The hooligan grandfather
“Olas? Olad? Oleg?’’ It’s always hard to introduce myself in Russia – but one man could only laugh.
“My name is even funnier,” he told me when we first met, years ago. “I’m Charlie, nice to meet you.”
It goes without saying that “Charlie” is a hard-to-come-by name around here, especially when you’re Russian and not British or American, like most Charlies.
The story of Charlie’s name is as tragic as it is beautiful. Charlie’s father was imprisoned by the Germans during the First World War. He managed to run away and get caught several times, eventually teaming up with a Latvian inmate by the name of Charlie on his last escape. Running from gunfire, that Charlie got shot and passed away in the woods. My Charlie’s father survived – and named his son after his fallen friend.
The stories 80-year-old Charlie tells are better than fiction. I once found the horns of a saiga, a type of steppe antelope, lying around in his house. I thought the little ribbed horns were a weird fashion item, but it turned out that Charlie shot the antelope in the 1950s. “Somebody took me along in a car as a mechanic, and we went hunting in Kalmykia. It was very quiet there.”
I laughed. Obviously, it’s quiet in the steppes. “You don’t get it,” he said. “The Kalmyks were forcibly relocated; there was nobody there.”
Charlie is a piece of living history. Though what he mostly likes to explain to me is complicated mechanics, I try to get him to talk about the past. He remembers the Second World War – how he jumped different trains between Moscow and Sverdlovsk, how food was in short supply and how he managed to climb a network of roofs to get a panoramic glimpse of the original Victory parade. “It was a good view,” he laughs. “But the hardest thing was not getting arrested while getting there.”
When he told me he exercised daily to stay in shape, I expected early-morning Soviet-style gymnastics. But Charlie is a fan of a Tibetan fitness regime, and I frankly wouldn’t be surprised to find him standing on his head one day. He still repairs cars, easily moves blocks of concrete around; he can fix everything that could possibly get broken in your house and was once observed single-handedly pulling a car out of a ditch. Needless to say, his granddaughters call him “the hooligan grandfather.”
When a friend named Charlie the deputy director of a firm that made musical instruments, Charlie found the ideal Soviet job – one in which he only had to sign papers to make a living. “It was boring,” he tells me. “So I asked them to show me how to make a balalaika. It’s not that hard, anyhow.” Soon, he was traveling the world with his hand-made instruments and even winning awards for them. When he saw me gazing at a map of the Atlantic Ocean some time ago, he said: “It’s a nice place, I once sailed over there.” In fact, he swapped his self-made boat for a new car last summer.
Last winter, when he was driving me in said new car on a busy road outside Moscow, a Mercedes began flashing its lights behind us. When we didn’t move over, the driver started honking and shouting all manner of obscenities through a built-in megaphone. Charlie kept it cool and didn’t give an inch. I, however, started to worry. Charlie is 80, after all – maybe his eyes and ears were failing him.
“I see him, don’t worry,” said the hooligan grandfather when I started freaking out as the Mercedes threatened to run us off the road.
“I see him,” he repeated. “Let’s keep the fucker waiting.”
