Prisoner to the Silence of Her Village

Nina Gordy was sitting naked and caked in mud when the men saw her through the cracks of a ramshackle cowshed.

The men, local police officers and leaders of a neighboring village here in western Ukraine, were searching for a stolen tractor. They went on with their hunt and forgot about Nina.

That was three years ago. Nina had been locked inside the shed for two decades. Her parents, who didn’t know what else to do with their mentally disabled daughter, had put her there.

When she was finally freed this spring, she was 36 years old.

“It was not my territory and I forgot about it,” said one of the men, Pavel Smolinsky, chief of the Veliky Zvanchik village administration. “I have five villages to look after. I can’t embrace everything.”

He wasn’t the only one who knew. Nina’s neighbors knew. For 15 years, they knew. And they did nothing.

Over the soft green hills of Podolsky Yar, the dizzying scent of summer nectar drifts amid fields of golden and violet wildflowers. In this ethereal setting, the girl grew into a woman in her dim shed.

She was a shadow, always present, like a dark blot on the villagers’ consciences.

“Everybody knew. The police knew. No one paid any attention,” said Lyudmila Nikolayeva, 26, one of the closest neighbors. “Everyone just got used to it.”

Nikolayeva said she brought food several times and watched Nina’s father, Vladimir Borshchun, unlock the shed door, push aside the heavy log jammed against it and hand the food to Nina.

“She was all covered in mud,” Nikolayeva recalled. “There was a small blanket. It was covered in mud too.”

Their silence seems unimaginable. But for locals, the biggest surprise seems to be that a journalist from so far away would bother with Nina Gordy’s story.

It’s a story of primitive and anachronistic beliefs in a remote village, overlaid with the complacency and lack of accountability common in former Soviet societies.

Smolinsky, the local official, returned to the house about a year after the tractor hunt. When he saw that the parents were keeping their cow in their house while their daughter remained in the shed, he felt there was something fundamentally wrong.

“I did not feel comfortable about it. I knew she was a human being. Whether a human being is good or bad, the person deserves good conditions,” he said.

Yet still he did nothing more than reprove the parents, saying he didn’t want to offend the administrator responsible for the village of Podolsky Yar.

That time, Nina was sharing the shed with dogs and a goat, he said. On a later occasion, it was turkeys.

Now Nina is in the Khmelnitsky Regional Psychiatric Hospital, where she has no possessions except for a pair of old shoes that someone gave her.

Doctors have made only a very general diagnosis: “oligophrenia to the point of imbecility.” The word “oligophrenia,” a general term for mental retardation, is used commonly in Ukrainian institutions.

When she was admitted May 26, Nina was afraid of people and hid her head under a pillow. Today she’s more relaxed. Once she gets used to a new visitor, she extends a small hand and smiles at the soft sensation of strange fingers stroking hers.

She is learning to eat with a spoon. She can wipe her hands and face with a towel. At first she was afraid of water, but now she likes to wash.

She loves to wear rings. She likes to have lipstick put on.

One morning in July, a nursing aide held out a white geranium: “Nina! Smell it! Smell it.”

Nina took the flower and raised it slowly to her nose, then thoughtfully took a bite.

Everything is new. That July day, she held a pen for the first time and drew experimental loops of red and green on white paper.

She shows pleasure by making a soft mewing sound, or by gentle movements that resemble a subtle dance. She makes displeasure equally clear, with a sharp, insistent sound.

Because her muscles have atrophied after years in the shed, she cannot walk upright and shuffles along on her haunches. She tires easily, and takes herself off to bed.

There is no doubt that Nina was a difficult child to care for, especially for parents who worked all day as shepherds for the local collective farm. When they left Nina in the house, they say, she broke windows and plates and smashed things with a stick.

“I had to lock her up,” said her mother, 64-year-old Maria Gordy. I was not at home. I went [to work] in the morning and came home at night. What could I do?”

She said she began locking her daughter in the house when she was 7 and in the shed at age 13, meaning Nina was kept in the shed for about 23 years. Neighbors couldn’t be specific but suggested that it was more than 15 years.

Vladimir Borshchun, 62, said his daughter was in the shed in summer and in winter, when the temperature sinks as low as 14 degrees below zero.

The parents’ house is bare and untidy, with a smoke-blackened ceiling and walls, puppies roaming over the rough concrete floor and a turkey in the second room. But with five goats, a cow and a calf, they aren’t the poorest family in the village.

Sitting on the grass outside his house, Borshchun pointed to the shed. He walked over, pulled aside the log and opened the door. A black calf peered out of a space of about 8 feet square, with a board floor covering the rear half and a deep puddle of rank mud near the door.

Asked if it was a mistake to keep Nina there, he replied, “It’s not my fault, is it?”

The administration of Podolskoye village, which is responsible for Podolsky Yar, tried several times to persuade Maria Gordy to send her daughter to a psychiatric hospital for care, but she refused, convinced that Nina would be poisoned in such a place.

