Russian Girls

“A poet in Russia is more than a poet”
                Y. Yevtushenko

The same formula can be applied to Russian women , who are or have to be “much more”.
 After the War there was a popular chastushka (a short funny folk song) illustrating how much more:
Both horse and bull I am,
I’m a woman and I’m a man.
No wonder – life back then was tough.
  Deeply convinced that the English-speaking world wants to know about us more and needs, too
I am ready to tell as much as I can, but I can’t be impartial – I admire Russian women.


Vera stepped out onto a small back door porch, looked around, took a deep breath – the air so fresh and sweet! Briskly walked past the yard, the green garden, passed by the apple and cherry trees and opened the gate leading to a deep and long ravine winding through a thickening grove that turned into woods. She stopped at the small clearing, covered with strawberry carpet, here and there mottled with ripe red berries. That was the place where her great grandfather, an enthusiastic fisherman, had found a buried pot with silver coins as he was digging for worms. She knelt and started picking and eating the strawberries – so delicious! When she looked up, she saw two girls. One was her classmate – Manya Indina – she lived with her mother in the other part of the town. Vera was a bit surprised to see her here, but it didn’t strike her as something unusual. The other girl did – Vera felt there was something wrong about her - not the looks, not the clothes, she couldn’t tell what. Still, the girl’s face was familiar. With a vague but growing feeling that this girl shouldn’t be here, that she doesn’t belong here Vera unwillingly woke up.
The old clock struck five. Vera took a deep breath – now uneasily and not only because she had long been short-winded – mostly because it brought her to this world again. The world where she is 83, takes a handful of pills every day, where she is a widow, has nobody to take care of, needs constant care herself, the world where she is almost blind, starts loosing hearing, has a bad appetite, and a still worse mood.
She tried to cheer up herself – that’s a morning of another day, after all! She made herself recall the so pleasant dream. Vera had a habit of training her memory by recalling her dreams. Besides, 5 a.m. is too early for getting up – her elder daughter, Elena, with whom she shares the flat, wakes up at 7. And that’s another habit – to stay in bed and think for hours on end about the past, about the grown-up children and grandchildren and growing great grandchildren and about life… so winding, so intricately woven.
Ah, the dream. Manya Indina … A Jewish girl, she lived with her mother and a younger brother in a small outbuilding, in the older part of the town, Bryansk, where Vera came from.  She was at the top of the class, and there was a rich private library in her house. Vera used to borrow her books. After she read something new the girls would discuss both the books and the authors. On the October 6, 1941 the fascists invaded Bryansk to stay for almost two years but still sometimes Vera came to see her friend – the Jewish who failed to evacuate and were yet alive knew better than to go out. One day she came only to find the house empty, with furniture upside down, books torn out, clothes and linen thrown everywhere. She rushed home in tears and panic, in fear… She never saw her classmate again. Vera felt those tears in her eyes again. To divert from these hard, choking memories Vera made herself concentrate on the other girl. “Oh,” - Vera’s mood jumped up – she was almost about to laugh – “What a mess I have in my old head these days!” The other girl, who didn’t match the old Bryansk house and garden and couldn’t be there in Vera’s early teens, was her elder and secretly most beloved granddaughter, Zhenya. When she was born, Vera was only 50, batya (that was how she called her husband, Sasha) was 51. They were very young grandparents, so to say. Vera was happy to have Zhenya, but the happiness was marred – she had been against her second daughter’s choice. Vera sadly thought that all her daughters chose wrong men and married beneath themselves.  All her three daughters… Never did she give birth to a boy. Batya didn’t mind, though. He loved his girls so much! What a rare husband and father he was... had been! One in a million! Vera felt a quick and strong pang of shame and self reproof that her first thought today was not about him. Tears again warmed her eyes. “Batya, batya, why couldn’t we have died on the same day, why did you leave me?” That was the thought that came to her if not every minute, then for sure every hour. They had lived 57 years together – as Russians say “soul in soul” – meaning in absolute harmony and peace. Why hadn’t her girls met good husbands?! Why are they so unlucky? Ira married first, at the age of 22, before the elder sister – a bad omen! So Elena married only 5 years later, being almost 30. Both sons-in-law were by ironic coincidence named Sashas – as her own husband and both made her daughters unhappy. Vera remembered the day when Elena returned to her house, with two kids. She did her best not to reproach her, but failed, of course. She felt sorry for that. Elena was the unhappiest of the three. But she had the worst character, too. Luckily, Ira lives in the house opposite theirs, and some ten years ago Vera could see her windows in the dark – Ira had a red lamp in the bedroom and a green one in the kitchen. Olya, the youngest daughter, lives not so close, but comes every other week. Ira visits her almost every day, sometimes several times a day.  Daughters are better than sons, that’s true. Vera has always thought so.
- Mom, are you awake? – Asked Elena looking into the room.
Today Vera felt like contradicting and murmured:
- No, I’ve been sleeping. I’d better sleep for another couple of hours. Are you already leaving?
- Yes. Sorry to wake you up.
Vera started to feel uneasy for being so naughty – after all, Elena cared about her, but immediately heard Elena’s cat roaring in the corridor.  The beast had nothing in common with normal cats – beginning with its ugly mashed-in nose, protruding lower jaw, extremely stinking pools it left in the corners, and finishing with cranky sounds it emitted instead of mewing. Now she felt Elena did deserve her morning attack.
She started comparing Elena’s Persian beast with her own late cat – graceful, clever, affectionate – in the days when she was unwell the cat had never left her bed – hadn’t even gone to the kitchen. She died a month after her husband’s death and added much to the grief.  Actually, it was the last straw – “the last drop” in Russian and since that Vera gave in. She no longer had anybody in charge and she broke – the remnants of her immune system relaxed and she either had smoldering otitis or exacerbation of chronic bronchitis, or spells of severe hypertension.
For some time Vera had been thinking about taking a kitten but she knew she was too weak for toilet training and still weaker for cleaning up.


CHILDHOOD

Mine had been wonderful – born to young parents – almost kids themselves who didn’t exaggerate my presence in the world and at the same time surrounded with comparatively young grandparents who on the contrary did, being the only kid in the family for some five years – I took it to the full.   A considerable part of my childhood was kindergarten – in Soviet time, living in the town, with all members of the family working – and that was the time when mothers were allowed at best six months of childcare leave, the baby inevitably got into the nursery and then to the kindergarten. How damaging this system of state childcare was for the children (and how beneficial it had been for the country’s economy) I cannot judge, but clear as day that even with the best nurses and child-minders most of the time in there meant waiting – for the parents, for the weekend, for some promised toy to be bought, or, finally, for getting old.  I was one of the happiest Soviet children as my grandmother was the headmaster of my kindergarten. So, I either haunted the corner of the playroom (serving the most popular punishment) or reigned in the granny’s office with a huge portrait of Lenin at the wall (when managed to escape).
 I used to plead my granny to fire both of my child-minders (working in chain morning and noon shifts), and it was only twenty years later that she confessed she had wished to fire them herself – as they were least of all cut for minding children – but back then it was next to impossible – Soviet labor legislation vigorously protected workers (especially bad ones).
All kindergartens were attached to some factories, plants or institutions of non-manufacturing sector.  Ours belonged to a sewing factory, which worked 24 hours a day, in several shifts which meant there was a 24 hour group in the kindergarten, marvelous fancy dresses for holidays and nice curtains on the windows, loads of pieces of all sorts of material for craft lessons (often used instead of toilet paper as well, at least in the baby group) and of course a lot of fatherless kids.
It was already there that I understood that some kids were deprived of many things I had and I felt awkward. I had always been mischievous and rebellious but only spoilt and overcaressed kids became objects of my attacks.
I remember my childhood perfectly well; out of 28 kids on the photo I still remember names and surnames of 18 and with some of them I later went to school and even to the same class. Thus Russian friendships started very early and lasted long since most people spent their entire lives rooted in one place.
Being the first and so early a step into society, kindergartens taught us a lot – some leant to fight for themselves, others to obey, still others to ignore, yet others to passively resist. However, they taught us to love our country and to hate its enemies – and not only through lessons or other pedagogic work – peculiar kindergarten folklore spread from kid to kid added much to the task:

- Are you for the moon or for the sun?
- For the moon.
- For the Japanese tycoon!
- Then I’ll  kill the Japanese
                and shall be a communist!

There was a variant:
- Are you for the moon or for the sun?
- For the sun.
- You’re brave and loyal one!

We used to cite rhymes like the following, too:

-Attention, attention! With Germany connection:
“Hitler with a tail was caught in rain and hail.”

And so on – that was what I call “naive patriotism” – not a bad thing for kids, I believe. My husband, being 10 years older than me and thus deeper involved into Soviet way of life once told me he had always been proud to be born in USSR and was sorry for the poor kids living abroad.
Strangely enough, reproduction let alone details of the process were absolutely irrelevant for us while modern kids are so much preoccupied with the matter.
Cartoons were not many on TV, and there were only two channels in the country, so showing us those black-and-white wonders used to be a special treat in the kindergarten. There was only one TV set there, and only two or three older groups were allowed to watch it. The Checho-Slovakian film “Three nuts for Cinderella” had been an event of unprecedented scale – a real feast for our eyes and we were watching it almost breathless, catching every detail – to redramatize the story endless number of times during our game hours. Years later I remember missing University to watch the film again – it was shown on some commercial channel that day. When my French professor learnt the reason of my absence she was most indignant – “Why haven’t you warned me and the rest of the group! “Three nuts for Cinderella” is every girl’s dream and we could have watched it in our language lab”.
By the way, kindergarten teachers were to write reviews on films and cartoons, stating their propaganda aims, pedagogical and educational tasks, and so on and then this abracadabra was discussed at special sittings and meetings; even if a cartoon was as simple as “Three Little Pigs” the theme might have sounded as “The role of working masses solidarity illustrated in the cartoon “Three Little Pigs”. I guess such tasks sped up imagination if a teacher was lucky to have one.
On the one hand, to have some ideology is not bad for the country, but only too often it leads to absurd situations, like my teaches’ perplexity on November, 10th, 1982.
It was somebody’s birthday, and two perfect homemade Napoleon cakes had been standing in the group since morning – but we didn’t get them – either for breakfast, or dinner, or supper. The morning child-minder was still at work, though the afternoon one had already arrived and I can only guess what the poor Birthday kid felt about it – finally, they hastily congratulated the celebrant, gave us the cakes, and then, in solemn silence, one of them announced: “Children! As you come home today, tell your parents and grandparents that a great disaster came upon our country today – Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev died”.
Most of us were not clearly aware of his existence not to mention his importance in our lives, still we were moved by the teacher’s tone and the atmosphere of the moment. At least I thoroughly followed her instructions and did my best to reproduce the solemnity of the news - I guess my Mum and Dad were surprised to see me imitating the grief. However, what surprised me was the absence of weeping or some other supernatural effect on their part I had anticipated – they had known the news and were not that tragic about it.
His death didn’t stop life in the USSR, but changed it, bringing about a long period of total deficit. Many products, goods - clothes, footwear, furniture that had been not easy to get before, became impossible even to see on sale. Queuing became a norm. I once read about a man, who at the time worked in the Zoo as a vet and had on some reason to take a penguin home. The man used to put a cap on the penguin’s head and leave it in a queue, say, for sugar, while he ran to another queue – for the washing powder or shampoo. The penguin was enjoying its next to natural surrounding – crowd and noise, the shop girls and other shoppers were having their fun while the man managed to do weekly shopping in a day.
I found it funny to take my one-year-old brother to the shop. We dressed against 20-degree frost, put into sledge and covered with extra throw-overs, only to get an extra packet of butter as they used to give one per head, but mother somehow didn’t share my fun. Queuing took much time, provoked disputes and quarrels, sometimes even fights. It was a normal thing first to get the place in the queue and only then to ask what was on sale. There was an anecdote –
-What’s the queue for?
-For nosebags.
-Which gaps?
-Prick caps.

