GRANDMA ORINKA
ALM 92, August 2026
SHORT STORIES
It doesn't matter why the trim, fifty-eight-year-old Sergei Viktorovich Krapchishin, in an elegant dark-gray suit, an ironed white shirt, and polished black leather shoes, unexpectedly found himself, on a spring morning in 2025, on a narrow, sunlit, straight, and quiet street, the houses on which were lost among the incredibly close acacias, maples, and tall bushes—that is, on the street that had run toward him from his childhood.
No, he wasn't going to fall into nostalgic memories while strolling slowly through the town where he'd lived sometimes for weeks during his school years, sent from the regional center by his busy mother to visit his grandmother, Maria. It was just that a mosaic of events had conspired to ensure that, that day, he should walking over the painfully familiar remains of old, time-worn concrete slabs mixed with gravel, sand, and unknown building materials.
"It seems like nothing has changed here," a ridiculous thought flashed through Sergei's mind. Indeed, the thought was absurd, for so much had changed over the years. After all, even the maples and acacias had grown taller, and in many houses, the owners had replaced the painted wooden window frames with white plastic ones, now called European. Yet, a cursory glance along the private buildings revealed no signs of modernity, such as shopping malls and ubiquitous advertising. The rows of mostly single-story houses, located on both sides of the road, seemed lost in time, and they exuded a patriarchal air. It was on this street that a kind, elderly woman named Orinka once lived.
Orinka, not Arina, was the name of Sergei's great-aunt. Sergei didn't know her actual age as a child, only guessing from snippets of relatives' conversations he had overheard that she was over seventy when he started first grade.
And then, during Sergei's years at school, then at university, and afterward, for several years teaching mathematics at a college located hundreds of kilometers from where he grew up, in those rare moments when chance would bring him to the house of Aunt Galya, whose last name was Letskina, Grandmother Orinka's daughter, it seemed to him that this same grandmother hadn't changed at all with age. She was always dressed almost identically, simply and neatly—a long, dark skirt that maybe touched the floor, a blouse of an indeterminate color, and a vest, or, more accurately, a kind of zhupan (a coat) that would probably have looked natural at the beginning of the twentieth century, but not at its end. Oh yes, and the headscarf, of course—the ever-present gray headscarf that made Aunt Galya's very thin mother so recognizable.
This elderly woman belonged to that rare breed of people who always radiate an all-pervading, unconditional kindness. When did Sergei first experience this? Back at the age of six. That day, he woke up to the sound of someone else's quiet voice that somehow immediately felt familiar. He realized someone had come to visit. It was, in fact, Grandma Maria's cousin, with whom the boy was living at the time, and her name was Orinka.
The thin, elderly woman spoke very quietly, but the boy heard everything. The conversation centered on household chores; despite her age, she was still busy with housework, specifically raising two pigs.
Later, when Grandma Maria sometimes took Sergei along to visit the Letskins, the boy always asked to see those piglets.
At the same time, he was not bothered by the specific smell of the pigsty or by the fact that he had to walk to the animals on old and dirty boards lying on the clay floor of a small barn, where, behind a plywood partition, small and funny-looking creatures with pink snouts grunted, looking at the little visitor with bewilderment.
But when Sergei first visited the house of Aunt Galya, or Galina Stepanovna, the chemistry teacher, it wasn't the piglets that made the biggest impression on him, but the tiny room of another small shed—a micro-house, really, consisting of one room and located directly across from the piglet barn, a few meters away. Grandma Orinka lived in this tiny room. There were icons, many icons, and, for some reason, candles burning near them. This home, quite strange in both its location and size, which Sergei glanced at through the open door, immediately struck the boy as surprisingly cozy, somehow much cozier than the large house occupied by Galina Stepanovna and Uncle Kolya, their daughter Nadezhda, a grown woman, and their son Yura, who was younger than his sister.
No one could really explain to Sergei why Grandma Orinka couldn't live in the big house with the whole family, despite his efforts to find out. Only as an adult did he realize that, - subconsciously, Aunt Galya and Uncle Kolya considered themselves more civilized and modern than Grandma Orinka. So, it wasn't that there wasn't a place for her in the house, but at a family council, a decision was made—and Aunt Galya's mother resolutely agreed with it—that her home would be a separate outbuilding, like a barn. She believed it wouldn't be a nuisance, and the piglets, who needed care, would be nearby. Sergei immediately felt sorry for the slightly hunched and hard-working Grandma Orinka, especially because she had poor hearing, and when Aunt Galya tried to speak to her, she always spoke very loudly, right next to her mother's ear.
