Epilogue: Grandparents
Pavel Pavlovich and Anna Nikolayevna had an airy apartment in the city bathed in rich Mediterranean light. They had their grandchildren in the country, just 20 minutes away, Galina, little brother Pablo, and baby sister Saran, wild little adventurers who thrilled at the parks and museums and other places their grandparents took them but who were just as happy to return home to their village in the hills and run barefoot through their parents’ garden and along the sunny dirt paths with their many village friends.
They had their daughter and their son-in-law, their rocket-girl Ksenia and her faithful Rudy, her young amerikanyets—young! Pavel laughed: older now than Pavel had been when he met Rudy.
Pavel and Anna did not miss the Russian cold or the long, dark winter nights. Pavel did express a desire for the midnight sun, which Anna satisfied by flying with him each June to Iceland, Norway, or Finland. They traveled to warmer climes as well, though not as often now that Ksenia had settled and given them grandchildren. When they wanted to get away, drives around the Iberian Peninsula mostly sufficed. Son-in-law Rudy kept their car in top shape. Pavel’s old Ural was lost, crushed by a garbage truck while parked on the street, but Pavel had found an old Kawasaki with a very stable sidecar in which Anna occasionally deigned to ride. Sometimes Pavel unbolted the sidecar and rode his Kawasaki all Sunday alongside Rudy, on a restored Sanglas touring bike, along the seacoast, or out to Zaragoza, or at whim through the countryside.
Occasionally, when school was out, Ksenia would bring the children to town, and Pavel and Anna would join them to watch their father at work at the Basilica, loading great panels and triangles and other strange shapes of stone onto cranes and watching them soar into the air to their places atop the Sagrada Família. Sometimes Rudy went up as well, buckled alongside the stone pieces, waving once or twice from the sky before focusing his attention on the spot where he would help secure the stone. Anna shook inside every time saw her grandchildren’s father suspended so far in the air, risking his life for Catholic folly, but Rudy and Pavel both told her he was probably safer on the cranes and cables than he was 150 meters below on the streets of Barcelona dodging tourist buses and young hipsters on scooters. Besides, Rudy said, the view from the crane and the tops of the towers was breathtaking, boundless: north and west the city and the hills, south and east the sea promising the Balearics, Corsica and Sardinia, Italy and Africa, Greece and Turkey, a world beyond, all beckoning as he rode stone and bolted it to the sky.
“Don’t try to make poetry out of risking your life,” Anna admonished him out of earshot of the children one Sunday afternoon at their apartment. “Hold on for dear life, and come home every night to my daughter and my grandchildren. They are your cathedral.”
Rudy did come home every night, always dusty, often sore, but always intact and grateful for another evening on the hillside, another story to tell the children, another kiss from his wife as he helped her erect the great monuments of their garden—a stone wall, a raised bed, a greenhouse with scrap material salvaged from work. Rudy would occupy Galina, Pablo, and Saran with little tasks—bringing him boards, Galina at the front, little Paolo at the back, Saran marching in front to make sure the way was clear; finding the right tool in the shed; measuring screws and bricks and spans across the yard to imagine how big a shed or garage or castle might fit—while Ksenia would sit in her office or on her balcony to write. Pavel and Anna would come stay with the grandchildren for a week or two every now and then while Rudy and Ksenia would ride—Ksenia had her own motorcycle now, but they would ride together on Rudy’s bike as often as side by side on separate machines—into the Pyrenees and on to Toulouse or Marseilles, or up to Bilboa, over to Madrid, anywhere just to spend time away from everything and everyone except for each other.
Rudy’s bosses respected his work and rewarded him with ample time off and paychecks that freed Ksenia to write. She sold her first book when the children were 5, 3, and 1; by the time Saran went to kindergarten, Ksenia had three novels on the market and four more brewing in her notebooks, all crime fiction, none high art but all entertaining enough to keep her publisher interested and bring checks that occasionally approached Rudy’s weekly pay. She wrote while Rudy was at work. She always brought a notebook along on their rides to write in little hideaways they would discover, to write for an hour or wo at their inn or campsite while Rudy took his motorcycle or his running shoes to explore some rougher terrain on his own.