By the way those caps were also a scarce commodity, and I guess many of us got brothers and sisters only because of that.
Some words should be said about our clothes industry. On some reason, our perfectly well sewn frocks, sarafans, skirts and trousers were made of gloomy-colored cloth, more often than not absolutely natural and ecologically friendly. Especially bad were the tights – or, actually, untights – always baggy, fading and again either brown or gray. My friend’s parents lived in GDR – his father was a military, and when I saw his bright orange, light blue, red and pink tights they brought him – I sort of envied. However he was not delighted to be wearing them since well-rooted gender-based education prescribed especially dark and gloomy colors for the boys.
Boots and sandals were especially precious. Every decent mother used to have her kids paper footprints in her handbag in case she would encounter the lucky occasion of footwear on sale.  My grandpa who had three daughters plus wife and mother-in-law often went to Moscow on business and used to bring shoes and boots for them just buying the first ones their size. And they were happy! (I secretly suspect he had a good mistress, as it was extremely strange that his presents – including squares of cloth - always pleased all his girls).
The things we lacked we compensated in our games by vivid imagination, passion for fairytales and inborn ability to take life as we wanted to see it. One of our favorite occupations, now completely unknown for modern kids was “making secrets”. We would dig a small pit, put some glittering piece of paper or colored leave on the bottom, decorate it with flowers, stones, small pieces of glass and cover it with a bigger piece of glass – the best ones were blue or red, extremely rare, but usually with green or brown – from the beer or Champaign bottles. Then the “secret” was finally covered with earth, and dug out again to be shown for the closest friends. Destroying other kids’ “secrets” was another popular occupation. And don’t ask me, why pieces of glass could be easily (or sometimes rather uneasily) found within the territory of the kids playgrounds.
Winters brought about making carrot-nosed snowmen, building snow slides which we painted with aquarelle, playing snowballs and so on and even during severe frosts, when schools were closed, kindergartens worked: parents brought their fur-coated scarf-wrapped mummies, usually in the sledge, and hurried to their jobs.
Holidays were great – we all believed in Father Frost who came with the New Year presents, though in kindergartens his part was always played by women teachers and the usual case was:
- Have you recognized me, kiddies? – Asked the white-cotton-wool-bearded figure.
- Yes, Maria Ivanovna. – Promptly came the chorus.

Presents were carefully packed into handmade silk bags, decorated with carton heads of bears and hares. How inventive were some women from the staff! The fancy dresses were made for every group, and all children participated in the concerts, dances and plays.
We also celebrated the Soviet Army day on the 23rd of February (though it was rather Fathers’ Day in kindergartens), the International Women’s day on the 8th of March (set as Granny-Mommy day), the 1st of May holiday (originally Labour holiday, but in kindergartens usually set as a spring holiday), and Children's Day on the first of June. Of course parents were allowed, but not all of them could be present due to many reasons which often made kids very sad.
I guess I was frequently given leading parts not only for some talent I might have really had, but mostly for being my granny’s granddaughter. Thus, I put on the school uniform (a brown dress and a white apron) three months earlier than others; one boy of my group (in blue school uniform) and I played the parts of schoolchildren at the Kindergarten Farewell Party.
So, at the age of 7 we left the place, and in September went to the first form.

My school being in the neighborhood, I could see my kindergarten with its crowded or empty playgrounds every day. Passing by I recollected my scratched knees, fights, licking frosted ironware, terrors of visiting dentists, wonderful toys exposed on the shelves of the Teaching Methods room - not for playing, my first crush – dark-haired, dark-skinned, green-eyed boy and felt so experienced!
Eventually my granny retired, a bit later the kindergarten was closed, for some time it stood empty and abandoned. Then great political changes came to the country, accompanied with birth rate crisis, and after all the building was quite ironically converted into a day-time department of women’s clinic – or, simpler, into abortarium.
Fortunately, conversion is not always that bad – my husband’s former kindergarten is now the Town’s Fine Arts Museum…


Zhenya woke up. 7.20. Good. For some minutes she was going to stay in bed and to think over her to do list for today. That was always her starting point. First, prepare soil for singling tomatoes and peppers seedlings – tomorrow according to the Lunar Calendar she followed in her agricultural activity there would be a favorable day. Then, iron the linen she had washed the day before – she always starched it, now it was easy  - she just put the powder into washing machine instead of conditioner. Congratulate Shura on her 81 Birthday – Shura had been a cook in the kindergarten where she had worked as a headmaster for more than 20 years. Watch “My Dacha” – 18:00, on the ninth channel – they were to tell about early spring grafting and cucumber pests.
Zhenya sat up in the bed and lowered her legs – for some time she couldn’t feel the feet, then a sharp pain confirmed she still had them. Legs and feet let her down badly these days, but she never complained. She took it as a petty nuisance – something annoying, but possible to cope with.
The same attitude she had about her husband’s death – she was sorry for him, but more than that she was sorry that she no longer had his help - she was 1.46cm when young and 1.40 now, so more and more often she had to use the folding ladder. Her husband Dima was a tall man and besides he used to do and to make many useful things about the flat and about the dacha.
She often forgot she was 82 and planned too much for a day. She disliked to have nothing to do – and never failed to find some work.
When at dinner time her granddaughter Zhenya, named after her, called to ask about singling seedlings – a good girl, planted them for the first time on her own this year– she was short and precise – she hated long telephone talks.

SCHOOL

Is still unforgettable. Ten years crammed with so many things – beginning with reading rules and finishing with itching pain that the carefree years are over. Thanks to school I have known some of my friends for 25 years! Just 5 minutes ago a friend called, whom I first saw on the preparatory courses, where we had been writing our first shaky and uncertain hooks, ticks, ovals and rounds – so to say, she is so fond of diminishing her age to at worst 26, that once even tried to impose the legend on me. Our first schoolteacher, with a rare name Aza  was then in her late forties and seemed to us hopelessly old! It was she who had shaped me into what I am – and I’m only one of her innumerable pupils! Now she is retired and has a great private practice, preparing new children for new knowledge, new life, but with her old good methods. And what a change in judgments – these days we all find her so miraculously young in her early seventies!
To begin with, I didn’t want to read – I had known all letters long before school, but putting them together and seeing some sense in it was the mystery I failed to perceive and thus refused to recognize. Aza Dmitrievna noticed my difficulty at the letter dictations and did the right thing – put me next to the boy I liked – with my ambitions, pride and desire to get his attention – a burning mixture indeed - I couldn’t but immediately learn the connection between the sounds and the symbols. Soon I was at the top of the class where I was destined to belong to the end and felt both satisfied and bored. Once dimly looking at the ABC plate I found out the Russian alphabet contains a phrase – an interrogative sentence! –
ÀÁ ÃÄÅ  ¨Æ ÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙúûüÝÞß
         – translated as – Where is the hedgehog? – and I often thought about the lost ¨Æ since that…Maybe the same thought came to Yuriy Norstein, the author of the cartoon “Hedgehog in Mist” – every third Russian considers it his or her favourite cartoon.
Other animals also attracted my attention – nay, I didn’t count ravens – I put dead mice into the boys bags, caught “lazy bees”  ( “male bees” in your language) into a fist and set them free at the lesson, fed homeless cats for money I got or found (which happened every now and then) and dreamt of taking one home.
Toys became less and less important, and it was out of curiosity pure and simple that my friend and I once promptly agreed to look at an “alive doll” which the man quite suddenly displayed out of his pants.  Our first reaction as far as I remember was that of broken anticipation and disappointment, quickly followed by disgust and anger. Our second thought was rather punitive – my generation was evidently the last one in the country with a burning sense of duty – so we had spent a couple of hours in search for a militia man, finally found one and made him go with us and catch the wrongdoer. We were only eight or nine…
In my time primary school in USSR took three years, and it was already in the first form, at the age of seven, that children became involved into the official State political and ideological system – we were introduced into Oktyabryats – the grandchildren of the memorable Great October Social Revolution (1917). A young Leninets –or octyabrenok was to learn the anthem by heart, to answer some questions on Lenin biography, was supposed to help everyone (we certainly did help that man in the park) and to study very well. In the most solemn atmosphere of the 7th of October children got special badges – red five-point stars with the image of Ulyanov-Lenin as a curly kid in the centre and onward were to keep them as the most precious things, unless got the next most precious symbols of the State children’s organization – a red scout-like scarf and a badge in the form of bonfire. Pioneers were supposed to know much on the history of the movement, on the biographies of the most famous pioneers of the past, on the Great Patriotic War heroes and so on – a useful thing for young minds, too.
Though being at the top of the class I had a reputation of a notorious bad girl and even the fact that I headed the class’s inner suborganization did not help me to get into the first “portion” of those elite angels accepted into pioneers. The second time when pupils were to join the army of the Soviet pioneers I missed for some illness, so finally, in the end of the year, still being the class organizing leader, together with the most confirmed lazybones and hooligans of the class I was tied the longed-for red triangle and took my swear to Motherland. Now it may seem funny – all that fuss about getting stars and scarves, but back then to come to school having left these signs of belonging to children organizations at home, was as disastrous as to come without a skirt or trousers.
In our town there had lived an old lady – I guess she wouldn’t like the word “lady” applied to her, preferring to be addressed as “tovaritsh” – “comrade”, who had been one of the first pioneers, accepted into the organization in 1917 and ever since taking her pride in the fact. She used to visit schools, meet with kids, tell them stories (or, mainly, THE STORY) and every headmaster of the town I suspect had to treat her in the best way imaginable to avoid her interference into the process of education and upbringing, which she could easily do. One day two boys of my class- they were about 14 that time - were queuing for hot pies in a small caf; just opposite the school. They were so absorbed into the process that didn’t recognize the walking museum of the town, who asked them if meat pies were sold there. The boys mischievously rhymed the answer: “Aha, and also with ass hair”.  The phrase aroused a storm of just righteous indignation comparable only to such things as bombing the Kremlin or denomination of 1998. The forever-belonging to the high ideals comrade went straight to the headmaster, made him let her in into every classroom, finally found the boys and since they were our classmates we had to share their shame, repentance, punishment and her two-hour lecture.  Such was the power of the red pioneer scarf.
My generation failed to continue climbing the social-political stair leading to Komsomol and, finally, to the Communist Party membership – due to political changes in the country – but at the time we were much more interested in other sex and the problem of buying jeans than in ideological identification. Time saved us from breaking oaths – there was a wave of burning Communist Party-membership cards by the former ardent members – though the Party did discredit itself, a true believer should be loyal to the end – I suspect I would have been just as my grandpa Sasha.

