Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER SIXTY TWO – OUR HOUSING AND WORK (ENDING)
While Lilya went to Moscow to manage her registration in her parents’ apartment, I stayed alone. In the absence of my friend Sasha, with whom we had been discussing all the troubles and personal matters for many years, I read up on graph theory and tried to solve the problem of four colors. Have you heard about this problem?
“To color any map on a sphere, it’s enough to have four colors not to paint with the same color adjacent countries.”
I don’t remember which modern mathematician called it the “disease of four colors”, that is, a contagious disease that every mathematician sooner or later gets sick without developing a stable immunity. Although a nine-hundred-page computer proof of the theorem (enumeration of options) was already available in those years, I wanted to look for something short and elegant. And by introducing my own terminology, I “proved” the theorem. That is, they usually prove that the minimum number of colors required to color any map is four. I proved that the maximum required number of colors is four.
I reasoned like this: let’s say we built a map (a graph) that requires n colors to color (you can’t color it with fewer colors!) I called it maximally colored. If we consider this graph as a map, then the number of colors needed to color it will be expressed by some algebraic expression, by definition, less than or equal to n. The solution to the inequality led to the fact that n ≤ 4: the maximum number of colors required to color any map on a sphere is four.
I sent my proof to Sasha, in the hope that he and Matvey, leading world algebraists, would find my logical error. By that time, Sasha had already tried to get a job at NASA and failed the polygraph test. And Matvey’s beautiful wife changed her husband to an American one, and Matvey, out of grief and shock, complained to the FBI that Sasha was a Russian spy who was released from the country in forty days with the help of his mistress Seda, who worked in the KGB.
Sasha sent me a short letter, like that a millionaire Tartakovsky sent to a gangster Benya Krik (see Isaak Babel’s story “How it was done in Odessa”):
“Nika, my friend, “throw of these nonsense”, learn your medicine and come here sooner. Not a single mathematician will even read your calculations until you use standard terms: not maximally colored, but minimally colored! That’s it. End of the discussion! Forget it!”
What was I supposed to do? I was sad for a while and then I forgot it.
Life always throws up unexpected news. This time they came from Madeleine.
She knocked on our inner door, separating her apartment from our apartment. She had her one-year-old granddaughter in her arms.
“I have two news,” Madeleine said, “Firstly, Emma spoke. Look what my bitch-daughter taught her. What’s your name? Emma?”
“Ye,” the child squeaked.
“And what’s the grandmother’s name?”
“Pich.”
“Ah? How do you like it? Well, isn’t my daughter a real bitch?”
“Ask about other people,” I suggested.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“Pich.”
“What’s your dad’s name?”
“Pich!”
“What’s this man’s name (pointing a finger at me)?”
“Pich!”
“You see, the child simply repeats a word that she often hears.”
“It doesn’t matter, children are still bitches! This, by the way, is secondly! My son demands his apartment back, well, the one you live in, and I can’t do anything about it. I said that in a month you’ll vacate his apartment. You don’t need to pay for this month, but start looking for another place.”
“Here you go, pich!” I thought, “And it seems that everything started so well!”
I didn’t even want to upset Lilya with this news, I hoped that they may change their mind, but it was my wife who gave me the news,
“I’m returning home not by plane, but by train, because my grandmother is tired of living in Moscow, suffering without familiar people and streets, and is eager to go back to help her granddaughter.”
Oh horror, now if we have to temporarily evacuate to “grandmother’s dugout”, then together with grandmother, where we …acked up her bed! But so far we still had Madeleine’s apartment for a month…
So, I prepared to meet the train with my wife. But as I love, I decided to surprise her and meet the Moscow train in advance, in the city of Gori.
In about two hours I reached Gori by a bus. I remember that there was enough time to have a snack – to try Gori khinkali (dumplings). I ate at the train station, apparently not in the place where one should taste the local cuisine. I didn’t like the khinkali: they were huge, the dough was gray and thick, there was lamb inside and no broth – everything was floating in fat. However, this station food was expensive.
I remembered Izya’s story about the railway public catering. Izya once taught chemistry to the son of a famous soccer player. In fact, it was a former soccer player’s story about the fate of the champion after leaving the sport. People like him were given lucrative positions in management. And so, he was appointed as a director of the food supply network of the Georgian railways. All restaurants, cafes, kiosks and stalls at all train stations and small train stops in Georgia were under his subordination. He was appointed at the end of the month. As it turned out, it was no coincidence. On the last day of the month, a deputy (note, not a secretary, not an assistant, but a deputy) entered the office with a thick package in his hands.
