I first heard this saying from Mama herself. Now I call this part of my narrative — in Norwegian — an episode. An episode thirty years long…
Once, someone came to my grandmother, who lived in the Moscow region, and said that a colleague of her husband’s from Blagoveshchensk was staying with them and could take a parcel for Mama. And this is what Grandmother told me when I was already grown up. She packed a little parcel and arranged to bring it to the train on which this military man was to leave.
She arrived at the station in good time and met him. A friend with whom the military man had been staying was seeing him off, and by custom, before the journey, they wanted “just a little” in the station buffet. “Wait, mother, we’ll be right there.” Of course my proper grandmother disliked this terribly, and at that moment she thought: “God forbid he should become my son-in-law!”
The parcel was safely delivered to my mama, at the factory where she worked. Mama came out; they were introduced, talked a little, since it was a working day, and she went back to her workplace. She says he did not impress her: stocky, not tall, 35 years old. She recalls that her suitors had always been tall. She loved going to dances. And for every dance she had a partner.
At work they began to ask “who and what.” The older generation of women advised her “not to turn up her nose,” but to take a closer look! Well, she “took a closer look”! Three days later they registered at the local registry office. The event took place on 11 December 1953. Exactly nine months later, on 11 August 1954, I appeared.
And when I asked Mama how she had managed to “conceive from the first night”? She said, embarrassed: “Irk, what a chatterbox you are!”
To be continued….