Oh, just two weeks ago I leant occasionally why my first teacher had been given such a strange name. Her mother had given birth to several children but none of them survived. And once a gypsy came up to her in the market and said that soon she would get pregnant with a girl, and to save her she should give her a gypsy name. Aza is the most common of them.
 Thus, Soviet ideology and old folk beliefs and superstitions came hand in hand.


Vera was still haunted by the idea of getting a kitten. She called her granddaughter, Zhenya, to ask her to fetch some stray kitten, better from dacha. Zhenya said she saw none and changed the subject – told about a found dog that brought about many troubles. The dog was small, long-haired, and the description reminded Vera of the dog she had had in Bryansk, when she was a teenager. Vera knew that Zhenya would listen to her at least for some time and she needed a company badly.  So started telling her about Marquise – that was the dog’s name.
Vera’s family failed to have evacuated from the town before the German army arrived. Her father was 60 and didn’t work – workers and their families had been evacuated together with the plants. Since Vera'a parents' house was big a lot of German soldiers came to them for a night during their march to Moscow. Three Germans had been living with them for almost two years. The older of them liked the dog and three times a day took him to the mobile kitchen to feed. Marquise hated Germans and every time any of them approached the porch, he was about to die from barking at the highest pitch he was able to. However, according to a Russian proverb “Hunger is not as kind as one’s aunt” – and the dog took to walking with that German, who was the only in his nation whom Marquise tolerated. He learnt to respond to his “Spitz, come!” but continued to bark at the other two occupants.
Vera preferred to recall only good or “neutral” episodes of that time.
Zhenya asked her about health and she went into the gloomy details.
- It’s because you have stopped fighting, – resumed she.
- I know, - answered Vera, - but I have nobody to fight for.
- Then fight for yourself.
- I’m not interested, and besides, too tired.
- You have a strong demoralizing effect on me! I do my best to kill my inner pessimist and you, granny, always bring him back to life! It reminds me of the anecdote.
- Tell me.
- You must have heard it.
- I don’t remember.
- A pessimist wearily and sadly says: - There’s nothing worse to happen. And an optimist enthusiastically opposes: - Oh, surely there is!
Vera laughed and had to recognize that her nagging is too much even for truly sympathizing nearest and dearest. She wished she could at least see a bit better, and had a bit lower blood pressure. Then an outing somewhere would be possible – Zhenya wanted to show her their  dacha, but she had to refuse – she has never been well enough these days…


BALLET SCHOOL

I wonder if all mothers want their daughters to do the things they failed to have done themselves or is it only my Mum’s way. In any case as soon as she had dreamt of attending ballet school and had no chance in her time, I was doomed to do that instead of her almost automatically - in spite of the fact that ballet had never appealed to me and my interests were rather theatre and painting – if they stretched to arts at all.
 So, at the age of 10 she took me to the local Music Comedy Theater, which had the best classic ballet school in the town and to my great disappointment I was accepted. Now I guess the reason had nothing to do with abilities or constitution, it was as simple as the market economy - two-and-a-half-hour-a-day, six-time-a-week education cost 16 rubles a month – for comparison, a good bike cost 35 rubles and Mum’s salary was 260. And by all means it was too late for professional ballet – those who dream to become ballet-dancers begin it at the age of 6 and earlier.
I remember how all my bones and muscles were aching all the time and even better I recollect how low I felt – being if not the fattest in the class of semitransparent dragon-flies then, undoubtedly, the clumsiest. It was there, too, that my total inability to coordinate awkward pas to music was revealed.
Constantly comparing myself to the girls who seemed to be borne for all those epaulements, demi- et grand-plies, battements tendus and the like I was quite aware the comparison with them was unfavorable for me and even innocent boasting that I attend ballet school didn’t help. Besides, the ballet shoes my size were always dirty yellowish and chintz while other girls who worn bigger sizes had them snow-white and satin. A pure case of discrimination!
The points we got in the second half year of studying were equally beautiful for all of us- light pink, freshly smelling of some special glue – they were a piece of art taken separately, but if put on proved to be a piece of agony. Still, beauty implies sacrifice and is said to know no pain– and I did my clumsy best to become closer to Art.
The teacher was admiring – slim, kind, pretty and exceedingly graceful. But since “ Art must belong to people” (one of the mottoes of the Great October Socialist Revolution) she had to belong to some people, too - and so her husband spoilt this ethereal creature with pregnancy, thus having deprived me of the pleasure to see her. As soon as her belly became too big for ballet, that is for her to show us jumping elements, she was replaced by a vulgar bad-smelling beldam, red-haired, ankle-swollen and rather plump, who used to shout at us and had a habit of smacking the most protruding butts (mine being among them too frequent). The change – useless from my point of view since the witch never made any attempts to show us those jumping elements – made the torture absolutely unbearable.
The examination we had at the end of the year – open for our happy parents – was the last straw to break my back (almost literally) and made me show my mother that I’m not a camel! (Oh! I now understand the origin of the Russian saying – “to prove you are not a camel” meaning you are not an idiot - it may have come from your proverb!)
I got only satisfactory marks (I believe they were not unsatisfactory only out of charity) while at school I was one of the best pupils and that provoked a huge home scandal with the freedom-requiring motives  “ Ballet school brings my self-esteem down! No points – no pain! Ballet for fans, cakes - for me!”
 Thus my first victory over Mum’s planning my life had been won.
I had never had any regrets after that, and for me it was the first lesson teaching me not to go in for the things I wasn’t made for.
Now, watching my 10-year-old daughter running and jumping, playing with cats or other kids, I can’t stop thinking that she is a borne ballet-dancer, full of grace and expressiveness and at the same time an irretrievable loss for the modern ballet – but since she had already said her vigorous NO to my choosing for her, I just envy my Mum’s talent to press for obedience.


Zhenya was waiting for her daughter, Polina, who was to come to plant out the seedlings from the boxes into the beds, prepared by her son, Sasha. She was almost happy he hadn’t been drinking for two weeks. She immensely liked to see somebody work – and Sasha did work if he was sober, but more often he wasn’t. Polina was a very industrious girl – now she was 63, but looked not a day older than fifty. Polina’s daughter had moved to Moscow, had a well-paid job there, but no family. This fact worried both women. Polina helped Zhenya a lot – since she couldn’t help her daughter as much as she wanted. She was reliable, but mother had no measure in demanding her attention, nor was she too thankful or careful – after all at 63 anyone has own health problems.
The day was wonderful – sunny, warm, and all forecasts promised no unexpected frosts. This year April was much warmer than usual, and it was already in the first part of May that “dachniki” had managed with planting. Watching Polina deftly putting strong dark-green seedlings into ground, Zhenya unwillingly thought she might not see the crops, but immediately dismissed the idea – instead she feasted her eyes on the neatness of the beds. She barely suppressed the urge to stand up and replace Polina - “if you need something well done, do it yourself” had always been her motto but her daughter really did the work perfectly.
For a moment she thought about Dima’s accuracy in making beds; in his love to order he had had gone so far as to have made a special instrument to make plant bed borders even and firm. She dismissed the thought – Polina took her father’s accuracy, but the wooden thing was too heavy for her and Sasha would surely say they were not going to lay out Versailles parks here.

ENGLISH

The class (36 pupils) was divided into two groups – one half was to learn German, the other – the lucky part - English.  We had been longing for the moment – back then foreign languages appeared in school curricula in the forth form and the subject seemed to us promising and appealing long beforehand, mostly because of the isolation the “iron curtain” provided. We certainly didn’t know the term, but as it was in the air we couldn’t but feel it.
I wanted to learn English because I wanted to understand what “The Beatles” sang about and besides I had a huge English-Russian and a teeny-tiny Russian-English dictionaries at home. (The period of total deficit went on – good books  - I mean interesting modern authors  - were of great demand, the same could be said about manuals and dictionaries – which usually got to school and University libraries without being sold in bookshops. In Moscow and other cities the situation was better, though.)
The anticipation was evidently created only to be always broken – and that time no miracle happened either– all we had been studying for almost a quarter of the school year was an obscure phrase “Transcription is a system of symbols used to render sounds”.  No need to explain that putting this phrase down, learning it by heart could not teach us to understand transcription; our English teacher failed to find an impressive way to illustrate how greatly the written form of the word may vary from its pronunciation and believed in her self-zombying method. So we read the words mostly by memory, reproducing her reading. True, we had made cards with transcription symbols, even showed some of them unmistakenably, but saw no link between them and the letters. It was much later, almost at the end of school that I mastered the Transcription, the best friend of English learners worldwide, with the help of a private teacher my mom had hired. I tell all my pupils, that transcription is a magic wand, helping to set English words free from the evil spell the evil spelling rules have laid upon them.
The textbooks were shockingly poor and absolutely uninteresting - “This is a table, that is a chair” and the supportive “typical” Russian family (!!! – where was the principle of the material’s authenticity?) with the name I never met in my life other than in our English textbooks – the Stogovs. The Smiths that occasionally appeared in the books were no better and seemed to be the Stogovs’ twins. So, since school while dealing with “nominal” texts I always pretended that I had lost my memory- say, after a long lethargy (car accidents in my time were exceedingly rare) and had to learn the basic notions from the start. It was more difficult with interrogative sentences, first person, singular – Am I a pupil? Is my name Zhenya? Do I study English? A clear case of amnesia…When my students find such questions too stupid while I anyway should show them all grammar forms and  after so many soap operas people have strong disbelief in memory losses due to mentioned reasons I tell them to recollect their first overbooze – it always works – they tend to trust real life with own experience much more.
Rhymes and poems were another fun – beginning with “ Who ever saw a cat in a hat?” , the first syllables of which coincide in pronunciation with a Russian phrase, beginning with the most prohibited word translated as ”What’s the fuck?”…By the way, the word “ prohibition”, which we learnt much later, also arouses a storm of laughter – it sounds in Russian as yours “ fucking fuck” or “fucking loss”. Your harmless “pedestrian” provokes a lot of fun in any class or lecture-room, too. As soon as pupils master the names of basic colors and food, they ask each other to translate from Russian into English the word combination “blue water” – to get Russian “vomit”. The "joke" seems to be spreading as an infectious desease...
The English language room was the place we immensely liked – it had lingua-equipment with earphones on the desks, a Shakespeare’s corner (portraits, book exhibition), display cases with toy furniture for every room and a considerable collection of fake food for teaching aid. Both English teachers – ours and the one that taught senior forms were prominently different from other teachers, even sort of alien – they had been familiarized with other cultures and that produced a certain effect. They both had been abroad, could compare some evident things, had seen other lifestyles, had after all, pen friends… If I hadn’t been dreaming of becoming a doctor – as my Mum and my aunts, I would have thought about teaching English.
It was in this room that I played the role of Cinderella, and my school years crush, featuring the Prince, had to dance with me and to put on a silver-papered shoe on my foot – other than that he would never do anything decent or normal to me.
It was in this room that we had been proudly announced the winners of the School Subjects Olympiads for getting prizes in language competitions in the district, town and region.
It was in this room that we heard and learnt so sad a song by Hamperdink – “The Last Waltz” – for the Farewell party.
After two or three years  of studying English we got that other teacher for senior pupils and she noticed my desire to know it better as well as the gaps I had. My crush boy was lucky – his mother taught English in the University and made him learn it at home. For me to get a book in English was next to impossible, so when once I managed to buy a textbook “English in two years” with examples taken from original newspapers and devoted to every day life (not political problems) I was happy. I remember a short text “Plastic passenger” even today, twenty years later – it was about a woman, Lucy, who used to drive home late at nights alone. To feel safer on the motorway she decided to put a plastic figure of a man next to her. For me these several lines were packed with information – back then women-drivers were exceptionally rare on our roads – unlike, quite ironically, women asphalt-putters. There was no picture, but I vividly imagined that Lucy  - young, pretty, tired after work and her light passenger in a hat on a dark road, and all those cars flying by, with night fires on… I personally would have most feared the dark plastic figure.
I remember how difficult that short text was for retelling – but I tried to find a sipler wording, to use the expressions all pupils knew. I retold it in the class, got my excellent mark and was extremely happy…
Years later I was coaching a girl for her school finals – she wanted to enter one of the higher education institutions of the town to study English professionally. The story of her family - her mother, Lucy, struck me as strangely parallel. Once Lucy's husband was  coming back home from work in the dark when a drunken company attacked him and broke his skull – neither operations nor long courses of treatment helped, though she had brought him to Moscow, to the best hospitals. He has been in coma for some ten years – and after all professors of Medicine told her and officially confirmed that he would never recover she still thoroughly takes care of him – feeds him with special food three times a day, washes and shaves him, changes postures – for him not to get bed sores, talks to him… The girl sometimes hugs him – she also needs him. They were offered to leave him in the hospital, but they said they need a man at home. They still need him. They never think of him as about a “vegetable” as people often call comatose patients, for them he would never remind a “plastic passenger” and they would never think how expensive his ticket is.
Coming back to English - after my family had chosen it for my future profession (I wonder how I’ve contrived to give birth to children not previously chosen by my family) I had two private teachers, who didn’t know about each other and made me plough the vast planes of English in all directions, which I hope, was not in vain.

