Losharik. Made with Love

The best father there ever was. He loved my mother endlessly — devotedly, unconditionally. In that pair, no question, one of them loved and the other allowed herself to be loved. Cheerful, charming, with an open, white-toothed grin, student Vitya won my mother over. He was quite the looker, and there'd been no shortage of girls in his student years, but he couldn't resist proud, clever, beautiful Galochka, her "best legs in the whole university," and the way she played volleyball.

They met at Tomsk University, married while they were still students, and after graduation were sent to the town of Miass on a mandatory work assignment. Family legend has it that when they stepped off the train with their bags, my mother froze. She was horrified, and demanded to be taken back to civilization. After five years in Tomsk — with its trams, theaters, cafés, and conversations about science — she'd been counting on, at the very least, something with pavement. Instead, standing in front of her was a lopsided wooden shack with a lonely sign reading "STATION." Around it: village houses, a rutted dirt track instead of a street, and a couple of cow pies. Welcome, as they say, to your new life.

There was no going back: they owed the state a debt for their free higher education, and had to work off the next several years at the local design bureau, KBM. The enterprise was known well beyond the town's borders and worked on developing rocket and space technology. My father spent nearly thirty-five years there as a ballistics engineer, and was even put forward for a state honor.

As it turned out, though, things weren't nearly as bad as they'd first seemed. The modest wooden station, it emerged, had simply given the young engineers an unnecessary scare, standing as it did in the old part of town. They were actually going to live in the newest district, called Mashgorodok — Machine-Town — built specifically for the freshly graduated engineering students. The district already had brand-new five-story khrushchyovkas — the squat apartment blocks thrown up everywhere under Khrushchev — standing empty and waiting for tenants. Here they would live, work at KBM, build up the town, and grow into themselves.

My parents were given a room in a state-owned two-room apartment. My father carried my mother in his arms, and a couple of years later, on April 3, 1977, I came into the world. From that moment their lives changed forever — they'd become parents. Three years later, in May, my brother was born.

Back before automatic washing machines, microwaves, baby monitors, and all the other conveniences we take for granted today, parenting, as I see it, looked a lot more like survival. I'm not sure I would have managed it as well as my parents did. I write these lines now with tenderness and gratitude toward them. Looking back through my memories of that distant time, and the few stories I've heard about it, I never once heard either of them say it had been hard, or that, given the chance to do it all again, they'd have chosen not to have children.

I understand I don't know everything. Maybe there were moments when one of them despaired; maybe there were fights, mutual blame. But I don't know that. I'll go further: I would have understood if there had been. Parenthood is hard work and enormous happiness. They chose that happiness, back then. And today I'm grateful to them for choosing it.

My father was a good father, and it goes without saying I was a daddy's girl. He learned to do everything a baby needed. Every day he ran to the milk kitchen, since my mother had no milk of her own (a common misconception back then), bathed me, took me on walks, told me stories, read me books, rocked me in his arms, and put me to bed. Three years later, the whole thing repeated itself with my brother. I even heard a note of envy from some of my parents' acquaintances — as if my mother could have made a bit more effort instead of being lazy enough to "hang" all the childcare fuss on her husband. My father just did what felt natural to him — being there when he was needed, and not treating it like heroism.

Time passed, the children grew. Behind us now were the first teeth, the sleepless nights, the first steps taken in a hundred-square-foot room shared by four people, the tiny kitchen shared between two families. My parents were given a two-room apartment in a khrushchyovka. With a balcony. And — jumping ahead a bit — my mother worked some quiet magic as the USSR was collapsing, and we were also given a three-room apartment in a newly built district. If I remember right, the state was generous with families who had children of different sexes — each child got their own room. Families with same-sex children, apparently, were expected to make do with one room between them. Our family got lucky.

After her maternity leave, my mother flew out of the nest and spread her wings — I understand her; creative impulses don't just switch off, they need somewhere to go. Her home workshop — sewing diapers, little gowns, hats, embroidering children's duvet covers and pillowcases — needed a bigger outlet.

