Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER SIXTY FOUR – THE APARTMENT (WE ARE EXPANDING)
I’ll go back a little in my memory flashes. Living conditions at Grandmother Tanya were not good, the new room on the second floor was under renovation, and no one had hot water, or a shower. Tanya’s rest room was in the yard, shared with the neighbors. Many people still lived like this, so it made complete sense to wait out maternity leave in Moscow with the child while I dealt with Ira and Shahe and improved our living conditions. I visited my family every two months in between classes, students (penguins), renovations, exchanging our Grandmother’s apartment for Irina’s room, new renovations, installing heating, building a bathroom and my own office on the balcony.
In September I returned home from Moscow.
“How is Grandma Tanya?” Ira asked sympathetically.
“Wonderful!” I assured her, “Fussing with her great-granddaughter. This joy extends her years.”
“Then, let’s do everything faster,” Ira asked, “I agree to pay the agent so that the exchange takes place as soon as possible.”
It was surprising to hear this from Ira, who deliberately delayed the process in the hope that Grandmother Tanya would die, and then they would get her apartment along with the room on the second floor. But the enigma was solved easily. Shahe had once again gone to prison, and the wife needed cash to get her husband out. Before the new IGWH (independent gas water heater) arrived from Tallinn, we had already made an exchange, and I started a new renovation. Now that the entire floor belonged to our family, it made sense to invest money not only in renovating the rooms, but also in improving the entire apartment. Alas, despite the good income, it was not possible to do everything quickly. The credit system did not exist. You could borrow one or two thousand from friends, but not ten or twenty. Therefore, you had to rely only on yourself and successful tutoring.
The most important thing was hot water and a shower. Yes, I built a shower room with tiles and insulation, but our building was not a modern one. To do everything correctly, I had to fill the floor of the toilet 2 m x 1.5 m with cement layer of ten centimeter (0.1 m). Do you know how heavy this is? With a cement density of 1200 kg/m3, this is 360 kg (800 lbs.) But there was no Home Depot or anything like that in that life. We didn’t even know about it. First, you had to get the damn cement, for example, pay at a construction site to have it stolen, then brought to you place, and then dragged to the second floor using the spiral courtyard staircase.
But it was simply impossible to load our wooden floor. So we had to separately get a powerful support with the steel beams for our floor and install them in the yard toilet’s ceiling. It was my luck that almost no one used the yard toilet anymore. Otherwise, the consent of the neighbors would have been costly for an upstart like me. Residents of the basements long ago received apartments in new buildings, and the basements were distributed to others for storage. One old women (Tanya) from the first floor moved to Moscow and the other old woman (her neighbor) – to “better world”. And the postman’s family built the toilet inside their apartment. Who wants to drag themselves to the yard in winter to relieve themselves?
In addition to amenities, it was necessary to warm up the apartment, that is, provide heating. Imagine, at that time not all people had steam heating. In any case, there was none in either of the two rooms. The fastest and cheapest thing was to connect new heating radiators in two new rooms to our old system and recalculate the payment, since the neighbor’s IGWH heated both them and us, and our area has doubled.
It probably took a couple of years before we were able to separate from the old system and lay pipes for our IGWH, which is located in the basement. Then I built an additional room – an office at the end of the huge balcony. Even though it was heated, it was quite cool in the winter, but it was just what I needed for studying!
In the large room I made a closet in the window bay onto the balcony. The room already had two large windows facing the street, which provided enough light. Interestingly, after building a beautiful wooden cabinet, I realized that I was unknowingly following in the footsteps of my father, who twenty-five years ago ordered a wall bookcase for our then brand new apartment.
All I describe looks very optimistic – everything seems to be well conceived and done – from the point of view of a housewife from a generation of my parents who suffered in even worse conditions. And for a woman from the modern world, it must have been a difficult life. Now I understand.
Judge for yourself. You should get up early and rush across the cold (initially opened) balcony, to the kitchen and toilet. Then you turned on the gas in all burners and the oven and heated the kitchen up a little. Next you turned on the gas-water heater and heated up the water. Then you can drag the child there and bathe, feed and prepare for kindergarten in warm conditions. After that you took the child to babysitter or kindergarten and rushed to work.
Concerning me – I went to classes early in the morning, and after them I worked with my private pupils – I earned a living, vacations and entertainment and construction of an apartment. And in the evening, having put everyone to bed, I sat at my textbook and prepared my medical lessons for tomorrow. And I also tried to be a good husband and father. No matter how you look at it, life is never easy. But we loved each other and lived friendly.
My wife though had different memories: how I put my daughter to bed and fell asleep with her to my own fairy tales about the cat Besik, and she, poor and lonely, cooked and did laundry in the kitchen until late in the night. Let me note: so that it wouldn’t be so lonely in the kitchen, I bought a small portable TV, red and cheerful.
Once an incident happened. Lilya got busy with her chores in the kitchen, despite the lack of light. This often happened in the city, and all thrifty people kept candles for this occasion. Lilya did not enter the room for a long time, and then she came in with a kettle in her hand, and there Ana and I were sleeping, and there was a fire on the table in the large room. The surface of the table has already fired, there was a chemical smell in the room, and there was a black cloud at the ceiling.
Lilya, in horror, splashed water on the table and extinguished the flame, and then opened the window and door so that the draft would draw out the fumes. I woke up from the noise and smoke and said that I had adapted the candle into a plastic candlestick.
