Norah planted vegetables in the garden of the workshop. One day, sitting in the garden with a thermos of black Russian tea on her lap, Norah had an inspiration. It was the end of September and the air was chilly. There was a shortage of coal and, by decree of the Party, heat was allowed only in public buildings. Citizens were required to sacrifice their private comfort for the general well-being. Only people who held positions of importance or knew someone who knew someone were able to get wood for fuel. “Silvia,” Norah shouted in joy, “we’re open every day and our building is heated!”
Silvia painted a comma after “Home”—the last word of the movie title—and wrote in large orange letters, “A Warm Place To Be.” Norah heated the room well, put back all the chairs, reserved the front two rows for the commissar, kept the lights on, and let the movie play.
As autumn advanced and the nights became colder, word spread, and people began coming to warm up at the theater. They visited with friends and family, played cards, ate dinner, cut their hair, and sewed clothes. Children played hide-and-seek, grandmothers knitted, and everyone kept warm before going home to sleep when the movie theater closed at eleven.
Even though attendance was high, Silvia continued to paint new scenes on the billboard—if only out of boredom and for her own pleasure. She took increasing liberties to slowly transform the blonde. Her lips grew fuller. Her eyes took on an oriental slant. Her white blouse soon revealed cleavage. The hero’s mother, in contrast, became increasingly disheveled. Endless interpretations circulated in the city. When Silvia’s mother-in-law got sick, the billboard showed Ivanov crying, while from her deathbed the mother-in-law was pointing a finger at the blonde. From that moment on, people suspected that the paintings on the billboard were just as often about Silvia’s relationship with her husband and mother-in-law as about the heroic Private Ivanov.
To attract more people, Silvia and Norah decided to go one step further and paint scenes that were not even remotely in the movie. On the International Day of Women, the blonde appeared dressed in a doctor’s coat, holding a book and a microscope. The mother wore a dark blue dress for the occasion, along with a bright red scarf. On the International Day of Children, Ivanov and several children were pointing to the sky, where pink, magenta, and green letters spelled out the message:
In our schools
There is a teacher for every student
And a student for every teacher.
And when the blonde and the mother were shown embracing, next to a flag-draped tank, the local newspaper congratulated Silvia for her contribution to world peace.
By spring, everyone in town knew the lines from the movie by heart and was using them in daily conversations. When taking a bus, the driver might ask in Russian, “Kuda ty napravlyaesh’sya, geroy? Where are you going, my hero?” In the schoolyard children would tell each other, “Da, ya geroiou, I am a hero! Ya poluchil razreshenie na visit domoy! I’ve received permission to go home!” Speaking Russian was patriotic; using the movie’s dialogue in Russian was ironic. Norah would return from the market and say, “Vot hleb, I got bread,” or “A myasa n’et, there is no meat.” Visiting friends would declare, “Ja prin’os zakuski, I brought appetizers,” or “Ja prin’os vodku, I brought vodka.”
After another year of painting scenes from the life of Private Ivanov, Silvia felt entitled to change the plot. She painted on the billboard a wedding between the blonde and a doctor. Comrade Commissar Nico found the choice appealing—doctors are few and people give them bribes. Only his political supervisor believed the blonde’s choice was disparaging of the peasant working class. Silvia should have married the blonde to a miner or a metal worker, not to a bourgeois intellectual. A red flag should have been painted in connection with the wedding. As it was, the painting on the billboard was not acceptable. It had to be repainted. The Party instructed Silvia to paint only scenes that advanced the goals of the working class.
“If you say so,” Silvia replied.
Soon after the billboard incident, the Party approved the screening of a new movie. Angelica, a film about a French woman who leads the people to kill the king and the aristocrats, was the first French movie to arrive in the country after the war. Everybody was eager to see the new film and to learn the dialogue. Silvia was especially enthusiastic. She now had a new repertoire to paint on the billboard: a queen, a palace, people riding on horses. To prepare for the arrival of the film, Silvia cleaned the workshop, moved the ping-pong table to a corner, found some new brushes, and sent her mother-in-law around town to find paint. The mother-in-law knew a person who had some yellow paint—a rarity at the time—so she acquired it in exchange for another “Jesus weeping over Jerusalem” icon.
Unacquainted with Silvia’s talents, and much to everyone’s surprise, the French sent hundreds of large, glossy, heavy-stock posters along with the film. In the poster Angelica is standing on a barricade waving the French flag. She’s wearing a white blouse beneath a purple mantle that covers her body. In the chaos of the French Revolution, her breasts are exposed, and one of her legs is visible all the way to the hip. Her blonde hair floats in the wind. In the background, one can see the king’s palace on fire. A young man falling backward off his white horse is raising an arm, a bullet hole spotting his white shirt.
Silvia found the posters banal. They didn’t show interior drama. They evoked no emotions, nor had they any message for the working class. The best thing about the posters was the smell of the ink; otherwise, the painting was childish, and Angelica’s costume frivolous. Silvia decided to repaint the posters to conform to the Party line. In exchange for a painting of the blonde kissing the soldier, Silvia’s mother-in-law obtained two kilograms of salami from the Party’s shop, which she bartered for some red dye from the flag factory. Silvia diluted the red dye and covered Angelica’s exposed leg. With the recently acquired yellow, she covered the breasts. On the flag Silvia wrote a message for the working class: “Comrades, look to the horizon—We have tractors!”
Your book looks interesting. Is it available at local bookstores? I hope your reading scheduled for February 10 gets rescheduled.