Hopping on one leg, six-year-old Olia was telling her friend: “We slaughtered a hog, because we’re going to have a toloka! And we also made homebrew, but don’t tell anybody.” The girls are looking forward to the toloka [a Ukrainian tradition whereby the village community helps a neighbor build a house — Ed.] just like they eagerly awaited a recent wedding where they overindulged in sweets.
“Organizing a toloka is much like throwing a wedding party,” Halyna Stroi speaks from her own experience. This will be her toloka. She and her husband Yaroslav are a young village couple, who have had enough of sharing a kitchen with their parents and now want to start their own household. Yaroslav has been to many tolokas, and now his fellow villagers will be helping him. But this one will be Halyna’s first. She hasn’t slept for two days: a hog slaughtered for the toloka must be processed to keep the meat from spoiling in the heat, on top of the usual village household chores and getting her daughter ready for first grade. Countless other treats were bought at a bazaar to go with the pork: herring, mayonnaise, cigarettes for the men and candy for the women, and, of course, yeast — for homemade bread and moonshine.
“There’s no way a bucket of homebrew will be enough,” says Halyna. “We must have one bottle per person. Some people here can knock back a liter and never show it. It’s better to be on the safe side, or else we’ll have to borrow more from the neighbors.”
In preparation for the toloka, they fashioned a wooden framework, reaped green rye and bound it into sheaves back in the summer, bought two truckloads of clay and sand, and brought three tons of water, which is still not enough. “Not to worry. It looks daunting at the beginning, but it’s going to get done,” a grey-haired foreman reassures the young couple. The women assemble after leaving their cattle to graze in the pasture. Halyna is arranging the breakfast right in the front yard on a makeshift table covered with a new oilcloth. Sausages, cheeses, meat jellies, stuffed cabbages appear in unending succession, and the feast gets underway. The main dishes are bread, potatoes, and homebrew.
Aunt Vira, a robust maiden, has been to countless tolokas. She knows how to begin and end a toloka, what to say, and what to sing. On the advice of senior guests Halyna is the first to throw a fistful of clay into a corner of the house. All of its clay walls will be raised in the same fashion, to be smoothed out later with a board.
“You can’t imagine how your arms hurt after shoveling this clay,” says the oldest of the women. Traditionally, the women raise the walls, while the men work at the top. Old Karas is one of the people who fetch and hoist rolls (wooden rings wrapped in rye and clay) to the ceiling. Karas, a.k.a. Hryhoriy Malchenko, did some quick math and said it was his fiftieth toloka.
Agreement in a team effort is crucial, especially during a toloka. When there are too few people, work is slow and hard, while too many is a crowd, but at a toloka nobody chooses what to do. Everybody does what has to be done and what the foreman tells you. The community chooses the foreman spontaneously, in a very democratic way, without voting. In a community with a common goal, where everybody knows everything about everybody else, they never make the wrong choice. The spirit of leadership, knowledge of the job, and organizational skills become evident early on, while trust in the chosen foreman is an unmistakable criterion. As a result, he becomes foreman for life. Uncle Tolia has directed more than a dozen tolokas in his fifty-five years. He says that people and clay are the main thing at a toloka.
“You’d better ask Oleksiyovych that. He has worked on a hundred something houses in the village. He is already 65,” Uncle Tolia says jokingly, stepping into the clay mix with his pants rolled up. There’s no time for chatting at a toloka.
If the work goes well, no one feels fatigue: you get up the next morning and go back to work. This depends on the host, and whether an eager hand began the toloka. The village community knows perfectly well who has eager or unwilling hands. There are lazy hands too, but nobody refuses to join a toloka, even though it is free labor. There is only one excuse: when it’s your turn to tend the herd on the pasture. You can’t lie your way out of it, because old and young alike know who tended the herd yesterday and whose turn it is tomorrow.
“People invite you, get ready, and are counting on you,” says Dmytro Maidansky, explaining the philosophy of the toloka. After this day Yaroslav will work at many tolokas for the community. And there will be countless more tolokas to come, even though construction is no longer on such a large scale as before, and there are many empty houses.
Where else does such an atmosphere of warmth and well wishing exist among people if not at a toloka? A team effort based on good will always unites people. Working in the same clay mix, Yavdokha and Teklia made peace as the work progressed, while earlier that morning they had been frowning at each other.
The builders wash their arms and legs in the leftover water, and when the host pours another round of the homebrew, the toloka gets its second wind. After the first hunger has been sated, simple and sincere wishes are sent from different ends of the table: wishes for a good life, fortune, and strength. In the new house Halyna was made to sit on a chair smeared with leftover clay. The guests laugh and crack jokes, while lifting up the young hostess and rejoicing over the new house and new life. A sad song suddenly follows a merry one. The guests begin to discuss their troubles and sorrows. Kateryna, for one, looks especially drawn. Her husband went to earn a living in Moscow and has not been heard from for two months. The responsibility for the entire household is on her shoulders, while her son is starting to misbehave without his father. Meanwhile, Olena’s husband is at home, but has been unemployed for five years. Their household finances are too tight to buy the kids winter clothes. For a moment everybody is engulfed in his or her own troubles. Suddenly the guests begin to rise one by one. The women are off to milk the cows, while the men, puffing on the cigarettes they were treated to during the toloka, trudge home in groups. Old Kylyna takes a winding path to her clay-walled hut. She also had a toloka in her youth.
