Natasha, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1998
Наталья Михайловна Исатченко
(Natalya Mikhailovna
Isatchenko)
Наташа,
Natasha
(1958-2020)
On August 17, 1958, Natalya Isatchenko was born to a Russian
family in the village of Novo-Dubrovka, Kazakhstan, now a new country, but in
her time Kazakhstan was still a republic of the Soviet Union. The climate in
North Kazakhstan, before the age of the global warming dawned, was Siberian.
Winter temperatures were typically as low as minus 30, and the snowfall was
incessant. Natasha lived her first thirteen years in Kazakhstan, what she
described as a very happy childhood. “I was always laughing and smiling.” That,
by the way, got her into a lot of trouble, as Russian culture frowns upon too
much levity. “Wipe that stupid grin off your face.” But she never learned to do
that.
Her surname is Ukrainian, and her passport reads
“Ukrainian;” that mistake was dutifully copied into lots of documents,
including her marriage certificate, but Natasha was pure Russian, and she never
even set foot in Ukraine until late in her life. Another instance of garbling
appears in her family’s spelling of the name, and in the way they pronounce it:
some long-lost relative inserted a superfluous letter ‘T’ into the spelling and
started putting the stress on the second syllable (it should be stressed on the
third: Ees-ah-CHEN-kah).
The garbling theme is appropriate, of course, since her mind
and psyche, later in life, were much garbled. On her first day in a Soviet
school the teachers told the pupils to pick up their pens and prepare to write.
Smiling as usual, little Natalechka picked up the pen with her left hand,
whereupon the teacher whacked her on the hand with a ruler. Lefthanded writing
was prohibited in Soviet schools. She learned to write with the correct, right
hand, but throughout her life she could write mirror-image with her left. She
did this naturally, with no concentration. Somewhere I still have a note she
wrote to me in mirror imagery: Я тебя люблю: you
hold it up to a mirror to read it.
In 1971 the family moved back to Russia, taking up residence
in the village of Kagal’nik (also called Dvurechie), not far from the large
city of Rostov-on-Don in the south. They still had a few relatives in
Kazakhstan, and late in her life one of Natasha’s whimsies involved thoughts of
returning to her country of birth. After completing secondary school in
Kagal’nik, Natalya enrolled in a pharmaceutical institute in Pyatigorsk, where
she completed a higher education in pharmacy and became a pharmacist. She
worked in pharmacies in the city of Ivanovo, near the Volga River. Always
intelligent and hard-working, she soon earned the respect of her superiors and
became head pharmacist for the whole region, in charge of all the pharmacies there.
After meeting Andrei Titov, an artist, Natalya followed him
to the city of St. Petersburg, where she continued working as a pharmacist.
Although never legally married to Titov, she had a son by him, Andrei, born in
1987. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1998, Natalya met an American,
the Russian professor, Robert Bowie, and they were married in St. Petersburg,
on June 21, 2000. In late 2000 the family moved to the U.S., living in
Greenville, SC, where Natalya found immediate employment as a Pharmacy
Technician.
Always a gentle soul, in some ways childlike, Natalya had a psyche
that was delicate, and the stress of a new life—new language, new culture, new
everything—told on her. In 2004 she began having serious issues with mental
illness; although still somehow able to hold down a job, she was assailed by
voices screaming obscenities in her head. For the rest of her life on earth she
never rid herself of those voices.
Her original plan involved working to achieve full status as
a pharmacist in the U.S. She had already taken several important steps toward
that goal, but her mental illness put a halt to the dream. She sought help in
the Russian Orthodox Church, hoping somehow that the devils she felt in herself
could be exorcised. In 2007 she made a pilgrimage back to Russia, to the most
holy site in the country, the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery, where she remained
for a week, trying to purge herself of her affliction. She took part in public
ceremonies of exorcism run by a priest called Father German.
The exorcisms were of no avail, and she returned to
Rostov-on-Don, where her sister helped her check into a psycho ward. She was
treated there for several months with heavy injections of an antipsychotic
drug, and when she returned to her husband in the U.S., in March of 2008, she
walked and acted like a zombie. The side effects of the drugs were as bad as
the illness. Over the next few years, she tried taking several other
anti-psychotics, but nothing really helped.
In her confused mind Natasha had a habit of assigning
persons around her to the camp of the devil. Her husband had tried to help her
and take care of her for years, but after losing her last job as a pharm tech
in 2010, she declared him to be the devil’s minion and insisted upon a divorce.
When they split finally, in late 2011, she departed South Carolina for Alaska.
Why Alaska? In the year 2004, at the beginning of her
serious travails, her husband had taken her, as a birthday present, on a trip
to Alaska. Although she was seriously ill in her psyche, they had a good time,
spending almost a week in August, driving around the Kenai Peninsula. Only a
few years later did she reveal to him what had, supposedly, happened to her at
the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage.
