In winter, I woke up at my grandmother’s when she stroked her callous hand on my back and said, “run onto the oven while the cherin is still warm”. The house already smelled of bread. That house had always smelled of viburnum, bread and milk. Grandma got up very early and kneaded a lot of dough – enough for bread, pies and doughnuts. And then, when the bread had been baked, and the oven had cooled down a bit, my sister and I were to relocate on its cherin. For those who don’t know – it is the surface on the oven, the one which is heated and where you can lie warming up all of your sides. I loved those morning dashes from the bed to the cherin. The sleepiness passes off, and you just lie there, dream and wait for the grandma to serve a cup of fresh milk and a huge pie on the oven.
“Granny, do you love grandpa?”
“For God’s sake! You’d better ask something sensible.”
Grandma never said whether she loved grandpa or not. She had lived her entire life with him – sometimes happily, sometimes horribly and hard, sometimes stepping over betrayal and meanness, the entire life together. I don’t know if I could live this way.
My grandma’s name was Kateryna. She didn’t know the exact date of her birth and said, “Well, I’m Kateryna, so I must have been born on the Saint Catherine’s Day.” She didn’t like emotional conversations, and nothing except for maybe the reading lessons could soften her. Yes, while having a very educated husband, granny was illiterate. Her mother died when she barely started attending school. And since that time she had to drop her studies so that each morning she could knead the trough of bread for her father and brothers, and run the household.
Granny washed the table, washed her hands with soap, put her glasses on, and opened our children’s books of fairy tales very carefully. At the age of 6, I was reading everything I could and did it in a quick pace, but grandma slowly slid her finger – “Kit-ty, so kitty, and roo-st-er, so rooster”. I was hanging around and hinting her if she couldn’t handle some long word.
“Granny, had you ever written letters to the front for grandpa?”
“For God’s sake! I wrote… I drew crosses. You’d better ask something sensible.”
The grandpa was taken to war suddenly. He needed some pants and food – it was the beginning of the war, the hungry times. And my grandma raced after him on foot – she made a hundred kilometers detour to catch up on the train. We joked, “Granny, you could have reached Berlin”. She said that no, she would not go there, because of the household – it was necessary to keep an eye on it.
I still remember their fights with grandpa! I wish I had recorded any of their highly artistic quarrels. When pretentious words flew out, took off, intertwined and unified into such a firework that you could look at it forever.
I then asked my grandfather whether he loved grandma. But he also scolded me and asked to put sensible questions.
They had lived together all their lives. Though none of them remembered when they got married. They had 8 children, 4 lived up to adulthood. They never talked about love, but only about work and the household. I still don’t know whether they ever loved each other, nobody told me. They did not talk about love, they baked bread, worked the land, grew crops on it and baked bread again.
And only now, more than 20 years after they had gone to the better world, I realized that the morning bread was about love.
My mom and dad had lived together for 25 years, then the dad died. They also had different times – they fought, made up, laughed. Sometimes I saw the dad sneakily kiss mom’s neck while she was cooking dinner. Sometimes some disgruntled murmurs were heard from the kitchen – meaning they were fighting. Sometimes I thought that with age people lose the ability to love. Well, really, how can a “forty-year-old elderly woman” fall in love?
I told that to my dad, and he laughed and said, “if only you knew how much I love your mom.” Sometimes I asked mom if she loved dad, but mom only laughed, or also asked to do something sensible for God’s sake.
Recently, my Nadiika found out about Saint Valentine’s Day. Of course, for her, it’s just an interesting holiday with heart-shaped postcards and pink gingerbreads when everyone is talking about love. And we were painting another heart when she raised her eyes and said, “Mom, do you love dad?”. I wanted to tell her about all these generations, all these “I love you”, about how my dad looked at my mother. But I just laughed in response and said that I love him very much, because only this kind of love may give birth to such beautiful and disobedient girls.
We often collect inheritance for our children since birth. Some important things, valuable items, important accounts. But it turns out that the most important, the easiest and most difficult task at the same time is to give our children love. This normal and such an important feeling, which then will keep their wings up and open the world to them.
I don’t know whether my grandpa Vasyl and my grandma Katia loved each other and what kind of love was between my dad and mom. But I am grateful to them for the most important inheritance – love.
Tatusya Bo