A gift for dad.

I first noticed third-grader Vitalik Karvatsky when I lined up the children in a column of two (to make it easier to count) in front of the bus. It was supposed to take twenty schoolchildren of different ages and me, a teacher, to the south, to the sea. All the pupils were from our rural school, located on land marked by the shadow of the Chernobyl disaster. Until 2014, children affected by the nuclear fallout were sent to rest in the mountains or to the sea. Vitalik caught my attention because, standing in front of the bus, he was holding a suitcase of an unusual size. It was too big for a child. “A strong boy,” I thought in the hustle and bustle of departure.

When we were already at the sea, Vitalik surprised me again with his suitcase. Or rather, with its contents. It contained a piece of laundry soap, a rag (probably for wiping the suitcase), and several old plastic bags; no one knows what they were used for. And the clothes?! They weren’t in the suitcase. All the clothes that Vitalik’s mother had given her child for the seaside vacation were on him. Vitalik’s mother could confidently outdrink more than one strong man in the village. She was a professional at drinking vodka. The boy was wearing shorts of indeterminate age and color, a similar faded T-shirt, and old sandals stitched many times by no one knows who.

Vitalik’s father had long since left the family and lived separately from them. Even now, I don’t know who he is or whether he ever comes to the village. But this didn’t stop Vitalik from talking about his dad very often. I don’t know what exactly in the child’s stories about his loved one was true and what was fiction, but the boy obviously loved his dad.

Often, during his vacation by the sea, Vitalik would say that he was preparing a gift for his dad, and I, sometimes encouraging the boy, didn’t take his words seriously. Later, I had to understand my mistake.

On the day of our departure home, I again noticed Vitalik with a suitcase. The boy was dragging it to the bus with great effort. “It’s strange,” I thought, watching the child, “is he really so weak after the sea that it’s hard for him to lift an almost empty suitcase?” I helped the boy and then asked,

– Vitalik, your suitcase is heavy. What do you have in there?

The boy answered, slowly and quietly pronouncing each word, almost solemnly:

– There’s a present for Dad.

– A present? – I was genuinely surprised.

– Yes! – Vitalik exclaimed offendedly, probably sensing my mistrust of his words.

Then he suddenly opened the suitcase. It contained several dozen small sea pebbles, which were very beautiful. The child had carefully selected them on the seashore. There were also several weeds; otherwise, I cannot call these dried plants because I do not know their correct name. In our native Chernobyl zone, such seaside weeds do not bloom. Their original shape and bright red-blue colors, apparently, attracted the attention of the boy, who was taking wildflowers home as souvenirs. I loaded Vitalik’s suitcase, along with the other children’s things, into the luggage compartment of the bus. The next day, unlike the other children in our group, no one met Vitalik in the village. He stubbornly dragged his suitcase with gifts for his dad home, refusing my help. The boy believed that he should manage on his own.

 

Yurii Tokar was born in 1967 in the Soviet Union. He graduated from Dnipropetrovsk State University in 1988 and began teaching mathematics and physics in the region affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Yuri Tokar’s stories, essays, and poems have been published in newspapers and magazines in several countries, including Ukrainian, German, and American. For example, his work has appeared in the Russian-language magazine Чайка (Washington):