Mama always had a very strong influence on me! I had to submit. As soon as my sister was born, I became an adult at 9! She grew as a restless child, and our whole life “spun” in one room, a five-metre kitchen and a toilet combined with a bath. The parents had no bed; there was a topchan — that is a spring mattress with a wooden frame. It was set on bricks. Well, there was nowhere to buy a bed, nowhere! There was only a huge, boundless country of total shortage. ...
10 May 2018 Victory found Mama in a paper sack. I have already written that throughout the hard war years she had to work around the clock, being a teenager. But by the end of the war she was already of age. In the four-storey building of the post office at Yaroslavsky Station in the city of Moscow during the war they worked 24 hours!!! hungry teenagers, women of all ages and rare men on whom, as they said then, a “reservation” had been placed. And at 4 in the morning on 9 May over all the loudspeakers and speakers this long-awaited word VICTORY was announced. ...
Today is 4 May 2018. Wow! I have lived to see it! All the way to the 21st century! Since yesterday I sent out invitations to my blog, I shall have to “answer for my talk” and write every day. Today’s event is the 30th birthday of my daughter-in-law Tina. She is Danish. How my elder son found her “remains a puzzle” for me. Or did she find him? In short, the virtual became real. It happens… I sent a little gift in good time. The other day they reported that “thank you, we received it! But we won’t open it until the birthday.” That is willpower! I don’t remember myself like that. ...
My mama was so impressed that on her return she said a phrase I cannot write word for word, but I will write a “nice” translation: “We would have to run to catch up with them and … we wouldn’t catch up!” And she added a “term”: 200 years will pass… and… She started a general clean! I remember one of Mama’s gifts, chosen by her and paid for by the Danish son-in-law: sandals! How surprised she was when in a Danish magazine she saw the Queen in exactly the same sandals! What a coincidence of tastes!!! She was very touched by this gift. Our Danish son-in-law Jakob treats my mama with great respect, calling her affectionately BabUshka, putting the stress on the sound “u.” It comes out very funny. ...
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. ...
I am anxious….. I am thinking….. 2009… that was our last trip to Moscow. I did not want to go. Mama rings and says: “I’ve taken two tickets for the train, in platskart, side bunks, by the toilet…” She presented me with a fact, adding, at her expense.. “Well, and I — ‘how am I related to your Moscow?’” — “You’ll accompany me!” There was, of course, a reason to go. There was an invitation. A nephew, on Grandfather’s side, was gathering all the relatives for the anniversary of his mother’s death. ...
Since Mama was from the near Moscow region, a train ride to Moscow was always a pleasant journey for her. Of course she took me with her. I still remember how they coupled a steam locomotive to the train! Ah, those times! In the evening we boarded the train, and in the morning we approached Moscow. And when I saw the MGU building, I already waited excitedly for the meeting with Grandfather. ...
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. ...
It just occurred to me that I wanted to begin Mama’s travels with airplanes — but no! Mama’s first journeys were short, but hard. She was born in the near Moscow region, in a place well known to many today, in the settlement of Bolshevo. And of course her first trips were to Moscow, to the theatre. That was rare, but very festive. And then the war began….. And Mama’s childhood ended. She was 14 years old; her father went to the front as a volunteer. Sergei Sergeyevich Dorofeev was 40. Only quite recently did I think about the age of my grandfather, who went through the whole war — really went through it, and in the song they sang “we crawled all of Europe on our bellies.” He did not like to talk about the war. ...