My Grandpa, my Dedushka, or Deda, would’ve turned 100 today. He died in 2014, at the age of 93, and since then all I have is memories of him.
Memories are truly weird and wonderful: you still can perfectly remember a multitude of insignificant things yet something, even a milestone, slips from your mind completely. Or does it?.. They also say that the older you get the more precious becomes each and every glimpse of your interactions with those long departed. I cannot confirm or disprove this: I know that everything I still (and may, and will) remember is what makes me myself. Even the silliest trifles—or them first and foremost.
I have been mentioning Deda quite often, mostly in Russian: I do not remember, however, of doing it that much in other languages, and not in Ukrainian, which is bad of me (I must do it). I am feeling at the moment that the time has come, and my linguistic transition (or something, which looks like that) is telling me to do so more regularly in English. Not for the sake of the interest of my friends: I don’t want to abuse their patience with my sentimentality, so they are welcome to skip this part, but for the sake of carpe diem I’ll continue.
Who was my Deda? He was the pillar of my family, the rock, the load-bearing wall. He had suffered a lot from the beginning of his childhood: after his parents—wealthy peasants from the Zaporizhzhia region—were killed under “dekulakisation”*, he became an orphan and nearly died of malaria at the age of 14. He was rescued by an old nurse who gave him quinine, which was at the time mostly used for curing venereal diseases: she decided to take the risk, and it worked for the frail boy who was constantly murmuring in fever.
Deda graduated from his Polytechnic college in the late 30s: as a “fabzayats,”** or a newbie factory apprentice, he began working at the Zaporizhzhia Engine Engineering Factory (The JSC Motor Sich now) until the Second World War began. He wanted to join the Red Army immediately, but instead was sent to the Ural region to work 24/7, producing engines for the Soviet military.
After the war he changed his location to the Kaliningrad district, where he met my Babushka (Nana): shortly afterwards they got married and had two children, my Mum and later my uncle. And then, Deda decided to change his life completely: he took his family to Arctic, where he became one of the main engineers at the seaport.
I’ve always found the local perception of “cold weather” hilarious: Brits love to think that -4 Celsius is “bitter cold,” and it’s adorable. The temperatures Deda had worked under were below -60; sometimes they were around -71. Temperatures like -45 were regarded as fairly normal and nothing special (I was born around -47). Deda loved the Arctic and the Far North: he loved long dark winters, and blizzards, and tundra, and everything related to this. He became great friends with the native people of the Sakha Republic: Yakuts and Evenk.
But time passed by, and he decided to retire in his native land: in Ukraine. He returned to Zaporizhzhia in the middle 70s with my Babushka and lived there until his death.
Deda was an inseparable part of my childhood: when I was left with my grandparents (Mum became gravely ill), I spent most of my time with him and Babushka. Sometimes Babushka slightly grumpily told us, “Guys go and have a stroll,” and Deda would take me out to wander around our neighborhood and further: we called it “to meet trains.” We went to our local railway station, a very primitive one, and behind it there was steppe with wheat fields somewhere behind the horizon. We loved to count the wagons of long trains, and, especially, those that carried coal: they smelled divine. In autumn, we walked and picked prickly rosehip and hawthorn berries; in spring, we reached the Stone Toad in the middle of our favourite meadow, which was a bit swampy at the time (it doesn’t exist anymore).
But main miracle was the Christmas tree. Deda always picked the best pine tree from the market and brought it in with glorious silence. He did so until the very end, when I, an adult 30-something woman, would visit him every New Year’s: he stubbornly fought dementia, and bought that tree, and we decorated it together. And those were some of the most precious moments of my life, which I will never forget. That is what makes him still alive.
Happy Birthday, my dearest.
___________
* A part of the Soviet collectivisation when wealthy people from countryside were completely deprived from their property, arrested and then either deported or executed in the time of so-called war Communism
** A Russian wordplay: a shorten version for “fabrichny zayats,” a young factory worker.
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