We weren’t actually sure what it was. It was a gift from the Moscow colleagues of my mother-in-law’s. In appearance, the object resembled a candlestick for one candle, but it was made of gray plastic and had heavy bolts in its leg. While assembling and disassembling this leg, neither I nor my physicist friends could ever determine what kind of device it could be. Therefore, we decided that the bolts were made for stability, and the object was still a candlestick. Of course, it was suspicious that four or five adult women chipped in forty to fifty kopecks each and bought a plastic, flammable imitation of candlestick for two rubles as a wedding gift…
It’s also unlikely that this was a prank item, like my “Remote TV Turn off,” but it turned out to be a great prank. And quite according to Chekhov: the candlestick fired in the last act of the play.
(According to Chekhov, “If a shotgun is hanging on the wall in the first act of a play, then it should be fired in the last act of a play.”)
The fire was not the only incident in our apartment. Another time there was a flood. My family was once again in Moscow, and I, as in the case with the candlestick, was sleeping. I woke up from the sound of a waterfall. Turned on the light – Oh my God! The ceiling hung overhead, bowing under the weight of the water, and a stream of water gushed through a hole in its center. In fact, it was not the ceiling that bent, but the calico – a strong gauze-type material that was stretched over a frame and then whitened to create an ideal, flat surface. During a heavy rain, streams of water penetrated under the third floor, and water began to accumulate on our calico until it broke through. I had to remove the water, dry everything, and stretch and whitewash new calico. There was no insurance or compensation!
I remember that in my junior year of medical school, I had the opportunity to give physics lessons at school. The May demonstration was approaching, and schoolchildren, alternately girls and boys, were taken from classes for marching training. I stayed in the class with the boys, among whom was my private student Yura. I saw that the boys whispering about something, looking at me, and then Yura asked to speak and said,
“We wanted to ask you something, not as a physics teacher, but as a doctor, while the girls are not here. May we?”
“Of course you may. Go ahead, ask.”
(He blushes, embarrassed) “We… I’m… ashamed…”
“It’s okay, guys, I’m a boy too!”
They were inspired by these words and began to push their comrade. He gathered his courage and blurted out,
“Is masturbation harmful?”
And I answered immediately, without any pause,
“No!”
“Hooray!” seventeen guys yelled, jumping up and down and cheering.
And then the door had opened and the school director came in.
“What’s going on? Does the teacher explaining well?” she asked.
“Top notch! Nobody ever explained better than him!” the seniors from the high school assured her.
Little strange stories happened in different areas of life. One day I was asked by Leo, Izya’s coworker, who helped me do the wiring in my apartment, if I want to earn extra money?
“There is a repair and construction organization that recruits dead souls. Nobody wants to work for the current prices. If you have a free (second) work book, I can recommend you. Once a month you need to sign the statement and receive 10% of the issued salary. For example, they write out 300, you get 30. And once a year, vacation pay – all 300 is yours.
I just had a work book lying around. When I left the Institute of Traumatology, I lost my papers with a work book somewhere. I returned to the Institute and asked for a new work record. It should be easy, because there were no other entries in it. They gave me a new work book without any problem. A few days later my lost documents arrived in a certified letter. I left them in the taxi. So I ended up with two work books, but who needed it?
It turned out that there is someone who needed it. Over the course of a year, the amount accrued would be the same as for lessons with one student. I decided to try it. But a few months later, Leo came running to me with a frightened face and told me that an investigation had been opened, and on Saturday all the “hard workers” were being taken to the sites to remember for interrogation where everyone worked.
On Saturday, a huge bus took a crowd of decent people, almost all were intelligentsia, on a country excursion. Among the crowd I recognized several acquaintances, physicists. The majority took notes: such and such an object in such and such a village, such and such a building, a power line on the left, a water tower on the right, and so on. At the end of the excursion, everyone was taken to the khinkali (large dumplings) café, fed lunch and introduced to the foremen, brigade masters and others.
A few days later I received a summons to the investigator. In the morning, the whole crowd of workers, and maybe even more, gathered there. I was prepared: I learned places of work; put on work clothes and held cigarette without a filter between the first and second fingers, black from ingrained fuel oil.
My interview went quite well. I calmly answered all the questions about who I reported to and with whom I worked. A protocol was drawn up. The investigator asked only one personal question – why did I work as a worker even though I had an education? But the question was rhetorical, in the USSR I never received a salary of more than 150 rubles a month, either as a physicist or as a doctor, and a simple hard worker had 300 rubbles. It was called social justice. So all sorts of similar organizations making money were formed…
And the case was stopped. Apparently, they agreed on some amount that it was more profitable for investigators to receive than to try to prove a crime without evidence.
Four years have passed. All this time, Lilya was registered with her parents, but lived and worked in Tbilisi. I hope she lived well and worked successfully. We have expanded our housing. Ana proudly bore both surnames. In Russia – Malinik, in Georgia – Neiman. The last improvement to the apartment happened when my family and I lived in Moscow for a couple of years. During this time, my sister got married and moved to live with her husband, and my mother, as my manager, glazed the entire balcony.
When we returned from Moscow, the apartment was already completely isolated and with all amenities. Everyone who came to us certainly asked the question: “Is this all yours?” They even installed a telephone for us; twenty-two years later our turn came.
I was joking, “They are trying anything to keep the Jews from leaving!”
Moscow forecasts about Moscow apartment unfortunately did not come true, a new large apartment never appeared either in Moscow or in the Moscow region. But our fictitious divorce eventually brought us results. At the right moment, Lilya’s registration became a great help. We got married again, and at one point I registered with my wife in the Moscow region.
But before describing these, as you will see, interesting events around the move, I’ll talk about studying at the medical institute, in the form of a medley called “Years in the Medical School,” and now I will give the floor to my sister, Maya, for one chapter (Chapter 65). After all, I’m poking around in my memory, where I’m studying, working, raising with my wife our daughter, building our apartment. And next to us, behind the wall my former family’s (my mother and sister) life is going on.
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