Mom Galya

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

In the hustle and bustle of the working day, I once again grab the telephone receiver, which almost never stops during the day, and a clear girlish voice, without any preface, loudly and joyfully announces:

- Mom, it's me. I came.

A natural question whirls through my head,"

Perhaps I went headlong into work, leaving several hours a week for the family, but not to the same extent that I forget that I have a grown-up son, not a daughter. And if it happens that my daughter-in-law calls me, then I recognize her by the pause she makes before speaking. She kind of ponders which words to say first today, "Mom, it's me" or "Hello, it's me." Her phrases change depending on how she treats me at the moment: she loves me or is angry with me.

The other two employees also have sons, by the way, they are not yet married.

I do not have time to do an express analysis of the marital status of all the employees, when one of them, seeing my puzzled look and the raised telephone receiver, almost runs up to me with a questioning and apologetic look:

- Someone on the phone?

And almost immediately the affirmative:

- It's me.

Silently I pass the phone to her. Really hers.

- Tanya, Tanechka, have you come? Her voice sounds even happier than on the other end of the line.

- Wait, I'll come out to you now.

And then the phrase already addressed to me:

- I won't be away for long, can I? My daughter came.

- Of course, go, dear Galina Anatolyevna.

We have been working together for so long, and as foreigners say about us, that we, Russians, try to live at work, and they only work, that's why I know how dear these words are for her, uttered in a hurried girlish voice into the telephone receiver.

I remember this woman as a girl. She was too independent and knew how to do any job - female and male, so she was in no hurry to get married, and was waiting for her husband to match herself. But seeing how the years go by, and the prince is still gone, she decided to marry a divorced man. And everything seemed to be not bad - my husband graduated from college, got a two-room apartment, she gave birth to his son.

But only two children (a boy and a girl) of her husband, left with their mother after the divorce, more and more often began to look at the light in Galina's apartment. It was bad for them with their own mother. Their three-room apartment quietly turned into a two-room apartment, where alcoholic drinks were drunk late after midnight and drunken voices sounded.

And then we heard from our Gali:

- Girls, I will probably take the children to my place for now. After all, they are still only ten years old. Sorry for them.

And then, already a timid hope for the almost unrealizable:

- It may turn out to exchange their mother's apartment. Give them a share, someday.

But this "someday" has not happened until now. All five continue to huddle in an apartment allocated by the state for a family of three, which now has less than six meters for each inhabitant. And in the apartment of their mother-cuckoo, her brothers who returned from prison began to live. The mother herself (if she can still be called such a lofty word) went to wander around the world in search of adventures on her own head. From time to time she can be found in the market in a coat that Galina gave her with her children so that she would not freeze.

Not everything went smoothly with the arrival of children in the family. It always seemed to the boy that everything should be provided to him on a silver platter. But there was no money in this family for expensive things, and there was only the warmth of the big soul of a fragile woman. And how many evenings she spent in conversations with the boy, trying to explain to him what the values of life are, as she understood them herself.

There were fewer problems with the girl, and Galya's mother was the first to whom she revealed her girlish secrets. But, a constantly cutting ear, dry - "Aunt Galya", from a child whom she did not just raise, but put a part of her soul into him, in the depths of this soul, at its very bottom, a quiet sadness lurked.

The husband completely shifted the upbringing of children onto the shoulders of this woman, who was accustomed to be responsible for everything. How many times have we listened to her stories about the antics of children, and in conclusion, the favorite man's phrase of her husband: “It’s you who spoiled them so much,” which even made us raise our eyebrows in surprise.

And if we add to everything that his own son grew up nearby, a desired child from a late marriage. A child who wanted to give everything. And this cannot be done, because it must be divided into three.

Much fell to the lot of this always affable and helpful woman. She had to lie on a hospital bed, where there was a sign, encrypted by doctors, but long ago deciphered by patients, with such a terrible name - "cancer" and forbid herself to even think that those four left in the apartment could be orphaned in one day. And, probably, this ban helped her to cope even with this terrible disease and return to work.

And to our feminine:

- Galya, now you yourself need help and food is good, and you feed other people's children with a living mother."

Galya just said:

- I already feel sorry for my labors. And they are now almost adults.

And then she added quietly:

- Yes, I'm used to it.

Together with her, we went through times of inflation, when we had to go to work but not get paid. Then the leaders of our company shrugged their shoulders in surprise: No money. Well, what do you want. And we didn’t want anything for ourselves, we had to feed the children. We simply didn’t have the right to come home with empty bags.

And this went on for more than one month, not two. With small handouts in the amount of one hundred or fifty rubles, for which one could only buy bread, but with long queues at the cash register, where they were given out, and where the most impatient with "obscenities", in the literal sense of the word, climbed over their heads to be first, we lived for over four years.

No, these were not the times of the revolution or the Great Patriotic War - these were the times of perestroika, it was in the first half of the nineties.

Now the boy and the girl are already nineteen years old.

The boy still has not called her mom. And the girl….

It's good that girls grow up earlier.