My mother's talent for organizing and her imagination found their perfect outlet in the trade-union committee at KBM. She threw herself into community work — preparing for various town festivals and local events, and collecting union dues. She wrote scripts for holiday shows, directed them, performed in them herself, hunted down scarce presents for the New Year's tree events, arranged staff congratulations, distributed vacation vouchers — and, I imagine, did a great deal more besides.

We never talked about it directly, but some black-and-white photographs survived, along with a few New Year's scripts typed up on a typewriter, and I saw with something close to my own eyes how much fun it must have been. She also sewed herself fashionable outfits from patterns, made New Year's costumes for me and my brother, sat on the parents' committee at both our schools, and decorated the most beautiful New Year's tree in the world at home.

My father, without fail, brought home scraggly, moth-eaten trees every New Year. My mother scolded him and grumbled while he dragged the old, battered suitcase of ornaments down from the top shelf. And then a real miracle would happen, because that homely little tree would turn into a gorgeous beauty. My mother would masterfully hang red and yellow balls with shimmering tinsel inside them from the branches, blue ones with snowflakes, gold and silver papier-mâché birds, little glass cucumbers and mushrooms, scarlet berries, icicles, and long, glittering strings of bugle beads.

A mandatory part of decorating the tree was the colorful foil streamer — serpentine, we called it — and the tinsel rain. I won't be shy about sounding like a fussy old crone, but they don't make it like that anymore. The serpentine was thin, silvery foil, colored on the outside — blue, green, red, yellow, or silver. Rolled up, it was a little disc about an inch across and a third of an inch wide. You'd take the end between your fingers, make sure you had about four meters of open space in front of you, and hurl it forward hard, gripping the end tight. A snake would go shooting out ahead of you in neat, even coils, curling into rings that never quite straightened back out. If you wanted to decorate the tree with it, you'd throw the little disc right over a branch.

For me, a tree is unthinkable without lights. Ours were colorful, elongated bulbs about an inch and a quarter long — an old string of Christmas lights, and my mother's grumbling would start up again the moment my father tried to plug it in to test it. Every single year, that string of lights refused to work, the wretched thing. My father would sigh, get out his soldering iron, and, with my brother getting in the way and trying his best to solder something onto himself besides the actual contacts, fix the string, replace the plug, or swap out a bulb. Then my mother would wind the lights around our tree and set the red star on top.

The final touch was dressing up the stand my father built himself, which the tree stood on. They'd drape it in white fabric, scatter cotton wool over the top, and lay down the old, tangled tinsel rain — and the picture was complete. Now you could dig flat packets of confetti out of the bottom of the suitcase, pour them into your palm, and toss them up over the tree! Little colored paper circles would rain down onto the branches, settle on the white base, and land right on the floor around it.

My father would plug in the string of lights, and it felt to me like the whole world went still — that's how mesmerizing those little lights were to me. Their glow seemed to lock in, forever, a feeling of home and holiday warmth. Years later I understand: ever since then, my whole life has shimmered with that exact same riot of color — alive, warm, a little naive, like the lights on my parents' tree. And in every one of those little lights, some piece of that same wonder is still alive.

My father was a real man — the kind who carries the woman he loves in his arms and his children on his shoulders; who can wield a soldering iron and doesn't just change a lightbulb but fixes a leaking faucet, a broken chair leg, glues anything to anything, and a thousand other small things besides. He even knew how to rebind a book — leather cover and all, like something out of an old library. Being technically minded didn't stop him from also being a jack of all trades. If a man can plot the trajectory of a ballistic missile, you can bet he ferments his own cabbage without even trying and builds a nightstand to exact government specifications.

