Babushka In Air
'Mamma mia...'
The year was 2024, and we were in Ölüdeniz, Turkey, celebrating my twenty-sixth birthday.
I have a tradition where every April, I drag my family together from different corners of the world and rent a large house so we can all hang out. It’s the only way we can still be together now. Scattered Russians during Putin’s stupid war.
That birthday felt especially unreal because my grandmother, my seventy-year-old babushka, somehow made it all the way from Moscow. She didn’t bring a gift, so when she asked what I wanted, I told her I didn’t need anything.
Unless, of course, she wanted to hike up the mountain in Ölüdeniz, where the paragliders gather, strap herself to a complete stranger, and jump off a cliff.
And she said, “Okay.”
The next day, a private Turkish driver took us up the mountain where the paragliders launch. My babushka’s instructor, a muscular guy in his mid-thirties with curly black hair and a permanent five o’clock shadow, sat beside her in the backseat of a black jeep.
He didn’t speak Russian. Or so we thought.
As we drove up the mountain, the driver making unnecessary sharp turns on a narrow serpentine, me cursing under my breath, my babushka pointed at the instructor and said, “Do you think he is married? What a handsome young man.”
Without missing a beat, the instructor turned to her, blinked, smiled, and said, “Mama mia.”
My babushka nearly collapsed from joy.
I rolled my eyes and went back to cursing the driver, clutching the seat handle.
Though at this point, I figured that if our car went flying off the serpentine, at least I wouldn’t have to watch my grandmother hit on a man who could easily be her grandson.
At the top, it was cold and windy. Paragliders strapped themselves in, put on helmets, and glided away. Our instructor walked up to my seventy-year-old babushka, plopped a helmet onto her head, took her by the waist, strapped his very fit body to hers, and with the confidence of a man who had done this a million times, ran off a cliff.
With our jaws on the ground, my sister Kate and I watched as the mother of our mother lifted into the sky like some Soviet-engineered eagle.
The instructor started doing little left-right swoops so we could film her, flying right over our heads.
“Babushka, are you all right?” I yelled, smiling, just to check.
They flew past. No response.
“Babushka! Are you all right?” I yelled again.
Nothing.
I looked at my sister. This time, concerned.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s probably not all right.”
My phone rang. The WhatsApp profile photo was the instructor’s sweaty forehead, mid-flight. I answered and he yelled over the wind, “Your grandmother wants to say something, but I don’t understand!!”
“Pass her the phone,” I said.
The phone changed hands mid-air and my grandmother screamed that she wanted to go down. Immediately.
I said I understood and passed the message back.
“We are not an airplane,” the instructor said, meaning that paragliders don’t go up and down on a whim of the rider. “But okay. We try.” Then he hung up.
My sister and I sprinted back to the car. The driver took us down the mountain, once again making unnecessary sharp turns on the narrow serpentine. This time I cursed under my breath at myself. What kind of grandson, I thought, sends his seventy-year-old grandmother off a cliff with a man who says “mama mia” and means it?
The paragliding community in Ölüdeniz is a tight bunch and information travels fast. By the time Kate and I reached the bottom, still alive despite our driver’s efforts, eleven muscular paraglider guys were standing in formation, apparently waiting to catch my babushka.
I looked up and a moment later there she was, descending like a Boeing 737 making an emergency landing.
When she hit the ground, they barely held her. Once the instructor unstrapped himself, they gently lowered her flat, like a wounded soldier.
I ran over, gasping.
“Babushka, are you okay?”
“No,” she said calmly, wincing. “I am not okay. I need to go home. Now.”
I called my mother and stepfather, who took her back to our cottage in Fethiye.
On the way, she became violently sick in the car. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say the vehicle required spiritual cleansing afterwards by my stepfather.
This is a good moment to zoom out and tell you about my babushka.
Her name is Tanya. She grew up in the Soviet Union as the daughter of a pilot and a woman who didn’t have a birth certificate. She spent most of her life at home, cooking, cleaning, and tending to my grandfather’s desires. To an outsider, her life resembled that of a house cat.
She met my grandfather, Vasilich, at Moscow State University. She was cleaning the toilets. He was guarding machinery. Later he went to work for a place you’ve heard of, the one people whispered about in the Soviet Union.
While he was a good grandfather to me, he was a terrible husband to her. Physically and psychologically abusive. Affairs, plural. Two she knew about. God knows how many she didn’t.
When he died a few years ago, something in her snapped open.
It was like she stepped out of a cage she hadn’t realized she was living in.
Suddenly there was space. Oxygen. Possibility. And she ran into it like someone afraid the door might slam shut again.
Within a year she had a boyfriend twenty years younger, a lily tattoo across her back, three credit cards, a car on finance, and a month-long holiday in Morocco.
It was as if she were trying to compress all the life she had missed, all the joy and rebellion and chaos, into the two or three decades she had left.
After the flight, she slept for a day and a half. During those hours, I tortured myself. I paced the house feeling like an idiot. An asshole. A negligent descendant. This was my fault. No wonder I don’t have friends.
Then, sometime in the afternoon, I heard laughter from her room.
I knocked gently, ready to apologize for the rest of my life.
She was lying in bed, holding her brand-new iPhone, watching the video I’d filmed of her flying. I could hear my own voice yelling, “Babushka, are you all right?”
She looked up at me and said,
“Next time, can you make sure I do it without the instructor? He’s ruining my video.”