Babushka's Revenge

Ivan Kuraev — Babushka’s Revenge

My grandmother was an orphan. She was born in Bashkiriya, an area in central Russia to a family of fundamental Muslims. And she lost both her parents by the age of 3 and she was raised by her older brother. And when she turned 16, her older brother sold her off into an arranged marriage, and he locked her up in a house with a man who paid to be her husband. And when that man came close enough to touch her, my grandmother pulled a knife to his throat and said, ​“You come any closer and I’ll kill you.” [audience chuckle] And she escaped through the window of that house, and she caught an overnight train to a tiny, tiny town called Oktyabrsk, and that’s where she spent the rest of her life.

I grew up in a Russian city called Saratov. And every summer, I would leave the city to spend three months with my grandmother. And she gave me all the care that she never got from her family, and she spoiled me and she coddled me, and she fed and fed and fed me, and she fed me. [audience chuckle] She fed me dumplings and hand rolled noodles and soup, and she baked me pies and roasted chicken, and she made me fried dough laced with honey. And she brought me cherries that were wrapped in newspaper. And by the time August arrived, I was so chubby, I was so– [audience chuckle] I was so fat that even she began to make fun of me. [audience laughter] 

And she’d say, ​“Vanechka, you are so fat. You are so fat. Can you even see your penis from behind [audience laughter] your stomach when you go to the bathroom?” And the rare days that I didn’t spend eating with my grandmother, I played with the neighborhood boys. And all of them were older than me, and they were tougher than me, and they were stronger than me, and they were meaner than me, and I really didn’t fit in with them.

But I remember this one day, I was playing with these four other boys, and we spent the whole day building a fort. And we started really early in the morning, and we were building it until late in the day. And by the time it was done, its walls were so thick and it was such a massive structure that it looked like it could withstand a hailstorm.

And so, we all filed in to celebrate inside the fort. And I was the last in line. And just as I was about to enter, the boy right in front of me turns around and looks at me, and he says, ​“You can’t come in.” And I said, ​“What do you mean I can’t come in? I helped you build this.” And he says, ​“You can’t come in. You should turn around and you should leave.” And so, I turn around and I walk away.

And I walk up the four flights of stairs to our apartment and I tell my grandmother what happened. And I see her face overcome with fury. And I know that she’s just as angry at me for not standing up for myself as she is at the boys who bullied me. And she says, ​“We’re going to do something.” And I get a little excited at the thought of revenge and I say, ​“What are we going to do?” And she says, ​“You be quiet and wait.” [audience laughter] And so, the whole night we waited and we waited and it got so late and I was so tired.

And finally, when it was pitch black outside, my grandmother goes to the kitchen. And I follow her to the kitchen and I see her pick up the biggest kitchen knife and tuck it into the waistband of her dress. [audience chuckle] And I follow her out of the apartment and down the four flights of stairs. And when we come outside, it is so dark that all I can make out is the white shape of her dress and the knife that she’s holding in her hand as she’s running towards the fort. [audience laughter] And I’m running after her and I see her slip inside the fort.

And then when I get closer, I hear the sound of breaking branches and snapping twigs and the sound of someone cutting through rope. And in the dark, I see this whole structure, the shadow of this mass, just collapse and cave in on itself. And my grandmother is still inside. She’s doing this from the inside.

And finally she emerges and she’s laughing so hard, and she’s laughing so hard. And she doesn’t care about being stealthy now. She is — she yells at me, she says, ​“Run.” And we turn around and we bolt. We bolt toward the apartment building. And she’s running with this enormous butcher’s knife [audience laughter] and I’m running after her. And we run up the four flights of stairs, we run back into our apartment and she slams the door and she locks it behind her and she heaves her body against the door.

And we’re both laughing. And when we’re finally out of breath from laughing, we fall asleep in the living room. And I never found out if the boys actually suspected me. I never found out if they thought I was the perpetrator because I spent the rest of that summer hiding in my grandmother’s apartment.

But I am sure as hell that they never suspected a 65-year-old woman, who in the middle of the night, picked up a knife and destroyed their fort, this fort that was built by a bunch of 12-year-old children [audience chuckle] that she tore down to avenge her grandson. [audience chuckle] And to stand up for the family that she now had and to teach her grandson a lesson of how important it is to stand up for himself.