“There were little demons there at the church, and they took
me and crucified me, and they tore out my soul from my body.” She stuck to this
story for years, declaring that she had to go back to Alaska and find her lost
soul. She lived out the final nine years of her life in Kodiak, where she was
sometimes homeless, but also sometimes earned good money working in the
canneries. She made frequent visits back to her family in Russia, even helped
her mother financially. Wherever she was, she walked incessantly, as she had
done back in Carolina, and people around Kodiak knew her as the lady who
walked. And talked in Russian to the bushes and trees. On August 19, 2020, the
day of the Feast of the Transfiguration, Natasha was walking down a road at six
in the morning, when she was hit by a car and killed.
Survivors include her relatives in the Russian Federation—her
mother and brother Viktor in the village of Kagal’nik, her sister Lyudmila in
Rostov-on-Don—her son Andrei Isatchenko of Charlottesville, Virginia, and her
husband Robert Bowie, of Gainesville, Florida.
Vero Beach, Florida, January, 2000
Florida Gulf Coast, January, 2000
Autobiographical
Note: My Family’s Life, My Life
by Natalya Isatchenko
When I
was born my family consisted of my mother, my father and my sister. My mother
was twenty-four years old, my father was thirty-one, and my sister was one year
and three months. My family was living in a small village in North Kazakhstan
when I was born. Kazakhstan is a country in Asia. At that time it was a part of
the Soviet Union, one of fifteen republics. Now it is a new country, not a part
of Russia.
My
father had been working as an accountant, and my mother had been working in the
library. Now I don’t remember anything that happened until I was three-five
years old. When I was three years old my brother was born. I don’t remember if
I had toys. Maybe never because my parents were not rich. One thing I remember
well is nature. Our village was in the forest. There were a lot of birches. I
have loved birches since my childhood, and I love birch leaves. I remember that
my sister and I made wreaths from birch leaves with our hands (weaving), and
put them on our heads. We wove dandelions into the wreaths, and how beautiful
this looked! I even remember how birch leaves smell. Especially when they are
fresh and sticky in early spring. Close to our village we had a lake where we
used to fish; this lake had a lot of white geese. My father liked hunting. He was
a great hunter.
When I
was five years old my family moved to a different village, only nine kilometers
from my old village. This village was named Dubrovnoe, and in fact I was born
there, because the small hospital (“birthing home”) was only there. My father
became the main accountant at this State Farm, and my mother began studying
accounting in the technical college. I remember this time very well. We bought
a TV and a car. I remember how we put up an antenna, and then the TV began to
work. It was a concert, a dancing program. I was five years old and I remember
how I was feeling. I was so surprised that in a little box (screen) the people
were dancing! In the evenings when we children went to bed, my parents turned
on the TV in a different room, and we were not sleeping. We tried to see the
movies. We did this so quietly.
My
father went to the forest and the lake very often in the car, and he always
took us with him. He shot wild ducks, and we ran and got them. We played the
role of dogs. My father liked his car—he still has this car, it is thirty-nine
years old, and we moved in this car from Asia to Europe in 1971, across the
Ural Mountains, in April, when there was a lot of snow everywhere. He liked to
drive very fast. He drove fast when he was in the car without my mother. When
she drove the car she always went at a low speed.
When I
was eight years old my family moved to a different village, named Sivkovo,
which is two hours from Dubrovnoe by car. We moved because my father was sent
there to develop a new State Farm. We lived there three years, and all the rest
of my life I have remembered this time with great warmth and love. It’s such a
pity we moved from this village later; I had never seen a more beautiful place
in my life. We had a very good house. We built much of the house ourselves. Me
too! It was very close to a beautiful lake in the forest. Another birch forest.
We had a very good school, very smart teachers. Since then I’ve loved sports
very much. I began to play handball, volleyball, tennis, went skiing, dancing.
I received so many good things from this school. Since then I have loved
studying different school subjects, and I have never forgotten this time. It
was the most lovely time of my life.
My
father began to have problems when we first moved there. When we were putting
all our things on the truck, my father’s mother didn’t want to go. She was
crying and saying, “Everything is done, all is lost.” When we came to the new
village, on the first day all our livestock were shot. People from this village
were afraid of a disease (hoof and mouth disease). They thought we had brought
it from our village. My father later began to have problems with his job. It
was the most difficult time in his life. This happened because of his boss, the
director of the State Farm. My father is a very smart, honest person who knew
his job well, but circumstances of the Soviet Union were not in favor of such
persons. My father wanted to seek justice. He was a Communist, and the
doctrines of Communism sounded very good. He believed in communist doctrine. He
sought justice until he was retired at age 59. He was twice deprived of his
party card, the last time when he was 59. By that time he already understood
what Communism means, but the first time (at age 40) he thought that if the
people were Communists, they were supposed to be clever, honest and just.
So we
moved from this place to a different place, also in North Kazakhstan. We lived
one year in a village named Beloe. I didn’t like that place, that school, or
the nature there. My father had a big problem with people who worked with him.