“This is for you,” he said with respect.
“What is this?” the champion was surprised.
“Respect of employees and love of the people. This is your monthly salary.”
The champion opened the package. There were fifty thousand rubles there.
“Are you crazy,” he said, confused, “I refuse to accept them.”
“It’s a pity. We so wanted you to be appointed to this place. If only you knew how much money it cost to arrange this deal. Many enterprises fought for you, but we won. People know you and like you, and they trust that you will protect them well.”
“I will protect them? … What from?”
“From prison and punishment. You will have meetings with big shots every day. Many of them are your former comrades from the “Dynamo” sports society (it belonged to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that is, the police). You will need a lot of money to dine and wine them, and in addition to contribute a share from our trust to the Minister of Railways and a share to the Minister of Food Industry. If you don’t meet the right people tomorrow, several people will be arrested, their families will suffer…”
“The champion was amazed at the world that opened up to him. He took the money and became the defender of his subordinates,” said Izya, “And now he has been suffering from cirrhosis of the liver.”
“The most difficult thing is how to avoid drinking toasts. Some people will be offended, and other people will suffer…” he explained his cross.
But then the Moscow train appeared, and I ran to the right carriage. Hugs, kisses, and tears of joy – in a word all what is now called Live TV.
And then the period of obtaining housing continued in our lives. It involved several different processes, and now it is not always easy for me to remember the exact sequence of events. Most likely, the processes occurred simultaneously, converging in spirals, until they connected at one important point for us – the apartment.
The first was moving out from Madeleine. Taking things out was troublesome, but not difficult; the main thing was to dismantle the huge wardrobe and somewhere to save its parts for the time being.
The second was to look for another place to live.
The third was preparing the “grandmother’s dugout” for possible temporary residence of the three of us.
I remember how I restored the grandmother’s bed. Teitl was small and thin, and did not pose a danger to her own bed.
I remember receiving the sofa that my father-in-law sent us from Moscow. It’s probably hard to imagine now that it was almost impossible to buy a good sofa, and the further you were from the capital, the more difficult it was. Osip Yuryevich sent us a rather narrow red Soviet sofa, but it can be opened comfortably, without quickly deteriorating parts. Only love allowed us, two large people, to crowd on it. We were turning in our sleep simultaneously and parallel, so as not to fall off the sofa. But, as they say, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when you don’t have one of your own.
And we were spinning in the whirlpool of these apartment-furniture processes – moves and transfers, and I don’t know how we would have gotten out of them if one sad event had not happened that dramatically changed the whole situation.
The last old lady on the second floor, from a large room behind the wall of the apartment where I lived and was registered since I was six, has died. Does this event tell you anything? Hardly. And it was like the death of the heir to the throne in a country surrounded by neighbors who immediately came to a state of combat readiness. So are we. Neighbors with adjacent walls (borders) had the greatest chance of expanding their living space at the expense of the deceased’s room.
I think that the mass terror of the Stalin era gave rise to mass denunciations against neighbors in order to obtain their vacated rooms.
Two families claimed the large room. On the one side, it was my old family (Mom, sister and I) living in two rooms. On the other side – another family, which was living in a small room and also having the apartment adjacent to Grandmother Tanya’s dugout on the first floor. And both families became excited and began to look for ways to take over the room. The arbiter in this matter was the district council, which sealed the room and waited to see who could find the best contact with them.
Suddenly it turned out that our old grandmother Tanya has amazing connections. It turns out that she worked for a rich family, for whom Grandfather Boris sewed suits. When he died, she was invited to walk with the children and read books to them, as Valentina Matveevna once did to little Nick. But their grandmother, unlike ours, was the chairman of the city council (mayor of the city). Teitl asked her, and I was granted an audience.
I came and explained everything: who we are, what we are, what our living conditions are, and what we are trying to achieve. She just waved her hand, saying “no problem.”
“I’ll call the district council chairman. He will arrange rally for two families, which you will win. He will find how. Everything will be fair, you’ll see. Don’t you dare give him money or bring offerings – you are my man! I don’t need anything from you, I’m trying to help Tanya. But my daughter teaches therapy to you, you can give her a gift, let her be glad how (ha-ha) her students love her.”
Everything turned out as the old mistress of the city predicted.
