Олег Филатов – The Unknown Tsesarevitch. Reminiscences and Considerations on V. K. Filatov’s Life and Times (страница 17)

It was a three-room house. The house was of saman brick. This brick had been made at our place. It was made of clay and straw. It was all made in a large pit filled with clay, water and straw/ Then it was mixed up. A horse was driven into that pit and it trod and mixed up the mortar till it became workable

Then the mortar was poured into rectangular boxes 30x20x10 cm in size. Then the moulds were taken out and dried in the open air. The resulting bricks were then used in building. But this does not mean that every house was built of straw. There were some built of real brick and wooden planks. There were many who had gardens. It was hot in summer. They had steel tanks, pumped water into them and the whole day the water got warmed in the sun. In the evening they watered their gardens. We had nothing of the kind. Our small house stood near the old shop. There was a road in front of the house, but it was screened with enormous lilac bushes. Two windows faced the road. If one stood in front of the house then the shop and the road to Mikhailovka (a branch of the kolkhoz) was on one’s left

It was a three-room house, not including the kitchen: two small rooms and one large. In the hall, as father called it, there were bookshelves, a round table, the radio, and bookstands

The entrance was from the roadside. On one’s right there was the entrance to the corridor. The small corridor had a double door to keep the warmth. (The plan of the houses was standard). Then, on one’s left there was a kitchen (10m, on one’s right – a children’s room (12m, farther, straight ahead, – a large room, “hall” (20m, and – parents’ bedroom (16m. There were two windows in the “hall” – one window looked on to the road, the other – on to the neighbour ^{2) 2) 2) 2)}

So, when you entered the “hall”, on your right, in the corner, was the radio with a bookstand underneath. The table stood in the center. Near the door to the parents’ room there stood a bookcase. The hall was illuminated with a lusters. The house was heated by the stoves. One stove was in the kitchen, the other was in the children’s room. By order of the director of the school, the parents as teachers were always provided with coal. Father and I unloaded the coal with the spades and then carried it to the shed in buckets. One and a half bucket was enough for one day to heat the rooms in winter. Winters were very cold – we were located on the steppe, with surrounding hills

Father liked to associate with people. Not simply to speak with, but to play chess, dominoes, to go wolf-shooting, duck-shooting, fishing. He loved to take part in performances, in amateur concerts, to lecture, to see films, and to participate in competitions, etc. When we lived in Pretoria, a former middle-school director of studies Kliver Yakov Yakovlevich lived just across the street. He was a pensioner. Father often visited him, they played chess over tea. Father was friends with Yakov Shmidt. He was a miller, his son studied at father’s school. Father distinguished him from the rest and said that he was a genuine man. Father had one close friend – the chairman of the “Karl Marx” kolkhoz Konstantinov. He also associated with A.A. Makarov, an old man who later moved to the village of Sud’bodarovka. During World War II, he was in captivity in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He had two sons: Sasha and a younger one, Kostia. There was a thrown-away lorry in our yard. We would often sit in it, giving ourselves out to be drivers, as if we were travelling. I remember this because father with Makarov and the chairman would go either to the chairman’s house or to the Board, and we were left all by ourselves. Makarov worked as a supply manager in our new, brick-built school. Once F father told me that this Makarov was captured during the beginning of the war, but before the war he had worked in the NKVD and that he was an untrustworthy man. Later on, when his elder son finished the middle school, they moved to Orenburg. They had left before our departure from Pretoria (the Makarovs lived near the club-house, opposite the Klivers)

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