Snippets of an Eastern Block Childhood
When I was little we had green linoleum in the kitchen. There was a break between the two sheets that covered the floor, a dark brown line that ran parallel to the cabinet on the left, a few inches away from it. The counter was checkered red laminate, with peeling corners. My parents kept a silver turkish coffee pot (ibric) in the far right corner, on a tray, together with a corkscrew and heads of garlic. After my father came back from India, they kept a big-bellied teapot there and loose leaf tea. Opposite the counter was the table, pushed lengthwise against the wall. It was a rickety, lightweight table with round silver legs and a checkered tablecloth. I always sat at the end of the table facing the window, leaning my back against the fridge. My father would sit opposite, right next to the pantry door. Whenever anyone needed anything from the pantry while we were sitting down to eat, my father would have to get up so he could open the pantry door.
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Summers were brutal. I lived on the 9th floor of a 10-story concrete building. We had no air conditioning, and temperatures got into the 90s for months at a time. It got so hot that parts of the street would randomly melt, collecting the footprints of the passers-by like a record of the scorching heat.
Keeping cool was a race against the heat, a game of cat and mouse. We would open the windows at night to let the cooler air in.
Our little apartment stretched the width of the building, so opening all the windows created a lot of cross-breeze. It was a rectangle split in half by a central hallway: the kitchen, my dad’s darkroom and my room on one side, the living room and parents’ bedroom on the other. Tiny bathrooms adjoined the two bedrooms: bare concrete floors with a rectangular drain in a corner, a toilet with a tank affixed to the wall and a jangling pull chain, a heavy pedestal porcelain sink. Neither bathroom had a window, so my dad jerry-rigged an extractor fan in the big bathroom.
In the morning, as the soon as the sun came up we would close the blinds. We had these straw roller shades with purple and white stitching, and I would make it a game to guess what time it was by looking at the color of the light peeking through: yellow in the morning, turning white at mid-day and darkening orange towards the afternoon.
Our movements were constrained by the time of day. We did our shopping early: walking to the shuk, the outdoor market, before 10 in the morning, finishing the cooking by noon and resting motionless, drenched in sweat in our darkened bedrooms until the afternoon.
