The Rooms We Live in

This story began with a door hidden behind a Czech sideboard in a Kyiv apartment and slowly became a story about the people who lived there before me.

About rooms, memory, and the strange things that survive history.

This is Part 1.

The Door

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 old city feels flooded with football fever. 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.

My mother told everyone over the shared stoves 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.

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.

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 panels stood rows of crystal stemware and patterned teacups — luxuries nobody ever touched.

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

The crystal existed primarily for admiration.

Once a year, my mother removed each piece for washing and polishing. The ritual took place at exactly the same time every year.

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 room exhales and becomes unusually quiet. 

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, exposed and out of place.

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.

To be continued...