I went to the controversial meeting on our side, and Ira, the youngest neighbor’s daughter – on their side. I once talked about their family. Dad was a postman who worked part-time as a plasterer man, and mom was a housewife. They lived modestly, eating (and drinking) out all their earnings, behind the wall from Grandmother Tanya. Some years ago, when a small ten-meter room became vacant on our floor, they got it to improve living conditions. In this room, their two daughters grew up, until the youngest succumbed to the charms of a Kurdish thief boy, who sat on a tree in front of their window day and night and hypnotized her with his narrowed eyes. One day she couldn’t stand this look and opened the window for him. Whether there was a draft or not, but the baby was blown up to Ira. Later they got married, and Shah or Shahe, that was the name of the young husband, became our balcony neighbor on the second floor, although he was spending proudly most of his life in the city prison.
And so, Ira and I went to a dispute rally. In a room with unpainted floors, on a roughly hewn wooden table covered with a red satin cloth, there were folders with personal files and applications from citizens to expand their housing. A commission sat at the table, several men and women, situated by a chance there to decide the fate of the unfortunate petitioners. Once upon a time, our pioneer leader ended up at such a table after staying overnight in the mountainous Novemberyan with the secretary of the district party committee, and my school girlfriends could not figure out whether she was a prostitute or a loyal communist.
In fact, all these assessors were just puppets of the chairman of the district executive committee, who decided all the issues until he got bored, and then he temporarily delegated his power to one of his deputies. But when I went to the city council, I learned that even the all-powerful district chairman was a puppet of the mayor. And all of them were puppets of the party bosses.
The hearing has begun. The secretary called the debaters case by case from the hallway, where there was a crowd of people. Finally it was our turn. The secretary read out the file about the vacant apartment and the claims of both parties. Oddly enough, many of the parameters of our poor conditions coincided: the area per person, the number of rooms for parents and children, the long line for getting an apartment in a new built house. The chairman needed to find some other criterion to make a Solomon decision. But he was an experienced man and, without thinking twice, asked,
“Do you agree to give up the line for a new apartment by getting this room?”
I said, “Yes!” Ira said, “No!” and the issue was resolved. I was given a warrant to move into a large room. It turned out so naturally and looked so fair that I later thought, how could the chairman bring the matter to the opposite decision? Yes, like an illusionist who points you to the certain card! All he had to do was to ask the right question. For example, “Which of you is preparing to add to your family?” Ira wouldn’t even need to answer, she had her belly with her! And although I was preparing too, my wife was already registered in Moscow and her pregnancy worked to expand the apartment there.
In the next month or two, repairs became my main hobby, fortunately it was already very warm. The new room was so neglected that even the electrical wires ran outside, rather than hidden in the walls. We did the internal wiring with my friend Leva, Izya’s coworker, a medical equipment engineer. I basically cut grooves in the brick walls with a chisel, and he laid and connected the wires.
“Listen,” said Leva, “You have a chance to get free electricity for your apartment. Of course, not completely free, but it will reduce your monthly bill.”
I shrugged. Before buying an air conditioner, our monthly bill was four rubles. An inspector who came to check whether citizens were stealing electricity without his participation was surprised,
“I charge five rubles a month, and then clients pay the state also five, not fifteen to twenty rubles.” And there’s nothing to take from you!”
It was true, but when I bought an air conditioner, the inspector’s dream for the summer months came true. We did not heat the apartment with electrical appliances, although we had a radiator in case of extreme cold. The tiled stove, which was heated with wood, remained in childhood along with the kerosene stove. And we and our neighbors heated our two apartments with an IGWH (independent gas water heater) that they had, and we ourselves could not regulate the temperature of the radiators.
“Look, an overseeing by different departments always gives you an opportunity to make money,” Lev taught me, “The electric meter in this room supposed to be removed and the wiring connected to the meter in your mother’s apartment. But they have no idea who got the apartment. Therefore, you pay for your electricity yourself, using a separate meter. And here we come and connect the wires as we want, namely, we connect three wires to the secret toggle switch – one pair of wires will go to your meter, and when the toggle switch is in position “1”, the electricity consumption will be taken into account. Position “2” will include one wire from your meter (for example, phase, that is, plus), and the second (ground, that is, minus) from your mother’s one. Then this outlet will become the “left” (illegal) one, and the electricity consumption in it will be unaccounted for. Understood?”
Of course I understood. After all, I had a Master Degree in physics and Math! We took a powerful toggle switch used in a military device and installed it in a niche, behind shutters, that was closed with a special lid in the slot of the wall. Everything was painted on top with one white paint, and then covered with shutters. There was no way to detect this system, but it did not provide much savings either. It was simply a kitsch of free spirit!