The dark-haired beauty Nadya played the piano beautifully. From childhood, her relatives called her an actress, as her petite figure, expressive face with delicate features, and incredibly open, sincere smile perfectly matched the image of a future movie star. In reality, after graduating from high school, she enrolled in a music college and was learning to teach music, while Yura was a first-year student at the Metallurgical Institute, intending to follow in his father's footsteps, or rather, even further. After all, the always self-assured Uncle Kolya had no higher education, despite working as a foreman, and his son planned to become an engineer.
One New Year's Eve, at the Letskins' New Year's table, where Sergei and his mother were invited, he tried for the first time a sandwich made of toasted bread with golden sprats on it. Until that day, Sergei had only heard about the extraordinary taste of sprats from his classmates, some of whom had already eaten this rare canned food.
On the way home after the festive feast, Sergei asked his mother, "Why did the Letskins have sprats on the table, while we never have them?"
He received a clear answer to his question: "Well, the Letskins are well-off." And so, a previously unfamiliar word entered Sergei's vocabulary.
Uncle Kolya earned a lot since the metallurgical plant paid quite well by those standards. Aunt Galya not only taught chemistry but also worked as the vice principal of a prestigious school. Although she earned less than her husband, she had the opportunity to "get" cheap, hard-to-find items or delicacies that were unavailable on store shelves with the help of the parents of her pupils who worked in retail. Running the household also helped. All this formed the basis of being "well-off," and Sergei somehow sensed its spirit. However, for some reason, he had no doubt that this spirit, although still carrying a negative connotation, had absolutely no connection with Aunt Galya's mother or the pianist Nadya. They were too kind—they were not just seemed so.
Once a year, on Christmas Eve, Grandma Orinka would send gifts to Sergei and his mother, who raised her son alone, through Grandma Maria. That is, she would pass on Easter cake, already blessed by the Church, eggs dyed red, and blood sausage. Oh! Blood sausage with the inimitable taste of homemade sausage—a taste of childhood! Sprats couldn't even come close! Only Grandma Orinka could make it—or rather, not make it, but create it with her thin, dry, yet magical hands, using pig intestines and filling them with chopped lard mixed with meat trimmings and buckwheat. Of course, somehow, the old woman's caring fingers would sprinkle just the right amount of pepper and salt into this mixture to create a soft, crumbly, almost melt-in-your-mouth blood sausage.
Clearly, the piglet in question was one of the ones Grandma Orinka had been caring for. It had been slaughtered before Christmas. Although a slight sense of bewilderment, tinged with pity, arose somewhere in the depths of the boy's subconscious, it didn't stop Sergei from savoring the delicious sausage.
Of course, the Letskins invited Grandma Maria and Sergei, like many other relatives, to visit on their special day—the day they purchased a Zhiguli, a car recently launched at a factory in distant Tolyatti.
A Zhiguli seemed like an impossible dream to Sergei, but owning a Volga, which in the boy's mind was the most prestigious car in the world, was simply a fantasy.
Nevertheless, during the inspection of the white Zhiguli by the guests entering the garage one by one, accompanied by tongue-clacking and boasts about the new owner, Sergei had the misfortune of asking a pointless question to the plump, short Uncle Kolya, dressed in black pants and a white T-shirt, who leaned his right hand on the roof of his car with a confident, yet cautious and proud air. The boy naively asked, "Why did you buy a Zhiguli and not a Volga?"
Sergei didn't expect the reaction that followed. Uncle Kolya's neck and face turned purple, and, looking at the teenager with disdain, he squeezed out an almost hissing voice: "Your mother can't even afford a Zaporozhets. And I'm glad I was able to buy a Zhiguli." Sergei realized his question was unnecessary, but the child harbored no resentment toward his adult relative. After all, Aunt Galya's husband had told the truth about the Zaporozhets. The boy was only confused by the anger evident in the car's new owner's words. "The well-off" could afford more in life than the "poor," and this seemed natural to Sergei.
Time passed, and Arkady, a handsome young man with whom the kind and naive Nadya fell headlong in love, moved into the Letskin house. "Fireman," Sergei nicknamed Aunt Galya's son-in-law when he first saw him in the Letskin house and learned that Arkady worked for the fire department. He didn't have his own place, but he wouldn't disrupt the lives of his parents and younger sister; he moved into Nadya's spacious house. The wedding, to which Sergei's mother and son were also invited, took place in a café. However, the abundance of food and drink on the table, the music, and the ostentatious merriment couldn't guarantee a happy future for the newlyweds. For a while, everything was fine. They had a son named Vladik. And then... But more on that later.
