I remember the summer after Chernobyl for its fertility and vibrant colors. Whether it was due to the high levels of radiation blown toward the Crimean Peninsula by the northern winds, as my family speculated later, or to my grandfather’s tireless efforts to turn a cleared patch of clay into a kitchen-garden, that year our land burst forth with fruits and vegetables of fantastical proportions: red, yellow, and orange gogosari peppers, steak tomatoes the size of a baby’s head, strawberries swollen with juice like noses of old drunks, firm yellow tomatoes with small tips like aroused nipples (called the “maiden breasts” variety), flying saucers of white and greenish pattypan squashes, and emerald zucchini and cucumbers.
My grandfather weighed and measured each savory miracle, painstakingly recording in his tight, miserly penmanship the exact dimensions of the fruit, the date it was picked, and the overall annual output. He spent long hours in the hot kitchen, chopping fresh garlic, dill, and parsley, boiling water, blanching vegetables, sterilizing jars, cooking marinades, and canning. Our pantry, the tops of both refrigerators, and the living-room floor were crowded with rows of potbellied jars, their innards glowing with the reds, the greens, and the yellows of suspended tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers.
That summer was the first summer of my grandfather’s forced retirement. His former workplace had allotted him a small piece of land in the middle of a forest—an uncultivated one-tenth of an acre. Unhappy to be out of work and looking for a way to escape our overcrowded apartment, my grandfather turned to this small patch of clay for his salvation. Every morning that spring he got up early, walked to the trolleybus stop, rode it for thirty minutes, hiked down the forest path, and after a fifty-minute journey arrived at a padlocked door barring intruders from his paradise.
There was not much inside that barbed-wire enclosure at first except a few clumps of strawberry plants, a rusty water spigot, multiple ant colonies, tree stumps, and rocks. Through his own sweat and ingenuity, with his family’s eventual assistance, and with the occasional indentured labor by his grandchildren, my grandfather pulled up the old stumps and tree roots, fertilized the clay with topsoil scraped from the nearby forest floor, mulched the garden with decaying foliage from the same forest floor, irrigated the vegetable beds with a homegrown system of hoses, canals, and raised platforms radiating from the rusty spigot, supplemented his irrigation system with buckets of mineral water from the nearby spring, and implemented a rigorous program of ant and grub extermination.
Within a year or two after Chernobyl, my grandfather expanded our kitchen-garden by conducting an illegal land grab. He cleared a section of the forest adjacent to our plot and fenced it off with barbed wire to make it look like it had been ours to begin with. The metal rails and the wire were requisitioned from the nearby state vineyards, where they had been left unattended. While it was undeniably an act of thievery, the way my grandfather (and many other Soviet people back then) saw it, he merely took what was rightfully his. Since all property in the Soviet Union officially belonged to the Soviet people, and since my grandfather was one of those people, both the wire and the land were clearly his to take before any of his neighbors (his former coworkers with the adjacent plots of land) had taken everything for themselves. Theft of state property had been an act of treason during Stalin’s regime, when my grandfather was young, but by the late 1980s it was only nominally so. There was so little accountability for anything when I was growing up that it seemed everyone made sure to pilfer what they could while they could. If such illegal and continual draining of state assets was directly responsible for the collapse of the Soviet economy, then I can attest that it was not the West but the Soviet people themselves who deserve the full credit for bringing the Soviet Union down.
After many years of hard labor and delightful crops, my grandfather eventually became too frail to take care of his kitchen-garden. Plagued with other problems, my family padlocked the rusty door and all but forgot about the plot until one of my grandfather’s former colleagues informed them that a certain resourceful individual had conducted his own illegal land grab and seized our property for his dacha. The occupant was alleged to be a corrupt oligarch and a dangerous criminal from Russia, but my family persisted in fighting him, in court and via the telephone, and somehow they managed to retrieve their paradise. A few months later they sold the reclaimed land to the very same criminal for a decent amount of money. No one was killed or injured in the process.
