My old man

At first, you’re somehow afraid of him, yet you respect him. Though you, of course, really love him, but he doesn’t let you get too close. He keeps his distance as it befits the elderly. He checks your English homework, although he doesn’t have the foggiest idea, and it irritates you. He dotes upon your younger sister and takes her side in every conflict. He fights against your teenage smoking with totalitarian methods. He brings cedar cones from Chelyabinsk and salmon from Vladivostok. You grow up and come of age and only now have you slowly started to repay your debt. Now he’s sixty-five. When you simply recall him, your heart squeezes and puppy tenderness courses through your whole body.

I’m talking about my dad. Especially in my teenage years our relations were complicated. “Caribbean crises” took turns with temporary “disarmament,” but the general degree of irreconcilability of two systems was very high. At that time, it seemed to me that it was actually he who had problems—not me. All teenagers think that way.

My dad distilled moonshine. Not for sale, but “for home, for family.” He did this at nighttime, in secret, after he had closed himself into our fifty-five square foot kitchen. He listened to Radio Free Europe until the morning and watched how the firewater trickled into the one-liter jar from a narrow pipe apparatus. Dad’s moonshine was considered a work of art. Perhaps therefore we don’t have alcoholics in our family.

One time, in winter, I came to my grandma for tea after my lessons. All at once there was a call from dad’s work. Grandma was hysterical:

“Andriy, the police came for your father! They’re taking him home. God, the moonshine is over there! Run home! Pour it out!” It takes three times longer to get home from grandma’s than from dad’s work. And here I am, rushing through the city, covered in snow to rescue my dad and to pour the moonshine down the toilet. I slip on the ice several times, my shoes get filled with snow and my lungs are ceased with frosty air. But I’ll definitely get there faster than the police. There is no other way.

My great-grandfather Vasyl

On the way from JFK to Manhattan many interesting things can be seen. The first thing that befalls your eyes is the former factories that haven’t worked in a long time and old cemeteries where no one has been buried for a long time. At one time, the cemetery rose like some parallel city on the background of thick pipe wickerwork and immense departments erected in the 1920s and 1930s probably for extraterrestrial giants. Back then architects designed as if they had lost sense of human proportions. However, the hands of common people of flesh and blood constructed those giant structures.

When arriving in New York, I always keep one fact in my mind: my great-grandfather Vasyl was among those who built this city. He was a deserter from the tsarist army, which was hopelessly losing World War I. At night he came to his village in the Podillia region to bid farewell to his family. His eldest daughter, my grandmother, told me when “father came” she was already sleeping, and she woke up when “father had gone.”

Through her dream, she heard his and mother’s unintelligible whispering—thieves or secret lovers communicate like that. Who knows, perhaps they were making love then—for the last time in the very long life of my great-grandmother. Maybe he came simply to collect foodstuff. Maybe he wanted to see his sleeping children—for the last time in his life. It’s only known that grandfather Vasyl left for America for money-earning, turning from cannon fodder into construction fodder.

Yet in Soviet times, letters and parcels arrived from New York. There was a certainty in the letters that he would return and they would buy land and finally live a happy life. There were gifts—snuffboxes, trinket boxes, and brooches—in the parcels. It was told that once he sent them money he earned doing construction work.

In 1927, a telegram arrived with news of his death. Grandfather Vasyl disobeyed the safety codes and fell from a high floor. Simply down, simply onto this eternal Manhattan that was built without him—a person without a name or story.

My uncle

Certain things in our lives may seem absurd from a passing glance. A nine-years-old boy lives near the yard I happen to frequent. Once I passed a group of kids loudly discussing something and I was almost knocked off my feet by his phrase: “I’m studying with my uncle in the same class!” Later it occurred to me that there wasn’t anything weird about the boy’s words. He was simply born into the family of the grandma’s first child, who in her turn, in the year of the 9-year-old’s birth, had his uncle.

I have three uncles. It’s also an absurd phrase since only one of them is still alive. The second has already been in the grave for sixteen years. However it’s hardest with the third. Presumably he is alive, but in practicality he is gone.

Mother’s eldest brother Valery disappeared in a town called Mendeleyevo in the suburbs of Moscow. He doesn’t write, he doesn’t call, and he doesn’t send telegrams. The letters sent to him come back. The telephone informs that such a number doesn’t exist. We’ve appealed to the officials and were informed that he isn’t registered among the dead.

Throughout the course of fifteen years, his mother passed away, his son, abandoned in childhood, died, and three grandson-nephews were born. But he can only guess about all these things. Maybe he also guesses that we still remember him. Though it doesn’t mean that he has forgotten about us—these are our guesses.

He’s seventy-five now, and we want to see him, especially his sister. In my childhood, when we lived nearby, I respected Uncle Valery for his weirdness. He liked to settle cozily on the chair, put the telephone between his legs and dial unknown numbers. When women answered, he would start reciting poetry and then he’d arrange a meeting. And none of those women ever hung up. Yet no one ever came for a date with him.

After all, I sometimes think, even if he doesn’t come for a meeting, he should just give us a call and tell us he is alive. Although that last phrase would also be absurd.