No joke, my father could do absolutely anything. And he did it properly, built to last. In his free time, my mother even recruited him into furniture-making, which, in an era of total shortages, came in more than handy. For instance, in the new three-room apartment, there was a huge hallway with doors to the living rooms lined up along the left wall. My inventive mother decided to fill every inch of free space on the right with a floor-to-ceiling built-in entryway unit — what everyone just called a "prihozhka." My father realized right away this wasn't going to be a quick job, and once it dawned on him that my mother meant to harness him to it for the long haul, he started grumbling and moping — insisting he could think of plenty of other ways to spend his free time. But my mother wouldn't budge, and, prodding and encouraging him in equal measure, sat down to sketch out the plan. My father had no choice but to give in, and a few months later, a magnificent front-hall unit upholstered in gray leatherette, thoroughly '90s in spirit, was finished.

Even though there'd been no shortage of leisure activities in Soviet times — sports clubs, fishing, hunting, hobby circles — my father stayed indifferent to all of it. He wasn't an athlete looking for a physical outlet, didn't collect stamps or coins, didn't go to philately or numismatics clubs, didn't fish or hunt. Ways of keeping in touch with people were primitive back then, and the rare get-together with friends, or a Soviet holiday, was probably his only real chance to step away from the daily grind and his job. There were also the absorbing weekends spent at the garden plot, though those could hardly be called rest — more like an extension of the same daily grind, just outdoors.

Still, it would be wrong to say my father had no interests at all. We had a big library; he hunted down books, and it's thanks entirely to him that I'd already read, as a teenager, several of the Strugatsky brothers' novels, and The Master and Margarita. I don't remember the whole library anymore, but we grew up in a family of readers, and there was always a book in one of my parents' hands.

My own childhood world was painted bright with picture books in gift bindings, full of vivid illustrations, which my father ordered for me from Moscow. For anyone who doesn't know: in the 1980s, in a provincial Soviet town, you couldn't just walk into a secondhand bookshop and buy books like that. You had to order them by mail, wait months, and pay more than you would have otherwise.

Ah, do you love fairy tales the way I love them?

I can say for certain that I grew up on fairy tales. And how lucky that my father chose kind, life-affirming stories — none of the Brothers Grimm, no Andersen, none of the bloodthirsty scenes earlier centuries' fairy tales were so full of. I had no idea back then about the dark meanings their authors had built into them, and I spun freely through worlds that felt so out of reach and so desperately wanted. Only as an adult did I discover, to my surprise, what real events lay behind some of those stories. But back then we had no internet, I read no reviews — and my acquaintance with fairy tales stayed cloudless.

I'll always carry the warm memory of my father reading fairy tales to my brother and me every single evening. He loved us fiercely, and he was a storyteller who truly brought stories to life. I think that's why those evening readings turned into a family tradition. Though the reason might have been more mundane: my mother had unilaterally put my father in charge of putting us to bed, and, wanting to get it over with quickly, he sang to us like a nightingale. And the stories worked every time, without fail. My brother usually konked out halfway through the chapter.

New collections of fairy tales usually took ages to arrive by mail, so rather than wait for them to show up, my father would often start telling us stories from memory, drawing on the ones he already knew well and seasoning them with whatever funny details came to mind. And he did every voice in every conversation. It was a genuine performance.

He'd march solemnly into our room, appoint that night's "back-scratcher," hand over the little massage roller, and issue his warning:

"If you don't interrupt, I'll read you two chapters tonight."

In grown-up language, that meant:

"If you don't fight over who gets to be back-scratcher this time, and don't run off to the bathroom every five minutes, there'll be a second chapter tonight."

Once I was older, I read and reread those same books until they fell apart. Losing myself happily in that invented, fairy-tale world, I lived through every adventure right alongside its heroes, all over again. My overactive imagination filled in every detail of what I read, and I mean it quite literally when I say I lived in that world together with the characters!

