Part 7 – Krivoy Rog Confidential
© Copyrighted by Doug Salem, 2004
Getting her paperwork straightened out did not occupy Olga’s entire one-month stay in Krivoy Rog. Although I was still on my road trip in the states, Olga kept me appraised with regular emails sent from the computer we bough for Mom four years ago for $600 (included modem, printer and scanner). They pay by the minute to connect to the Internet, and the rates are lower from 8:00 pm to 8:00 am local time. The most economical way to communicate through email is to connect at ten minutes after eight just long enough to download your incoming emails, disconnect, answer them and compose new ones, then reconnect and send. Mom’s monthly ISP bill is usually only $ 6 per month, but the presence of her daughter with her new, annoying Western work ethic and sense of responsibility drove it to double that. Olga, of course compensated her for it, making the 12-mile trip to the ISP’s office in the center of the city by metro to pay in cash over the counter, as is the custom.
Holed up and exhausted in hotel rooms, I down- and up-loaded my end of our correspondence on my laptop. I pictured Olga sitting in the uncomfortable chair, in the inevitably-dim FSU lighting, in what used to be her childhood bedroom, struggling with Mom’s Jerry –rigged computer. It was on the seventh floor of an immense nine-story, crumbling concrete apartment block, one of dozens built by then-Soviet-owned Krivoy Rog Steel on the outskirts of town to house it’s thousands of patriotic workers, “heroes of the State” - now neglected orphans of the State. Built in the ugly, modern “concrete panel” style, the complex’s many buildings form the letters “CCCP” (Cyrillic initials of “Soyuz Sovietskyih Sotziolisticheskih Respublic” – Union of Soviet Socialist Republic), but you would have to fly over in an airplane to appreciate it.
Olga’s parents live on the outside curve of the “P.” They moved there in 1982, when the complex was brand new. Olga was four years old. The new digs were a big step up from the “kommunalka” they had shared with another family for five years in a much older, five-story building in the city center. Mom had traveled all the way to Moscow to claim the family’s entitlement to one of the new apartments. She pleaded Pop’s many years in the yoke for Krivoy Rog Steel, and that their family had grown from two to four.
Everybody knows everybody else’s business in the apartment block. Or if they don’t, they speculate. Olga’s marriage to an American was kept under wraps, lest some nefarious characters try to extort American money out of Mom and Pop. But as the belle of the building whose love life had been closely monitored by the ever-watchful babushkas in the courtyard, Olga’s sudden disappearance had spawned rumors. To make things worse, I had slipped up during my very first visit by naively taking my coffee downstairs one morning and trying to chat up the bench babas. “Amerikanski!” they reveled, “we should have known!”
After Olga left for Ameeerika, Mom and Pop suddenly found themselves in better financial shape. Smaller utility bills, a third less food to buy, and most of all, they were spending much, much less on clothes and shoes. Plus Mom, who had been under-and un- employed ever since the wall came down, was now earning some money as an in-country agent for Olga’s little translation and flower & gift delivery business. We were not sending them a lot of money; mostly because the financial burden of Olga had been shifted to me and increased by the K-1/mail order bride assimilation process. But they were doing much better now, so Mom decided to re-invest their good fortune into a much-needed remodeling of the apartment.
She had two water heaters installed, one for the bathroom and one for the kitchen. She hired a jack-of-all-trades handyman who re-covered the floors with new, weird vinyl and new, weird carpet; and the walls in new, weird wallpaper. She had a drafty old drafty, wooden-cased window replaced with a double-paned vinyl job. She had the bathroom, water closet (“WC”), and kitchen re-tiled and other rooms re-painted. She got a new gas stove that starts from pilots instead of with matches. She got new Formica counter-tops and refaced cabinets. She got a new toilet, new living room furniture. And she converted Olga’s bedroom into an office, chopping the massive wall unit that was in the living room down to become a computer workstation with bookshelves.
She spent a whopping $1,000.
The remodeling, which took a full year, and the handyman who drank and smoked a lot, drove Pop crazy, making it impossible for him to read the newspaper, watch TV, or relax in any way. It also drove the neighbors across the hall and the bench babas downstairs mad with jealousy. This is a Russian trait you need to get used to. They hate to see somebody prosper or do better than them. They go absolutely green with envy, and they get vicious. One bench baba accused Mom of “selling her daughter to America to get money to remodel her apartment.” Yes, that’s what she said, right to her face. Mom’s characteristically diplomatic reply was “it’s none of your effing business you old shoe” as she slammed her freshly-upholstered front door on the toothless woman. (They do elaborate treatments to front doors, you know. “Trading Spaces” and “Home Depot” are way behind with regards to the latest trends in front door upholstery.
That shut the bench babas up temporarily, but now that Olga was back for a visit, they were buzzing with gossip again. “Look! She has returned by herself! She is still so skinny and almost five years with still no child! He does not feed her. And with all that food in America! What kind of marriage is that? The American has sent her back!” Chitter chatter chit. They sit on the bench, guarding the entrance to the “P” building, chewing sunflower seeds, and spitting the hulls into the dusty yard. Olga and Mom strut by with their lofty agendas – places to go, people to meet, passports to straighten out, Internet bills to pay, western babies and grandchildren to be provided for, sons and sons-in-law to meet in Russia. Make way you silly nabobs. We have progressed beyond you.
And we have our own hot water.
To be continued…
Doug Salem
