master linguists
…foreign accents, big words and work ethic…
Steve and John Ivanovich Malloff – 1979
Osatka Village Grand Forks, BC
John Ivanovich Malloff was always one to throw around big words, it was an entertaining way to educate us. He challenged everybody around him to learn more by expanding any and every conversation with words greater than the confounds of our common vocabulary. He did this to everybody. No conversation was safe. He relished in using colourful words. My father read so ferociously that he could call upon all the authors that he had consumed to provide him with an impeccable foundation for any verbal requirements. I was fond of this routine of his. Before my sister and myself went to Expo 86 and before I was in high school we typically heard words such as, conducive, harangue, uncouth, punctilious, reconnoiter, flabbergasted, behoove, chagrin, cahoots, perpendicular, expunge, audacity, bequeath, intersperse, imperative, skedaddle, shellac, bamboozle, besmirch, decorum, and so on. Looking back now, I see how it gave my sister and myself a leg up in conversations. This was the 80’s and the times were slightly different than it is today. We still referred to physical encyclopedias when we had a question, well that’s if our John wasn’t nearby.
Dad was fluent in woodwork, railroads, horses, baseball, post-industrial history, construction and many other forms of trivia. He could easily banter with academics in another twenty of thirty subjects. He knew what he knew and most of the time he never seemed to pretend to know what he didn’t know. To this day I remember the first time I asked my father a question and he didn’t have the answer or a sufficient approximation. I was seventeen when that happened, it was a strange experience.
My uncle Steve, John’s brother, didn’t use big words as much as entertaining accents and an impeccable command of the Russian language. Russian has a poetic yet scientific structure and an evolutionary refinement that non-speakers will be completely unaware of. I imagine, as all languages must do, it lives, but to me, Russian lives differently. It seems alive as it adapts, encompasses and expands. The Russian language is constantly seeking to master the scientific expression of a poem. Obviously, I am ignorant as I only speak three languages, but I often wonder how other languages shape the thoughts of the people who yield them. To this end, Russian is by far the most articulate, scientific, poetic and literary form of communication I know. Uncle Steve taught Russian at Grand Forks Secondary School. In fact, he was responsible for bringing the Russian language into the BC curriculum in Grand Forks, Castlegar and Nelson BC. Both Steve and my aunt Irene were Russian language teachers. I had my aunt in elementary school and my uncle in high school.
From a young age I already knew of Steve’s fondness for the Russian language. As we were growing up he slapped it on his own children like handcuffs. Tamara, Yevgeny, Nikita and Natasha all had to practice Russian in the evenings. My sister and I were a bit luckier, or so it seemed, to escape the enforced evening study sessions.
Uncle Steve bought a shortwave radio in the 80’s to catch Russian broadcasts beamed around the globe. I will never forget the joy with which he sat me on his lap as we tuned into various statically crackling radio programs. I could barely understand what was being said, nonetheless there we sat for an hour, both chewing sunflower seeds and listening to the static crackling and obscure sounds generated from the numbers’ stations[1] of the Cold War. Sometimes I think he pretended to interact with these broadcasts. He had the ability to will his jokes into the hearts of his loved ones.
When I was in grade eight I was lucky enough to join my uncle Steve on one of his school trips to the USSR. Quickly upon landing I realized that Steve was in his element. It was apparent how his command of the language gave him the confidence to observe and understand so much more than usual. The itinerary he arranged for us was action packed. I remember one of the guides telling me that Steve had been awarded an honourary diplomatic status by Brezhnev for his cultural exchange trips to the USSR. The guide further went on to say that few Russians spoke as clear and correct as uncle Steve. Onetime uncle Steve needed to secure tickets to the circus in Moscow, apparently, they were sold out and there had been some sort of mix up with our group’s reservation. Knowing that the Director of the circus was a native Uzbek, uncle Steve used an Uzbekistani accent to charm his way into the graces of the director’s empathy and secure tickets for our entire tour bus.