Oh, how I miss that kitchen-garden now! I dearly miss the crude shack my grandfather had nailed together from the stolen boards of an abandoned building, the juicy shashlyki (shish kebab) we cooked over the campfire, the fresh-mint tea in a sooty kettle, the tea-stained mugs scrubbed with dry clay and rinsed under the rusty water from the spigot, the loud crunch of a freshly harvested cucumber, the stinging rivulet of tomato juice on my chin. I miss the cool and slightly sulfurous taste of spring water in my cupped hands, the plump blackberries picked off the thorny vines my grandfather had trained around the barbed-wire perimeter, the yellow spheres of alycha (Shiro plums) ping-ponging off the wooden table onto the hard-packed dirt around the shack, the purple figs whose pregnant bellies burst with seed. I confess—I did despise my grandfather’s kitchen-garden during the first spring season, when my hands were black and green from weeding and gathering topsoil in the woods, but I grew to love its perforated shade in the summer, grew to love it for its tranquility and beauty, for my aunts’ flower beds of white, yellow, pink, scarlet, magenta, and orange asters, gladiola, and zinnias.
The garden that had become my family’s refuge from the world and from each other, our source of spiritual and physical replenishment, is now gone forever. Gone are the blackberries, the alycha, the asters, and the rusty spigot. Gone is the shady deciduous forest surrounding the lot. Gone are the adjacent plots of land belonging to my grandfather’s coworkers. All have been devoured by the sprawl of new construction.
The story of my grandfather’s kitchen-garden seems to mirror the larger narrative of the Crimean peninsula. History tells us that at first the territory of Crimea was settled by the Tauri and the Scythian tribes, who were later oppressed or pushed out by the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Goths, the Genoese, and the Mongols, among many others. Then the land was ruled over by the Crimean Tatars, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire. The French and the British fought for its territory; so did the Red and the White armies, fascist Germany and the Soviet Union. When I was growing up, everyone in our town knew (even though they rarely talked about it) that the fruit trees scattered throughout our forests—the figs, the plums, the apples, the pears, the peaches, and the almonds—were left over from the Crimean Tatars, whom Stalin had resettled after the Second World War. The Tatars’ houses and orchards were parceled off and redistributed to the newly arrived Russian and Ukrainian settlers.
My grandfather’s kitchen-garden, then, might have been someone else’s yard forty years before it became our haven. The flat terrace where my grandfather erected his hut might have been the foundation of a small house sheltered by the low-hanging branches of two fruit trees. And yet, despite the land’s hidden history of conquests and displacements, and despite the dangerous winds from Chernobyl, my family was able to find peace and nourishment on that small patch of clay. The land gave generously as long as you were willing to pour sweat into it. It took no sides and passed no judgment.
Now our former paradise belongs to another occupant, and the Crimean peninsula has become, once again, a tasty morsel sought by rival powers. I wonder how much peace and relaxation the current owner of what used to be our kitchen-garden was able to derive last summer while sunbathing by his luxurious swimming pool with the threat of enemy drones zooming over his children’s heads? I wonder how long it will be before new owners move into what is now his dacha, lusting, too, for the balsamic air of the Crimean pine forests, the warmth of the Black Sea, and the local muscat wines?
For our family, Crimea was always more than merely a pretty spot for sunbathing; it was our treasure and our salvation. Since we were toddlers, my brother and I had been taught to value nature’s offerings. Besides being a dedicated gardener, my grandfather was also a skilled fisherman who knew where to trap crawfish and how to angle for rainbow trout, carp, and sardines. My grandmother was a botanist and an enthusiastic forager. She could identify all local species of fungi and herbs by their scientific names and was the leader of our family’s weekly expeditions into the mountains in search of slippery jacks, truffles, saffron milk caps, and champignons. My father and my aunt specialized in collecting wild thyme, lavender, chicory, greater celandine, and Saint-John’s-wort for their medicinal concoctions. While there were rampant food and medicine shortages and cleaned-out shelves in the post-Perestroika grocery stores, our family always had either fresh or pickled vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, jams, herbs, herbal teas, and chicory “coffee” on our table. Our land’s bounty—gifts from its forests, lakes, rivers, the Black Sea, and our kitchen-garden—sustained our family throughout the lean 1990s.
Most of my family has passed away by now; my grandmother, mother, grandfather, and father—all gone. Crimea is my remaining family. It is my flesh and blood. It is my motherland regardless of which nation claims it. And while the rusty spigot, the alycha, the blackberries, and the asters have vanished forever, Crimean land and my memories of my grandfather’s kitchen-garden will keep my past alive, giving me hope that one day in the near future my children and I will set foot in Crimea again.
Yekaterina Droog grew up in Crimea, Ukraine. When she was nineteen, she moved to the United States. She has been teaching writing and literature in the US public school system for the past twenty-five years. During school vacations and on weekends, she writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and professional essays.
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