THE LABOR CAMP

The agricultural theme I’ve just mentioned in metaphor reminded me of a quite prosaic and rather practical phenomenon, survived to our days, though transformed.  The school year has four educational terms and one “labor” term – 10-14 days of summer vacation during which schoolchildren are to come to school to take care of the building, flower beds, garden etc. So, the idea of free work first realized in Lenin’s “subbotnicks” is still alive. In some schools there is a modern alternative – just to pay a certain sum and your child won’t have to get up early in the morning and go wash windows, sweep the streets, water flowers, paint floors, whitewash walls and in other ways be useful at least at school. Though I’m all for some work for kids, last year I paid for mine  - I suppose kids under 10 are of no real help and bringing them to school and then back to the summer cottage is three times as expensive.
In my time there was another alternative to the school repairing way of spending the fifth term – working in a labor camp.
Soviet economics including agriculture had been organized in a rather peculiar way as it constantly needed free workers support – represented by combined force of soldiers, students, schoolchildren and other helpers. Maybe the idea served well for purposes of education and upbringing, but I doubt its expediency for economics. What I don’t doubt – it was a great fun.
Back then kolkhozes and sovkhozes (forms of collective farming of the Soviet time) had  camps for kids within their territory and on their financial balance. A capm looked like several barracks (one-storeyed plain long building usually divided into four big rooms with separate exits - per four groups), a canteen, a washing place, a simple sports ground and a square for everyday common meetings and special occasions.  In the morning after breakfast the kids were to work four hours in the fields, either weeding the long rows of carrots, cabbages, beetroots and cucumbers (in June and July) or gathering crops (in August). The teachers were to go with their classes to supervise the process and to organize kids’ leisure. After work in the fields the campers had dinner, two-hour rest ( teachers prefered a two-hour sleep),“poldnik” – a minor snack, some free time, supper, disco or some sort of self-organized and self-performed concert or other “show”, second supper (a very light one), washing and finally, bed. The difference between usual summer camp is that you go with your schoolmates and your teachers – the people you know and mostly like – or at least have ways with, and you get tired not just for running about, but after being useful to your country. We were even paid some small sums and the best workers got stimulating bonuses, too. Rather than that children got the same summer pleasures – swimming in the nearest river, sports Olympiads, ball games, loves and hatreds, friendships and treacheries, delights and disappointments.
While our labor was not very effective from my point of view, the work of Tadzhiks certainly was. Tadzhik children – some were our peers, but most of them were older, came from their remote southern republic to make money for their families. The life there was poor – in towns and under the urban lifestyle it was not, but in their mountain villages, with traditionally great number of children, it was medievally wild and most families were starving – at least while we lost our weight in the camp – simply because we disliked the food there – they put it on – simply because they had plenty of it…To see us, girls, in the bathing suits was for them as dazzlingly shocking as seeing us naked. We mostly felt pity for them - their clothes were shabby, they were working as little robots or big ants, five hours before supper and four hours after it. Fights between them and our boys were rare, but football matches were vivid.
Once – the year when my school friend Elvira and I chose to work at the canteen full time instead of going to the fields Tadzhik girls arrived – to change us and to serve their boys.  They  were all wearing their traditional clothes – long dresses, pantaloons or whatever they call them and kerchiefs.  We showed them the canteen, explained their duties and how to use detergents. They could not understand what they were for…Smells of all kinds – from pieces of old food, dirty tables, their own unwashed long hair seemed not to bother them. One of the girls even sent me a latter after some time, beginning with the words “Hello, my dear friend Zhenya, this is Maksuda writing…” I was touched and had been keeping the letter for many years before it got lost somewhere in the past. I guess now she must have some eight children and look twice as old as me.
By the way, it was in the labor camp that I befriended Elvira  - my classmate I previously disliked. Elvira had been my rival in leadership and unlike me was rather sociable – she liked to dance and sing, while I at most took part in our amateur theatre. She and I were the only excellent pupils who prefered labour camp to schoolwork. It finally brought us together. We even shared the “coffin”  - another thing our children are not likely to experience just because they now have nice wooden beds in their camps and sans. We put our single iron dormitiry beds with a bit higher bars at the head and lower ones at the foot together then stretched rope or thread over the bars and finally put sheets over the construction for intimacy of talks and as an anti-insects device.  It was an effective anti-other girls device, too, when we secretly devoured chocolate and sweets under our protective roof. Oftentimes we were caught at it and had to share – not that we were greedy or other girls didn’t have anything tasty – no, it just was a special fun – to eat on the sly, to crunch struggling with giggles and still giggling and crunching and thus giving ourselves away completely.
Once we had to conceal a far bigger secret, and the most thorough conspiracy failed again due to the specific sounds. In all sorts of camps there is a strong tradition to make fun on the last night. Usually girls go to the boy’s barrack (room) to smear them with toothpaste and vice versa. With the vigilance our teachers developed over the years of going to the camps our boys had no chance to penetrate into our cloister and the girls were much more preoccupied with careful dressing up and making up for the last disco than in attacking boys’ room. So the glorious tradition was quite evidently going to be abruptly broken. Elvira and I had always tended to follow old rules rather than  "primitive interest for discos" and decided to see to it. While the others were “discoing” we informed the boys that they might have a good chance and absolutely safely make use of their toothpaste. We offered hiding their delegate in our coffin and the plan got a wide approval. The boy we called Vintik (Screw) for his inability to sit calmly and behave in a decent manner came to our barrack while all the girls and teachers were away and took the place between us. He had an enormous stock of toothpaste with him and it had been agreed that he would also put some on our faces, for us not to look too obviously “untouched”. He was so anxious about his mission – to stay awake until the girls and especially the teachers fall asleep and then to quietly open the door for the other boys to come in that finally fell asleep. We were determined to wake him up when needed and so lasted a bit longer. So, the operation was completely ruined. In the middle of the night Vintik took to snorting at such a volume that he woke up the most sensitive (and the youngest) chemistry teacher, Svetlana Viktorovna. Armed with a pocket flash she and went in the direction of the alarming sound. Imagine what a great surprise it was for her to discover a downright (why not downwrong?) hooligan of the class laying between two most innocent and well-behaved girls! I still remember her big brown eyes wide-open in utter amazement as she said : “Zhenya! Elya! I would have never expected anything of the kind from YOU!”
Then she added “OK, it’s not your fault you’ve failed such a good plan. Wake him up!”  - Vintik went on snorting while we were listening to what had been started as a sermon. When our united attempts ended only in lowering the volume we had to open the door and let the boys in ourselves. At least Svetlana Viktorovna supervised their activity.
She was a nice girl, beautiful, full of life, optimistic, kind, talented, devoted to her family – husband and a small daughter, Kate, whom she used to call “Kitty”. Some time later she divorced, then came the "crazy" nineties when teachers used to be unpaid for months and lost consciousness at the lessons due to undernutrition – and she had to leave school. She found a job at a fire station - quite a safe job of a coordinator but  she died there in the accident when an oxygen cylinder exploded on the station. 
Vintik, who had graduated from the Law Academy, got married, had a child, later quite suddenly underwent a sex-altering operation, found a husband and left the town…
I imagine if Svetlana Viktorovna got to know that, she would say, beautiful big brown eyes wide open: “Vintik! I would have never expected anything of the kind from YOU!” No one have… 

Vera has just returned from a funeral. Ira accompanied her there and back – she no longer ventured to go out alone if it was a longer walk than to the nearest bakery. She was very weak and tired, Ira gave her some medicine and put her to bed. Lena was to come home to dinner and look after her.
While waiting for a sleep, Vera was thinking of her late friend. So, another friend who remembered her young and strong is gone… Nina had been her neighbor for ten years while they lived and worked in the Forestry; they had much in common – colleagues, they both had daughters – Vera had three, Nina two. All the girls became doctors. Two years ago Nina lost her elder daughter – it was a tragic and absurd death. Tanya had been doing something about the kitchen, awkwardly fell down from the chair, hit her head against a jar of home pickles, lost consciousness and died in a hospital month later. Poor Nina! Tanya had been a gifted doctor and had a kind heart – but such is life. Her own sister could do nothing to save her – ironically Nina was brought to the very department her sister headed. Vera failed to come to her funerals – had been ill and frankly speaking had no courage. It’s no good to bury children. Poor Nina! Vasily, her husband, was broken, too – but he is a man, he had no right to be weak. Today he looked greatly depressed, but still not bad for his age – his thick wavy hair had turned grey long ago, however it was thick; he preserved his good posture and that irresistible male charm that had attracted so many women to him. Nina had a right to be jealous - her husband was not a saint…She would make scenes every time he came home late and many a time she managed to find tangible proofs – a long hair on his clothes, some perfume, lipstick spots. “Vera, you are so lucky! Your Sasha is a family man!” – Nina used to say. So he was. If Nina knew her Vasily went somewhere with Sasha she was relieved – she was sure he was really at work, not after some shameless skirt. Oh, Nina! Their girls once had measles one by one, and then chicken pox…Vera was falling asleep when she seemed to hear Nina’s rich laughter – “ha-ha-ha! A dog! Vera, ha-ha-ha! It was a wolf!” She woke and vividly saw that “dog” again – she was twenty three or even younger and walked through woods to the nursery garden – rather a long way from home. Sasha and her neighbors were working there that day. She had a loaf of bread with her and suddenly realized she was followed by somebody. Not that she was afraid – she just had an unpleasant feeling of anxiety. She turned round, noticed nobody and went on. Sometime later she turned round again and saw a big dog, following her at a considerable distance. The dog stopped and smelled the air. “Doggy, doggy!” – Vera called the animal and threw s piece of bread to it.  The dog slowly approached the bread, smelled it and left it untouched. “As you wish!” – said Vera and made for the nursery garden. The dog moved after her, followed her for some time and finally dropped behind. “What a big dog,” thought Vera. “Whose can it be?”
Some years later wolves completely disappeared in the region– together with other big animals. The towns and settlements were growing fast, more and more lands were ploughed up, old forests were cut out, new ones planted in the planned sites. Well, life goes on and no one knows when it’s going to stop for him…

