Food and family. Famine. Semya i yeda. Golod. Голод. Семья и еда. All hunger when I think of Dedushka Senya. How his mouth opened as big as his heart and stayed open to command Babushka to shut hers or spoon-feed him soup or bring him tea or cut up his meat or read him the menu because putting on glasses was too much effort or do for him what he could, with a bit of effort, do for himself. How when my children were babies, he would lift them right up to his face and show them his big yellow teeth, food still stuck between them from the last meal. Potatoes or beets from borsch because there is no meal without boiling, rotting root vegetables turned gold. How he’d chatter his top and bottom central incisors against one another, his rattling sounds and giant smile overwhelming the babes with belly-full laughter. My daughter cried and hid from him. My son would hit and push him when he was older, afraid of what aging looks like.
When I said, Dedushka is dying, my son asked, Does that mean he smells bad? Because when the stench rose from our cat, panting in its last hours, I explained animals begin to smell before they die. Dedushka is not that kind of animal. He still smelled of soap and was freshly shaven soft as a young peach. How he would do just about anything to bring laughter to his family, to fill their stomachs, because in childhood, his stayed empty for so long, his father stayed gone even longer, Dedushka made sure his children would never be without a father or hungry, but we’d feel guilty for our fullness.
Inside my favorite memory, he is tan, in a baseball cap, and black Speedo, walking along the beach in Riviera Maya, Mexico making conversation with anyone and everyone along the way, whether they wanted to speak to the overly tan white man or not. With barely any English and no Spanish, Dedushka made friends across languages and cultures and believed, with his whole self, that everyone he met loved him back. Once, in minutes, he went from “Hola Amigo!” with locals working to clean up the beach of our overindulgent resort to convince them to borrow their ladder so he could climb a palm tree for a fresh coconut, “You’ve never tried anything like this,” he said, “You must!” My desires matter as much as the fruit’s. Its reluctance to be cut. Insistent yellow bloom and will to grow, irrelevant to the hungry.
After proudly bringing down the orb with the biggest grin, Dedushka got the men to drill holes inside so we could drink the milk and then he had them chop it in half with their machete so we could eat the flesh, his own belly hanging over the wet Speedo and the men, I kept searching their faces for hunger. Dedushka first filled our bellies with laughter at the old man scaling a palm tree mostly naked and then with delight we had never tasted. It didn’t matter that I hated coconut, “Nu poprobui, prosto poprobui, tak nado.” When Dedulya set his mind to something—”Try it, just try it!”—it was hard to say no and harder still to keep from smiling at his insistence to fill you up.
Before we left Ukraine, at the overcrowded tolkuchka, push-n-shove bazar, where we tried to sell the parts of our lives we couldn’t take to the promised land of plenty, I was young and famished and they bought me a giant, American-made Bounty candy bar, pillows of sugared coconut, covered in dark chocolate. From one bite, I puked and puked, and that taste has never left my gums, moonlight stuck in the mouth.
He loved when we would gather over too much food and too many presents and more obligation than even he could swallow. On New Years, he and Babushka would come carrying giant army-green duffels they had used to bring our life from Ukraine because war made sure they could never throw anything away, but now, instead of filling them with Soviet linens and wool-knit sweaters we would never use or wear or get rid of, they overflowed with red and blue and gold wrapped boxes, one bigger and brighter than the next.
On his way to the kitchen, he would always grab some fresh-made goodness off of the half-set table, an olive or deviled egg or “Kusochek sira ili kolbashki, oni padali s tarelki,” he would justify, they were falling off the plate, he was saving them, лишнее, he explained, he only ate the extras ruining the aesthetics of table. He learned excess means you can’t taste trauma.
And we could chide him, for not waiting, for using his hands. But he never raised them on me or the children, Babushka reminds, how this was rare for men of his time, for any man. Keeping his hands on food was how he showed love to the bodies around him. He’d smile, go into the kitchen to put on his red apron so he could butter the bread or chop pickles, sol’oniye ogurchiki, or fill crystal serving bowls or wash dishes, always busy, always helping prepare for celebration. But each time he passed the table or a newly plated dish, he’d sneak another bite.
And in recent years, I’d help, bringing him spoonfuls of olivye and salatiki as I was making them even when he didn’t remember the bite he’d just had. I would indulge with him, filling the belly, because as it filled with food from our birthplace, with too much mayo and garlic and often not enough salt, though never a shortage of tears it filled with the childhood he never got to have. The one he would feed us—three generations who came from him—still just as hungry, as willing to keep open our mouths.