Broken Nutshell

I did not cry when my grandfather died.

It was early afternoon, and I had just come home from school, where we celebrated our classmate’s 11th birthday by sharing chips and other snacks, when my father broke the news. “Granddad died this morning in the hospital. His organs failed,” he told me quietly while I was untying the laces on my new purple sneakers. I froze and looked up at him. Father’s eyes were red, and when a single tear ran across his cheek, I felt something in me stir uncomfortably. I had never seen him show emotion – a man with a heart of iron, he was toughened and trained by Eastern traditions and all the horrors of the late Soviet era.

When I entered the salon, my whole family was there. They all seemed to be crying silently. At the sight of me, my grandmother immediately rose from a little wine-dark sofa she was sitting on and pulled me into a tight embrace, her plump, warm hands frantically stroking my head. “He loved you. So much. Remember, when he forgot everything – even your father – he still called for you all the time,” she barely mumbled this sentence, gasping for air between sobs. I figured out the feeling that I had. It was a strange sense of emptiness somewhere deep down – in my soul, in my heart? But I did not cry. Sitting down with grandmother on her sofa, I tried blinking faster than usual in the desperate attempt to wet my eyes. Everyone else was crying, and I felt like I must do that, too.

I had never encountered death before that, and I did not really understand it. How can a person you had seen almost every day since you were born – full of thoughts, and dreams, and memories – not exist anymore? To me, it almost felt as if my grandfather went on a long journey somewhere – he travelled a lot when he was young – and would come back soon, like the hero from one of the stories he used to tell me. When I was around 5 or 6, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, reading or listening to him play Rachmaninov, or Prokofiev, sometimes Chopin on our old “Riga” piano that was sold away a while later. The ancient stories shone in their full brilliance when he read them to me. Forts, battles, beautiful princesses and gods – I saw it all right in front of my eyes. My favorite one was about a man of many turns, who, after two decades, came back to his land and family.

“I wish I could come back home like him. At least to see everyone and everything once more before I die,” he told me after finishing the story. But unlike Odysseus, my grandfather never saw his homeland again – not alive. Our little region on the shore of the Black Sea, torn apart by the military, deserted and politically isolated, was almost impossible to come back to. My family escaped to another country after the beginning of a war and never saw the land they so desperately missed again. I grew up hearing all about their golden days back there, how everything was full of beauty, and how happiness and peace could be heard in the sound of the sea waves.

In the last year of grandfather’s life, the situation in the region had improved, and it was possible to visit. Still, he was so sick and so out of his mind because of the illness, needing constant medical attention, that my family gave up on this idea. The only thing they could do for him was bury his remains in our homeland – in the tiny village where he grew up and where some of the houses were now abandoned, with dark traces of bullet shots still visible on the walls. His funeral was held there – all relatives from the older generation gathered to honor his memory. I was 11 years old, and my parents did not take me. I did not see my grandfather dying in the hospital – emergency rooms in our country have strict regulations, and no visitors were allowed inside – nor did I see his dead body. It only strengthened my inner childish belief that he had just traveled away from us. And what was death, anyway?

“When I was young – just like you – some of the kids from the village and I used to come to my parents’ little nut grove when the hazelnuts began to ripen, sometime in late August. I am telling you, they were the best hazelnuts I have ever tried. And I tried a lot, in different countries too. Those hazelnuts had some milky aftertaste with a hint of pleasant bitterness. I miss it all,” my grandfather told me, and in his eyes I could see the ghosts of the times long gone. He told me many other stories filled with a longing so deep that I cannot forget them to this day.

It was the beginning of September and five years after his death when I visited our little land with my parents. At last, I saw every story I heard in childhood come to life before me, my imagination taking a tangible form. Mountains’ leafy ridges shimmered in the wind, while the waves murmured against the rocks on the shore, tall chestnut trees with branches intertwining with one another and casting wide shadows. It was probably at that moment that I realized the full weight of the quote favored by my grandfather: “I know no sweeter sight on earth than a man’s own native country.”

There was another place that I needed to visit, despite the wave of various feelings overtaking me. The road to the village was easy and not as lonely as I imagined – we were surrounded by a lot of cows, sheep, and goats most likely owned by local farmers. Some of them had thick, colored collars on their necks. A bit outside the village, there was that same cemetery where my grandfather was buried. Among dozens of burial sites, some without gravestones, I saw the one. A portrait of my grandfather – he appeared to be around 50 years old here, one of his best photographs – looked at me from the gray tombstone. I felt that shuddering emptiness, the one that was hidden away and silently haunting me for a couple of years. I was kneeling beside his grave, tracing my fingers over the earth.

After what felt like half an hour, I got up, head full of thoughts, and went in the direction of the house where – according to my grandfather’s tales – he grew up. My parents came along, quietly talking. Sometimes they were sending directions: “Now to the right. And then we go straight.” I immediately recognized the place by the nut grove to the right of the building, now under reconstruction started by my parents.

“I am going to be back,” I said quickly to my parents who were entering the house to check the progress. The grove greeted me with shady coolness and a subtle, fresh scent. I reached for the branches slightly above me, collecting hazelnuts. The shell was very thick – I couldn’t possibly crack it with my hands or teeth. I glanced in the direction of some bigger stones lying here and there in the grass. Placing one hazelnut on a flat stone, I cracked it open by hitting it with another – bigger – rock. The taste was exactly as my grandfather had described it: the sweetness of a milky flavor mingling with a hint of bitterness. I picked up one half-broken shell from the ground and put it, along with the good nuts, into the pocket of my light jacket.

Later that evening, when we came back to the relatives’ house where we were staying, I was so exhausted that I collapsed onto the bed in my room without changing clothes. A little broken shell that I kept from earlier rolled out of my pocket. I immediately noticed and took it. Holding this little nutshell, I cried and cried, unable to hold back the tears. For the first time, I understood what he had meant when he told me he wished he could come back home like Odysseus. He never had an opportunity to return the way he had dreamed of. War had taken his home from him; illness had taken his memory, and death had taken the rest. Yet, somehow, he had made it back, his body lying in the soil he had spent decades longing for.

I did not cry when my grandfather died.

I cried five years later, when I finally understood that he was never coming back.

And perhaps, five years later, I finally understood that he had.