Pavel had spotted that Sanglas in the city just a couple months after Rudy and Ksenia landed, a bike that had broken down and been left outdoors to rust. Pavel had seen his daughter’s husband familiarly adrift when they arrived, head spinning from their escape, unsure of his place in Barcelona, a city warmer and noisier than any place he’d been for 20 years. Pavel, too, had needed time to adjust to life outside Russia, to Europe, to retirement. Pavel hired a truck to bring the Sanglas back to Pavel and Anna’s apartment (Ksenia and Rudy’s first tiny flat had no garage), loaned Rudy tools, and spent hours in the courtyard with Rudy tinkering and testing while Anna sustained them with lemonade and tapas. Pavel took Rudy out to explore the city by bus and on foot, ostensibly in search of parts and paint but more to help the young man—Rudy scoffed at being so called, but Pavel insisted Rudy had more life ahead than behind—help his son-in-law get the lay of the city and make it his home. That project pulled Rudy out of his quiet daze and restored his initiative. A week after they got the Sanglas running, Rudy found work with the masons at the Sagrada Família; a month after that, he and Ksenia put his first paycheck, Ksenia’s last savings, and a small loan/gift from Pavel and Anna into a down payment on their home in the foothills.
Pavel and Anna spoke Russian and Spanish with their trilingual grandchildren. When Galina, Pablo, and Saran asked why they lived in Spain, Pavel and Anna explained that they wanted to retire someplace warm, someplace they could play with their grandchildren outside all year long without having to bundle up in snowboots and scarves and parkas, because who has time to put on so many clothes when there are so many games to play and paintings to see and make so what shall we do now?! The grandchildren were easily diverted from probing too deeply into details of their family history; Galina, Pablo, and Saran would not know and thus could never say anything that might lead someone to ask troublesome questions and draw attention to their curious little family. Rudy could build, Ksenia could write, and Pavel and Anna could live a golden retirement blessed with Mediterranean sun and even more brilliant grandchildren.
One tarnish on this golden retirement was the lack of friends from the old country. Pavel and Anna strolled and played cards with a few Russians in Barcelona, but in Barcelona and all of Spain and their travels before and now, they had not met anyone else from Galich. Rudy and Ksenia stayed away from Russian and American expatriates completely. Rudy had lived that way for 20 years—here in Spain, Pavel and Anna were the only people who recognized him as an old amerikanyets. Rudy spoke Spanish with a heavy Russian accent.
Pavel asked Rudy once, at Rudy and Ksenia’s home in the country, if cutting off from his old life was easier this time, now that he had a family. Rudy looked off toward the orchards. After a long while, he said, “Who says I didn’t have family in Siberia?”
Only once did Rudy’s old family intersect with his new. One August morning, Pavel was walking alongside the park across from the big cranes Rudy managed. Anna had baked pryaniki for Rudy’s men—the basilica might be Catholic folly, but Rudy and his men deserved treats for their strenuous labor. Pavel had waited at the gate for Rudy to arrive on his motorcycle and handed him the red and white paper bag containing Anna’s pryaniki. Rudy eagerly gulped one treat down and took the rest to his “office”, a big desert-tan army tent, flaps all up, a table and drafting boards and a large cooler inside. Pavel bought a newspaper and lingered to watch the morning work begin. He came up to a man in the middle of the sidewalk who was staring obliviously upward at the highest central towers.
“¿Magnífica, no?” Pavel said.
The enrapt stranger jumped. “Oah! Perdóneme.” The man’s Spanish sounded like Rudy’s, but slower, far less sure. “I hope… I don’t bother you when I stand… here.” The stranger looked up again. “Yes, yes, magnificent.”
Pavel took a guess from the accent. “Are you Russian?” he asked in his native language.