SUMMER VOCATIONS

In Russia summer vocations start in the end of May and last up to the 1st of September – the day of Knowledge. So, these almost 90 days present a great problem for the parents – what to do with the kids? Popular ways out are – sending them to the country, to babushka (granny) – but not all families are lucky to have babushkas and even less are lucky to have babushkas living in the country; sending kids to summer camps – in my time it was not expensive as the State and parents’ professional unions paid 90% of the voucher cost (now it costs a small fortune and not everyone can afford it, especially to well equipped prestigious camps). I have already mentioned labor camps, but even when they existed children lived and worked there for two and at most three weeks. At present there are so called day-stay camps - usually organized at schools, but most of them provide staying till 3 p.m. – time when parents are at work and can not safely take the kids home. I don’t remember such camps in my childhood, maybe because I was enormously lucky – I had a wonderful place to spend summer vacations.
Both packs of my grandparents had dachas. Dacha is a special part of Russian lifestyle and even mentality. Most of us have agricultural if not rural roots, I mean even townsfolk in several generations at certain historical moments had to take up growing vegetables to survive. So, maybe our love for dacha is our response to the call of the earth, maybe it’s the hard times that never end in our country, maybe it’s just a cheap escape from concrete jungle – very few can afford a weekend abroad or at the seaside…But statistics on dachas show that more than a quarter of the country’s population are dacha-owners. By all means, dachas vary depending on the family income and many other things – it maybe just a hut with classical 5-6 hundred square meters or a nice palace-like cottage with conveniences and a much bigger piece of land.
Unlike Dad’s parents Mum’s parents didn’t live at dacha – they just came to work there. Grandpa had a car, pet-named in our family “Verblyuzhonok” – believe me, in Russian it sounds very kind and labor loving, and means “camel colt”. It was a yellow “Zaporozhets” – a small two-door passenger auto, made in the Ukrainian automobile plant. It was the cheapest Soviet car, and the most available. There are many anecdotes about it and I love this one:

A motor cop stops a “Zaporozhets” with a blind-drunk company of 18 inside. Bug-eyed with their boldness and compactness he arrests all of them. The next day a special cop committee in utter disbelief asks the company to take their places in the car. Now, when they are sober, they cannot all get into it and begin to quarrel as to who hasn’t been there the day before. Finally, they decide on one of them. Indignant and hurt the man protests – “If I hadn’t been in there, then who do you think was playing melodeon for you?”

Here the capacity of the car is surely a bit exaggerated, but I can confirm that 6 people (on condition that some of them were either children or just not giants) could easily get into “Zaporozhets” and that was not the limit – once 7 of us went to gather in mushrooms and returned with the boot and rack stuffed with our prey. The number of watermelons and packs of potatoes transported in “Zaporozhets” was truly unlimited.
So, our trip to dacha usually began with our careful getting inside, with numerous bags, buckets, baskets, boxes of seedlings, etc and as a rule, at the end of the process one of the adults – most often Granny suddenly recalled about leaving something important at home. Thanks to Grandpa’s unprecedented patience and tolerance to everything, nobody blew up; we rather took it as an integral part of the ritual. Still, I cannot imagine what stretched his patience to the unrivaled peak of tolerating Granny’s copiloting (Turn left! Now switch off the turning signal! Look at your right!) while he was driving.
My grandparents sold their dacha a long time ago, but as I close my eyes, I clearly see every square meter of it.  The plot was long and narrow; the house was small, painted dark green. When I asked once why they hadn’t built a bigger house (Grandpa had a high position in local forestry and could afford it) Granny said it had been prohibited, there had been special control organizations, and since my Grandpa was a man of highest morals and a law-abiding citizen and besides a member of the Communist Party, he would have never abused the law and his position.  Maybe because I spent less time at their dacha than at Daddy’s parents’, the place seemed to me absolutely wonderful. While granny Zhenya liked ORDER above everything Vera preferred NATURAL way of things – of growing (both plants and kids), spending time, doing tasks, working about house and garden… At Vera’s dacha there were many apple-trees, black and red current bushes, a tousle of raspberry, tangles of strawberry, vegetable beds were irregular and nobody was crazy about eradicating weeds to the complete extermination. There was a pleasant shade and cool there, but the drawback was considerable – mosquitoes adore shady and cool places. I disliked repellents, but they were indispensable.
 Mum’s parents used to tell us, kids many useful things about herbs, plants, insects, birds and animals. They both had encyclopedic knowledge in forestry subjects. Besides, both were well read, knew a lot of long poems by heart, had a good home library and subscribed to several “thick” literary and popular science journals. I’m sure, all that was the best school; at least I got their taste to learning and thirst to reading…

Zhenya’s and Dima’s dacha was different.  Their plot was perfectly square, sunny, and weeds-free, the house was big, three-roomed, with a large veranda and every summer the family moved there to live. Bus circulation began at 6 a.m., and while they both worked we arrived at the kindergarten on time – 7a.m., Granny  - to head it, me – just to wait for the evening. Grandpa Dima worked as an electrician in one of the town electric stations. In dacha settlement he was an electrician, too, while Zhenya was the local paymaster – in fact she still is. Later Ded (Russian for Grandpa) got an automobile – he bought it, but just to buy a car without queuing for it for some years and without rendering special services to the country was impossible. Ded Dima was a Great Patriotic War invalid (Vera’s husband was “only” a participant), a perfect worker and thus he deserved his right to get a dream of USSR car-owners  - Moskvitch-4121. Export variants of the car made by Izhevsk plant had been at some time popular not only in the Socialist states, but also in Finland, Norway and even France.   
However in a rhyme comparing Soviet automobiles, Moskvitch did not have a very high rating:

Volga is a trendy dandy,
Zhiguli is apt and handy,
Moskvitch is an invalid,
Zaporozhets – simply shit.

(Task for those who have left USSR and have been living abroad: give the Russian variant – if you still remember it).
As soon as Ded Dima got the car, morning wake-ups started a little later and trips to the town became faster and easier. Automobile owning inspired Ded to assemble a battery recharger – those factory-made ones were a deficit and Ded’s device was popular among neighbors. Once he left it on the window ceiling of the ground floor, where he took newspapers out from the mailbox. The recharger was found by the janitress – a woman of about 70, who took it home and stuck a note on the front door with the following context: “ To a person who left the bomb on the ground floor – phone the number below…” When Ded phoned her he asked why on earth she had taken it home, if she decided it was a bomb. She couldn’t answer why, but added she kept it on the balcony for safety.
Ded invented and improved many things, his self-made hootch-prodicing device was unique and his dacha irrigating system had been working perfectly for years.
My summer staying at dacha meant a lot of helping, beginning with gathering dropped rennet apples  - there were several trees of them (Ded cut the apples and squeezed juice – for hootch processing) and finishing with washing paving planches. Zhenya was very proud of her planched paths – ORDER above everything! (Vera was quite satisfied with footworn ones and occasional wood planks in the dampest places).
Still, dacha summers were wonderful – bathing in the river Ural, playing with friends and later with my cousin (when she grew up old enough to stay there) made them great.
My Ded Dima died at dacha – he was 80 that year. I hope he died happy – at least he knew
no pain – that very day he had been digging out potatoes, finished with them, then had supper, took a bit of vodka and was sitting at table, looking out of the window. Granny thought he was dozing, told him to go to bed to have a more comfortable nap – he didn’t move…
At the time Ded Sasha had been bedridden for several months and we didn’t tell him that Dima died – not to upset him. Dima, who smoked and drank vodka whenever he could do it without a big scandal used to tease Sasha who never did anything of the kind:

He who neither smokes nor drinks
Will be healthy to last winks!

Quite ironically it happened vice versa. Sasha outlived Dima for three years and died three months before his 80th anniversary, but he hadn’t left his room during his last year.

               

NA KARTOSHKU
It’s another free labor phenomenon, specifically Russian, and translated as “ gathering potatoes in the potato fields”. The fight for the crops began in September and depending on weather and other circumstances lasted to October –November. I wonder if the notion “fight for the crops” exists in any other language or if it’s only Russian expression born from our habit to get everything through pains. Schools, colleges, universities, research institutes, armed forces were summoned to the Motherland fields to gather in the potatoes after agricultural machines lifted them from the soil. It’s one of the greatest mysteries of the former state – the reason why the country with predominantly rural population needed all those schoolchildren, soldiers, students, their teachers, professors and academics– including gurus of sciences helping out in the fields. Evidently to remind people of their roots… The help was considered voluntary, but in our country there was no more compulsory a thing than voluntary participation in social activity. Thus, for November (Social revolution day) and May (Labor day) parades called “Demonstrations” in every organization there were special check-in lists of those who came and the “black” lists of those who did not. Still, if you had managed to get some booze both participation and life became easier.
Trips “na kartoshku” were both fun and torture, especially if they were longer than one-day there-and-back occasions. Nowadays psychologists work over team-building measures, back then teams were built naturally – outsiders had few chances to survive. At least psychologically.  Sharing the common ideas, common feelings and reactions to common problems helped to feel a part of the mass (or of the team, in modern wording). What can be more common than a bit of cold and hunger – immediate human dangers? No other things bring people together as tight as these and it’s not bad – it’s where sympathy, sharing and understanding others’ needs come from. But imagine having your period there – with no hot water and bidets, no modern pads and pantyshields. And living there for two weeks in some rural club with conveniences outside. No need for TV reality shows – just try your hand (and other parts of your body) in survival.
Still, potato raids for the majority of people were fun. I guess the number of village-town marriages, started in the potato fields was not big enough to influence statistics, but the number of romances with following heart-hurting break-ups was considerable.
If you ask Russian immigrants aged at least 40 about going “na kartoshku”, they would recall agricultural trips of their youth – some with disgust, others with nostalgia, yet others with a smile of warmth and tenderness…
My parents’ friends got married thanks to such a trip – he was a University lecturer, she – one of his students. He used to say that she looked so lost and helpless there in the fields that he started helping her in every way he could and finally fell in love. I could never believe it - she always looked anything but lost and helpless. She looked bossy, in fact. It was he, a romantic and kind man, who looked lost and helpless ever after – especially from under the disarmingly dwarfing thickness of his glasses. But they lived a happy life; only she took some hectic measures for him not to be sent to the fields any more.

