A short story from "Happy naked people" collection, translated by Hanna Leliv
As it turned out, it was Grandpa who made dresses for me when I was a kid. Before the war, he used to carve things on lathes, some remarkably precise parts—he had sensitive and gentle fingers—but during the war, he lost his eyes. Eyes, not legs—and Grandma welcomed him back. They weren’t much of a couple before the war, just dance partners, but after the war, Grandpa, real, robust, warm, and unharmed, but for his eyes, was considered an incredible stroke of luck.
Grandpa could not only dance well, he was also great at making deals, so he always found some odd job here or there. The veterans’ association would often organize his lectures at technical schools. He lectured on scientific communism, but who cares. He even managed to earn a degree in history, juggling night school with all those lectures. He walked around the town with his thin, clacking cane, sporting stylish glasses. People helped him get around.
Grandpa badly missed his lathes. Grandma’s Podolsk sewing machine reminded him of a lathe, with its metallic clatter and easy-to-reach, well-greased mechanical parts. Grandma used it to make sheets out of torn blanket covers, pillow-cases out of worn-out sheets, and grain sacks out of worn-out pillow-cases. She never made anything more sophisticated than a cotton buckwheat sack, didn’t even try. After all, Grandma was an accountant at the army exchange, which meant both money and connections, so she could have whatever clothes she wanted made by whoever she wanted.
Grandpa loved touching the sewing machine, patting it, caressing it. Turning its hand wheel slowly, listening to the needle moving, or putting a sheet of paper under the needle and touching the holes it punched. He learned how to thread and feel the length of a stitch and the speed of the needle by sound and touch. He spent hours trying to understand how the thread weaved so simply, turning round and round and making this or that stitch.
I don’t actually know this for sure; I’m just making it up, since my blind grandpa was already pretty good at sewing by the time I was born.
I’m not sure how other people got by, but Grandpa came in handy when the Soviet Union collapsed and we