I climbed trees with Pippi, Tommy, and Annika, rose up in a hot-air balloon with Dunno, flew across the starry sky straight down the moonbeam path with Wendy and Peter! I tasted peppermint confetti with Gelsomino, saw the Emerald City with my own eyes, gazed in wonder at the giant berries and fruits growing in Flower City!

Together with Moomintroll and Snufkin I fished in summer off the wooden pier by Moominhouse, watched in astonishment alongside Alice as the card-suit gardeners painted the white roses red, tried to imagine the taste of gingerbread the way Michael and Jane understood it, and stared, spellbound, at foil stars turning into real ones.

All of it filled my real world with feeling, with the capacity to feel, with kindness, friendship, selflessness, honor and honesty, responsibility, mutual support, beauty, courage, and lightness and humor too. Thanks to those fairy tales, my world was never gray or dull.

The fairy-tale era ended with The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy opened a door to other worlds for me, but childhood in the world of fairy tales was, all the same, over. My parents breathed a sigh of relief. How they'd complained that it was time I started reading "real" literature, since the real world looked nothing like a fairy tale. I honestly tried to read the copy of The Deerslayer my father foisted on me, but I never got past the first three pages. Maybe because I was a girl, used to feeling for characters and learning about friendship and loyalty from fairy tales, not from swamps full of Hurons.

But I'm endlessly grateful to my father, who gave me that world — bright, kind, full of color, utterly real. Remembering that warm, love-filled tradition from my childhood, I tried to pass on a love of fairy tales and reading to my own children too, but it never took root in our family. Unfortunately.

My father also loved ordering records from Moscow — I imagine everyone did back then. We had a fairly impressive collection: ABBA, Whitney Houston, Queen, Pugacheva, Rotaru, the complete works of Vysotsky, and plenty more besides. My father worked the record player himself and wouldn't let my brother or me anywhere near the records, worried we'd scratch them with the needle by accident. We did, though, have our own collection of children's audio fairy tales: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, The Blue Puppy, and many others. I still remember every song and every line of dialogue. We listened to them into the ground.

Somewhere deep down I've always felt that my father spent more time with my brother and me than my mother did. In reality, though, that was simply because his workday started an hour earlier than hers, and he let her sleep that extra hour. It fell to him to get my brother and me ready for daycare and school. Only now do I understand what a genuine feat of fatherhood that was.

Think about it: a man lets the woman he loves sleep in. And makes the kids breakfast himself, gets them dressed, and walks them to daycare and school. Every day, for years on end, in every season. Which means not just dressing the children, but armoring them for winter. Forty years ago, winter outerwear was, frankly, a nightmare to deal with. The same went for fall and spring gear, for that matter. And don't forget hats, mittens, scarves. And tights! That was a feat, no question.

I still remember that classic Soviet breakfast my father made: black tea with sugar, with a slice of bread and butter and some sausages on the side. Just thinking about it makes me hungry!

But there's another side to the coin here, one that deserves credit too, when it comes to my father's parenting. Since my mother's workday started an hour later, it also ended an hour later. Which meant it fell to my father to pick my brother up from daycare as well. I walked to and from school on my own, since it was close to home. That's probably why it stuck with me that we saw more of my father than my mother.

My mother didn't shirk her parental duties, either. Every summer she'd go off for several shifts to work as a camp counselor at the children's summer camp my brother and I attended. My father, I suspect, treated the arrangement as a kind of vacation, even though he kept going to work the whole time. But one summer his solitude came to an abrupt end, when I came down with chicken pox at camp. I was pulled out immediately and sent home to my father, who was given sick leave to look after me. I still remember how we spent that time together, and how carefully he looked after me. He dabbed my itchy blisters with brilliant green antiseptic, and then we'd drive out to the garden plot and pick strawberries.

At home, my father would pour strawberries into a bowl for me, pour on some milk, and sprinkle sugar over the top. All the strawberries, and my father too, belonged entirely to me! My brother had stayed behind at camp with my mother, and my quarantine lasted at least two weeks. Afterward we'd make strawberry jam together and listen to records.