Vera had a busy day – her granddaughter Ann brought her year-old son to Lena. It was Vera’s third grandchild and she wished she could have more energy -  half an hour with him and she felt broken, had to take a pill to bring her blood pressure down. Lying on the old double bed she was wondering how vigorous she used to be and how weak she is now. She had been that weak only after Lena – difficult delivery, bad after-care, infection…She and Batya came to Orenburg in 1950, with two small suitcases - after the University they were sent to Orenburg steppes to grow forests. Soon they got their first dwelling – a house in the local forestry.  Soon Vera’s mother had to leave Bryansk and follow them – the young family needed her help. The times were hard and baby care leaves were short. Irina, the second daughter, arrived when Lena was four, Olya - when the elder girls were nine and five… Vera used to get up at five in the morning - they kept a cow and after milking she made breakfast for the family and rushed to work. She knew her mother would take care of the girls – dinner and supper were her duty, too. She had seen too much in her life, her mother – including two World wars…. So, three girls were not a problem. Vera suddenly felt the smell of potato fritters – oladyi – her mother often made for supper. Almost immediately she heard her girls’ feet stamping on the wood floor, their giggles and she was about to feel the bumps as they would rush to the kitchen and get into her standing near the table…With the same stamp and bump they attacked Batya as he returned home – usually a bit later than her. Didn’t she understand she was extremely happy?  Back then she had no time to think about it. She has it now…   

UPK
The idea of this school subject was full of concern for the young generation. Your know what happens to all good ideas. I left the abbreviation in Russian, having only transliterated it, just for nostalgia - it meant something like career-guidance centre which we began to attend in the 9th form in addition to the handicraft lessons, which in their turn deserve some words. Girls and boys were taught them separately. Our five-year course included cooking (bliny – Russian pancakes, vinaigrette – popular salad from boiled vegetables, borsch – national Ukrainian and Russian soup), knitting (samples of the main patterns, the simplest items - scarf, hat) and sewing (kerchief, apron, nightgown, home robe, skirt, sport shorts and boxers with a gasset – the part most uneasy to deal with). What boys’ course consisted of is still a secret to me, but my husband’s cousin Natasha who works at a village school being a teacher of German gives lessons of boys handicraft  - along with geography, life safety, and PE!!!
Presumably, after handicraft lessons girls were supposed to be prepared for being wives and boys, respectively, for being husbands. However, it was already at school that a lot of children proved to have been made for other things. One of my friends was extremely talented to finish school with a blank in handicrafts. Her abilities in the sphere turned out to be really outstanding – the dishes we made were evenly uneatable and were consumed by our boys only due to their enormous appetite, and she grew up a good cook, but other than cooking everything she made was a monstrous disaster. I remember her nightgown, which began as one for herself, continued as a nighty for her never existing younger sister and finally finished with her mother’s help as a dress for a teddy bear. The boxers she scraped through were so absolutely impossible to wear (and we were sewing them for sale) that she had to buy them herself, restoring the damage she had caused. Having a good sense of humor she presented her father with that self-spoiled thing for the Country’s Defender Day and he still keeps it to have a chance to reproach her in “handlessness” and prove it with tangible corroboration (while she meant to emphasize the idea that she was nothing but a chip off the old block – Russian proverb says – apple drops not far from the apple-tree).
As for my personal growth in sewing – our teacher can be proud of me – I progressed as far as to making wonderful fancy dresses for my kids, but to save her from a heart attack I wouldn’t dare to show her their inside and tell her that I always ignore all stages of paper modeling and draft-making and cut out details by eye.
UPK appeared in our curriculum to set us free from making hideous sport shorts and men’s underwear we had been practicing. First of all it provided testing to reveal our personal predilections to the professions we were going to choose in future, resulting in our belonging to one of the four possible orientations: Human-Human, Human-Nature, Human-Word and Human- Machines. The testing was rather primitive as well the computers used for the process, but the range of courses where one could try one’s hand in was wide enough – thus I even had a real choice between design lessons and journalist studio. Finally I chose the latter – the teacher was an experienced local paper journalist and in her lessons there were discipline, system and order – while the design teacher – a very nice old man lacked all that. Some girls preferred to continue sewing boxer and nightgowns – it had the convenience of being located at school, while the career-guidance center was rather far from the centre of the town. Some boys took computer courses – the most popular ones, others chose technical courses like plane modeling, my husband had got his driving license at similar courses, but in my time at least in my school they no longer provided it.
UPK was a sort of a nagging reminder about the adult life, which seemed so close and about the most important thing in this adult life – frightening choice of the future profession. On the other hand you could experiment with it.
The first task in my journalist training was writing a story about a classmate’s professional choice. I wrote about Vintik and his creative “crazibility”  - his new vision on the most trivial things and objects, his non-conformism and his promising future as designer. My brilliant piece was, evidently, brilliant only because I had no real rivals – most students of the group were there just to escape sewing or its male alternatives. Still, the teacher enormously liked me and if it flattered me in the beginning, it plagued me in the end. What I disliked was her too formal approach to pieces - after all I was in my most protesting teens and the fact that she was a professional, and a shark in her business only confirmed my suspicion that to change anything I had to blow up walls. I had enough examples to see it as a useless windmill-struggling. Luckily my disappointment in journalism happened at the end of the course. But it tasted too bitter to forget. “Why don’t you want to go on? You have everything for that!” – the teacher demanded an explanation. Instead of answering I asked her to tell me about the most interesting interview in her life. “OK. It was… well. It was the interview with comrade Smirnov, the local leader of the Communist Party at the opening of the N. plant.” Something deep down in me jerked at the insignificance of the event and protested against her pride at it - I couldn’t tell her that I imagined interviews with Mick Jagger or Freddie Mercury and found no excitement in talking to local politicians. So I said I had no talent in making such interviews interesting to people. She promised sharing her secrets and even phoned my mother to influence me – but my mom had other plans on me and didn’t interfere.
Looking back I feel thankful for all our teachers, especially to those we still remember, who used to show us their skills and volens nolens demonstrated us how professions deform people – and this part is not less important. I couldn’t stop thinking about the weavers from Charles Peirro fairy tale – the one with a huge lip and that with a giant thump… 


For almost two years Zhenya had been saving up – after the arson in which her summerhouse completely disappeared she needed a better place than the mansard-roofed garage converted into a kitchen with a tiny bedroom upstairs. She planned to begin the construction immediately after bedding. Sasha had no job worth spending time on and he wasn’t against building a new house instead of the burnt one. Yes, as soon as his younger sons pass their exams and are able to help him – the construction must be started.
She was sorry for the house, and she caught herself several times on counting the things, perished in the fire together with the house… the furniture, the crockery, the red blanket, almost new, two carpets…Oh, she is doing it again! She made herself stop it and tried to find positive moments. The house was too big, inconveniently built, too dark, the floors were rotten – and now she had a chance to plan it her way.
Her granddaughter’s dacha was burnt first, together with the neighboring one. A month later arsons continued. All in all six houses were gone that damn season. It was clear as day that somebody – a very powerful and influential somebody wanted their plots on the bank of the river. Zhenya stopped to believe in militia – corruption everywhere – just switch on the TV and have a look, but she never stopped to believe in herself.
Tomorrow she’ll move into her “summerhut” – the weather is warm enough to move to dacha and in some two weeks the stuffiness of the fifth floor flat will be unbearable. Besides her feet are not good to climb that high - “khruchevkas” built in sixties had been made for the young - so no lifts were meant. Well, last looks around for what else she needs to bring tomorrow and she can call for her son to drive her home.


LAST SCHOOL SUMMER

Actually it began in early spring – the feeling of last everything – last school vacation, last lesson in every subject, last exam, and those were not always sad feelings (especially about exams),
 but then came the last day together – the Farewell Party – and it stirred emotions in everyone. We all were overwhelmed by the idea that it was all over – luckily we, girls had no time to shed sad tears as we had other exiting things to be overwhelmed with. Economically it was the period of fast developing market (“buy there and sell twice as expensive here” was the motto of the 90th) and it brought about an unprecedentedly wide range of clothes. So we had to make the first most important choice – that of the dress for the party. I remember the numbers of my examination cards in the subjects I passed – Literature, History and English only accidentally  - in fact it was one and the same number 13, but I remember my Farewell outfit in every detail as I had a right (or chance) to be proud of it at last! (At the moment I was sick from being proud of perfect marks only). A month or so before exams my mum had come to the conclusion that everyone should try her hand in selling  - market was fed by (and with) women desperately wishing a better life for their children – and millions of its sellers were yesterday teachers, doctors, librarians, nurses who had left their monstrously underpaid or regularly unpaid jobs for “shuttling” – going to Poland (later Turkey), Moscow or the nearest bigger than your own town, buying some goods there, transporting and finally reselling them at the markets of the hometown. Mother’s attempt was neither very profitable nor successful and thus inspired no further trips, but the white satin suit she brought for me was the peak of her taste (never mounted again) and of the fashion that year.  I meliorated the top by cutting off its vulgarish golden buttons and replacing them with pearl ones  - they were too small for original buttonholes and I sewed on two buttons per hole, which added special chic to decoration. With pearl necklace and earrings, in white open-heel shoes I looked (and actually was) a personification of purity - a na;ve, fresh and virgin school-leaving girl. Sweet Sixteen…(The fact that I weighed 45 kilo only confirms that such pictures from the past refer exclusively to the area of myths, tales and utopias). So, the Farewell party was my real triumph – and every girl had the same idea in her head. Though, quite ironically, the fashion “prima donnas” of the class contrived to buy dresses varying only in color and spent the evening as far from each other as possible.  My personal triumph was marred, too – the number and sizes of pimples I had to conceal that day required tons of make up and were outnumbered and outsized only by those grown for my Wedding day. Thus I realized a SAD RULE ONE – triumphs are always marred – or, better, tarred (as Russian proverb runs, there is always a spoonful of tar in a barrel of honey). And much later I discovered a REASONABLE RULE TWO – every girl exaggerates her sad rules (and circumstances) as well as her pimples, their number and size (thus, even in the biblical expression we find masculine “He sees the speck in his brother's eye but fails to notice the beam in his own eye”; applying it literally to seeing, we notice it works the other way round with girls).
In Russia Farewell parties are always parties with parents and closest and most loved teachers including infant school teachers – over the years they usually get to know each other well enough to have many common topics. For them it’s a touching moment, looking back, comparing looks, exchanging memories…
For many of us the party was the first visit to a restaurant, for some orthodox puritans it was the first time to taste vine, for one of my classmates it was the first time he drank vodka (brought in by the boldest boys on the sly) and on some unknown reason it turned out to be his first glassful of vodka which caused his first and thus unforgettable blackout. My ‘harvest” of new discoveries included a proposal – done in the most serious manner with introduction to the possible future mother-in-law, my first denial – done in a clumsily humorous way and finally understanding that life is never more real than in the moments when it is about to change completely and for ever.
 Traditionally in the morning the company goes to the town bridge (the place may vary from school to school and from town to town) to meet the sunrise and take photos there – mine were black and white, which emphasizes the remote historism of the event.
The rest of the summer was tense – entering exams, our first serious thing to overcome took much energy. However while reading for them we managed to find time for the boys. School loves sharpened at the prospecting inevitability of loosing each other in the whirlpool of the new life stretching before us and many dying relations were reanimated. Some even finally reached their long-desired climax – the first sex –usually in its mildest forms described in the popular joke below:
               Petya was going from a meeting and Mitya was going from a petting.

