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Over the Radiola’s face was pulled a special sound-friendly cloth thru which you easily could trace the big oval speaker beneath the round sleeping eye whose glass flashed up with green when you clicked on the Two-in-One on. The long low plate of glass inserted along the front side bottom bridged the control knobs: the power and volume adjustment (2 in 1) above the range selection switch on the right, and only one knob on the left—for fine-tuning to the wavelength. The glass plate was glossy black except for four horizontal transparent stripes, from end to end, marked with irregular hair-width vertical snicks and the names of capital cities, like, Moscow, Bucharest, Warsaw. While twirling the knob of fine adjustment, you could follow, thru those transparent stripes in the glass, the progress of the thin red slider crawling from city to city along the i
The radio was not very interesting though, it hissed and cracked and swished along with the slider movements, sometimes there would float up an a
With the turntable switched on and spi
The cabinet under Radiola held a stack of paper envelopes with gleaming black disks made at the record factory in the Aprelev City whose name was printed on the round labels about the center hole, beneath the song’s title, and the name of the singer, and the instruction that the rotation speed was 78 rpm.
Next to the adapter’s perch, there was the gearshift lever with notches for 33, 45, and 78 rpm. Disks of 33 rpm were much narrower and spun slower than 78 rpm disks, but they—so small—had two songs on each side!
Natasha shared it with us that when you launched a 33 rpm disk at the speed of 45 rpm then even the Soviet Army Choir named after Aleksandrov began to sing with Lilliputian puppet voices…
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Dad never was too keen on reading. He read nothing but The Radio magazine full of schematic blueprints of capacitor-resistor-diodes, which every month appeared in the mailbox on our apartment door. And, since Dad was a Party man, they also put there the daily Pravda and the monthly The Blocknote of Agitator filled with the hopelessly dense text ru
Because of his Party membership, twice a week Dad attended the Party Studies Evening School, if it was his “dog watch” week. He went there after work to write down the lessons in a thick copybook of leatherette covers because after two years of studying Dad had to pass a very difficult exam.
From one of the evening classes, Dad brought home a couple of Party textbooks, which they distributed among the Party members who attended the Party Studies Evening School. However, he never opened even those books, which, as it turned out, was his mistake. The bitter fruit of his neglect came out 2 years later when in one of those Party books he found his stash—a part of salary concealed from the wife for expenses at one’s own discretion. Full of heartfelt regret and belated self-reproach lamented Dad over the find, because the stash was in the money used before the monetary reform which turned it into fu
Among the many names used for the Object where we lived, there also was that of “Zona”, the vestige from those times when zeks were building the Object. (Zeks live and toil in “Zonas” as know all and everyone.) At the end of the second academic year at the Party Studies Evening School, Dad and other learners were taken for their examination “out of Zona” – to the nearest district center. Dad was noticeably worried and kept repeating that he knew not a damn thing, although his thick copybook was already written down to the almost very end. And who cared, dammit, argued Dad, for another year at that Party Studies Evening School!
From Out-of-Zona he returned in a very merry mood because at the examination he had got a feeble “3” and now all his evenings would be free. Mom asked how come he passed the exam without knowing a damn thing. Then Dad opened his copybook for Party Studies and showed his good-luck charm—a pencil drawing of an ass with long ears and brush-like tail, which he made during the exam on the last page and, beneath the animal, inscribed his magic formula: “pull-me-thru!”
I did not know if Dad’s story was really worth believing because he laughed so much while telling it. So I decided that I’d better not say anyone about the ass who pulled my Dad from the Party Studies Evening School…
Mom was a regular book reader in our family. Going to her workplace, she took them along for reading in her time at the Pumping Station. Those books were borrowed from the Library of Detachment. (Yes, one more name because we lived not only in the Object-Zona-Mailbox but also in the Military Detachment number so and so.)
The library wasn’t too far away, about one kilometer of walking. First, down the concrete road, until, at the Gorka’s foot, it was crossed by the asphalt road and, after the intersection, the concrete road got replaced with the dirt-road street between two rows of wooden houses behind their low fencing and strips of narrow front gardens. The street ended by the House of Officers, but about a hundred meters before it there was a turn to the right, towards the one-story brick building of the Detachment’s Library.
Sometimes, Mom took me with her down there and, while she was exchanging her books in the back of the building, I waited in the big empty front room where instead of any furniture there hung lots of posters all over the walls. The central poster presented a cross-section outline of the atomic bomb (because the full name of the Object we lived in was the Atomic Object).
Besides the posters with the bomb anatomy and atomic blast mushrooms, there were also pictures about the training of NATO spies. In one of them the spy, who jumped from behind on a sentry’s back was tearing the soldier’s lips with his fingers. I felt creepy horror but could not look away from it and only thought to myself, O, come on, Mom, please, change the borrowed books sooner.
At one of such visits, I plucked the heart up to ask Mom if I also could borrow books from the library. She answered that, actually, that was the library for adults but still led me to the room where a librarian woman was sitting at her desk on which the stacks of various thick books left only room for a lamp and the long plywood box beneath it, filled with the readers’ cards, and my Mom told her that she did not know what to do about me because I had already read the entire library they had at school. Since then I always went to the Detachment’s Library alone, without Mom. Sometimes, I even exchanged her books and brought them home together with the two or three for me.
The books for my reading were scattered at ready over the big sofa because I read them in a scrambled way. On one of the sofa’s armrests, I crawled across the front line together with the reco