We like to think that luck is a shiny, shimmering lottery ticket, no price tag attached. But what if this is an illusion and the nature of luck is darker, more bitter, and carries a strong scent of smoke with undertones of blood? Take my great grandma Varvara. This is her face in a framed photo on my desk. She was a very lucky girl.
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The year is 1919. In a country shattered by the revolution and the civil war, a sixteen-year-old with two dark braids snaking down her back and reaching to her waist boards a train to the city where her mother has come down with that new illness all the newspapers are writing about. The train rocks, spurting black steam, and the men cough, smoke, and spit. She reaches the old capital in time to witness her mother die from Spanish flu.
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Another train takes her back—to her home village and the outbreak of smallpox. Varvara gets to nurse one sister back to health and buries the younger boys, while the pox passes her by just as the flu did.
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Back to the city of steel mills and smoking chimneys the sisters go, to the sudden and brief freedom of the 1920s, to the jazz orchestras and late-night dances. Varvara marries a young artist. One year later he is dead from consumption, and she is a widow at nineteen. Her lungs remain clear, but the parties are over.
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She makes a sensible decision, marries a neighbor, an older man. “I respected him,” she would say many years later, when her daughter asks about love. The Second World War comes roaring in and her husband volunteers for the front when the German troops approach the city. A fifty-year-old with poor eyesight, he never makes it out of the forests and the swamps. Varvara stays in the city under siege.
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She digs trenches, erects fortifications, and this earns her the extra one hundred grams of bread per day. The grams that keep her and her daughter alive—no small feat in the city of the dead, where all the cats are eaten by the end of that first winter and skeletal, frozen bodies line the streets. One day a shell hits the road close to the military truck taking her to work. It overturns killing and maiming the women inside. Varvara walks away with one bloody scratch.
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I imagine the war has taken most of Varvara’s luck, but it manifests one last time many years later, when my elderly great grandma hurries to catch a regional train going back to the city from the countryside. That same city of steel and granite, where she survived everything. She is running late, as she so often did, and barely makes it into the last car. It is that one car that remains standing on the tracks, when the train derails, green coaches crushed into twisted metal, so many people trapped inside. A lucky girl.
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Tonight, I’m standing over my daughter’s bed in a land far away from my great grandma’s ashes and, as the red sand from Egypt blows across the sea and covers the tiles in the backyard of my new home, I wonder if having wished for a tiny sliver of Varvara’s luck for my little girl is going to haunt me in years to come.
