The biography of my grandmother

My grandmother was born in Moscow countryside in 1925. Her earliest memories of childhood were a lemur and a camel in the zoo, that she had visited with her father. She was also impressed by the seaside package holiday, where she could see a coastline and hills with lavender and the ruins of an ancient town Hersones in the Crimea. During her holidays she took a risk by looking around from the window of a cable car without permission. At the end of the trip she got malaria from mosquitoes and diarrhoea from bacterias in the Ukrainian cuisine. But my granny took it easy.
In early 30"s she went to local school, where she was rather an indifferent pupil. Her teacher was very cruel and the lessons were tiresome. Once laziness had vanished and my grandmother presumed to enter the institute. So, during the warfare times she had entered the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages. During those war years she always thought about Jews in ghettoes, who had been swelling from hunger. She did take an oath to avenge.
After graduating from the institute, she began working at school as a teacher of English. She often went trekking with her pupils to the forests. One day, a group of pioneers, having taken no notice, vanished in the wood. After tiresome searches, a search party found the remains of the pioneers. The rest of the pupils took part in searching too. There are always flowers on the tombs of those pioneers. After that appalling backpacking trip to the forest my grandmother took everything for granted, but she had to go to work to another school, because of some parents and officials, who were putting pressure on her.   
She got married in 1953. That year she had a row with the school"s librarian because of the powder of cocaine, that my granny had stolen. She was afraid of being mugged and murdered and decided not to take a risk and move to another city. Soon, a big jumbo jet with my granny"s family landed in Kyiv. Next year my mother was born. My grandmother went working at school again. She loved to visit some tourist spots in Kyiv and often took a camcorder with her.
Five years had gone. My grandmother heard the librarian in Moscow"s school had been imprisoned, where she had died from cancer of liver and had been buried in Novodevichie graveyard. All the family returned to Moscow, having wired to relatives in the capital. In Moscow my grandmother taught pupils till pension.
When she went on pension, she began cultivating strawberry in our garden and nursed her grandsons (I was among them). Nowadays, she likes to follow the political and economic events and she makes some forecasts. Her attitude to the future is rather pessimistic. In the evenings, watching news on TV, she comments "all that vile misinformation from official broadcasts".      
    
2001