The man’s eyes lit up with surprise and relief. “Da, da! A vy?”
Pavel nodded, and the stranger told him he was on vacation and had come early to buy basilica tour tickets for himself and his family. “We walked around the outside yesterday—amazing building! My children were scared for the men, so high up on the cranes, so tiny.”
“My son-in-law is crane foreman. He keeps his men safe.”
“Foreman? Up there?”
The cranes weren’t running yet. The men were just breaking from an assembly by the foreman’s tent. Pavel saw Rudy in his white hardhat at the center of the dispersing crowd, several men enjoying Anna’s pryaniki. Rudy was speaking and gesturing emphatically to two men in lighter, cleaner clothes who did not fit the hardhats plunked on their heads. One of the two outsiders held a raft of white plans rolled under his arm. Rudy pulled one out, unfurled it, pointed to things he appeared not to like, then dropped the large paper on the gravel and showed the men what needed to happen, building bell towers in the air with his hands. Plan man bent awkwardly to retrieve his paper, but his other plans fell to the ground. Rudy pointed to two masons whose dirt-streaked hardhats fit well; arms mapped actions, and the masons nodded and departed to do what Rudy had told them. Rudy remained for a moment with the two outsiders, knocking down his air drawings and making clear some deep exasperation with whatever bad ideas had made their way onto the papers the men were retrieving from the dirt and tucking under their arms.
Pavel pointed across the street to the worksite. “There he is, my son-in-law, setting those guys straight.”
“Working here, every day, under such beauty…” the stranger marveled. Then he gasped. “Rudy?” he whispered. “Rudy!” he shouted. Pavel turned just as the stranger bolted from the curb. A college boy in a yellow DISCO t-shirt that matched his bright scooter swerved to miss the running stranger. “Rudy!”
Rudy was tying a red bandana around his head, ready for sun and sweat. He turned his head toward the shout, spread his arms in surprise, and sprinted to the fence. Clouds of dust puffed out beneath his heavy brown boots. “Vitaly!” Rudy shouted. The men met at the fence and gabbled wildly at each other through the chain link.
Pavel crossed more cautiously and followed the men as Rudy led his unexpected visitor to the delivery gate. Rudy and Vitaly shouted at each other the entire way over the growing din of forklifts and cranes firing up and moving stone and mortar. When Pavel reached them, the men were locked in a dancing hug.
“Dyedushka!” Rudy gasped at Pavel. “Vitaly! Vitaly! My friend Vitaly! He is alive!”
“You’re alive!” Vitaly shouted back, and they laughed in each other’s arms.
Pavel stood to the side. My son-in-law, he thought, such luck, such wonders… Pavel caught names and a few details—Maria, Ireland, all three kids, week’s vacation…
Rudy and Ksenia had invited Pavel and Anna up to their house for dinner that night. Pavel suggested Vitaly’s family join them. “Of course, of course,” Rudy said. Pavel left Rudy and Vitaly to catch up at the jobsite and returned to the apartment, calling both Anna and Ksenia along the way to alert them to the change of plans and the need for more bread.
Pavel took Anna grocery shopping, and they drove up to Ksenia and Rudy’s home early, at lunchtime. Anna got a jump on baking an extra loaf of bread. Ksenia finished revising a chapter before joining her mother in the kitchen. Pavel sat on the front porch, nominally supervising Galina, Pablo, and Saran, who mostly occupied themselves with games and books in the shade before Pavel advised them to clean up and help their mother get ready for visitors.
The visitors came a little after 19:00, Vitaly, wife, three children older than Pavel’s grandchildren, all in a small rented electric car. Rudy came outside, freshly shaved and showered, white shirt, dark pants, leather sandals, and the light blue apron he wore to chop tomatoes, peppers, and three garden lettuces for their salad. The women followed, both in aprons but Anna more richly floured and kitchen-marked. Pavel’s girl had never quite taken to the kitchen with her mother’s passion, the passion every good Russian woman in Pavel’s day was expected to have for cooking feasts for her man… but Pavel had never expected his raketnaya dyevushka to settle into such domesticity.
