Lady M., revisited

Elena Mikhailovna - not Pavlovna - was my first host mother. The day I arrived, she gave me a bowl and a mug, rimmed with painted bees, for which she designated a spot on the counter. She ladled oatmeal mush or buckwheat (or the mystery soup of the day) into my bowl. Her glasses slipped off her nose; she shoved them back like Sisyphus. When I had excused myself, she called her teenage son, Kiril, to the table, and served him. She herself never ate, as far as I could tell. She liked to stand with her hands on her hips and lecture me about the dangers of Paris, where, she said, men reached out of cars and snatched the pocketbooks of pedestrians. "Hold it close," she said. 

In the kitchen there stood a washing machine. Elena M. said it didn't work. At first I took her word for it, but I grew suspicious when I came home to find that all the sheets and towels had been washed and the machine still throbbed, its forehead streaked with condensation dew. But I didn't have the nerve to pursue the matter. Without complaining, I washed my clothes by hand and hung them on the clothesline strung across the kitchen between the two refrigerators.

Yes, there were two refrigerators. Elena M. only ever took food from the first. I opened it when I was home alone one day, and found it empty. She had inexplicably transferred the food to the second fridge. To further complicate the situation, there was only one bucket for the entire household, so often my laundry was held up for days while Kiril soaked his grimy clothes.