We, the generation of thirty years old, still caught those grandmothers.
I remember, some time ago, in the visits to a friend, I was very surprised to see how her grandmother, after eating, before wiping out the table, carefully collects all the little ones that fell on him and carefully, from the palm, sends them into the mouth.
I knew that she had survived war and famine, and it must have been the ghosts of this hungry past that made her, more than sixty years after the war, so ridiculous to gather these, no one in the two thousand unnecessary crumbs.
I understood it. The head. Because she explained so, noticing my intrigued and unintelligent look.

In fact, I couldn’t understand inside.
It was so old, and so strange. Collect the crumbs when after the war more than sixty years have passed and the shops are full of bread. What kind of bread you want. And any food at all.
That seemed stupid to me. Almost a marriage.

* * * * * *
We once sat down with a longtime friend, also Katka, and she was telling about her childhood. And about the cabbage.

Well, that is, her childhood came to the nineties, when there was a tension with the sausage. In general, of course, the tension was with everything, but for some reason it was the sausage, the ordinary, the same cooked sausage, which was once twenty or twenty, and then it was gone, imprinted in the memory as an exceptional delicacy.

So here. Coal has become a deficit. And when she, however, appeared somewhere, it was expensive, and her mother, raising two younger children, simply had no money for her. Well, that is, they were enough for some cabbage, bread and cabbage. No to the sausage.
And here Katka told me how she wanted sausages as a child.
And then, when she was fifteen, she had a girlfriend, Natasha.
And Natasha had a grandfather, a taxi driver. And he had money. And the sausage, the same sausage that my friend’s mother couldn’t afford to buy, just lay in Natashkin’s refrigerator, and nobody ate it.
That was wild.
And Natasha always made her friend sandwiches with sausages.

Many years passed. My friend has a life, she has earned herself for an apartment and a car, and she is dressed expensive, and her refrigerator at home if you open - there is everything you want. Meat, marinated in a special way, shrimp from the palm, cheese...
And the usual cooked sausage is almost never in it.

Katka said she doesn’t buy it often yet. In my head, a screw was firmly stuck: the sausage is a expensive delicacy, not for every day.
Katka told me that one day, buying just for dinner an exceedingly expensive meat, marinated in a special way, thought that now would be just a piece of sausage... and didn’t buy. The Delicate.
Only at home did all this absurdity come to her.
However, she says, if the sausage appears in the refrigerator, it does not hold in it. Because Katka begins to go to the refrigerator every ten minutes, convincing her a little bit, a piece, with a feeling.

* * * * * *
I listened to it and it was both weird and funny to me. It’s really stupid such a screw in the head. And apparently for a lifetime.
Now that everything is there, and thinking of the sausage as a delicacy is strange.
These are some kind of fun childhood ghosts. It is funny.

Then I went home and put something in the closet. I thought I wanted to get a coff.
Suddenly, for the first time, I really noticed that there were a lot of boxes in my closet. And there are shoes. Some of them I have never swallowed, they lie, bought, new, different, kind all, skin.
I began to take those boxes out, fold them near the closet, and counted thirteen pieces.
Thirteen pairs of shoes.
For you to understand, I do not get out of my favorite timberlands, and I drag them in the tail and in the hryvnia.
There are thirteen pairs of shoes in my closet.

It immediately became not funny.
When I was very young and still in school, for some reason I almost never had normal autumn shoes. I don’t remember what was there with the winter, but the memory of what I was walking in completely shattered, and why it didn’t go away in my head.
But with autumn, it was delayed. Shoes my mom bought rarely, very rarely, there was no money, and if something new was bought, it was not at all, and so, it would go.

And also I remember walking in the worn shoes that her sister gave her mother, we had the same size legs and shoes all the aunts were comfortable, but some quite adult, what, exactly what aunts are. And I was always terribly ashamed of this shoe, and I never had anything to wear for a school walk. The clothes were most often worn by my mother. I had to take the shoes that I already had. And there was always one pair for several seasons, and then it was wrapped up and the rope somewhere began to fly away, and I always thought that nobody would notice this rotting.
It was shameful. Very shameful.
And that shame, apparently, was forever wrapped in the head with such a screw, and it could not be removed.

Many years passed. I buy shoes and I don’t even notice it. I don’t wear them almost, well, because I have something to wear, but I buy, not even very understanding why. About the stock, right?
Just these stockpile of shoes are there and I am calm that I will never in my life again have the teeth and that shame when you think that it's all noticed.
This is a childhood ghost.

And I, when I got these boxes and thought that, probably, it is worth a portion to reward, suddenly caught some such a state, not even fear, but grief, what... As if I had to give something very, very necessary, to take away from myself.
I put them back in the closet. I thought it would be hard for me to give back my shoes, because then I would be without shoes again.
I will not give my shoes. Let me not even wear them, but let them stand.
I must have shoes.

Also, don’t laugh, I make stocks, money in bottles. I am collecting coins in pots and then hiding them somewhere, hiding them, then remembering, finding, recounting coins and... rejoicing, so stupidly rejoicing with these coins.
And I hide banknotes, and I don't even specially hide them, namely that I find some stupid hiding and treasure, and sometimes I rub myself, and I understand: it's reflective. It is fear.
And I understand with my mind that these reserves are strange, really peculiar, and to me, if it happens, they will not profit at all, and for nothing they are, when long ago there are cards on which money, but these pots are my very childish reserves, if my mother suddenly says to me then, many years ago, "Katy, we have no money...", I will start getting my pots and small bills, and we will have money.

* * * * * *
Probably everyone has something like that, a special point, a screw, when a man suddenly becomes an old lady collecting the drowned crumbs.
The war has long passed.
________

Ekaterina Unnamed