Fish of Life

A year ago, after a course of radiation and chemotherapy, Yevgenia Mikhailovna Lisenko lay in bed, awaiting death.

She had metastasizing tumors in her lung, spine, and left leg. Stage four. The prognosis was poor. She had no strength. Her legs didn’t work. The pain made her want to climb the wall. Doing nothing increased her suffering. Racing thoughts gave her no peace. In the present there was only pain, and the future was blank.

What helped Yevgenia escape her despair?

Fish therapy.

We traveled to Belgorod Oblast to investigate and found, on dry land, catfish decorated with lilac peonies, stripes, and rhomboids; a red flounder with a heart and blue polka dots; scads of colorful herring; a checkered bream; a trout with a smile and eyebrows. It was hard to decide which one we liked best. All were funny, warm, and cheerful. And all bore the label “beautiful.”

“In the morning, I have the same facial expression as your flounder,” wrote one customer on Instagram.

I peer into the fish face with its buttony eyes and realize that I too urgently need a fish.

Yevgenia started creating her funny, multi-colored pillow fish a year ago December on a sewing machine given to her exiled babushka by the NKVD.

In point of fact, the fish lifted Yevgenia up out of her wheelchair, and the donations she receives for the pillow-fish help to pay for her medicine.

Sewing for Real

“Mama, get up, it’s time to sew!”

Yulia, Yevgenia’s youngest daughter, has come for a visit. At a family conclave, it was decided that mother needed to be kept busy and distracted from her painful thoughts. They came up with the idea of making sofa cushions that could be sewn as holiday gifts for friends and relatives. The older sisters entrusted the creative direction to Yulia, as she is an artist and designer at Simple Things, a network of workshops employing adults with learning disabilities. More than once, she has had to devise various unusual gizmos for creative arts-and-crafts workarounds.

At some point last year, she came across a meme that was swarming social media involving cats admiring fish displays: “Вы рыбов продоете? Красивое,” (“You selling fish? Bootiful.”). And she thought, “We’ll sew fish.” She made a few quick sketches, gathered up some fabric and headed out from St. Petersburg to visit her mother.

“Bootiful” is the family’s brand, inspired by the cat meme. Although Yevgenia sews all the fish, the entire family takes part in some way. The inscriptions on the tags are embroidered by Yulia.

Together they cut and sewed several colorful flounder, trout, herring, and bream. They turned out to be smile-inducing. Julia posted photos on her Instagram account, and the fish caused a sensation. “We want these,” subscribers wrote in unison. Within three days, they had received 15 orders from friends.

Yevgenia cheered up. She asked for crutches to replace her wheelchair: it was difficult to move between the sewing machine and her pattern table.

Husband and daughters watched the process unfold with bated breath. Yulia created a new Instagram account (@krasivoeeeee) and came up with the idea of embroidering the world “Bootiful” as a brand on the labels. She posted pictures of the fish and wrote a post about her mama, her cancer, and the handiwork that had gotten her back on her feet.

Amid the New Year’s holidays, a popular Petersburg channel, Mash na Moike, posted on Telegram about the Bootiful fish. Dozens of comments flowed in. People shared best wishes for Yevgenia’s health, asked if fish could be sewn for them, and offered money for medicine.

When the orders exceeded 100, the fishmongers realized things were getting serious. Grigory Georgiyevich, Yevgenia’s husband, was drafted to cut the fish. He had never sewn in his life, but his engineering hand made him a first-class cutter.

It reached the point that they had to raid their couch pillows for synthetic fiber fill. Then their strategic button reserve was depleted, along with the gay, colorful fabrics. After the holidays ended, Yulia returned to Petersburg. And then the middle daughter, Zhanna, flew in from Khabarovsk to be with her parents, and took over the business side of the fishery. Over the next ten months, they filled over 300 orders and sewed over 500 funny fish.

The Hook that Saves

“These fish saved me,” Yevgenia confessed. “They crowded out all my thoughts of pain and death. I couldn’t imagine anyone would be interested in them. And now orders are flowing in from all over the country. People write so many words of support! It is so touching. At first, after radiation treatments, I felt sick all the time. I would sit there sewing and feel sick. I’d step away, take a breather, and then sit back down to sew.”

Yevgenia began to gain weight again, putting on three kilograms, and found herself thinking less and less about painkillers. She switched from injections to pills, then started forgetting to take them. She progressed from crutches to Nordic walking sticks, and now she walks without any support. Her head has been filled with thoughts of fish.

