The Tea-Scented China Roses
When I was little I used to spend a lot of time with my grandmother in a large countryside house. Several generations of Russian parents have a sociocultural tradition of bringing children to their grandparents for the whole summer. Big cities in Russia become overcrowded with huge influx of tourists and teenagers, who both hang out on the streets days and nights long, looking like there is a privilege being in a city during the high season. It always becomes chaotic and among the chaos there are parents who need to make money, preferably without a headache about their kids. This text is about one of those years when I am 5–10 years old and I still do not perceive the exile to the countryside as an exile.
Parents were usually coming to see us every weekend and by default Friday was the best day of the week. Their arrival was never expected because when you are a child you always have something to do even (or especially) when you are placed in a village. Hang out with kids of the villagers and together tease chained dogs, jump in the hay from the second floor of the hay loft and do not pay attention to the calendar. My average day was intense and started early enough for the holiday time. I was waking up from grandmother’s rooster yelling and ate semolina porridge first — a relic of a hungry Soviet past. It helped soldiers gain weight during the Second World War and for the same reason was considered junk by modern nutritionists. My mom would never cook it, but I loved the way grandma did, not a single lump. Ever.
During the week there would be a special day when I would wake up earlier than the rooster start yelling: the day when granny’s favorite show “Play, Accordion!” was hosted. I liked it because my grandma did, but as a child I did not understand why and who watches the show. Even for the beginning of 2000s its content was very very retro, every episode two hosts were traveling to new region, where together with villagers they dance and sang old songs and ditties, often accompanied by accordion. Most likely it was hosted for grannies like mine, intending to bringing back pleasant reminiscences of their younger days. Grandma was very fond of music. In her youth working as a telephone operator at the spaceport in Baikonur she whistled pop songs of those years. She often recalled those times, telling me how she lived with Yuri Gagarin on the same street and how sweet were those pears in Tashkent. Everyone who knew her would say that she had always been craving for changes, she managed to live in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kaliningrad, Estonia and Lithuania. All three of her children were born in different countries of the Soviet space and she made the last move with her kids when my mom was 10 years old, my uncle was 15, and aunt was in her 20s.
Her house was the only one on a dead-end part of the street, right at the edge of the northern woods. The “edge” here is not proper word as there was only wild forest around. Full of firs, pines, blueberries and mushrooms. For hundreds of kilometers to the left, right, front and back there still is only the forest, and somewhere among it there are tiny villages like the one she lived in. This is how the whole Karelia region is. After the breakfast if I didn’t run away to play with friends, she would invite me for a walk to the forest and I would go. To crawl among wet mossy rocks and count how many times the cuckoo cuckooed — superstition that predicts how many more years one will live. Or to the swamps, to pick the cloudberries, when my fear of drowning turned innocent berry picking process into adrenaline adventure. Or to collect small bouquets of lilies of the valley, which are on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. She was very fond of flowers despite of some “conditional prohibitions.” The second grandmother’s favorite point of flower gathering was the garden of her friend, Tamara Ivanovna. Lush bushes of white Tea-scented China roses bloomed there. Heavy branches were throwing themselves over the weak wooden fence that framed her tiny garden. So many times we were intentionally taking the road leading to this nice little place. We would break the excess branches and satisfied with the catch laughingly leave the scene of our crime.
Despite all the variety that days had to offer some nights could seem awfully long and I would beg grandma to visit her friends. She was an outgoing person and there were quite interesting characters among them. For some reason I clearly remember only one woman, baba Katya, she drank a lot of vodka and was telling fortune with playing cards. My grandma could let herself drink a few shots when she enjoyed the company. Vodka with weird adult snacks like fried pickles, that’s how dinners at baba Katya’s place looked like. My grandma was okay with such dining, while I was fascinated with the process of “fortune telling” and didn’t have the capacity to wonder about anything else, including food. Only when we would come home in the late evening, I could eat some yoghurts or other snacks before going to bed.
Grandma never liked to cook tough dishes and never forced me to eat anything unlike my mom did. But I wasn’t starving. We always had a huge pod of soup in the fridge, mom would cook it every Sunday. When you are little soup is not an option, especially if you have access to sweets and yoghurts with insane amounts of sugar. Nevertheless, if mom cooked the soup, the pod is in the fridge then you got to eat it (Russian pragmatism). But I was just eating those soups when I felt like eating it. And sweets with cookies and those yoghurts all week long. No control and it was great. Not as great as homemade dumplings or buckwheat with pork, or homemade cinnamon rolls, all made by my mom, who I eventually missed.
At some point Friday comes. And so do parents. And mom cooks. She bakes the best cinnamon rolls. And these buns are not just buns, but a symbol of liberation from the soup, from grandma, from sweets, from lilies of the valley and Tea-scented China roses, from gatherings with baba Katya and vodka. Cinnamon buns are paradise and love.
And cloudberries, cuckoos and yoghurts with soup are paradise and love.
While I was writing this text a fly got in through an open window — that’s how deceased loved ones come to visit, another superstition says. Grandmother died on March 12, 2016. She died from heart attack in Tamara Ivanovna’s courtyard.
I let the fly out and turn on the recording of “Play, Accordion! (2003)” on YouTube. I miss her.
Anastasiia Gerasimchuk, senior student majoring in Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Bulgaria. She misses her grandmother.
