Semion Pavlych, pt 2

There is a well-known literary type in Russia, from Gogol's Korobochka (in Dead Souls) to Ilya Kabakov's aptly named "Man Who Never Threw Anything Away," from his 10 Characters series of the eighties, of people so extremely retentive that they never get rid of anything. I didn't know they actually existed, but that's what Senya was. When I got to Moscow, the room where I was going to live was filled with an enormous mound of old papers, milk cartons, tools, parts of pieces of furniture, picture frames, in short, anything composed of physical matter, and therefore valuable. While I recovered from jet lag sleeping in a room only half full of stuff (and into which the mound would be moved), Senya sorted through the mountain and distributed it elsewhere throughout the apartment.

Collecting was not a habit Senya had gotten over. If Oleg (the grandson) or I tried to dispose of a bottle or a TetraPak when Senya was around, the diligent grandfather would always rescue it from an ignominious end in the waste basket and file it in a more appropriate location. Tetrapaks, after all, are good for storing nails and screws. So we got into the habit of hiding the trash whenever we thought Senya might be by with a load of water. Or even, perhaps, of taking it out.

There was a little ukelele in my room, the strings long since too rigid to play. It hung in the corner. Later, in the depths of the Moscow winter when somehow the charms of neither Moscow television nor my dissertation could entertain me, I pulled an old photoalbum from the wall of books in my room. The album showed a history of Senya's brood, including a great many shots from within the Stalin-era (stalinka) apartment building on Ulitsa akademika Vavilova. Apparently, Oleg's whole family had lived in the room I was then in back when Oleg was born (ca 1975), for there was a lot of diaper changing and cooing going on in the pictures. And in the pictures, in the corner, hung the ukelele.