Sunday, April 12, 2020

Midcentury Life in the Soviet Union

As a young woman, Tamara liked to say that she had no use for the past. She lived in a 25-square-meter room with Maria Nikolaevna and her second husband, a taciturn, disapproving man who dressed cadavers at a morgue. Their daughter, a cheerful brown-eyed girl named Lyusia, shared Tamara’s bed. At 15, Tamara began working 70-hour weeks as a seamstress and pattern maker. The long hours suited her, and the job provided a supply of good fabric and kept her away from home, where she usually ended up arguing with her stepfather.
She first noticed Vassily because he was square-jawed and trim, with a major’s boards on his shoulders and, at 32, older than the other men at the dance hall. He seemed, Tamara said, masculine yet self-effacing, one of the few men she’d met who was entirely without bluster. He had a soft, unhurried way of speaking, but what impressed her most were his manners; he didn’t kiss her until their third date. They married three months later. After she moved in, Vassily sent for his daughter from a previous marriage, a timid, brooding girl named Inna who never warmed to her stepmother. My father was born two years later, during the first winter following the war. 
Tamara looked forward to going out walking with Vassily on Sunday mornings. Both were particular and vain about clothes. He wore his parade uniform and she her couture, and when they strolled arm in arm along the boulevards in the city center, they reveled in the surprised glances of Moscow’s plainer, grayer residents. Though he was often gone, Vassily sent plenty of money and arrived home with a suitcase of presents for her and the children. He was fastidi­ous, rarely drank and never complained about taking a turn sweep­ing or washing dishes. Vassily didn’t speak about his job and Tamara knew not to ask. When he was away, after the children were asleep, she spent the last hours of the night reading books she bought or bor­rowed, by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Strindberg, Shakespeare, Balzac. Though she never enrolled in a university course, on those nights she discovered a fondness for books that never left her. (Read more.)
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