It's difficult to explain why Arkady seemed insincere to Sergei, merely seeking his own gain. Perhaps the boy discovered early on that he had the ability to recognize people's inner worlds. When he was already in ninth grade, his mother asked Aunt Galya to tutor him in chemistry, which the teenager found difficult, unlike, for example, mathematics.
Indeed, Sergei had several lessons at home this way. But one day, during the fall break, while arriving at the Letskins' house for yet another lesson, he took off his shoes and stepped over the curtains, sheets, and duvet covers lying on the floor, ready for the wash. He realized that Aunt Galya was busy with a massive laundry day. She then invited him to her desk. Sergei leafed through his notebook of stubborn formulas while waiting, overhearing Aunt Galya whisper something to her son-in-law. A few minutes later, Arkady approached the boy, sat down in the chair next to him, and asked bluntly, "Are you sure you want to study today? Maybe we should give you the day off? Your aunt has a lot of things to do today."
Aunt Galya's son-in-law, with a mischievous glint in his eyes, looked at Sergei as if he were a poor but slightly amusing relative. The boy almost opened his mouth to ask why Galina Stepanovna hadn't told him this herself, but for a moment, he felt it wasn't worth it. Without directly answering the question, he shrugged, stood up, and said, "If it's a day off, it's a day off," and headed for the front door, where he'd left his shoes.
Of course, it's impossible to say that Sergei was eager to spend an hour poring over a notebook of formulas that day, composing chemical equations. But when he stepped out of the gate, closing it behind him and leisurely strolling toward his grandmother Maria's house, his heart was pricked by the encounter with Aunt Galya's little trick. For some reason, an old saying about the Letskin family flashed through his mind: "They're well-off, aren't they?"
"And here's the pear tree," Sergei Viktorovich stated with surprising calm as his gaze fell on a tree growing slightly below Aunt Galya's house, not in someone's yard, but right on the street. Of course, Sergei recognized the pear tree he'd climbed as a boy many years ago, despite his mother's categorical prohibition. The large, juicy green-yellow fruits with a reddish tint stubbornly beckoned the teenager. However, the lower-hanging ones had been plucked, so he had to reach for the ones hanging above. One of the branches couldn't support even Sergei's modest weight and snapped, causing the boy, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, to fall, escaping with scraped knees and a bruised right elbow. Despite the bleeding wounds, he didn't cry like a man; instead, he picked up a large pear from the ground, which he had plucked before his fall, and placed it in the wide pocket of his shorts.
Sergei, who had left for permanent residence hundreds of kilometers from his hometown after graduating from university, learned of the Letskins' fate many years later. Nadya, who had masterfully performed minuets and sonatas on the piano with her fragile fingers, divorced Arkady when her son Vladik grew up. She later died of a then-incurable blood disease. Uncle Kolya also passed away, and Aunt Galya raised Nadya's son alone. As a teenager, Vladik first began to talk incoherently, then to see things that weren't there, and eventually ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Grandmother Orinka also passed away, as quietly as she had lived, simply not waking up in the morning. She cared for her piglets until her last day.
All Krapchishin had heard about Yura, Nadya's brother, who became a metallurgical engineer, was that he had managed to start a family. It's possible that Yura and his family were now living in the Letskins' house.
Or maybe Aunt Galya was still alive? Then how old was she? Eighty-five? Yes, Sergei passed by the Letskins' house; that same pear tree grew down the street. Should he have opened the familiar gate and entered the yard? Maybe he should have, but he didn't, not wanting to dredge up the past. And who really owned that house now, he didn't know for sure. Of course, as he passed, Kropchenko couldn't help but glance at the building's whitewashed wall, just as he had years ago. But naturally, the thin, welcoming face of Aunt Galya's mother, beaming with a smile, couldn't appear from around the corner as it had so many years ago.
And so, Sergei continued walking down the street, intending to turn left and take the path leading uphill toward the commuter train, which would whisk him away from childhood memories and into the bustling hustle and bustle of everyday life. However, along the way, he firmly resolved that when he got to the church, he would definitely light a candle for the repose of Grandma Orinka.
Yurii Tokar was born in 1967 in the Soviet Union. He graduated from Dnipropetrovsk State University in 1988 and began teaching mathematics and physics in the region affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Yurii Tokar's stories, essays, and poems have been published in newspapers and magazines in several countries, including Ukraine, Germany, and the United States. He is the author of the book "Ukrainian Essays," which has been published by Lulu.
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