When the printing was over, Dad turned on the light in the bathroom, the charmer’s chamber disappeared, giving way to a small workshop. Dad took the wet pictures from the basin, put them face down on Plexiglas sheets and ran rubber roller over their backs so that they stuck well.
Those glasses he leaned against the wall in the parents’ room, and the following day the dried-up photos fell off the glass to strew the floor, like the leaves from the trees in autumn only white-backed, smooth, and glossy.
…here am I with round eyes and the neck bandaged because of a sore throat …
…brother Sasha looking so credulously into the camera …
…Mom alone, or with her friends, or with the neighbors …
…and that is Natasha with her nose up in the air, and the eyes on something else happening to the right, and the ribbon tie in her pig-tail got undone as always…
Besides photography, Dad also was a radio fan, that’s why he subscribed to The Radio magazine full of all kinds of charts.
I liked the smell of melted rosin in the kitchen when he worked with his soldering iron, collecting this or that scheme from The Radio. Once, he assembled a radio receiver a sliver larger than the FED-2 camera case. At first, it was a thin brown board with radio parts soldered to it, then he made a small box of plywood, polished it and varnished, and hid the board inside. There were just two knobs outside the box: one for adjusting the volume and the other for tuning to a radio station. Then he sewed the case for the receiver from thin leather, because he could work with the awl and knew how to alter a common thread into stitching one by twining it and applying wax and pitch. Finally, he attached a narrow shoulder strap to the case so that you could carry it and still have your hands free.
Later on, Dad made a special machine fixed on a stool to do bookbinding, and bound his The Radio magazines into volumes, one for each year. He had just golden hands.
And Mom, of course, had golden hands too because she cooked tasty meals, sewed with her Singer machine, and once a week did general washing in the washing machine “Oka”. At times, she trusted me with squeezing water out of the washing by turning the crank of the wringer fixed on top of the machine. You stick a corner of a washed thing in between its rubber rollers and when you start turning the crank, the washing is pulled thru the wringer, which squeezes brooks of water back into the machine basin. And the thing crawls out behind the rollers thinly pressed and wrung out.