Official Says He Was Powerless to Act

Andrei Haymer, head of the Podolskoye administration, insisted that without parental permission, he had no power to remove Nina. He said the first attempt to get the parents to give up Nina was in 1992.

But Valentina Glushchenko, who is in charge of neglected children for the Ukraine State Committee for Youth Policy, Sports and Tourism, said that if a child’s or adult’s life or health is at risk, the chief of the local administration does have the power to remove the person without parental consent.

“The local administrators should have intervened immediately if they had signs or information that the child’s health or life were in danger,” Glushchenko said. “I am sure in this particular case the local administrators can be held responsible for ignoring the situation and not taking any measures.”

Now the heads of the neighboring villages, Haymer and Smolinsky, are both claiming credit for Nina Gordy’s liberation. When a journalist visited Smolinsky’s village in April on other business, he says, he told her about Nina. The reporter, Vera Isachenko of the Podolsky Vesti newspaper, wrote a story, triggering Nina’s release.

‘How Can She Be Happy if She Has No Tongue?’

Asked if he loved his daughter, Borshchun said he had become “fed up” with her.

But Maria Gordy, smiling, said she loved Nina--”everything about her.” She said she wants to take Nina home from the mental hospital, and she insists she’ll never agree to have Nina permanently transferred to an internat, or state institution for disabled adults.

“I’m her mother,” she said. “I have the right to take her away. I fed her and I brought her up. I must take her home.”

When Nina was admitted to the hospital, she weighed 70 pounds and showed signs of malnutrition.

Her mother said Nina is incapable of showing pleasure or any other emotion and asserted that her daughter has “no tongue,” although Nina does have a tongue and does express emotion.

“She doesn’t understand. She’s mute,” she said. “How can she be good if she doesn’t understand? How can she be happy if she has no tongue and cannot speak? How can I know what she wants if she doesn’t speak?

“She was sitting there, and you would just give her food and that’s it. She screams when she wants to eat. She screams when she wants water,” she said.

Staff at the Khmelnitsky Regional Psychiatric Hospital said Nina reacted very positively when her mother visited and hugged her, bringing a piece of pork skin for her to chew on. The problem wasn’t an absence of love but an absence of understanding, said Natalya Goluyad, chief of the department for female chronic psychiatric patients.

Authorities See No Need for Charges

The district prosecutor’s office has not filed charges over Nina’s imprisonment. Asked about the lack of action, Podolskoye official Haymer said no one had called for a probe.

“You don’t expect me to file a claim to the prosecutor’s office blaming myself, do you?” he asked.

Nikolai Brovchuk, deputy prosecutor of Kamyanets-Podolsky district, suggested that Nina’s parents had little option but to lock her in the shed.

“I don’t think we can charge the parents, because they had to protect their property and even their health and lives. They had to somehow act to protect themselves,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t write about this.”

Maria Gordy and another daughter, also named Maria, said the villagers treated the family as outsiders.

“The neighbors thought they were better because I have an invalid and all their children were clever,” said Nina’s mother.

When she was young, Nina wandered near her parents’ house or near the riverbank or sat on the ground in the fresh air, singing her own melodies.

Neighbors and family say she was usually naked or in rags because she tore her clothing to pieces. She explored the world through her mouth, eating flowers, plants and even frogs.

Like other village children, neighbor Lyudmila Nikolayeva was afraid of Nina when she was growing up.

“The other children made me feel frightened of her. She would scream, and I was afraid of that,” she said. “People thought she’d attack them, but she never did anything like that. People teased her.”

In the village, there was an odd myth that Nina Gordy had divine protection. Stories still circulate that as a child she could put her hand into boiling soup to pick out a piece of potato without reacting to the heat.

“We say she was protected by God,” Nikolayeva said. “She never got sick.”

Now, in the hospital, meals seem to be Nina’s favorite times. She picks out her meat to eat first. Staff members coax her to use a spoon, not her fingers. She tears her bread into tiny shreds, sniffing each one carefully before placing it into her mouth. When a crumb falls on the floor, she pounces on it.

One nurse, Maria Chaikovskaya, has formed a close relationship with Nina and brings her treats.

In her brief time at the hospital, Nina has made progress using a spoon and a chamber pot, combing her hair, jumping onto her bed and laying out a coverlet. She no longer rips up potted plants, and she chooses clean clothes over dirty ones.

“She’s used to white coats now. For her, they are something good,” said the department chief, Goluyad. “She demands very little, just the minimum comforts, that’s all.”

But Nina’s stay in the hospital will be limited to several months. Once she learns basic skills and hygiene, she will be moved. Her prospects in a state internat are poorer. Internats in the former Soviet Union have been severely criticized by groups such as Human Rights Watch for their low standards of care.

There, Nina Gordy will have more light, air and space, but not much more individual attention than she had in her shed.