Part 8 – The $50 Bra
© Copyrighted by Doug Salem, 2004
Olga’s stay in Krivoy Rog was not uneventful. If idleness is the devil’s playground, then the apartment blocks of Ukraine’s rotting industrial cities must be his teeter-totters and hop-scotch runs.
At Olga’s former apartment block, where her parents still live, a new conscript had joined the babushka brigade that guards the entrance. Let’s call her “Masha.” She is not a full-fledged babushka because she is still in her thirties and her teenage daughter has not yet gotten pregnant. Masha is one of the few women in Krivoy Rog her age that has a lot of time on her hands. So she sits like a bench baba all day. Watching the coming and going of the block’s inhabitants, gossiping, and sucking on sunflower seeds. Masha appeared in the spring and lingered menacingly throughout the summer.
How did Masha come to have so much time on her hands? Well, before divorcing her good-for-nothing drug addict husband and having him thrown in jail last year, she managed to trick him into signing the apartment over to her. Then she acquired a new boyfriend, a younger Russian man, some sort of mafia underling. Not just an ordinary boy toy or “Alphonse” mind you, but one with income. (“Alphonses” are young Russian male freeloaders/gigolos.) They shacked up in the paid-for apartment she wangled from her ex and Masha settled into a meager Ukrainian life of Riley. But now, in addition to being her incarcerated ex-husbands worst nightmare, she was about to become a royal pain for Olga’s mom as well.
Masha lives on the eighth floor in the apartment directly above Olga’s parents’. There was actually a time when she and Olga’s mom were friends. A few years back they formed a strategic alliance to capitalize on a lucrative post-U.S.S.R. racket. They borrowed money from investors. Olga’s Mom traveled to Poland and used the money to purchase high-fashion clothing and shoes that were not yet available in Ukraine. Mom would cart the goods all the way back to Krivoy Rog, and she and Masha sold them at the bazaar, making enough to pay off their investors many times over. This made the bench babas furious. They came to loathe Masha and Mom for their industry.
Masha used her profits to remodel her apartment to be the finest in the building. Mom sunk hers into her then-teenage daughter, Olga, paying tuition for her degree at the Pedagogical University in advance and grooming her for marriage. (Pedagogical University gives degrees in Education, and the equivalent of a teaching credential.) By dipping into the merchandise, Mom transformed Olga into the best dressed girl in the complex. That, along with Olga’s other charms, attracted a good number of high-rolling New Russian suitors.
During these salad days, the block’s babushkas sat dutifully on their bench as usual, like crumbling, rusting gargoyles atop an abandoned Soviet administration complex. They watched, hissed, and spat like cats as Mom disappeared for days at a time on her buying junkets to Poland. Then, when Mom returned they watched her and Masha exit early each morning laden with goods for the bazaar and return late in the evening flush with the proceeds.
They observed workers on their way up to Masha’s apartment with the latest furnishings and appliances; then coming down laden with the detritus that is standard issue for the less fortunate (and less motivated). In the early evenings they saw Olga returning from technical college in one new knock-out Polish outfit, then going out again only a few hours later in yet another. In the late evenings Jeep Cherokees and Audis came to pick her up for scandalous evenings at New Russian hangouts. They pulled up so close to the bench they almost toppled the gawking women into the mud. Later they would see Olga’s father slink down to the nearby grocery kiosk under the cover of darkness, then smugly disappear back up the lift with his favorite kielbasa, 40-oz. beer, and sports magazine cradled lovingly in his arms.
The unholy alliance between Masha and Mom must be broken, the babushkas resolved. They can not live like this while we all suffer and look on. They must be taken down a notch. Old pros at this game, the babas would bide their time until the right opportunity presented itself.
It took a while, but it came. Competition, tariff hikes, and mafia bites squeezed the Polish clothing racket until it was no longer worth the dangerous cross-country trips carrying large sums of cash. Olga married the American. Masha got the divorce and shacked up with the young Russian mafia guy. Masha and Mom became unemployed and idle, bouncing off the concrete-slab walls with nothing to do. Masha gave in to passing her days sitting on the bench with the babas, but Mom, ever the industrious one, refused to lower herself. Mom stayed upstairs and planned her next venture.
Masha never liked to work as hard as Mom. Her approach had always been to let somebody else churn the butter then skim off the top. And her next opportunity came in the form of the State-run utility companies, which until now had always been the enemy...
After a pay-check drought that had lasted several years, the Ukrainian government had finally managed to start paying employees that work for State-subsidized industries again. Krivoy Rog is a mining and steel town, and just about everybody works in a subsidized shop. As a result, the city had been hit particularly hard. Most citizens could not pay their water, gas, and electricity bills, so the government issued a kind of payment reprieve. The catch being that the unpaid bills would accrue until the paychecks started flowing again. Now the paychecks were finally coming, but everybody owed big bucks to the utilities.