It was another discovery that petyas and mityas were actually coming from petting. But this meaning of the verb “to come” I would learn only at my second year in the University, when I chanced to buy Thomas Harris’s “Silence of the Lambs” in a second hand shop: there the crazy Miggs did that to the smart Starling, passing by his cage.
Since I had a sort of “ sesame” opening University doors – a golden medal on finishing school, after the first exam, successfully passed with the best result possible I automatically entered it. But on that my privileges were over and together with several other lucky girls and one boy I started the entering students’ “corv;e” - painting desks, washing windows and floors. I had nothing to worry about – I entered and what was even more important I entered free, and my parents were exempt from the burden of paying for my studies. I realized they wouldn’t be able to afford such a spendthrift. 
Still, if girls failed their entering exams it could at worst lead to an early marriage, if boys failed exams – they were to go to the Army for two years. I am not against serving to one’s Motherland – but that was the period of the first Chechen War…where the boys of my age were being slaughtened, making their mothers grey with the grief and leaving some of us single for the rest of life.
Actually only one boy from my class got into that war - he was the elder son in a one-parent family with four kids and his mother had to juggle several jobs to feed and dress them. So, he had to leave school after the 9th form and to start working as she had no opportunity to let him continue studying, nor could she pay for a fake medical certificate, which would exempt him from the Army. He was lucky to return alive.

Today Vera stayed in bed a bit longer – Zhenya promised to come round – now she was jobless and nervous about it and to divert she found herself an important task – she was making a family photo album, with basic information about everyone. She had scanned all Vera’s oldest photos, all photos from her granny Zhenya, and all photos that were kept at her husband’s parents’. Good decision – when you work you never have time “to stand and stare”. Three years ago when Batya had been alive and could tell so many things Zhenya had been too busy for that – two small kids, students, and dacha… Batya seldom talked about the past, anyway. He had a very good memory and was a perfect narrator, but any stories about his childhood and youth would always remind him about the war. He never talked about it – only when sometimes at nights she had to wake him up, tossing, kicking, murmuring or even shouting in the midst of his frequent nightmares, only then did he tell her, breathlessly and abruptly, some never-forgotten but deeply hidden in his memory episodes, peeping through the depth of sleeping consciousness and returning him, a 16-year-old boy into what he had to outlive. 
Vera was lying in bed, checking her memory – the names of her grandparents she got right, it was a bit more difficult with Batya’s grandparents. Why hadn’t they thought about writing down their ancestry when they were younger?
The oldest photos Vera had - solid cardboard photos, were taken in 1911 in Bryansk’s only photo shop, owned by nnnnnnnnnn  - featuring her granny at the age of about 38-40 and her mother as a 17-year-old girl. Then came her own photo, as a three-year-old girl, with her elder brother, Slava, on the right and his photo with mother – these dated 1935-36. Then came several hobby snapshots, taken in 1939-1940 by their lodger – they had a big house, with outhouse, summer kitchen, storage and some other household outbuildings. Vera’s father was 58 and previously a well-paid worker at a big plant, at the time he was weak and unhealthy. Vera’s mother was a machinist at a sewing factory, but both in skill and salary a far cry from her parents – mother, a seamstress and father, a ladies’ tailor. So they had to rent rooms and the outhouse to scrape through.
 Vera’s father didn’t like to be taken photos – maybe because his head looked very much like a ball – not only was he bolding, but shaved his head to get that absolutely clear egg-effect. Still, there was a picture of him – small, dog-eared, darkish. There were even some photos of the house, of some neighbours sitting on the porch, sitting so peacefully, maybe discussing rumours, maybe even about possible war with Germany…
She had only one brother, now dead, while Batya came from the family with five children. His younger sisters, Valentina and Svetlana live in Kharkov, now another state, the Ukraine. Even phone calls to them are expensive let alone trips. Perestroika, damn it, had cut families and friends off – few people can now afford visiting their relatives previously living in republics of one great state, later disintegrated into independent and often hostile countries. It’s easy, for them, silly young people and power-thirsty politicians to blame Bolsheviks and Communists and Soviet times in all possible sins – but where would they all have been now? She witnessed so many good things in her life – electrification, gasification, free education, guaranteed jobs for young specialists… Take them, for instance. She and Batya came to Orenburg to grow woods here – it was a necessary, noble, honorable work, they were in demand. Life was hard, but they were sure in their future. Besides life did change for the better – year after year. She remembered how in 1956 they bought their first washing-machine and what a relief it was for her, though its cycle required a lot of handwork. The first noisy fridge, the first black-and-white TV set…Everything was an event, every present was a surprise and joy – and now she didn’t know what to buy for her grandchildren for their Birthdays or New Year – modern kids are difficult to please. How glad she was to get a big new sofa- with a shelf on which they put the traditional symbol of the family happiness – seven marble elephants. Her girls were happy if she sometimes let them play with the elephants. Where did she last see the two remaining figurines?

UNIVERSITY

In my time Foreign Languages Department of the local Teacher’s Training or Pedagogical University was the only institution in town that provided learning foreign languages.  English subdepartment was the most popular and eventually the most difficult to enter. As soon as you got in you realized how lucky you were to be there – to be the University elite. Students were mostly girls and almost all – real beauties. So both in the University and in town the Department was unofficially called CPS, which stood for…Central Pussy Storage, like it, laugh at it or loathe it. The would-be teachers of foreign languages shared the four-storeyed building with future teachers of maths - physics and PE (represented respectively, by frail spectacled Harry Potterish mathematicians and physicists and solid body built Swartsnegger-like looking sportsmen). Loves, “friendships” and even marriages between foreign languages girls and male-departments boys happened, but few were happy and long lasting.
There were four English groups, two French and two German in the Department. On graduating we were supposed to know two foreign languages and teach them in schools, lyceums, gymnasiums and Higher Education institutions of the town – but actually very few of us devoted their lives to sowing Reasonable, Kind and Eternal – originally proposed as the motto for all educative Prometheuses by Russian poet Nekrasov in 1877 and in our case the euphemism for crucifying yourself for the sake of several plain phrases your ungrateful pupils may or may not keep in mind after the school course of English… My professors spent their time on me not totally vainly – at least now I sow carrots, fennel and petunias. I also use my skills to resow pronunciation my kids bring from school and fertilize their homework in English with fresh brushing up on reading rules.
For a month all groups of first year students had and still have traditional introductory course of practical phonetics during which professors exterminate school pronunciations and instead inhabit students’ organs of speech with sounds more or less resembling those of native speakers. Actually the process lasts all five years of study, but this “phonemonth” serves a certain vaccination meant to save professors from heart attacks caused by the Babel mumble the freshers bring in. The importance of this educative measure was so high, that first year students were even exempt from “na kartoshku” trips (the potato trips described above).
Our phonetical Mecca where we were supposed to exercise our sounds and shape out listening-comprehending skills frightened us with the equipment at least twice as old as we were at the moment – its reel-to-reel recorders were as archeologically antique for us as gramophone disks – also kept in the phone lab (!), but disused as “old-fashioned”.  However I could easily imagine how super progressive the lab had been some twenty years before when the University building had been just painted inside and stood shining with its just put in window panes. It turned out, though, that over the years it lost none of its educative powers, which only proves the value of the “good old methods” (Note: almost all phenomena referring to the past are considered by Russian people to be “old good …” and quite often they really are).
 Our professor was both old and good, a representative of the University’s oldest teaching board. She taught us several subjects – Oral and Written Practice, English Grammar, Home and Supplementary Reading and finally, was our tutor, whose functions include informing students on the University events and supervising their attendance and academic progress. She could be a perfect miss Marple – the very image of her in appearance she possessed the same shrewdness and exuded the same old times charm. But her name – Stalissa Stepanovna – hinted at some other historical epoch and geographical location as well as suggested steel stamina, which mild miss Marple had in a much smaller degree. Later we leant that originally her name had been far more impressive (or even suppressive) – in the days of her youthfulness she used to be Stalina but our informer was not sure if it was derived from “Stalin” or “Stalingrad”, where her father died fighting with fascist.  Anyway, after certain political changes she preferred to alter her name making it sound more apolitical, peaceful and Wonderland-like. Alisa-like.
I had always been lucky to have good teachers, and Stalissa Stepanovna undoubtedly was one of the best. She had a strong systematical approach, complex but not complicated, simple but not simplistic.
Whenever we revealed laziness or carelessness to studies she appealed to the memories of her studenthood – half-hungry, poorly dressed they used to be ardent about leaning, despite the lack of books, tapes, original literature and presence of the iron curtain, isolating them from foreign cultures, lifestyles, news and events. Looking back and comparing us with modern students I cannot, but notice the same phenomenon – the better the students live and the better facilities and information sources they have - the less interest for studying they show.
Stalissa Stepanovna recommended to us to start and keep special card-catalogue for every English word including the word’s transcription, all its meanings and examples from the books on its usage… I can only guess how thick was her Stalissapedia – together with the tracing data of those quotations.  Modern students having permanent access to all sorts of the Netopedias ant translating programmes don’t even bother to click the searching system and check the word’s cooccurrence to clarify its meaning.
With all my love to English I never started my card-catalogue. I believe out of self-protecting instinct. Had I started one, I wouldn’t have time to get married. And I was quite preoccupied with it – I was actually only 18, but my younger brother used to stick a note “SPINSTER” at the back of my bed – thus hinting at the fact that three of my classmates had got married immediately after the Farewell party and left more living space for their younger brothers and sisters. The exigency of his escapade had a serious “dwelling” explanation which you’ll find in the next chapter.


