Everything about Odessa reminded me of something else, as if I were living in two places at once, or no place. But bit by bit, the present overtook me. My life lost its strangeness, became ordinary to me. And since my parents had returned to their past, at least in some portion, it seemed to me they made their way more quickly, comfortably, through this new old life. On their free days, my parents would get on the trolley to drink tea and eat at Manya and Lev’s comfortable quarters, the samovar polished, hot, Manya catering to my mother with china cups of tea and exquisite purchased cakes. Sipping her tea, my mother read from the paper, lecturing Ben on the latest of what Comrade Stalin had said about education: Only petit-bourgeois windbags could think that the elimination of the antithesis between mental labour and physical labour could be achieved by lowering the cultural and technical level of engineers and technicians to the level of average skilled workers. In reality, such equality could only be brought about by raising the cultural and technical level of the working class to the level of engineers and technical workers.
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