After camp, my mother, it seems, needed a little solitude of her own, and for the rest of the summer she'd book vouchers at the Silver Sands resort and send the three of us — me, my brother, and my father — off there for the weekends.

We lived in little wooden cabins in a pine forest, they gave us a wooden rowboat with oars, and my father ran our whole shared little household. We got to know all the charms of an almost-Robinson-Crusoe island existence, him with his two Fridays. My father showed us the different berries growing in abundance right around our cabin, and we'd pick them, racing each other to see who could gather the most, the fastest. Down by the water we fished caddisfly larvae out of their little cocoons; my father and my brother would put together tackle for fishing, and we'd head out onto the open sea. Just kidding — the lake. My father was captain, my brother was appointed first mate, and I was handed a blue bailing scoop and solemnly named ship's boy.

Obviously, a woman on board is bad luck for real sailors, but as I recall, this particular woman hauled in perch and roach that made ears ring, bigger than some of the others' catches. So I'd earned my spot on that vessel. Besides, that bailing scoop came in handy more than once on every trip, and I happily carried out my duties as ship's boy, swinging it around with real enthusiasm. And, under cover of duty, you could also get in a good splash at your little brother. Which would set off his outraged howl across the lake, and I'd consider the fishing trip a success.

On shore, my father taught us how to clean fish, then cooked up fish soup or fried it. And when it got dark, he'd hand us flashlights, and we'd head down to the water to go hunting for crayfish.

And the sand at that resort really was silver. Rock formations rich in mica surrounded the lake, and over time it had crumbled and mixed into the fine yellow sand along the shore. I'd scoop up water in my cupped hands and study the little silver flecks for ages; in the sunlight they'd sparkle and turn gold on my fingers. The water in Lake Turgoyak, the lake of our childhood, was clear and pure, and we even drank it, wading out from shore and filling our cups and our kettle straight from the lake.

Who had a sweet family nickname as a kid? I did. And my father was the one who came up with it.

There was a touching little claymation film from 1971 called Losharik. It's about a juggler who lived at the circus. In his leather bag — the kind shaped like a big kiss-clasp purse — he kept balls of every color and size. But the juggler didn't actually dream of being a juggler at all; he wanted to be an animal trainer, and it made him deeply sad that he wasn't. He juggled the balls from his bag for so long that he tamed them, and one day, out of them, Losharik was born — a little horse made of balls.

The juggler was overjoyed to have an animal of his very own, unusual as it was, and started performing with him at the circus, and the little audiences adored Losharik. The circus director noticed that the juggler had managed to tame such an extraordinary creature and entrusted him to perform with a real tiger and lion. But those two proud beasts refused to share the ring with Losharik, because he wasn't real. And the juggler couldn't give up his dream of being a trainer, so Losharik left, so as not to get in his way, handing out all his balls to the children. And that was the end of Losharik. At the next show, the juggler came out into the ring with his animals, but the audience kept asking: where's Losharik? The juggler realized how attached he was to his true calling, but his leather bag had no balls left in it. He was heartbroken — but then the children in the audience started throwing balls back into the ring. Losharik reappeared, and forgave his friend.

I was curious to watch the film again as an adult, and it turned out I didn't remember it at all. But that's not really what I wanted to tell you about. One day my father and I watched that cartoon together — and from then on, he started calling me Losharik, tenderly. It was unbelievably sweet, and I loved my nickname. He called me that for years, I think, all the way up through the end of middle school.

One time my parents and I went to visit my childhood friend Anechka, and, as always, we had a loud, happy time. My father called me Losharik, the way he always did by then — the nickname had firmly stuck within the family. When it was time for us to head home, Anechka ran up to her father.

"Dad! Did you hear what Nadi's dad calls her? So sweet!"

"No," said Uncle Seryozha. "Didn't notice."

Anya pouted.

"He calls her Losharik!"

