Grandma, part 4

Osya found a girlfriend, moved out, got married, graduated, got a baby, and three years later Lyuba, Osya and Osya's wife and kid moved together again. I don't remember the details, I was the damn baby. By my first coherent memories were of the time when we were living together with grandma.

Grandma was a formidable woman with short dark hair, a body that took two strong men to insert it into a corset, and a thunderous voice that was undoubtedly the world's second loudest (the world's loudest voice belonged and still belongs to her sister Frida. When the two sisters were together it wasn't safe to enter without hearing protection.).

She worked and partied a lot, and wasn't home as often as my parents or even my other grandma (who was at our place a lot), but when she happened to be home she always had a lot of time for me. We talked and cooked together, and baked cinnamon pies. She always thought I liked cinnamon pies and never figured out that I just liked to participate in the baking.

She was different. For one thing, she was the only strongly extroverted person in my environment. She was also the only "girly" woman who had a lot of makeup, exotic foreign nail polish, jewelry, and all of that in bright colors, too, and bright-colored clothes, and a lot of fluff decorating her room, and in that she was very different from demure and stern women from my mother's side of the family. She also had a penchant for drama. I guess all humans do, more or less, but she had more. She also liked books and music and painting and all the other forms of arts, and travel, and even managed to travel a bit in Warsaw Pact countries all the time lying shamelessly about having, or rather not having, relatives abroad.

She used to give me little exotic things that her sailors (the ones she was treating) brought her from abroad, such as colored pencils and chewing gum. She gave me a little transparent rubber ball with glitter inside that bounced like no ball I'd seen before. The ball got lost during some move, and I never found one like that again until Joy got one for 50 cents from some dispenser at a gas station last Vappu and gave it to me.

When I was 6 or 7 grandma married her boyfriend Mark and moved in with him. She did not have a veil. Mark seemed a friendly old fart like many others, but he was the only person I've known who'd actually been in Gulag for a reason, and was proud of it.

Back in 1945 USSR faced the problem of too many disabled people, which meant too few people working and too many receiving disability benefits. USSR tried to solve it in a truly communist way by denying most of them disability certificates, and therefore benefits. Doctors, Mark included, were given a quota of how many disability certificates they were allowed to write, and were not allowed to write more even if the patient had no head. Mark, on the other hand, was of the opinion that at least people who do menial labor are not very good at it if they have lost both hands. A number of handless people got over-the-quota disability certificates, and Mark got 25 years. He got lucky and served only 10, because Stalin finally died.


Mark died in 1980 (concentration camps are bad for your heart) and Lyuba was living alone again.