Married to Mother-in-Law (Fieldwork Encounters)
Her first mother-in-law was a third-tier party boss. Stately, tall, with grand breasts — Alla showed on herself how great her breasts were — and with a thin waist, she was powerful and impressive.
She and Alla were sitting at the table in her house: a spatial apartment in a good, quiet and drowning in parks part of Moscow. I said that the cups we were drinking coffee from after the plate of borsch and some meat, were nice. Thin, painted, these porcelain wonders were made in GDR in the 1950s, she said; that’s why she recalled her mother-in-law.
“She taught me to love such things,” Alla said. “Only many years later, I realized that I was married to my mother-in-law. She actually sent me to the Course for the Wives of Chiefs.”
“What?” I asked. “There were such courses in the Soviet time?”
“Yes, there were. We were taught everything: how to iron shirts and pants; how to meet guests and part with them; how to arrange the table; how to cut the meat and cheese [narezka].”
Her house was full of such riches as the porcelain cups I was gazing at. She collected beautiful things throughout her life and lovingly preserved and displayed them in cabinets with glass doors.
She had a collection of gzhel porcelain, and pearls of this collection were figurines made a century ago. Gzhel lived through a revival as the Russian traditional art, but the old gzhel, still made quickly and painted briskly, was markedly different from the new gzhel: simpler.
She had two copies of one thing — a beautiful composition of rooster and chick around a nest of chickens — and offered me one copy at the beginning of our meeting, but I refused.
She had a lot of decorations of semi-precious stones in her apartment, as well as bronze horses statuettes, a huge porcelain swan vase, silverware, and, among all this, she lived a solitary but not so solitary life of a widow with adult children and her clients coming to her house. Alla was a psychologist.
“So, was your first husband also a chief?” I asked.
“No, he wasn’t,” Alla responded.
The mother-in-law sent the wife of her son to the course for the wives of chiefs because he certainly deserved to be treated like one. Unaware, she prepared her daughter-in-law for the second marriage.
Alla’s second husband was much older than her. He was a big chief indeed, a CEO of a Soviet factory of heavy industry that he was a director of and was fast and sharp to privatize on the wave of privatization.
“And how long did the course last?”
“Three or four months.”
For three or four months women were taught how to iron shirts and pants and be good wives for the Soviet bosses. That was certainly something interesting. I did not recall reading about such courses. They were not widely advertised in the Soviet times, nor widely analyzed later.
She decided to accompany me a bit on my way home. Walking through the alleys as we passed the Timiryazev agricultural academy, I noticed the elaborately cut trees and asked her if she had a dacha.
“I had a dacha,” Alla responded.
And she proceeded with a memory in a lower, softer voice: “I once gave my husband a birthday present by arranging a garden. I invited a landscape designer, and she and I worked on creating Alpine Mountain meadows and a Japanese garden.”
She kept a moment of silence and added. “By the way, the next day I came and saw that the gardener — Vanya — mowed grass and, as he did, scattered my rocks.” — “Oh my, why?” — “He did not see the beauty in what we created.”
When her second husband grew old, he fell sick. He also had a general change of mood. Life slipped out of his hands, and he lived on that dacha inviting prostitutes and experiencing lapses of memory. The sharing of his property after his death between his children from the first marriage and Alla and her children did not go smoothly. By asking about the dacha, I inadvertently stumbled upon something that still felt like a lack to her.
Alla and I parted ways near the metro station. I went home — with a gzhel vase that I had to accept, but at least this one was not an old rarity — and she, back to her apartment of horses and statuettes.
