After two years of the Nazi occupation, when German troops retreated driven westward by the Red Army blows, my grandfather disappeared from home one day before the liberation, together with his bicycle—rather a valuable item in those times.
The next morning, heavy bombardment made Katerinna and her three children flee as far as the suburban village of Podlipnoye, where a shell fragment cut an apple tree branch right above my mother’s head (a telling detail, if not for the odd inches I wouldn’t now be composing this letter to you). By noon, the advancing troops of the Red Army liberated both the village and the city. Katerinna came back to Konotop where she brought up, as a single mother, her children – Galina, Vadim, and Lyoudmilla…
Another ten years passed and Galina, the eldest of the three, thru a postal acquaintance met Nikolai Ogoltsoff, a petty officer in the Order of Combat Red Banner Black Sea Fleet. “Postal acquaintance” meant the postman delivering a letter which starts, “Hello, unknown Galina…”, and concluded by, ”…Send me your photo, please!”
So, on his next year furlough Nikolai, instead of customary visiting his native Ryazan Region in Russia, arrived in the Ukrainian city of Konotop where the width of both his bottom-bell Navy pants and his chest in the deep V-cut demonstrating the striped vest, and the golden-lettered legend “The Black Sea Fleet” above his forehead in the ribbon around his marine uniform visor-less cap whose 2 black tails ended with imprints (also golden) of anchors (one per a tail) hanging loosely from the back of his head, and one more shining anchor (this time of brass) in his polished belt plate impressed the quiet lanes in the town outskirts where he’d been sending his letters in envelopes embellished on behind with the line of his own design, “Fly with my greetings, come back with the promise of meetings!.”
And three days later my parents, forgetful in the rush to notify my grandmother, registered their marriage in the Konotop ZAGS…
(…did Regional Trade Auditor Vakimov set up innocent people after his arrest?
Affirmative. The show had to go on. So you signed anything they put before you of your good will or you signed it as a cripple if not killed by the tortures and beating under the name of interrogation.
Did he collaborate with the Nazi occupants?
Knowledge of the language would give him such an opportunity but then you should suppose he did it gratis, without bettering his housing conditions or procuring a new pair of shoes for his wife. The bicycle also a telling clue—Germans, still having more than a year of war on their hands, could find room for an able-bodied collaborationist in the bed of a truck heading westward… Seems like he was dead scared at the prospect of another round of interrogations when riding his bike—trying to cross in a bath-tub the wuthering ocean of War.