My-tì-schì

Maya Guileva

Gò-rod nash My-tì-schì, Rò-di-nòi zo-vè-tsià.

Our town My-tì-schì, That which we call our mòther-lànd.

Whilst nobody, including me, remembers a single, other line from this malignant song, its motif still mockingly follows me to all family gatherings like a particularly bad, incurable case of an aural disease. In my own, over-inflected six-year-old voice, this line comes ringing, verging on internal tremor, dragging with it a hazy memory of a Russian sub-urban town from which I had spawned, or simply — of home.

Whenever I recall it, Mytischi is always overcast, its streets of concrete apartment blocks stamped with an austere, shadowless light. It’s one of many towns that has not yet woken up in a haste to remove the statue of Lenin from its main square, so the git just stands there dumbly, hand still raised to the sky, lonely and poor, stripped of the republic, of honours and of followers. Behind him stands a battered Theatre “Fest”, a hub of battered stage productions and worn out troops, hanging by a loose, boozy thread, whose only salvation from total zapoi is the call-back for the annual New Years rush, which they accept submissively, understaffed and underpaid, rotating a malted beard, a vulgar pair of blue velvet mittens, one shabby sceptre and a pawned smile between redemptive acts as the granddaddy figure of Ded Moroz and his manic granddaughter Snegurochka.

On no particular winter, I remember being inside its derelict walls,

when the state budget stretched to hiding its ruin behind a sickening volume of tinsel. Bow on crown and bonbonierka in hand, I gazed at the four-storey, over-decorated pine, catching light beautifully in its cavernous halls. Accompanying me was my very own version of Ded Moroz, or simply, deda, still blushing from the cold, whose face, by contrast, was free from the sinister, thick layer of make-up. Whenever my greedy, childish eyes unstuck from the Sengurochka’s shimmering kokoshnik of fake jewels, and dashed to look for and find deda’s, he would scowl his dentures encouragingly, as if to say, go on, say hello, she won’t bite.

Deda has always been a man of routine. Every day, at eight o’clock in the morning, deda would leave the house with a little plastic bag in his pocket, returning strictly half an hour later, bringing two identical loafs of bread of a standardised shade of beige. After taking off his cap, hanging his sheepskin coat, unlacing and neatly tucking away his boots, sliding into a pair of heal-less slippers, he would shuffle first to the bathroom to thoroughly wash his hands with a soap bar, pat them three times on a hand towel, then shuffle to the kitchen table, already laid with a butter box, a teapot hiding a silver strainer with loose, overbrewed Assam, and a cling-filmed dish of cow cheese, and, untucking the chair, he would take his seat. He would cut one loaf, setting aside the crusted ends which he loathed, and, in no hurry, he would systematically plaster two outstanding slices with butter, smoothing the surface to perfection. Like Houdini with a butterknife, deda would hypnotise me with his methodic spreading motion, then relocate my attention to spooning heaps of white, sandy sugar into his tea, now swirling inside to the melodic scraping of metal against the teacup, before breaking the trance with a clang and a slurp, setting my ordinary day into motion.

Our town My-tì-schì,/That which we call our mòther-lànd. This hometown from memory, covered in Soviet plaque, that which the rapid crusade of capitalism hasn’t yet mopped off the face of the Earth, is the place I’d like to re-visit. I’d walk past the sordid “Fest”, past the git with his hand still raised, past the bakery where deda routinely bought bread— past Mytischi’s distinctively indistinct streetscapes soaking in dull light, those which are so prone to forgetting.