Vitaly’s wife Maria raced up the steps and engulfed first Rudy and then Ksenia in tearful embraces. “Together!” Maria cried and laughed, clutching her hosts’ hands and eying their lustrous birch rings. “Together!” After standing for inspection before the amazed and strangely emotional adults, the children eagerly escaped, with Vitaly’s Ksenochka, Rudolf, and Olga gamely following Pavel’s exuberant children around back to explore the trails.
Through all the introductions, Pavel kept an eye on the driveway and the road beyond. Rudy noticed: as the grownups headed inside to see what mostly Anna was cooking, Rudy paused at Pavel’s side. “It’s o.k., dyedushka. Vitaly is smart. No one followed him.”
The sun dropped below the hill, and the heavy heat of the day eased to a soothing evening warmth. Vitaly’s children shed a few years and submitted happily to their younger counterparts’ direction in hikes and games. The parents toured the house but spent the rest of the evening on the verandah out back. Rudy helped Anna and Ksenia bring trays outside, setting the food and wine and lemonade out on the small tables and the railing. They sat and talked mostly of their new countries and just a little of the old.
The verandah quieted when Vitaly spoke of a woman named Galina, the scientist Pavel had heard Rudy speak of. “She saved us all,” Vitaly said, his voice going husky. “Tickets, papers, stories, to get us and our families out. She prepared everything, in secret, and was ready when the FSB attacked. She had a way out for you, too, and Saran and Volodya, if you hadn’t been in Moscow.”
“Have you heard from Galya?” Rudy asked.
Vitaly shook his head. “Many of us flew out together, but she did not come with us. She considered staying at the Ring, to bargain, to fight to keep the project alive. But Maksim…”
“Big Maksim?” Rudy asked.
“Yes, Big Maksim, your man. He’d been on weekend patrol, and he was with us in the office, listening to all the plans. And then he spoke up. I remember, he said, ‘You cannot fix this, Galya. You have to run, too.'”
Ksenia reached for Rudy’s hand. “That’s what you said to me, at the mountaintop,”
“Mountain?” Vitaly raised his eyebrows. “How far…?”
Rudy exhaled loudly. “And Galya ran?”
“Yes,” Vitaly said. “She grabbed the heart-stone from her desk and left. With Maksim. Disappeared, like all of us.”
The sun had set a half hour ago. Pavel heard excited voices in the woods. His little Galina led her young troop into the yard and up to the verandah. She ran to her grandfather and hugged him. “We would explore more,” she said, “but the bigger kids need more energy, so I brought them back for more ice cream.”
“And you, Galinka,” Pavel said to the squirmy, wiry ten-year-old in his arms. “Do fearless leaders need more ice cream?”
The little girl looked at her father, who blinked sadness out of his eyes and smiled at his daughter. “Yes, please. Ice cream chases fear away.”
Rudy and Ksenia both started to get up, but Pavel waved them down. His granddaughter took his old hand and led him inside, to the kitchen, where she rinsed bowls in the sink and he filled them with the last scoops of ice cream from the cartons he and Anna had brought up the hill in the afternoon. Galya handed bowls to Olga, Ksenochka, Rudolf, Saran, and Pablo, in that order, before taking her own bowl. Vitaly’s children, polite young strangers showing no sign of adolescent ennui, thanked both little Galina and Pavel Pavlovich before taking their ice cream out to the backyard. Pavel’s grandchildren eagerly followed.
Pavel licked a last scraping of cherry ice cream from the scoop and stepped out the front door, alone, for one last look down the driveway. No engines roaring in, no lights coming up the road. Only one star coming out, two, three… Pavel heard the voices, faintly, from the back yard, giggles from the children. But no one else was out. No one was coming. His daughter, his grandchildren, their father, their friends—all were safe. He and his dear Anna had their family, a good motorcycle, the sea air, and a cathedral they could watch grow every day.