Many people had gone in so deep there was no coming out, and the utilities were actually foreclosing on their privatized apartments, selling them at rock-bottom prices – often for just the amount of the outstanding bills. And as luck would have it, the apartment next door to Masha’s became a casualty. Masha persuaded her new boyfriend to buy it. She wanted to try her hand at a the latest craze in FSU real estate development – acquire two apartments next to or above and below each other, punch through the concrete slabs that separate them, and viola you are living large Ukrainian style.
Masha orchestrated this latest coup with very little effort and without giving up her newfound position on the bench. Although the babas despised her, they permitted her to stay, lulling her into a false sense of security. With typical and ingrained Soviet-Slavic sentiment, they could never forgive her for the good fortune and success she had flaunted in their faces all these years. But also with typical Ukrainian duplicity – which, incidentally, comes from centuries of being a smaller, weaker country sandwiched between two larger, more powerful ones - they humored Masha. Why? To further their diabolical plan to drive a wedge between her and Olga’s mom for good is why. To begin the process of taking them down a notch; to diffuse their power.
And Masha, also in typical Soviet-Slavic fashion, made them hate her even more. She sat on the bench one day and bragged that, thanks to her young mafia cohabitant, she was now wearing a $50 bra. That’s right, he bought it for her. She doesn’t have to go to work, gets serviced regularly by a young stud, plenty to eat, one splendidly remodeled apartment already paid for with plans to expand next door - maybe even into the entire building eventually, and on top of that a $50 bra! The babas, breasts sagging and furious, added this to their list. The snap of the $50 bra would be like the shot that was heard around the world, or at least around the apartment block.
Like Masha, Mom also experienced a small rebirth, although one of a different kind. Her daughter, Olga had started a business in America and recruited her to work as an in-country agent delivering translated letters and flowers and gifts for Western suitors of FSU women. Mom got a computer, learned how to use it, and got busy on the new boom industry. She wisely added the money she earned to the pool of savings made possible by the recent down-sizing of their family. Through a little loan-sharking she compounded it into a tidy sum.
Mom then set to work making her world beautiful and bearable again in the absence of her Olga by remodeling the apartment. She scoured the countryside and procured the services of the best jack-of-all-trades handyman around. And in typical Mom fashion, she got him at rock-bottom prices. I mean this guy was really good. He did it all. Walls, floors, cabinets, furniture, plumbing, windows, doors, you name it.
This is how the spring and summer of 2004 unfolded. Masha in her $50 bra sitting on the bench downstairs with the babas; and Mom toiling upstairs in her $2 bra, supervising the handyman. Sitting, chewing and spitting, gold teeth glimmering in the bright summer sun, the babas plotted against them. The ever-babbling Masha gave them the one half of the intel they needed to run their operation. They gathered the other half through surveillance runs on Mom’s apartment under cover of asking to use her telephone. Feigning to use another resident’s telephone is an old bench baba ploy for gaining entry to suspicious apartments.
The babushkas had to work hard to illuminate the dim light bulb above Masha’s head. Now that she had acquired the foreclosed apartment and would be knocking down the wall between it and hers, shouldn’t she be looking for a good-but-cheap handyman? In addition to knocking down the wall she would need to remodel it to match the state of her existing luxurious digs. The babas told Masha that while in Mom’s apartment using the telephone they had beheld beauteous and wonderful things. Mom’s handy man was even better than rumored, they observed. He was working miracles up there, and for a pittance! Masha had better get him they nodded in unison, and sooner than later, for these kinds of blessings always seemed to slip away in FSU where “seize the day” and “screw your comrade” are ways of life.
The babas then set to work on Mom, whom they knew could put two and two together without any help, and on whom they could count on for a for quicker response. The babas had watched the handyman slowly but steadily fall from Mom’s grace as the remodeling project progressed. His initially stellar work had begun to take on directly inverse relationship to each incremental cash payment Mom gave him. With a few paychecks under his belt, and once again the typically Slavic-FSU penchant for seizing the day, the hot-shot handyman began to lose his fire. He spent his earnings on cigarettes, sausages, and vodka. He dawdled and began showing up late, drunk, and sometimes not at all. The project lapsed despite Mom’s best attempts. After all, motivating a privatized work force, was a subject in which even Mom, was sadly out of her element.
The babas made a catalytic move that set off a chain reaction, like a big, organic Ukrainian Rube Goldberg mousetrap. They audibly criticized Mom for her management of the remodeling job, more specifically, of the handyman. She should fire that lout they chided. Next thing you know he would be stealing things. This pushed Mom, the ever volatile, over the edge, and she did it. Just like that. And in this fashion, the babas succeeded in helping Masha steal Mom’s less-than-miraculous handyman, and in making bitter enemies out of Mom and Masha.
Although she was glad to be rid of him, seeing her just-fired handyman on his way up to Masha’s apartment to work each day proved too much for Mom. By the time Olga arrived from America for her visit, Mom was fit to be tied. Mom cheered up a bit, although the insult dealt by Masha festered dangerously inside her. And this is when the babas decided to tell Mom and Olga about the $50 bra. Olga shuddered. She knew her Mom. And she knew Mom was now a time bomb just waiting to go off.
Doug Salem
(of Olga Salem’s GoEastNow
www.goeastnow.com)
To be continued…
Doug Salem
