Medal of Honor, Pt. I

At ten, nothing thrills a boy more than a veteran pinning a war decoration to your chest.

Uncle Seva was awarded a Medal for the Defense of Odessa in July 1943 after his submarine brought food, munitions, and gasoline to a besieged garrison off the coast of Odessa. It was a risky mission, and the medal spoke to that—with its gold-embossed print of two infantrymen intrepidly charging into battle, the back carrying the words For Our Soviet Fatherland. It was only the beginning of the adulation Odessa and its protectors would see as the status of Hero City was conferred upon the seaport town in 1945.

On July 23, 1993, exactly 50 years after Seva was awarded the medal, I took it out of my wallet. It was time to restore the luster. To that end, I took a small rag given me by my dad and a bottle of solution by my brother. Propping myself up against the paint-chipped wall in the cramped two-room suite that housed my grandparents and me, I started to scrub…

*****

In preparing to depart the former Soviet Union, people received the strangest of advice on what to bring to the New World—whether Israel, Australia, Germany, or the U.S. In our family’s case, it was a veritable hodgepodge of the unsellable and the undesirable: Cold War-era spy kits for young sleuths; commemorative china featuring the architectural highlights of Odessa and its environs; vial upon vial of green mystery potion used on minor cuts and major scrapes that left thick jade splotches on our palms, ankles, and foreheads; and, our prize possessions—two ghastly, poorly rendered paintings depicting the beheading of John the Baptist by a bloody red sickle and the Godmother as a skanked-out meth addict, respectively. It was only later learned that my father’s painter friend, Kolya, might not have been the connoisseur we’d all thought.

My dad, furrowing his thick, austere brows, instructed us to bring only the bare necessities, or, stuff of value that would fetch some ready cash. The idea was to sell our wares upon arrival at his cousin’s apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, just until we got on our feet. This excluded my hobby railroad and collection of rare toy Red Army soldiers, which were to be distributed among left-behind relatives, neighbors, and friends; UFO clippings I’d been collected with my brother’s help since I was 5; and the collection of young reader fiction occupying our bulky bookshelves. It included my bulky scratchy wool sweaters, passport that stated Jew, and a little drawing of zoo animals playing soccer that had graced my wall since birth.

Still, I’d managed to sneak the medal into my kid-size leather wallet, sent as a gift from one of my distant aunt’s friends in America. Now, as I studied the bronze-colored coin, I wondered what exactly Seva did for it—I only knew what it did for him. Aunt Sveta told me the story herself—how Seva, the snot-nosed kid just back from the front in 1945, one of a morbidly popular group of men known as “male deficit,” had proposed to her with the medal after 3 months of courtship, too poor to put a thimble round her slender finger. What I didn’t know—and what I always wanted from Seva—was the account, full of gore and glory, of the gallant exploits that netted him the precious lump of metal.

Although so called, Seva wasn’t truly my uncle—he was Grandma’s second maternal cousin—ordained as father figure when hers was claimed by the German war machine. Our friendship was a quirk of my parents’ busy schedule—and my reticence among peers. So it was that Seva, childless himself, became a multigenerational surrogate dad—a Father Emeritus. We spent days in his woodshop—a rarity in any Soviet apartment; nights going through photo albums and listening to the bombastic, patriotic records of his youth.

I would not only eat, but sleep at Seva and Sveta’s much coveted three-room, park-side apartment. My toys were wood and saw; my playmates, Seva and his neighbor, Alec the cobbler, who taught me bridge and solitaire, much to my parents’ chagrin. There I spent many Friday nights, until, at 1100 hours sharp Saturday, Grandpa came to get me.

Grandpa never passed his medical test and spent the war making plane parts in a munitions factory. He was a tall, stout man, probably head and shoulders above his diminutive, malnourished coworkers, drawing attention and questions—why was this vigorous lad making planes, not flying them? His favorite mode of conversation was censure; he enjoyed delivering short, impersonal homilies. He knew no games and played no records. I visited him, but always briefly, since he had lost Grandma. When asked about the war, he had little to say.

When I asked Seva about the war, a vague excitement knotted my throat and swelled my eyelids. I stared directly at him with affected gravity, the way I saw adults do in movies when they asked veterans the ever-important question: “What was it like?” But he just turned away and lamented our soccer team’s woes, or polluted water at the Lanzheron beach. The almost scripted silence sent my mind ambling in the romantic vortex of unfinished sentences and meaningful looks.

It was these reveries through the battlefields—fed by Seva’s silence, nourished by scores of war films—that possessed me every time I removed the medal from its case, a French candy tin I found under a seat in the international lounge of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. It was this reverie I would retreat to when I returned to our temporary digs after losing both my quarters—one to the Ninja Turtles game and one to the teenage pickpocket—at the video store downstairs.