Steve seemed to love to dangle accents in the face of acquaintances. We grew up on the American border. Often times while crossing the border uncle Steve would speak with a Texan drawl and make random innocuous statements as a way to provoke the customs border agents into some sort of confused state of inquiry. His accent was a mix of a Marlon Brando (read Captain Kurtz) impression on authority mixed with the dead-pan comic indulgence of Bob Newhart.
Steve also had a passionate interest in shooting video and video editing. He was a ferocious producer of films for the wide variety of Doukhobor festivals and community events. Due to the fact that I worked at the local custom photography lab, Contact Photo Arts, uncle Steve would always consult me regarding his next big technology purchase. He was an avid accumulator of both liner and non-liner video editing technology.
Uncle Steve always encourage my creative side, in high-school he commissioned me to illustrate a Russian textbook he was authoring. He received a grant for its production so he paid me three times the minimum wages at that time. I felt like my drawings were not up to par but he was ecstatic with the drawings.
I reflect on where my uncle and father came from. My grandfather John Grigoryevich Malloff, passed away nine months before I was born. Through my father and my uncle, I am connected to a man that I never really knew. John Grigoryevich had six grandchildren, it was only myself that he never met. I would not feel his embrace nor know his face. His wife, Pauline, my paternal grandmother would often tell me how much I reminded her of him. Sometimes she would have a debate with herself who more resembled my grandfather Malloff. My older cousin Yevgeny or myself. Judging from photographs, I would say that my cousin Yevgeny had more similar feature to our dedushka. I always felt connected to deda in a weird way though, something intangible, like a cosmic string.
Sometimes I might consider myself slow to saddle, however when I get moving I can maintain a steady and unrelenting work pace. I feel that I inherited my grandfather’s work ethic. There are funny things that I can do at great length and with a rather ethereal connection that I do not truly understand. I can chop firewood or woodwork for days on end. The smell of wood being split, burned, cut or otherwise worked comforts me deeply. Garden work was always a chore, mostly because my mom was dictating what was to be done, so it felt like an order, which never quite sat well with me. That being said, if left to my own devices, I can pick fruits or berries, vegetables, roots or mushrooms well into the darkness of night. Maybe this is a connection most people have, I simply do not know. Surely, I inherited this from my mother, who is the hardest working person any garden has ever met, but I have a sneaking suspicion my grandfather Malloff was also such a person.
My niece Anastasia is a picker too, she is more like my dad, she is a hand-to-mouth, self-satisfier. Me, on the other hand, I like order. I like the look of a full bucket of berries, with no twigs or leaves. I like to measure and quantify and break target objectives. I love the smell of my mother’s hot parnik[2]. The fragrance of tomatoes intoxicates me, sometimes I go into the parnik and just sit there and breathe in the scents of the nightshades.
My mother has a garden that rivals none. It stands alone in a small town known for its dazzling gardens. She is the original gangster of the organic patch. For a brief period in the seventies, we lived in North Vancouver. I remember in 1977, she would send us to the back yard to pick dandelion leaves for her wild urban salad. During the spring we had fresh pressed carrot juice, not a hit with the neighbourhood boys playing hockey. In the summers she made fresh homemade strawberry ice cream, which was a hit with the neighbourhood kids. Mom is an almanac for farmers of all stripes. Before hippies sought health food stores, mom was there, placing special orders.
It was 1978 when we lefty Vancouver for the Kootenays. I was five years old. I’ve heard my parents argue that it was to help my grandmother trying to manage the twelve-acre farm after my grandfather’s passing. I’ve also heard it was to raise us in the Kootenays among our Russian roots. Both arguments seemed to get us closer to the quintessential Russian garden. Russians are addicted to gardening like Japanese are addicted to fishing. A life without a garden is a suspect proposition.