KHRUCHOVKA

As soon as I was ready to leave the maternity home with my mum – or, rather, when my mum was allowed to take me home (approximately when I was five days old) I was brought to my father’s parents flat – a three roomed (! – exclamation means “big enough to be envied”) flat, with floor space of 31,5 m2 (!!! –triple exclamation stands to show how crucial was the problem of living conditions if such trifles could be envied) and though the flat had a considerable flaw being located at the top (fifth) floor and there are no lifts in the houses of this type, back then no one noticed that flaw.
That was my first unconscious acquaintance with the most popular type of dwelling of the moment – and the flat could seem big enough for five only to a tenant, peacefully sleeping in the cot, pacifier in mouth.
The house was designed and built as millions of other typical five-storied blocks of flats all over the immense country from north to south and since this wide-scale construction took place at the time of political leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khruchov, the houses were informally called after him. This mass construction project was meant to solve the problems of dwelling for the fast growing population of the USSR and still faster migration from rural areas to urban ones. The project was supposed to be a temporal measure – but we all know how temporal things become and forever remain constant…Khruchovkas were originally planned to serve 25-50 years and now are said to be OK for another century; the fact that they are being pulled down in Moscow doesn’t change the situation in the whole country.
 By the time of my arrival the building was eleven years old, the boiler in the bathroom had been changed for a flow-type calorifier in the kitchen  - it was supposed to be a progressive measure (and a bit later my Ded would use its draught system for his hootch production process), the balcony hadn’t yet been glassified (it would be allowed only in some fifteen years) and served the place for my first outings. There was no air conditioner (at the time only very important offices were equipped with bulky and noisy items made in Baku) and according to the fashion of the day walls and floors of the tiny bedrooms and the “large” sitting room were covered with carpets– a clear case of breathing space shortage. If one wonders how four adults and a child could live in that box – believe me it still is a norm (minus carpets and plus conditioner). Three generations coexisting in one flat is a classical situation in Russia and since the words “classical” and “eternal” often go hand in hand, there were, there are and unfortunately there will be millions of families living back to back or actually ass to ass in the microflats of the past. I remember an anecdote I read and understood in an adult(!) comic-satirical journal  “Krokodil” : a woman tells a friend of hers –“Dear, what I really like about your flat is  the number of these built-in cases”. The friend answers “They are not cases, dear, they are rooms”. 
The larger bedroom (about 7 square meters) belonged to my grandparents, the smaller (4 square meters) was occupied by “some” parent and my tiny body while the other parent had a lucky chance either to sleep on the sofa in the sitting room or to nap in a wonderful spacious and quiet lecture room of the Medical or Pedagogical Institute.  By the way, the luxury of having two bedrooms was an exclusive privilege of corner flats, since only they had an extra window, absent in all other flats, where people either had one long bedroom or one of their small bedrooms was blind.
I suppose, to have hasty morning bites and leisured late suppers the family had had to keep a strict and intricate “eating pattern”, because the kitchen or better, kitchenette (sounding in Russian as “no kitchen” and actually being “no kitchen” in both languages) was so teeny-tiny that an average adult, sitting at dinner table i.e. in the middle of the kitchen (at any possible furnishing) could easily reach for anything he or she may need while eating or cooking. However, “no kitchens” were not just a part of low-budget mass lodging design but a part of the global social project: Soviet people, according to some bright idea (leading to the bright future ever anticipated as light in the end of the tunnel) were supposed to spend their precious daytime at work, their well-deserved evenings in theatres, cinemas, museums, stadiums and other places of sport and culture and thus have their meals at canteens, refectories, cafeterias and other places of the public catering. The idea failed, at least in the part of non-cooking at home – Russian women displayed unexpected (for the idea-makers) thirst for cooking and feeding their families with wholesome home-made food. And Russian men supported their efforts with enthusiastic appetite. Poor women never understood that those minikitchens they used to plague for tightness and stuffiness were the triumph of progressive convenience and design compactness over the backward slavery of cooking and useless tidying up.
Khruchevkas, in short, in all respects were a symbol of minimalism and simplification in housing construction.  Luxury of the pre- and post war Stalin mansions with appended architectural superfluities like high ceilings of over 3 meters, round, oval or corner balconies, spacious winding stairs with massive grids and wide banister, peculiar ridged roofs with turrets and spires, decorative chimneys, fretwork and other attributes of Stalin Empire style were completely abolished and changed by their perfect counterparts. Thus, ceilings became much lower – 2.40, maximum 2.50 meters, balconies took unified rectangular form and ultra compact size, narrow stairs barely allowed to bring in furniture and carry out a standard casket, roofs totally flattened and the only specks of decoration occasionally traced were mosaic panels (usually featuring cosmonauts and stars) on the blind gable facades. 
When I became old enough to look out of the window I loved to scrutinize the opposite house, some twenty meters afar. Being evidently built a bit earlier it had an extravagantly high tiled roof with attics and since on its ground floor there was an atelier, corresponding letters attached to the corner in the middle floor. That house especially in the evenings seemed miraculously attractive, quiet and full of secrets, hidden under the colored curtains. True treasures of the house – tons of pigeon dung hidden in the attics seriously attracted dacha owners, including my granny Zhenya, but I leant it later.
Among treasures, veiled by the curtains of the gaily-lit windows in some flats there were imported furniture sets, usually Checko-Slovackian or, very seldom, from GDR; occasional booty carpets and clocks from Germany, Vienna chairs, first Soviet reel-to-reel recorders and very fashionable and therefore abundant crystal vases and glasses. In my opinion, the only treasure worth envying was the hamster, owned by the girl next door (I got that opinion at about three or four). Except the precious articles above, furniture, domestic appliances and other household belongings were identical in most families, and if I saw kitchen table or plates of a different color I was sort of surprised.
Meanwhile my parents moved to a family hostel (it was another typical khruchovka). Every serious organization had had some infrastructure – kindergartens and summer camps for the employees’ children, sometimes a hospital or sanatorium, and a fund of free dwelling for specialists. Young people who just started to work for the organization and needed a flat at the beginning got a room in the organization’s dormitory or a flat in family hostel. In some years they got a real flat of their own (though strictly speaking in USSR ownership on flats belonged solely to the State, which among many other things meant one could exchange it, but couldn’t sell it). The more economically powerful the organization was (gas, oil, construction) the sooner young people got their chance to move to a new flat.
The family hostel looked like an ordinary block of flats, but the rooms in its flats were occupied by two or three different families while the kitchen and the toilet facilities were for common use – that is the classical pattern of “kommunalka” – way of postrevolutional communal living in big luxurious flats of the exterminated bourgeois class. In our case two rooms belonged to a Tatar family, though they also had only one child (connections and protectionism in our country used to be and still are the driving force of living and in particular of improving living conditions) while one room belonged to us. However some relatives of our Tatar neighbours totally ignored the fact and I still remember an old “babay” (meaning Tatar “grandpa”) in his traditional vest and skullcap, sitting cross-legged on our carpet before our TV set and murmuring something in his Tatar.  The language was absolutely unknown to my parents and since nothing said or shouted or yelled in Russian didn’t affect him he was let sitting on. Evidently it was the mildest displeasure caused by our neighbours – once I saw something which didn’t touch me as strange or insulting back then but provoked a shock in me when my mum recalled the incident some years ago and I clearly saw the picture again. It was a big floating poop tossing in the bath half filled with water.
I guess there were many equally stunning experiences originated from coexisting with our neighbours that my mum had to survive.
As for me I’ll always remember the smell of the common dwelling - a mixture of cooking and cigarette smoke. And I’ll always remember the great transmigration of cockroaches moving through our common corridor in a torrent and disappearing in a big hole in the floor – an army of brownish marching insects, slightly rustling on their move.
Still my parents soon robbed me of above described “pleasures” as my mum all of a sudden got a separate flat (in fact refused by all less young specialists, aiming at flats in newly-built houses). No wonder after the hostel it was a real two-roomed dream for her. Again the paradise was located on the top fifth floor (the usual wording of the flat-exchanging offers ever was “No top or ground floors”).  I once came across an Internet picture of a two-storeyed khruchovka (a countryside modification) with the same slogan beneath.
Our apartment (“flat” seemed an inappropriate, petty word”) seemed to me exquisitely modern, spacious, light and exiting – I even had a room of my own! My Dad was a handy man and made wall units for the kitchen and the small hall himself.  Both seemed to me pieces of art – which they actually were – the standard variants of furniture sold in shops were rather limited and even then not easy to buy. Furniture sets had been queued for and paid extra to be bought at once. The hall wall unit he made for my mum’s parents had been an example of perfection in comfort and convenience for almost twenty-five years and was replaced with a modern one only a year ago.
The neighbours taking the adjacent flat were an elderly couple (I do not remember the husband as he had soon hung himself but my mum does – it was she who took him out of the loop), then lived an alky family – a mom of ever fifty and her plumpy son of 28-40 (depending on the quantity of vodka he had taken the day before) and it was no wonder that we soon befriended the family living opposite our door who were my parents peers, she – an accountant in some shop (any shop meant connections), he – a bus driver and a girl two years younger than me who unfortunately primarily lived at her granny’s.
Very soon I had to move to my granny Zhenya myself – my parents had presented me with a younger brother, but what at first (approximately for half an hour) seemed a gift, turned out to be the greatest disappointment, or at least a Greek gift. I was six and had been anticipating for the promised playmate - got all my toys seated under the New Year Tree - the disappointment arrived soon after the New Year, but actually I got a bother of a brother. He had been infected with something dangerous in the maternity home and mum had a lot of troubles with him. Though my escape to granny did look like a breakout, one can’t really blame a child accustomed to only occasional shouting for a small family scandal and totally unprepared for 24-hour nagging and yelling. Besides, the nearest school turned out to be too dark a place to enlighten the bright kid like me and it was decided that I would go to school near my granny Zhenya’s. She had to pull all the strings she could to get me in – at the time children were to go to the nearest school according to their official address.
My brother became more or less “playable with” at about four, when I loved him best. Still I often stayed at the granny’s just because my classmates lived there and I seldom went for a walk at home – the company in the yard was not always interesting to me as having to go to my school by bus through half the town I was an outsider to them.
When I was thirteen and my parents like many of my classmates’ parents divorced my mum decided to exchange the flat to live closer to her mum, my granny Vera while Dad moved to his parents. The great flat exchange was a triumph point in her life – no one ever left our dirty industrial district, especially our house where the ground floor had been occupied with militia department, which meant bringing the wrongdoers there, keeping them for a while and then letting them go. No need adding that they used our entrances and stairs as toilets and by all means never presented a view one could admire.
More than anything my mum like other Russian women adores unaccomplishable tasks. Nothing easy to do has ever attracted her; she got interested in something only if it was about next to impossible. She had looked through kilometers of newspapers’ ads, hand written sheets on stands and bus stops; she had phoned to all of the more or less suitable variants and still for a year couldn’t find what she wanted. During her search she brought to contact a lot of people – those were the variants she refused or she didn’t satisfy. They were glad to find their ideal variants and called mom again to thank her or sometimes to ask find something for their friends or relatives. If somebody had advised her to start a real estate agency I would be a daughter of a millionairess. But the time of entrepreneurs and money-makers hadn’t yet arrived, and thus mother’s talents were lost.
However she managed to find a combination of triple flat exchange (previously looking as intricate as a five-step formula, but finally simplified) and we moved to …again a khruchovka, just opposite the house where mom’s parents lived together with her elder daughter Lena and her two kids.
No need to add how much the unprecedented move was envied by the former neighbours.
The “new” flat – if there can be any new flats in the building twenty-five years old – needed a good repairing and was on the ground floor…If beggars at least sometimes can be choosers, people living either on the top or ground floor could never break out of the vicious circle. At least mom got a sort of consolation and a bonus for her extraordinary combinational talent akin to that possessed by all great chess players – it was a dacha plot, thickly planted with strawberries, added to a smaller flat which satisfied the third participant of the exchange. He preferred our garage and money to “Strawberry Fields”
 (to be continued and corrected)