On Sunday we dropped into the Eco-market. That is a shop of Polish-Russian-Ukrainian products. Besides buckwheat and tvorog I bought a few sweets. Yes, I am a sweet tooth, but I do not consume sweets by the kilogram. For some time I have tried to eat two or three sweets, and even then not every day.
We came home, I chose three different sweets for myself and think: “Now I’ll eat half a sweet each, and leave the remaining halves for myself for evening tea.” I bite off half a “Romashka”…. and here you have memories of this sweet, which I cannot “get rid of” for several days already, so I decided to write.
I recalled the Gastronom that was next to our “khrushchevka.” It had a folk name “the yellow gastronom,” because the house in which it was located was yellow. That house is still there in Kyiv, on January Uprising Street 26 (I think the new name of the street is I. Mazepa). We children were often sent there by our parents to stand in a queue for fresh bread, for milk… but for sweets, of course, nobody sent us.
One had to beg mama for 20 kopecks for 100 grams of hard candies with the intelligent name “Teatralnye.” And “Romashka” sweets were almost twice as expensive and cost 37 kopecks for 100 grams, and they were bought very rarely.
What amuses me most now is the memory of the weighing and packing of these 100 grams of sweets. Today one can “call” the packaging ecologically clean. Very dense paper like cardboard, light brown in colour. A stout auntie-salesperson with a deft movement of the hand would twist a little cone from this cardboard, and throw in at first 5 sweets, look concentratedly at the scale needle and, understanding that “Romashka” does not reach 100 grams, cut with a knife another half-sweet and “throw it in” up to 100 grams! “Voilà,” as the French say.
I would carry 5 sweets home. I could not hold back from eating that half-sweet. And the remaining half-sweet was, as I now understand, “profit” for the auntie-salesperson, just like the ecologically clean cardboard, which also had its weight.