My mother's stories (chapter four)

My mother's stories
chapter 4
 Urban life and its advantages

        My parents, meanwhile, were building our house. It was not a quick process, because they didn’t have their parents to help them with money, and they couldn’t hire any workers. My father could bring some nails and two or three boards from work. Authorities turned a blind eye on such things. Maybe they realized that their workers were underpaid or maybe in that way they felt better, as they were sneaking something themselves. But, actually, people didn’t consider this as stealing – deeply inside, I suppose, they really believed that everything in the country was theirs.

             Nevertheless, most of the materials my father had to buy of course. He spent his weekends and holidays building the house, I imagine how tiresome it was for him. Saturday as the second day off was given to factory and office workers only in 1967. Peasants as usual were left without this new benefit. Anyway, by that time the construction of our house was drawing to a close. Mother helped my father a lot – not only with plastering and painting but with a hammer in her strong hands too. So our house was finished in the end, though it happened when our neighbours had had their houses already built for several years.

             I helped my mother sometimes with her house work or in the kitchen garden, but it was not too much. My hands were too slow and I preferred reading books or playing with my friends. My mother often emphasized how different my life was from what she had in her childhood. “You have never been beaten on your head, your father has never been shot and you have never had a war”, - my mother has said these words recently and suddenly it came to me. That was the refrain of my childhood and my teens and the later years, I suppose, too. I think she used it as self-defense every time when I complained or reproached her or asked her for something she didn’t want to do.

             And she was actually right – my life was much more quiet, comfortable and carefree. What were my troubles in comparison with hers? I hardly ever had clothes, which were popular among the girls of my age, for example. Those dresses made of white nylon with big red flowers – my mother said they were unhealthy. It didn’t matter to me as they looked so attractive. A lot of girls wore them and I continued to ask my mother to sew me one in spite of her persistent refusal. Or those velveteen camping shoes, which I wanted so much, that I still remember the soft burning sensation that I felt every time when I saw them on the feet of some lucky girl.

             We lived in a seaport city and sailors brought a lot of attractive things from abroad, which their wives then sold at a high price at the famous Odessa Flea market named "Tolchock". In fact, it was not a genuine flea market as a considerable part of goods there were new and expensive. And it was not surprising that the imported clothes and shoes were so expensive – they looked much prettier than those plain and uncomfortable things that our shops were full of. My parents didn’t have enough money to buy such expensive garments. Mother had worked as a draftswoman, but she stopped working because of the problems with her eyes when I was about seven or eight. Father’s salary was not too high and they were building the house at that time. Besides my parents didn’t want to earn money in some illegal or half-illegal way which were widespread in our country. People were eager to deceive the law and get some extra money to add to their modest salaries. They called this style of life “spinning”. My parents weren’t able “to spin” and they didn’t want to, actually. Sometimes Father took additional work to do at home, though it was not officially approved. Mother was working hard in the kitchen garden and bred chickens, but she didn’t want to sell her produce at the market, though it would have been a good legal way to increase our income. I think she particularly disliked selling because her mother used to be fond of it.

             My mother's attitude often confused me. For example she didn’t consider the lack of nice clothes or poor interior of our house as something upsetting. She just didn’t see all of this with my eyes - she saw only a high ceiling and big windows. She spent her childhood in a thatched hut with tiny windows where adults could reach the ceiling with the tips of their fingers. In winter the distant corners of their dwelling were covered with hoarfrost even when the stove was hot.

             My problems with clothes looked just laughable when my mother began to tell that it was a custom for villagers to walk barefoot till the first snowfall, or that small children never had their clothes washed - mothers just sewed their collars together and they were wearing their garments till they turned into dirty rags on their shoulders. And, of course, new coats and boots, if they were lucky to get them, were always too big as children were supposed to wear them for several years.

         Unlike what we have to eat nowadays their food was natural, though nourishment in the villages one couldn’t call healthy as after short periods of comparative abundance they usually had the time of half-starvation. They had never had enough milk, sugar or butter, it was a rare pleasure. Yet, as my mother told me with bitterness, they always had some nice food, laid in store for feast days. It was the only time when her mother cooked a lot of tasty dishes, which were so different from those disgusting things that she usually made. I think my mother’s loathing of feasts came from that time when she watched her mother’s guests devouring heaps of dainty victuals that their family was deprived of on ordinary days.

          The only things my mother regretted losing after she left the village at the age of twenty were the picturesque nature of the place and the taste of nice water, which they took from the springs and artesian wells. It was so delicious, especially in comparison with what people had to drink in the city, that my mother couldn’t get used to it for a long time. At the beginning of her life in the city she used to go by tram to the place, where a spring with tasty water miraculously survived. There she stood in a long queue with the other fans until an awful accident happened. Fortunately my mother was not there at that time, but she was told that, for some reason, maybe because it went downhill in this place, a tram derailed and a lot of people from the queue were killed. Some time later, as my mother told me, relatives of the victims, stricken with grief, came and covered that place with cement or asphalt and that was the end of the spring.
          This disaster, however, didn’t put an end to my mother’s affection for nature, which took its origin from the beneficial land, where she was growing up. She always remembered with nostalgia the forest, where she used to go with her granny and the river, where her father used to swim. Unfortunately, she didn’t cherish the same feelings for majority of people, who lived in those nice parts and whom she considered ignorant, superstitious and ill-disposed. I am afraid they really were, but at least they had all the reasons to be embittered and distrustful, because the time of my mother's childhood was one of the hardest periods in the history of our country.     

                   

         To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)