Did I ever think, in my past life, that I would remember someone who had been of no interest to me at all. And it turns out the time has come to remember Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. That he promised to build communism by 1980 and to provide all Soviet people with separate apartments — that I remembered clearly.
I remembered the empty shelves in the “yellow” grocery shop on Yanvarskogo Vosstaniya Street in the city of Kiev, after they removed him from office. Very meanly the party people treated him then. After Khrushchev’s removal they arranged a famine for the Soviet people. Queues for bread…. and the famous Soviet white batons suddenly became grey, poorly baked. And at school they started handing out tiny white buns, the taste of which did not please me at all. How poorly we lived then! But what is most interesting is that we did not know it!
Who are these “we”? My relatives, my neighbours in the “khrushchevka,” my girlfriends. One girlfriend of mine would say with pride: “My papa has a stomach ulcer, and they give us white bread on a coupon!” That was in 1964; I was in third grade. And during the winter holidays mama decided to take me and my one-year-old sister to grandmother and grandfather in the Moscow region, in Bolshevo. Now I understand why. And then I understood that I was going on holiday (hurrah! I even visited the New Year tree at Luzhniki). My holidays “stretched” for a whole school term, and I even managed to study at the Bolshevo school.
Forgive me, I have gone deep into the consequences of “Khrushchev’s removal”… And now I will write about that world-famous event when Nikita Sergeyevich “paid an official visit to America” and from the tribune of the UN Assembly, banging his shoe, threateningly shouted: “We’ll show you Kuzka’s mother!”…… since an untranslatable phrase needed translating, I think the simultaneous interpreters had a pause, during which a question came from the Americans: “What does it mean, Kuzkina mat’?” They had to make a literary translation — “Mother of Kuz’ka.”
And when do you think I learned about this? I answer: being in 6th grade, studying English, or more precisely, studying the topic “The possessive case in English.” My beloved English teacher Riola Mikhailovna Pyatkovskaya (I have already written about her in my earlier stories “How I studied English”) suddenly, right in the lesson, began telling us, children! this outrageous case, which official sources kept silent about.
I, of course, this possessive case “Mother of Kuz’ka,” and more grammatically, purely in English it sounds like “Kuz’ka’s mother,” remembered for my whole life! Which I now report not only to you, but having come home from school that same day, I told my papa, who suffered greatly from Khrushchev’s order “On the reduction of 100 thousand servicemen from the ranks of the Soviet Army,” having gone onto a modest military pension and continuing to work until the end of his life.
When papa heard this, he laughed until he cried, repeating many times “mother of Kuzka, mother of Kuzka…” Every evening papa would quietly switch on the transistor and catch the mysterious hostile “Voice of America from Washington”…