being deaf, I wouldn't know how to distinguish between them anyway.

My guide had gotten the tickets--such was necessary, because had I attempted to purchase them, I would've been immediately identified as a westerner, and hence charged inflated prices, and in hard currency--and we were pushing our way through the crowds towards the proper platform, when our progress was delayed by arrival of another train, enormously long and enormously packed.

Peasants from the villages and countryside, coming to the capital to sell their goods in this food-challenged city.

Out of one set of doors there emerged one group of circa twenty peasants--not a single family, but obviously people related to one another--an ancient babushka (grandmother) in the forefront, walloping and shoveling and cursing the hordes out of their way.

Most of them were loaded down with back-racks (?--not sure if this is the correct term; some sort of wooden frame carried on the back, loaded with goods, which if one encountered snow, he could make a sled out of it, and drag it) of potatoes. But at the tail end, there were four younger men, teenagers, carrying a crude litter at shoulder-height.

On the litter lay the regular-adult-sized head of a fully-grown male.

His head was about half his whole body, all below the neck being withered and infant-sized.

I had been in the socialist paradises long enough by then, to have seen all sorts of cripples, malformations, deformations; such people were supposed to be submitted to the tender mercies of free medical care, but many families, well aware of what that meant, preferred to take care of their own, themselves.

I stood transfixed as the litter weaved through the crowd, and suddenly decided upon a change of plans; I wanted to see what would happen.

My guide protested; to him, such sights were a dime a dozen, and besides, we had already gotten the tickets for another destination. But as I was the one paying all expenses, and had already paid him a carton of Polish "Marlboro" cigarettes, the guide had to go, reluctantly, where his golden goose was going.

We followed the large extended family outside the station, to some sort of open-air market some minutes away, where they set up shop. I wished to speak with them, but given the hesitancy of my guide, and that I tended to, uh, alarm peasants (my being the first American they had ever seen in real life), I decided to leave it be, and just watch.

The goods were set up for sale, and the litter with the monstrosity was parked where things were comfortable, and visible to its occupant. The family did a brisk business with the urbanites, but something else compelled my interest.

The monstrosity, laying there on the litter, carried on incessant banter and chit-chattery with his family, and with browsers and customers. Rather than being something that stuck out, some oddity, he seemed as a natural and accepted part of the environment, nothing at all unusual about him.

I was reminded of the promise of God, that ".....every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low; the crooked straight, and the rough places plain....."

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