Uncle Seryozha: "What's that got to do with me?"

Anya: "Maybe you could come up with a nice nickname for me too, and call me that!"

Uncle Seryozha: "Uhhh..." He scratched the back of his head. "I could call you Horse! There's a horse hiding right there in Losharik, isn't there?"

"Oh, DAD!"

There are so many bright flashes of warm memory tied to my father and his care. Woven together, they make up the multicolored blanket of my childhood, one that still keeps me warm today.

Still, I have to admit there were skeletons in his closet too. As there are, I suppose, for anyone. But since he was my parent, I don't think it's my place to judge him or hold a grudge. That would be foolish. He was his own person; his life, like anyone's, was only his to live, and he faced his own trials and made his own choices. Even where his words or actions hurt me, and where, as a parent, they were monstrous and unacceptable, I still hold no grudge against him. I learned from it, the way I've learned from every other lesson life has handed me, and it only strengthened my resolve to be a different kind of parent to my own children.

One time we came back to my hometown to celebrate the New Year. Our third son had just been born, and I wanted my father to see him. We took a family photo together, and my father said to me:

"We weren't the kind of parents you are... You're the BEST mother there is."

Once again, I make my own choice, and choose to live in the very best of what he gave me. He was, after all, a good father. And it's none of my business what kind of man or husband he was. Looking into that closet, I'd rather walk past his skeletons, reach my hand to the back wall, and find the door hidden there. In my reality, that door leads to a magical land. And I promise you, I'm walking through it.

So here, I'll keep only the magic of my childhood.

Brother

As kids, we were nowhere near friends. Like a cat and a dog. I couldn't stand him, because I was the older sister, and he was a sickly child, and once he was born, he got more of our parents' attention. Which made sense, sure, but from where I stood as a kid, it stung. On top of that, for my first few years of school I was a straight-A student, and he was held up as the example he should follow. My brother was your average C-student, and, for his part, wasn't too fond of me either.

As if that weren't enough, my class was assigned to mentor his class, and on top of that, I was put in charge of helping him keep up with his schoolwork. All of it drove me up the wall. It never earned me any extra points in my mother's eyes, either, because it was simply expected. But the moment I refused to help raise my brother, that provoked instant disapproval. And then this little brat would get sick again and become the center of our parents' attention all over.

One day he'd recovered from whatever illness it was and was finally let out to play in the yard. The rest of us were already out there having fun, swinging on the swings. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ilya had gathered a whole gang of kids around him and was showing them something with great enthusiasm. I hopped off the swing, went over, and saw everyone examining my kindergarten graduation medal. It was an ordinary metal medal engraved with GOODBYE, KINDERGARTEN! on a light-blue ribbon. And my brother was showing it off like it was his own. Telling everyone his sister was a straight-A student. And every single kid there was madly jealous of him. I honestly don't remember why he was showing off a kindergarten graduation medal — I doubt he fully understood it himself. A medal, as they say, is a medal, wherever you go. Doesn't matter what it's for.

He got it from me, full force, and, as usual, we ended up in a fight. Each of us pulling the medal toward ourselves, until the little ring connecting the ribbon to the medal finally straightened out, and one of us ended up with the medal in hand, the other with the ribbon. Which made it doubly unfair — he got a smack on the backside for it, hit me back, threw the ribbon on the ground, and ran off laughing. I sobbed. It felt so unfair — the medal was mine, I was the straight-A student, and yet my brother was the one showing it all off, and for some reason everyone envied him, not me.

Now I understand it only looked, to me, like he got away with everything. In reality, he got in trouble constantly. One time, for instance, he and a friend decided to throw eggs off the balcony, and our whole family went without breakfast the next morning. He was always losing textbooks, notebooks, pencil cases. Once he even managed to lose an entire school bag. Like any normal kid does, probably. Except in Soviet times, new things didn't just materialize in stores at the snap of your fingers, and my parents were at their wits' end every single time.

