Everything Begins In Childhood

Chapter 12. Guncha

For as long as I can remember, I knew my mama was a seamstress. “Quota,” “output,” and “plan” were among the first words I remember. Mama would mutter them angrily. I heard familiar words in Chirchik because Mama also worked at the Guncha sewing factory there. However, Mama spoke about her work with less irritation than before. Something had changed. Of course, I didn’t understand what. I was too little to understand production processes and relations. I grew to understand that much later. As a child, all I had were impressions. One memory that stuck in my mind was once when Mama took Emma and me to the factory where she worked.

Our kindergarten was closed for a quarantine that day. Mama had been at home that morning, and as she was getting ready to leave for her night shift, she said, “You can’t stay home alone. You’ll be better off sleeping overnight at the factory.”

We took a long ride on a bus. It puffed heavily and let out a roar as it went up hills. There were many of them. The twisting road ran now up, now down, and new four-story apartment buildings crowded together, some on top of hills, others at their feet. Some of the buildings still had scaffolding. The fourth micro-district – that was what this part of town was called – was under construction and growing. That was where Mama’s factory was located.

Cool air embraced us as we entered the wide lobby. A large chandelier sparkled on the ceiling. There were many bright posters on the walls. Among them, there was a board crowned with red letters that had photographs on it. Suddenly, I noticed Mama on one of them. I stopped and grabbed her by the sleeve, “Mom, what is it?”

“It’s the board of honor.” She laughed, but her face had a contented look.

We approached a door with a glass plaque. Mama adjusted Emma’s dress and knocked on the door. “We’ll be seeing the manager. Say hello to him,” she whispered.

The manager wasn’t scary at all. He called us bogatirs (Russian epic heroes), but when Mama asked his permission for us to stay in the workshop overnight, he waved his hands, “Oh no, Ester, we can’t do that,” but, when he saw that Mama was upset, he grunted and ordered, “Put them on a pile of rags in the corner, away from the machines. Got it? And they shouldn’t run around.”

We walked up the steps leading to the workshop. Something upstairs was rumbling and chirping and rolling loudly. It seemed that something swift and huge might dash out onto the staircase toward us. It was the sewing workshop that was making all that noise. It was crammed with sewing machines, 20-30 of them in each row. It took my breath away – there were so many of them there. The foot pedal Zinger sewing machines seemed so splendid to me. The shift began, and Mama sat down at one of those wonderful machines.

Guncha was a knitting factory, and they mostly made knitted jackets there. So, what was actually being sewn? Making the jackets included many operations, from cutting them out to sewing on buttons: many short, clearly delineated, strictly limited operations that didn’t require any imagination but demanded precision and concentration and didn’t allow for any minor deviations.

The team in which Mama worked attached collars. That operation was divided into a few stages. Mama performed the first stage – she had to attach the middle of the lower part of the collar to the back of a jacket’s collar line, right in the middle. Everything else was based on that first positioning. If Mama made a mistake, the whole jacket would be ruined, and it would be classified as defective merchandise.

Someone brought a cart piled with jackets to the end of the row. Mama snatched a jacket and a collar. Oone, and a jacket flew into the machine. Twoo, Mama turned it so fast with her hands that I didn’t even notice its color. And I didn’t notice how the collar ended up in the right spot. Thrree, it was done, and the jacket flew on to the next seamstress… Mama’s machine was chipping and chirping. She sat with her head down, rocking slightly. Her feet moved without stopping, her hands made fast, precise movements. She was absorbed in her work. It seemed she didn’t notice either the rumbling of the workshop, the rattling of carts passing by, or her children who sat in the corner on a pile of multi-colored scraps watching her… Well, I was the only one who was watching Mama. The pile of bright, soft scraps was a real treasure that any girl would have envied. It was hard to imagine that such treasure was considered trash at the factory. Emma rummaged through the scraps, mumbling something, snatching and twisting them, tying them together, trying them on. She made a scarf, a shawl, or something that looked like a harlequin’s outfit. In a word, she was very busy.

But I could not tear my eyes away from the assembly line. I watched how fast the jackets moved along it, but my eyes always returned to Mama’s machine, to her hands. And what I soon noticed was that Mama was working faster than the others. She would pass a jacket to the next seamstress, who had not yet finished with the previous one. Someone called from another part of the workshop, “Ester, take a break! Slow down!” But Mama seemed not to hear; she didn’t raise her head.

Mama was a wonderful seamstress, a virtuoso. She couldn’t possibly do bad work.

But that was not the only reason. At Guncha, unlike at the factory in Tashkent, they paid according to one’s output. Mama’s earnings depended on her hands, on her craftsmanship. Mama’s restless hands kept Emma and me fed.

Only here in Chirchik, Mama felt that her work was valued. Before long, she was awarded the Order of Labor of the Third Degree. Only five people in town had received that award. Mama was certainly proud of it. Perhaps, she was even very proud. Mama’s work was exhausting, her speed, efficiency, and concentration required an enormous output of energy and produced nervous tension. Good heavens, but did she ever think of herself?

When apprentices showed up at the factory, they were taken to Mama. Who could possibly teach them better? Who could demonstrate to them more patiently, many times over, how to do the work? They sometimes brought defective items to her, and she repaired them with the skill a surgeon would use operating on a seemingly hopeless patient.

Probably, a true master in any field is one who possesses emotional generosity, as well as skill.

…The time passed, hour after hour. The workshop rumbled ceaselessly. Emma had fallen asleep long before, buried in her pile of treasure. I was falling asleep too, but I gave a start and woke up because silence fell over the workshop. A break began. I don’t know if there was a cafeteria at the factory, but many seamstresses had a snack at their machines. They plugged in their hand-held water boilers. The sound of paper rustling could be heard as they unwrapped their sandwiches. Now and then, women ran up to Emma and me to treat us to candies or cookies. They had kind, tired faces, scarves tied around their heads, wearing aprons covered with bits of thread. Then, Shura Cheremisina, our neighbor, came up to us.

“Good! You’ve brought your kids,” she told Mama. “Let them see what we do here.”

“We work like mules,” Mama’s answer was short. She sat down near us. There was a piece of thread hanging from her lower lip. Almost every seamstress had a piece of thread on her lip. It helped them concentrate while sewing. Every part of them participated in the work process – hands, feet, eyes, even lips.