“It took a while to get things right,” she said, as if apologizing to their first customers. “Either the back came out crooked, or the seam did not work out. So much was torn out and resown while we figured out the order in which it was best to sew everything together.”

From pictures posted on Instagram, you can clearly see how her skill and strength as an artist grew. In the first fish, the mouth was a straight line. Then in the spring the fish began to smile, after a customer requested that their trout be smiling.

The field of fish emotions – this is an arena in which Yevgenia is experimenting. They tried eyebrows, different mouth shapes, heart-shaped eyes, a toothy smile. The bigger fish have fry, and a stingray became a pillow for cats.

Zhanna now helps choose the fabric combinations. She also sews the final blind seam after the stuffing is in. Then Georgy gathers up the pack of fish and carries them off to the post office.

Such is the family fish cooperative.

Georgy and Yevgenia have been together for 51 years. “He married me out of spite,” Yevgenia laughed, watching from the window as her husband worked in the garden.

She had had her eye on this attractive older brother of her girlfriend for a few years. But he was in love with someone else and could not see young Yevgenia right in front of his face. Then, while Georgy was serving in the army, the girl of his dreams ran off and got married. That opened his eyes to Yevgenia.

Their fate was decided by the cashier at the village club. She would put together “suitable pairs” from among the young singles in the village, selling them tickets in adjoining seats – the club’s movie hall being one of the village’s few local diversions. All the village youth grew up before her eyes.

After a second “accidental” meeting at the screening of some long, Indian film, Georgy offered to walk his neighbor home.

“She served as matchmaker for many village couples this way,” Yevgenia smiled.

They have been living in Belgorod Oblast for just three years, after deciding to move there from the Far Eastern town of Kavalerov to be closer to their eldest daughter. But they met in a tiny Siberian village.

Yevgenia was born in the cold autumn of 1950, in Severo-Yenisei, a taiga village 600 kilometers from Krasnoyarsk.

The progressive Soviet state had developed large gold deposits in very hard-to-reach places. Exiles labored alongside civilians at this backbreaking work, carried to the Far North by the Yenisei on caravans of barges.

Such was the final leg of the journey from Voronezh Oblast Yevgenia’s “kulak” grandparents took to their taiga exile in the 1930s.

The Yeletskys were a peasant family that earned themselves the “kulak” (rich, greedy peasant) designation – and thus the fate of being exiled – because they owned a single horse. The mother of the future fish lady was just 10 years old at the time. The trip was harrowing; the barge’s hold was coated with ice. They were starving. There were lots of children. The kids’ diapers, Yevgenia’s grandmother said, were dried by women with the heat of their bodies, wrapping their bodies in wet cloth instead of dry underclothes.

Upon arrival, Grandpa was immediately sent out to cut down trees, and died of scurvy. Grandmother was assigned to the mines, where she was to pull heavy trolleys filled with ore. On her very first day of work, however, she got lucky and broke her leg. This got her transferred to lighter work on a farm, where she milked cows and looked after the livestock.

“Babushka felt that God saved her and her children through this exile,” Yevgenia said. “During the war, almost every resident of their home village died under occupation. She was very devout.”

Grandmother did not break under the pressure of exile. On the contrary, she excelled. Being skilled at familiar peasant labor, she was highly productive and set milk production records. And a few years later, for her successes on the labor front, milkmaid Yeletskaya was awarded a trip to Moscow, to participate in VDNKh – The Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy. It would have been like something out of the Soviet-era romcom, The Swineherd and the Shepherd.

But, alas, her story did not have a romantic ending. The authorities opened her case file and were horrified to discover that they had nearly sent an Enemy of the People to the capital. Someone else was sent in her place.

“Instead, grandma was awarded this sewing machine. It is almost 90 years old,” Yevgenia said, stroking the somewhat battered black Singer. “I have conversations with it. It recently started acting up, and so I persuaded it to hang in there. My daughter has a modern, electric one. I tried it, it’s not the same.”

Yevgenia kept her family clothed with this machine all through the years of shortages. And now she sews fish on it. To make people smile. So as not think about death.

“I am a happier person now than before the illness,” she said. “My horizon has expanded. I have become interested in life. I have no time to die. I want to live long enough to see peace.”

The village where Yevgenia and Georgy live is just 20 kilometers from the border with Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine.

The first rocket landed in their village on February 24.