After rotating the spool with the loosely wound film on it for five minutes, the solution was poured out of the cistern, the film washed with freshwater and then treated with rotation in the fixing solution followed by one more washing out. For drying, the film was pinned on a rope just like a usual laundry. But if before the final washing, the film got awkwardly exposed to the tiniest beam of light, it got spoiled and instead of frames, you’d have just a glittering black ribbon of a film, a throwaway.
When there collected several developed films, Dad arranged a photo lab in the bathroom. He covered the bath with two deal shields made for the purpose. They served as the desktop upon which he put the photo-projector with its downward-looking lens. In the photo lab, Dad used a special red lamp, because of photo paper’s exceeding sensitivity, and only the red light didn’t damage it.
The projector was also equipped with a movable light filter of red glass, right beneath the lens, so that light-sensitive photo paper would not become a throwaway while you’re adjusting the image sharpness with the lens.
All frames in the film were negative—black faces with white lips and eye sockets, and the hair whiter than snow. After adjusting the sharpness, the red filter was turned aside so that the crude light from the projector would pour thru the film frame onto the paper, while Dad counted down the seconds needed for exposure and then returned the filter back into its place.
Then the completely white sheet of photo paper was taken from under the projector and put into a small rectangular basin filled with the developer solution, which sat next to the red light lamp whose glowing couldn’t disperse black darkness in the room and only turned it into a sorcerer’s chamber. Under the dim light of the red lantern, commenced the magic in the plastic basin and, on a clean white sheet, there gradually appeared clothes, hair, facial features.
Yet, pictures should not stay in the developer for too long, or their paper would turn into black wet squares. The rightly developed pictures were taken out with the pincers, rinsed in freshwater, and placed in the next small basin with the fixer, otherwise, they would blacken all the same; then, after five to ten minutes, the ready pictures were transferred into a large enamel washing tub filled with water.
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.
But hanging the washing was a job for adults because there were no linen ropes in the Courtyard and everyone dried their washing in the attic of their house. Only Dad could lift the heavy basin with half-wet things up the vertical iron ladder and thru the hatch above the landing.
However, with his strong, golden, hands, he once created a long-term problem for himself. It’s when he made a “bug” inside the electric meter, so that it would not rotate, even with all the lights on and the washing machine buzzing busily in the bathroom.
Dad said it reduced the bills for electricity, but he feared very much that the controllers would catch us “bugging” and punish with a big fine. Why create so much worries for yourself because of saving on bills?
As for Mom, she never did unreasonable things, except for those yellow corduroy shorts with suspenders, that she sewed for me in the kindergarten. Oh, how I hated them! And, as it turned out, not for naught – in those hateful shorts I was when the red cannibal ants molested me so severely…
~ ~ ~
At one of my solo forest walks, I went out into a glade and felt there was something not quite right, yet what namely? Aha! It's the thin smoke that never belonged to the usual woodland picture. And then I saw flames, almost transparent in the sunlight, fluttering, charring the bark of trees and creeping over the thick carpet of dry Pine needles on the ground. So, it’s the forest fire!
At first, I tried to trample out the flames on the needles, but it did not work. Yet, a small Juniper with multiple dense twigs severed from its roots turned the right thing for quenching the underfoot flames and was efficiently killing the fire on trees trunks.
After the tiresome fight and glorious victory, the burnt area turned out not enormously big, about ten to ten meters. My shirt and hands bore smudges of black soot, yet I didn’t mind because the battle dirt is not dirty. I even ran my sooty hand over my face to ensure it got smeared too so that everyone could see at once – here’s the hero who saved the forest from the death in the great fire.
Unfortunately, I met no one on the way home. Walking the empty trail, I dreamed of being written about in The Pioneer Pravda, where they published an article about a pioneer who signaled with his red tie to the locomotive driver about the damaged railway ahead.
And only entering the Courtyard, I met, at last, two passers-by. They looked at me alertly but none of them asked, “Where does this black soot in your face come from? It looks like you've been fighting a forest fire, have you?”
At home, Mom yelled at me for going around so dirty, and no washing machine would do to keep my shirts clean. I felt unjustly hurt but suffered silently…
On summer evenings, the children of Block and mothers of those kids, who as of yet were to be looked after, went out of the Courtyard onto the surrounding road of concrete. Everyone was waiting for the platoon from the Recruit Depot Barracks to come up to the road for their usual drilling promenade.