Pearls and diamonds

“My daddy was from a wealthy family. He was a little gentleman,” my grandma tells me.

“They came and shot his parents right in front of his eyes,” she says.

“He was fifteen. He had nowhere to go. So he went to the army. He used to say, ‘Lenin? Stalin? I only knew Trotsky,’” she tells me again with a laugh.

I’ve stopped by for a too-rare visit to her small senior community apartment. I’m guilty of the too-rare visit, and so I don’t mind nodding along to the stories she’s told me many times, hoping to piece together the fragments of her youth, her story. My story.

The tale she weaves is a hastily spliced filmstrip, with gashes and overlapping frames, characters whose names she can’t remember, parts repeating like a haunting refrain. It’s a tangled yarn of faces in faded photographs and ghosts I haven’t heard of, people with many siblings and tragedies.

“When my daddy came to ask for my mom’s hand, he had nothing. He said ‘I have my uniform, my rifle, and many many lice,’” she laughs again. She’s retelling these stories again and again, and each time they spill out in a rush, like a pot of soup left boiling too long. Her laughter is tinged with pride and sorrow for the journey she’s had, people she lost along the way, many too soon. I ask her to write it all down, commit these memories to ink. Instead, she tells me I should.

But these memories, so vivid in her pale eyes, are just shards that I don’t dare assemble on this page. Because no matter how many times she repeats these things, I can’t know enough about the long string of pearls her father gifted his young wife a year after they married, or what her mother felt when she traded it away for ration cards a few years later, or the hunger they lived through nonetheless while men were at the front.

“Your great-grandmother went to cooking school in her 40s. Did you know that?” This new revelation is my precious reward. “And when she got a job, she would bring home a pot of soup to feed all of us.”

She tells me again about Tashkent, the city of bread, where her parents joined a farming collective while Ukraine suffered through its Great Famine of the ‘30s, and where she was born and grew up an only child after the loss of her two older brothers. She tells me again about their little house — just that it was little, no more no less, and so full of people during the great war. All those siblings who stayed behind, spilling out of evacuation trains and finding refuge in this home. An occasional straggler with nowhere to go, too.

“For a time, there were fifty-one people sleeping in our house. The kids would sit at the table and wait for my mom to bring soup.” One evening, she says, a policeman confiscated my great-grandmother’s pot and she came home empty-handed. “We all sat at the table and cried. Everyone was crying except the youngest, who was three. She paced around the table, chanting, ‘Where will we get soup now? Where can we get soup?’”

“That’s that,” she pauses.

“It’s a good thing he gave her those pearls,” she wants me to remember. She doesn’t mention the origin of that fortuitous long string, and I don’t pry. Because if she knew more, she’d have already told me.

“That’s just how he was brought up — with nice things. He was from a wealthy family.” And she tells me again how her father was left with nothing at fifteen, how he rebuilt a life in Tashkent while much of his family perished in Babi Yar, how stately he carried himself, in a suit and with a fashionable cane, until his last days. “Like a gentleman,” she repeats again and again.

My grandmother’s story is not unlike many others of her time. Some may not have been as lucky to have had the love, respect, and even comforts that she’s had. She wants everyone to know that she’s a very wealthy woman — her children are her gold and grandchildren are her diamonds. And while her narrative weaves and loops onto itself, each bit is a jewel I treasure.

My great-grandfather said he had nothing but his uniform, a rifle, and many lice. But just a year later he got my great-grandmother a long string of pearls. Those pearls got them through the war.