Dad was a master wood worker. In North Vancouver he was employed as a woodworking teacher at Sutherland High School. He loved his job. His students loved him. I remember on occasion, when my parents didn’t have a sitter, he would lug me to Sutherland Secondary School. I have faint recollections of his office, all the big machines and the high school boys, with jean jackets and long feathered hair. Dad would always insist I stay in his office. Clearly a two-year old should not be in a secondary woodworking shop. It was the seventies, rules were more like recommendations back then. I remember one incident when dad had to deal with some insubordinate students. He made a student stand in front of the class with his back to the blackboard and his arms raised in the air. I remember how the other students laughed and thoroughly enjoyed the meted-out punishment. Even the reprimanded was happy with his sentence. I was under three, but I was already learning a thing or two about the classroom. Dad taught Brian Adams, he mentioned that he wasn’t much of a talented woodworker. He would always chirp that the kids were high on acid listening to Steppenwolf and rather somewhat ruffian. He loved them though and he loved his job. It was after the summer of ’69 but the salad days were still in effect.
Dad could make anything from wood. He could build a house, or carve a horse in full gallop with muscles and sinews rippling. He knew what he knew, and he knew it well. I would say he was an odd sort of perfectionist. He would smash a mahogany dresser to pieces if one drawer was a millimeter off, yet our own house in Grand Forks would have all sorts of improper short cuts employed in its construction. He remembered the rabble of haphazard building in the Osatka Village. His metric for what mattered in regards to precision was uniquely his own. This was even more comical considering he was the Building Inspector for the Kootenay Boundary region.
My dad always said his father, my dedushka Malloff was the hardest working man he knew. The hardest working woman he knew, was his wife Margaret, my mother followed by his babushka Malova. I grew up with a father whose word you could take to the bank. If my dad gave you an answer there was a 99% probability that it was factually more accurate than the next ten best answers you got. It was almost as if he had an eidetic memory or some sort of ancillary condition to hyperthymesia. Dad would get banned from radio trivia contests because he had all the answers.
At Christmas we would play Trivial Pursuit when it became popular. Dad could fill a whole pie and finish the game before you successfully answered one segment. My cousin Tamara would study the cards during the eleven months before Christmas and my cousin Yevgeny who was known for reading encyclopedias since age seven were both dumbfounded at dad’s ability to recall trivia like child’s play. Dad knew he was gifted and sometimes he would enjoy his brain power most of the time he was very humble and sly with his ability to know things that nobody else knew.
Dad was always gentle. My mom might say he was lazy or careless when he was doing work she assigned. He was most comfortable taking in data, reading books, listening to radio programs, watching television, as long as it wasn’t science fiction. John preferred to stick to the facts. Many times, John would say I reminded him of his father. When asked how, it was the way I would just get things done. The way I wouldn’t listen to others. The way I would do what I wanted and travel where I wanted. He said nothing stopped his father and that he saw the same feature in me.
I know my grandfather died on Boxing Day. I was conceived in December. I always imagined this was the transition from which we passed. My grandmother alluded to as much. Deda was out in the orchard working, I think he was gathering fahrost[3] from the apple trees while the family was inside enjoying the holiday. It took a while for my Baba to enjoy Christmas after that, Christmas became a harsh reminder of her loss. She loved her husband and always defended his lasting memory. I remember when I was visiting Grand Forks for a summer, she had a home-maker come by and help her. The home-maker suggested that baba was a good woman and she should find a man to keep her company. My grandmother chased her out of the house with a broom and told her to never come back.
I am grateful for these various forms of literacy that my family provided. Whether they were observed, inherited or created a new, I am the beneficiary of a wide spectrum of fluencies which have assisted my development as a whole person and hopefully as a classroom teacher. They provided an education that no public school could. Thanks to them I can thrive in the country as well as in the city.
[1] A numbers station is a shortwave radio station that broadcasts all sorts of random numbers, often thought to be mostly used by spy agencies to communicate secret messages to its agents in the field.
[2] Russian word for a hothouse. It can be made from glass or plastic wrap. Usually for tomatoes and peppers.
[3] Fallen pruning from the fruit trees that were collected for burning.