Socks

Grandpa Vitka Samokhin always trusted the television. There was no one to talk to in the village, but in the television there lived pleasant, respectful – though sometimes high-strung – people he could chat with. Vitka stayed up to date on the map that showed how the military operation was going, though the flags on it never had to be rearranged. The front line was at a standstill.

He would peer through the window at the snow lying on the house roofs and covering the barns and even the post office, and feel blue. He imagined the front from the tales told by his pa, Pyotr Samokhin, who had been caught up in the dreadful bloodbath at Velikie Luki in the winter of 1942. The young Vitka also remembered Dad complaining to his old lady, not about being afraid to die, but about his feet being frozen all the time. Now Vitka wondered to himself how that could be. Tanks, planes, and his dad shivering with cold in his felt boots.

Vitka thought a while longer and watched some more television, listened to the anchor who got worked up so easily and always scared him with his cussing and his arm-waving, and decided that the front needed help. The very next morning, trampling the snow under his old felt boots clad in new, glossy, black overshoes, he ran around the village, trying to prod the grannies into showing their mettle. They weren’t too eager to be prodded, all being as old as could be, but there was no getting away from him.

“Get this, you old dimwit” – Vitka was pounding on Granny Nyura’s table – “their feet are freezing out there. It’s winter, winter everywhere. But you, you pair of old galoshes, you don’t give a rap.”

He frightened Granny Liza so much that she dead-bolted her door from the inside and listened to him through the keyhole.

“Liza, you tightwad!” Vitka howled, hopping around the porch like a hare. “You’ve got thousands of knit socks. Hand them over: the Motherland needs them.”

Worn out by Vitka’s yelling, Granny Liza cleared her throat. “To heck with you, you bald-headed devil,” she said. “They’re new. What if I get married? They’ll be my dowry. I’m not giving them to you! Go find some wool, and I’ll knit it up, but don’t you touch what’s mine.”

Granny Ulyana cried her eyes out when she heard Vitka’s tale, because she didn’t watch television. She had nothing like that at home except the district newspaper that came to her mailbox.

“I’ll knit some socks, Vitka,” she said, wiping her tears. “Why wouldn’t I? You think I don’t understand? But where is that country – the one where our lads have gone?”

Grandpa Vitka couldn’t explain to the old girl where Ukraine was, but for some reason persuaded her that it was up in the frigid North.

Once armed with the agreement of all the available old ladies, Vitka went on a search for wool. They hadn’t kept sheep in the village for the longest time; the wool-carding shop had been shut down in 2004; the old ladies had sold their drop spindles to the summer people; and the most ancient board distaff with its horizontal base had been carted off to the local history museum. Vitka was so put out that he decided to get the grannies to give up the goods whether they wanted to or not, like in the good old Soviet times.

“Come on, girls,” he shouted in the store when they were buying stale loaves and granulated sugar. “Hand over all your knitwear. We’ll unravel it. We’ll wind it into skeins. And we’ll knit it up.”

The old girls – no fools, they – didn’t care to give up their new goat-wool scarves or their patterned woolen sweaters. On top of that, Granny Liza, a handicrafter in her younger days, had worked her knit tops with colorful embroidered flowers, roosters, and shining suns.

“How,” she wanted to know, “am I going to hand these lovely things over to you? For socks, so the heels can be worn into holes? Nope, I’m not handing them over just to make socks! But I can knit a soldier’s sweater with a turtleneck and an embroidered portrait of a general – you want that?”

Vitka brushed her off with mild exasperation. “You’re a nitwit,” he said, “If everyone in the company gets one, then yes. But what if there’s just the one, and the general gets it? The others’ll all go green with envy. Still, you can embroider letters, the permitted letters – nobody says you can’t.”

Granny Nyura, the one Vitka pestered the most, brought a bundle of her grandfather’s old things, and, sitting at Vitka’s table, unraveled each one, filling the air with dust and rattling on about life as it used to be, which was a whole lot better than now, because people kept sheep back then and Nyura – well, Nyura was young. Granny Ulyana suddenly remembered that a good eight years ago she’d hung skeins of bleached wool to dry in the attic and forgotten about them. The attic door was forced open, but the skeins had been eaten by bugs and weren’t good for much at all.

Vitka’s energy reached all the way to the district center, where his distant relatives lived, and they sent him a sackful of colored yarn. Now it was all but a done deal: Vitka just had to pass the wool out to the grannies and wait while they knitted the socks.

The grannies acted up, wanted nothing to do with the skeins from town, because that wasn’t real wool, they said,. It squeaked and gave every sign of not having been sheared from a sheep at all. Vitka talked them into it, though, and settled down to wait. And, so the time would go faster, he started a batch of moonshine. “Socks are all well and good,” he reasoned to himself, “but vodka warms like nothing else.”

The first run he drank himself – because you can’t send an untested product as a gift – then went wandering around the village, singing the wartime song about Katyusha. He had to know just how strong the moonshine needed to be as a help in surviving the bitter cold.

“It’s an experiment,” he told the grannies. “I’m testing it on myself.”

The roofs started dripping; March had come; and the grannies brought Vitka a sackful of socks. Funny-looking socks they were, all different-colored stripes, and they squeaked like the snow.

“Lovely” Vitka said, clearly dubious about his neighbors’ hard work. Then, slinging the sack across his back and picking up his canisters of moonshine, he took the bus to town. And there they laughed at him. The distribution of moonshine was forbidden, and the socks turned out to be worse than useless because summer was coming and besides, who fights in felt boots these days?

Upset, Vitka went straight to the market, sold his moonshine, and bought a sheep. She bleated and didn’t want to go anywhere by bus, but Vitka, hinting broadly that sheep could come to a bad end, finally crammed her on board and made a happy journey home, listening to the sheep bleating and thinking about how she would have lambs and the village would be teeming with sheep, which meant that there’d be socks, once there was something to knit them from.