Spring Paintings

“Wow, Mom! How did you do it!” I cried, full of genuine admiration and respect. “Years of diligence and sacrifice, my dear,” she answered with a sly smile. As usual.

“The ‘Aunties’ at school aren’t ‘Aunties’ anymore. They’re ‘Comrade Teacher’ now,” I announced proudly one early spring day.

“Are they? So, did they join the Party? And what on earth are they going to teach you?” my mother asked sarcastically, grinning bitterly. Irony and sarcasm were the default mode of communication in our family—and likely in society at large. It was probably a consequence of our history’s harsh circumstances. Since the 17th century, we had lost our elites to emigration or physical extermination about half a dozen times. Irony, sarcasm, reading between the lines, and humor black as ink—black as coal, as hell itself—became a national survival strategy. “Laughing Beasts,” the high-ranking Nazi criminal Reinhard Heydrich had called us. We were proud of it.

“No, it’s because we aren’t babies anymore! We’re supposed to address Comrade Teacher the proper way!” I retorted, feeling self-important.

My mother couldn’t argue. One week prior, the whole family had completely forgotten my fifth birthday. “When is my birthday, Mom?” I had asked on Friday evening, forcing her to turn off the vacuum cleaner. The whole family had to do housekeeping every Friday. That’s why we—my brother and I—hated Fridays; our walk home from school took twice as long as usual.

My mother wasn’t used to lying. “Tomorrow. Your birthday is tomorrow,” she had groaned. “Yay! Great! We’ll have a beautiful cake and I’ll get presents too!” I chanted happily, oblivious to the trouble the family was in. All stores closed at 5 PM on Fridays, and on Saturday mornings only a few opened—usually just grocers—and even they closed at noon. There was no way to buy a cake. That kind of luxury good had to be ordered a week in advance.

But my family excelled at improvisation, and they succeeded once again. My mom sewed me nice new trousers overnight, and my father—a proud former college sprinter—appeared in the doorway the next morning, completely soaked in sweat, holding a “years-of-diligence-and-sacrifice masterpiece”: a cake assembled from assorted individual slices. They were meant to be served one by one with coffee at a pastry shop, so the final product looked like a patchwork quilt. Honestly, it was the most beautiful cake I had ever seen. That forgotten birthday is the only one I remember from my early childhood. Probably because of the sheer effort my parents made to put the universe back in order.

So, my mother couldn’t deny I was a big girl now. I was five, and I had started calling the nursery school Aunties properly. Perhaps my mother was a bit unfair to the Comrade Teachers, though. They did teach us to draw, which was my favorite lesson. In March, there were no major communist holidays, so we drew flowers.

“Today, we will paint something special to welcome spring,” announced Comrade Teacher Auntie-Witch. “Every child must obey orders, because we are using special silver paint and we have very little of it!” I was excited. Genuine silver! My excitement grew when I learned the theme: blooming willow twigs. In my language, we call them “kitties” because of their soft, fluffy appearance.

I tried to obey the orders carefully. I really tried. But the Comrade Teacher made a tiny mistake: she repeated one instruction four times as she circled the tables. “Carefulllly make a looong brown line,” she droned. By the time she said it for the fourth time, I had painted a massive tree trunk.

“Ha! See what happens when you rush, you naughty child! Now your ‘kitties’ are sitting on a log!” she hissed vengefully. She refused to give me a new piece of stiff paper. “If everyone did that, we’d run out of paper in no time,” she declared, using the standard argument. There was no room for individual mistakes in nursery school.

Every society has essentially two ways to punish divergent members: ridicule or excommunication. This time, they chose ridicule. All our paintings, properly signed, were displayed on large panels in the school hall. My “kitties on a log” hung there for everyone to see until they were finally replaced by new paintings.