In Soviet times there was a poster: “Fly by Aeroflot airplanes!” I am trying to remember what was depicted on it… I don’t remember! I’ll have to “draw” it. Most likely in the foreground there was a white-toothed blonde stewardess in a little cap, and in the background an airplane with the inscription Aeroflot.
I wrote the word “poster,” because we had no advertising, and that word, “advertising,” appeared, I suppose, when there was nothing left in the country to advertise. But this one, which I will now quote in Ukrainian, really was advertising-like advertising! Enormous, hung on the end of an old building, opposite Kiev’s Dynamo stadium.
The advertisement proclaimed, and a blind person could see it: “Pyite druzi vitaminy, naturalni, svizhi soky, i rumyantsem neominno zapalayut vashi shchoky!” Drink, friends, vitamins! Natural, fresh juices, and a blush will certainly adorn your cheeks! A rosy-cheeked toddler held a glass of tomato juice…. I remembered this clearly; it was the flowering of my youth, and I often visited the open (open-air) Dynamo pool, which in the 90s “successfully dried up.”
Let us return to airplanes. Personally I never dreamed of flying in airplanes. But my mama! (Here I make a mysterious pause.) “Up the hill tra-ta-ta and down the hill tra-ta-ta!” If she had had such an opportunity, she would have flown. Well, it is never too late to fly either… And so her first flight she made as a woman “not of Balzac’s age,” at 72… and … straight to Copenhagen, but via Moscow (my younger sister lived in Denmark, married).
Of course, before the trip she completely renewed her wardrobe. I have already mentioned that Mama sewed excellently! My worries as the one seeing her off cannot be described in words! It seemed to me then that Mama was flying into space! At the moment of parting I asked: “Mother, did you at least take money with you?” — “What money?” — “Well, dollars,” I answer. “Yes, I have some, 5 dollars..” — I “??!! Take my 20, you have a transfer in Moscow!”
The habit of travelling almost without money, or with a small sum, she had kept from Soviet times. And the dollar for her was an abstract notion. But having arrived in Moscow she understood the power of a dollar bill: surrounded by a dense ring of taxi drivers offering to take her for 100 dollars from one airport to another (I don’t remember now from which to which). Luckily there was an experienced fellow traveller nearby, who obtained free transport for transit passengers.
And so my mama found herself in the Kingdom of Denmark, in which “everything was in order” (here I allow myself the liberty of paraphrasing William Shakespeare; he wrote: “something is rotten in the state of Denmark!”). Perhaps in the time of his hero Hamlet not everything was in order, but when my mama flew in!..
To be continued….