These people also wanted to take state property. So we moved from “Asia to
Europe.” That sounds funny! Now, for thirty years, my parents have been living
in a village named Dvurechie, close to the Azov Sea in the south of Russia. My
sister, my brother, and I finished school in this village. I lived there four
years. My father first worked as an accountant, but very soon he quit his job
because he understood that he couldn’t work such a job. Everywhere he met such
dishonest people. It didn’t depend on places where we lived. It depended on the
political system of the Soviet Union. If people began working in high
positions, they began to become not good as persons. I noticed that these kind
of people wanted to receive a job higher up because they wanted to have power
over people.
My
father worked as a driver, then maybe two years as deputy director at a farm
where there were a lot of cows. He became the best deputy director of a small
such farm in all of Russia. They showed him on national TV news, with the
Minister of Agriculture, who came to our farm. Before he came everybody was
laughing, because the director made them paint all the tree trunks on the farm
and decided to put rugs down over the whole place—so the Minister would not
step in the mud and cow manure! My father began receiving a salary twice as
much as the director of the State Farm, and this director kicked him out and
took his party card. Such people always found reasons. This happened with a lot
of good people in Russia. I’m glad my father didn’t go to prison, as a lot of
good people in Russia did. He lost his job, his party card when he was
fifty-nine years old. Since then he has lost his health. He worked as a carpenter
the last year until he was retired. Since then he has found his hobby: taking
care of bees. Now he is seventy-four years old, and he is sick now. I worry
about him every day.
When
Russia began breaking with the old regime in 1986-87 my father was so happy.
But this period has been going on in Russia already for fifteen years, and
still there is no good news about the Russian political and economic system.
When my father worked as a carpenter, my parents decided to build a new house.
It took about eight-ten years for them to build it, and now they have been
living in this house about seven years. I’m so happy about that, because when
they lived in the old house they received a lot of trouble from our neighbors.
Those neighbors even poisoned the bees. My father was very sick about that. I
think he still couldn’t understand such people.
After
finishing my school, I worked two-three weeks as a milkmaid; then I worked at a
secret factory named “Electroapparat” for eight months. In the Soviet Union a
lot of factories were secret. We worked for the military. After that year I
studied for five years in a Pharmaceutical Institute. Now it is called a
Pharmaceutical Academy. We’ve changed all names in our country since the new
system started. When I was studying in my institute I had a very good time. I
liked this time very much. I lived in the Caucasus Mountains—between the Black
Sea and the Caspian Sea, close to Turkey. I liked studying nature and plants
there. Especially I loved the subject named pharmacognosy, where I studied
herbs (natural medicine). Since then I’ve been interested in nature, herbs,
active ingredients in the herbs. In Russia maybe thirty percent of drugstore
medications and remedies are herbs. Ten percent are homeopathic. Another twenty
percent are things like hot water bottles, ear syringes, enemas, etc. Only
forty percent are chemical medicines. I don’t like it when people take strong
chemical medications. I think that first people should try herbal remedies,
homeopathic medicine, and only if this is no help, then they need to try a
chemical product.
After
school my sister had been studying accounting for three years in a university.
Then she was married when she was twenty years old. Her son was born a year
later, and her daughter was born six years after that. Now her son has
graduated from university (last year) and has been working for a gas company.
Her daughter now is a sophomore in the university. My brother was in the army
while I was at my university (pharm institute). It was a very hard time for our
family. In Russia we still have obligatory military duty. In 1979, after three
months on the Russian border with Turkey, my brother was sent to Afghanistan,
to the war there. After two years in Kabul he was wounded and spent six months
in a hospital in the city of Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan. Since then he has never
felt well. Sometimes he is so nervous. I love my brother very much and also his
wife. They are so good! They have a son fifteen years old, the best friend of
my son. My brother lives very close to my parents, and I’m so happy because of
that. My brother after the army studied in a technical college and since then
he has been working as a driver on a State Farm.
After
university I was working for five years in a drugstore close to Moscow, near
the river named Volga. I was the head pharmacist for the whole area. I ordered
medications, checked all the drugstores in my area, and my workers liked me
there. Then I met my son’s father and moved to Leningrad, which was his home
town—now this city has its old name back, St. Petersburg. I liked living in St.
Petersburg very much. This is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. I wish
everyone could visit St. Petersburg; there are so many good things for the soul
there.
My son
was born when I was twenty-nine years old. I decided not to marry my son’s
father. He is an artist. He has never had a family and he likes a free life.
So, my son did not have a father for twelve years. We lived together, my son
and I, and we are very close to each other. Now, thanks God, I have a family
for two and a half years already, and I’m so happy with my husband and son.
[Note written in Greenville, SC, in 2001, as an assignment
for a class in English as a foreign language]
Working in Pharmacy, Greenville, SC, 2003