And in fairness, I should add that despite our constant skirmishes, we happily united whenever a common enemy showed up. And then we'd hate that enemy together. The garden plot, for instance. Oh, that was a genuine plague. Every single weekend our parents dragged us out to the dacha to pick berries, weed the beds, or hoe potatoes and pick Colorado beetles off the plants in the field.

One summer, our parents decided they needed a break from us, and sent my brother and me off to stay with our grandparents. They lived in Ust-Kamenogorsk, and my grandfather was building a dacha. Plenty of people know the type — the eternal construction project. A man decides he wants to build a dacha, naturally with his own two hands, since one of my grandfather's professional qualifications happened to be construction foreman. Never mind that a foreman's actual job is to oversee a build, understand every stage of it, and bring together the right specialists so the whole thing comes out the way the architect designed it. But brave men like my grandfather decide that wanting to badly enough is all it takes for a dacha to build itself. No deadlines, no extra mouths to feed, my grandfather happily self-employed himself. And so my father brought Ilya and me for a visit. First thing, my grandfather organized a tour of the dacha, where he proudly showed off two floors of red brick — scavenged from scrap — with no windows, no doors, no floor. Or rather, instead of a floor there were old boards with rusty nails sticking straight up, and I immediately stepped on one. The tour ended with an emergency trip to the ER.

That week, while my father was visiting his parents, wasn't dull at all. My brother and I were still guests, technically, in our grandparents' house. They took us to an amusement park, bought us ice cream, we went visiting and had visitors of our own. But once my father left and we stayed on for the summer, the easy life ended.

As it turned out, we'd only been guests while my father was around. After that, we became, quite literally, slave labor. At six in the morning they'd get us up so we wouldn't miss the bus, and we'd ride a full hour out to the garden. Ilya was handed a wheelbarrow and hauled crushed stone — I don't even remember from where to where anymore. My grandmother and I spent the whole day bent over, endlessly bringing in the harvest. Summers in Kazakhstan are scorching, and the harvest is always huge. Tomatoes so juicy and enormous they seemed almost unreal, strawberries the size of a child's palm, cucumbers ripening not by the day but by the hour. We'd never seen a harvest like it, not with our climate back in the Urals.

They harnessed us like real slaves, and Ilya and I quickly banded together against the ruling regime. Work ended at five in the afternoon, and we got half an hour to run off and swim at the quarry. Sullen and exhausted, we'd float in the water and sit on the bank, complaining to each other about our lives. How good we'd had it back home with our friends in the yard, how we could burn this dacha down and never get caught. We were even ready to sign up for our weekend trips to our own garden plot back home — the potato field had started to look downright appealing by comparison. So a shared disaster bonded my brother and me for good. After that horrific summer, the two of us treated each other with a lot more patience. When we got home, our parents listened to everything we'd been bottling up for weeks, and never sent us there again.

Years went by. Somehow, my brother and I never became close in the sense of constant messaging, phone calls, or, say, seeing each other every week. But that doesn't change anything. I always knew I could count on him. And I hope he knows the same is true of me. Maybe the strongest love isn't the kind people talk about all the time. It's the kind where nobody has to prove anything, because real feeling doesn't need proof.

His whole life flashed before my eyes. How he dropped out of university after our mother died. How he lived with our alcoholic father. Earned his own way, taught himself how to live, how to love, how to be happy. Never complained, never asked for anything. How Ivan and I moved to Piter — St. Petersburg, though everyone here just calls it Piter. How he came with our father to our wedding. How the two of us goofed around and danced. How he moved to Piter himself, and how glad I was we'd be close by. How he agreed to work with us and stayed with us all nineteen years. How he was there to pick us up from the maternity hospital. He was there for every important moment in our lives. I remembered so much, and he was there in all of it.

You know, brother... Take that medal. Take my achievements too. Take all the medals there ever were.

I love you, brother.