Part 2 - Rosa
📖 The Rooms We Live In — Contents
I never met her.
My father did not have a single photograph of Rosa, his mother. Nor of her sister, who studied voice at the Kyiv Conservatory, her older brother, who later made his name in medicine, or their parents.
They owned this apartment before the revolutions, before the wars, before the communal kitchens and Czech wall units.
In the years after the Revolution, the apartment began to shrink. Another family was assigned several rooms. Doors that had once connected bedrooms and sitting rooms now separated neighbours. By the time war came, Rosa's world occupied only part of the apartment she had grown up in.
But back in 1916, the building was brand new.
The streets around the old centre were filled with curved balconies, coloured tiles, wrought iron and tall windows.
The balcony doors stayed open late into summer evenings.
Music drifted upward from the synagogue and mingled with the sounds of the streetcars below.
At night, the plaster rosettes above the chandelier caught the glow of the street lamps, their shadows moving softly across the ceiling.
Kyiv is in love with Art Nouveau, but Rosa is in love with music.
Not what her parents expected, or what her beloved professor Lysenko taught her.
Rosa was lost to ragtime.
“The Maple Leaf Rag.” “The Entertainer.” Scott Joplin had travelled to Kyiv, folded inside sheets of music from Moscow.
She hid the forbidden sheets inside the grand piano, amused by the obviousness of the hiding place.
But today, on her sixteenth birthday, she is pleading with her brother to cut off her heavy braid.
She had planned it carefully around his visit home from Moscow. He could never say no to her. He was a medical student and carried the heavy scissors she needed.
Rosa did not want the silk blouse he brought her. She wanted a haircut.
“Like kursistki,” she tells him, thinking of the serious young women students she had seen around the city, books pressed tightly against their chests, hair cut straight across at the nape of the neck.
So they stand there together, staring at the mirror in amusement, her dark locks scattered across the floor.
The cut is slightly uneven, revealing the natural wave in her hair and her long neck.
It is much shorter than expected.
She shakes her head, feeling the lightness of it now, thrilled by the mistake they have just made.
The black dress. The short haircut. The exposed neck.
She throws open the large wooden doors to the living room, where the family is waiting for the birthday dinner.
She steps out of the bedroom.
Below, the city keeps moving toward the future.
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