Her Name Was Tonya

‘Her thick pubic hair glared at me in reproach.’

‘I was six years old when we moved into my grandmother’s apartment. My father had big plans to reinvent himself, start a business, and move to America. My mother wanted me to attend a better school than the two available back in the crime-and-drug-addict-filled town of Podolsk, where my father grew up.’

The entrance to my grandparents’ apartment in Moscow had a small foyer we shared with our neighbour. It was an anteroom the size of a matchbox where two families kept their shoes and coats. It’s also where I stored the sleigh I used to ride down man-made hills atop car garages during the winter.

Through this anteroom, an army of cockroaches would crawl out from under our neighbour’s door and into our apartment.

The first time my little mother saw one in the mid-1980s, she screamed. She was home alone, watching TV in the living room when a roach the size of a small rat or a large mouse entered without knocking. Its long antenna-like whiskers moved slightly as it took in the scenery. My grandmother’s prized chandelier, the Soviet rug, the TV showing black-and-white movies about WWII.

My little mother didn’t take long to remove her slipper and slap the uninvited bastard as hard as she could. The slipper did the job, and the roach lay still underneath it. Afraid to check whether it was still alive, my mother ran to the kitchen, unable to bring herself to reenter the living room where a potential corpse lay, and made herself tea, assessing her next move.

More than the roach, she feared her mother, my babushka. My grandmother Tanya is…