And using a spare toggle switch I made a device for a prank – “Remote TV turn off” and tried it out at my friends’ house. A high-power toggle switch, easily able to withstand a short circuit, connected two plugs (plus and minus) inside the box. The sticker claimed that it was a “Remote TV turn off, Made in USA” device for turning off the TV remotely.
“You plug it into the network, press the switch, and the TV turns off,” I explained. Everyone was intrigued. They inserted it, clicked it, and the TV went out, but so did all the light in the apartment! Bumping into furniture, we ran in the dark to the balcony to the meter, turned on the traffic jams and… again! And so on until everybody’s nerves gave way. Everyone was amazed that the device did not work under our conditions and put forward theories as to why – different voltage or different frequency of alternating current. But no one ever suspected that the device was a fake simply completing a circuit – the sticker was real!
So, by the summer the following situation arose with our apartments.
I had renovated a new room, when Grandmother Tanya’s neighbor in the “dugout” passed away. Ira and Shahe were the only contenders for the deceased room and easily got it. It turned out that the parents with their eldest daughter, and the youngest daughter Ira with her husband Shahe lived in two different apartments in the courtyard, and Grandmother Tanya’s apartment was located between their apartments.
On the second floor, on the opposite side of the small courtyard, my mother and sister lived, Lilya and I lived in a new room next to theirs, and Ira and Shahe lived in a small one next to ours. It turned out stupidly, both families ran up and down the spiral staircase and disturbed each other with their rooms, wedged into the living space of the neighbors.
Then I came up with the idea to offer my former rivals to exchange their small ten-meter room on the second floor for the Grandmother Tanya’s apartment on the first. Both they and we received chain of rooms, and everyone will became much more comfortable.
My friends were laughing at my wild idea,
“They will never make a deal with you after you defeated them in a contest for the large room!”
But I was an optimist and offered Ira an exchange. She and her husband conferred and… asked for an additional payment of ten thousand rubles.
I agreed to five. Then the negotiations stalled until I set a deadline. Either consent or refusal, then I’ll make exchange with some villagers who are just interested in city registration. They’ll also pay me extra for the grandmother’s apartment in the city. And Tanya will move to Moscow with her daughters. By the end of the term, Ira agreed to my terms, and we agreed to launch the exchange.
Just when Lilya started her maternity leave, she flew to Moscow, and Grandma Tanya became ill, and a cardiogram showed a heart attack. The ambulance took Teitl in a semi-conscious state to the hospital. The neighbors immediately slowed down the exchange, hoping that Tanya’s room would go to them anyway. But grandma recovered. Her youngest daughter, Iza, came from Moscow to pick her up and took her mother, who was very opposed to this.
Iza rarely came to Tbilisi. When I entered fifth grade, she was my pioneer leader at the city camp, then she came to the funeral of her father, Boris, a tailor from our yard. She complained to me about life,
“Our mother was a beautiful, but silly woman. Dad worked, saved money, and she was losing everything,” Iza was recalling the story фищге the suitcase with the ending. “One day dad wanted to sell the wardrobe, but mom took it and gave it to the porters for a pittance. Dad almost had a heart attack when he returned home. It turns out that after losing the suitcase, he collected trophy jewelry, for which people used to pay less and less, in a secret drawer of the wardrobe… And now this fool managed to go to the hospital with bonds worth ten thousand, which she hid on her body. One can only guess where they were taken off from her: in an ambulance or in the emergency room.”
Iza also complained about her husband,
“He has severe uncontrolled diabetes, but he hid it from everyone, ate irregularly, fell in a coma on the street, and the police, sniffing the smell of acetone, mistook him for a drunk and beat him with their boots, and once they even had broken his ribs.
The relationships between Iza and her husband were not going well, and she wanted to divorce him… How could I help them?
In a word, Iza took her mother to Moscow, despite any of her protests.
And I finished exams, practice, classes with applicants and, preparing to exchange the grandmother’s apartment, sorted out the remains of Tanya’s things. And suddenly… among the old kitchen utensils I found the grandmother’s stocking with bonds worth ten thousand rubles. What a find! My mother-in-law and her sister Iza were terribly happy! It was something like greetings from their beloved father.
The neighbors delayed the exchange, and I, knowing that Teitl was feeling well, boldly prepared to go to Moscow for the birth. It was time to meet the heir… We didn’t know yet whether it was he or she. The times of universal sonograms have not yet arrived…
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