8 Frames: Fuji Pro 400H on Yashica D TLR with Anya

This story is about my Tyotya Anya, a giant slayer.

Anya barely stands above five feet and is 83 years old. I wish I could say I have half her energy.

When I visit her Bensonhurst apartment and the phone rings, she jumps up and bolts towards it, in another room before I even realize what happened. She jaywalks across one-way streets like a true New Yorker, barely glancing at traffic, and she takes a no-nonsense approach towards government agencies — all in Russian, whether they understand her or not.

When I ask her how she stays so fit, she tells me it’s thanks to Tai Chi. Every morning, at 6:30, she joins a group of several dozen practitioners in a public park led by, in her words, an energetic Chinese man with the best music and a structured approach to exercise. They don’t speak the same language, but she’s been going to this park near her apartment for almost two decades.

Tyotya means aunt in Russian, like the familiar titi in Spanish. She was my grandmother’s sister; a woman I never met, who died before I was born, in her late 40s. Anya likes to say that I’m more her grandson than her great nephew. Even though we used to live in different counties, I always had fond memories of visiting her apartment, where she has lived since 1994. She came to the US in 1992, a year after the fall of the Soviet Union.

But Anya was never alone.

It was always Anya and Alik. Alik, or Alevtin, is her husband and partner. Together, for our family, they were a package deal. They never had children, it was just them.

Today, Alik is in a nursing home, and Anya is alone in her apartment. Alik has cruelly been afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Alik has gone blind. To see Alik, Anya has to do a weekly Covid test and get a ride from another relative of ours to the home. Sometimes he recognizes her voice, sometimes he doesn’t. She says he’s so thin now, barely eating. I had visited him several times as well, before Covid made it almost impossible.

It’s hard to watch someone who had such an outsized presence in your psyche take a turn like Alik did. For Anya, it’s exceptionally harder. For several years, before I immigrated to the US in 2018, she took care of him in her apartment. His Alzheimer’s made things complicated for her. She couldn’t sleep. She was frustrated all the time, mostly due to the heartbreaking reality of having to watch the man she has called her partner since she was 14 years old turn into a stranger. Or rather, someone who sees her as one.

When Anya and Alik came to America, they had posters up on their walls and doors, on spots where the sticky tape didn’t ruin the custom wallpaper they had installed. Even in a Section 8 Brooklyn apartment, they had particular sensibilities about interior decoration that they brought from Russia. The posters had, to my childish eyes, a random assortment of vocabulary words. Whenever they walked by the posters, they practiced one word or another; an English pop-quiz on the way to the bathroom, or bedroom.

Those posters aren’t up anymore. It was hard to learn a new language at their age. Every now and then, Anya will surprise me with an English phrase or word that I didn’t know she knew. When I translate for her at a doctor’s office, or at the bank, she will interrupt me to say “Covid test, put in nose” or “Sorry, I need statement.”

I want to write more about who Anya and Alik were, before October 2020, when time had caught up to them both. For now, here is a set of photos I took of Anya at her apartment yesterday. She is wearing a turtleneck with mistletoe on it. The connotation to Christmas probably escapes her (she is Jewish, or Baha’i, depending on when you ask); she just likes that it’s green and pretty.