Part 1 - The Door

📖 The Rooms We Live In — Contents

Mathematics tomorrow. I remembered late.

I am in Year 4, and homework still feels sacred.

Besides, Sashka Popov will never let me copy his work.

I spread my books across the dining table. 

My father jumps up from his chair in front of the television. 

Loud and animated, he shouts at the referee on the screen.

It is the semi-final: Dinamo Kyiv against Spartak Moscow. Dinamo is leading by one goal.

The Central Stadium stands at the end of our street. The rolling hum enters through the open balcony doors.

The game is nearing full-time. The referee gives Dinamo another penalty.

The clock strikes nine.

The match disappears.

Nine is time for Vremya.

Mechanical trumpets explode from the television.

My father swears loudly at the man in the grey suit with the square face.

The voice is grey too, I think.

He is new. Usually, the nightly news is read by an ageless woman who looks like my school principal, only with heavier lipstick.

The television sits perched on top of our new Czechoslovakian sideboard. It is my mother’s pride and joy.

Weeks of queuing at the Central Univermag, Kyiv's main department store, had finally paid off.

All day long she could run across the street to check what had been “thrown out” for sale that morning: oranges, sausages, Czech shoes, crystal, winter boots.

My mother kept telling everyone in the communal kitchen, shouting over the noise of three other families and their cooking, how lucky she was that the Mining Institute where she worked stood nearby.

We shared our apartment with three other families. Each family had one room of its own, while the kitchen, bathroom and long corridor belonged to everyone. From morning until night, news and gossip floated above simmering pots.

So now we are the owners of peak Soviet glam: an imported Czechoslovakian sideboard — dark polished wood standing on slender, angled legs. 

My mother positioned it awkwardly against the old double doors, trying to hide them, but the doors stretched floor-to-ceiling — too wide and imposing to disappear behind a slim piece of Czech modernity.

Behind the sliding glass stood crystal stemware and patterned teacups no one ever used.

Every family in our apartment, all my classmates, perhaps the entire Soviet Union, proudly displayed some variation along their walls.

Once a year, at exactly the same time, my mother removed every piece for washing and polishing.

Old newspapers were stacked carefully beside the table. Brezhnev's speeches turned out to be useful for polishing crystal and, when toilet paper disappeared again, for other household needs.

It is late now, and I hear voices drifting from the kitchen, neighbours still gossiping about the day.

My father steps onto the balcony for a cigarette, and lonely tram bells spill into the room from outside. 

I am in bed.

Late spring darkness enters through the tall windows, softening the room.

The night lamp catches the ceiling. Plants and waves curl above me. The rosettes around the chandelier throw long shadows across the walls.

I look again at the tall double doors behind the new Czech sideboard.

Floor-to-ceiling. White painted wood. The lower half is completely blocked by the sideboard, but the top of the grand frame still looms above it.

I know our neighbours live on the other side.

But I do not understand why there is a door in the middle of our room.

📖 The Rooms We Live In — Contents

→ Part 2 — Rosa