Chapter 15
With Old Friends
It was that time, when it happened, that my boss sent me for a business trip to the GDR. Actually the topic could have been settled by correspondence, but he wanted to reward me for the performance I did with the small harbour-tug.
His arrangements disturbed some circles. My department head would feel for a time, that the boss trespassed his premises to give somebody among his men a task over his head. And the foreign trade director, together with his import purchasers, would think the same. I did not know anything about it at that time. Fortunately, it has not been an important topic, and both parties would soon forget their injuries.
I have bought some devices in the Centrum store in Berlin, as the GDR has always kept prices on a lower level than our country. And the quality of their goods has been high. I still had my electric razor and the many things we took 5 years before. That time a wall-clock, a flashlight for my camera and numerous other things came into our use.
It has been very pleasant to be at home again and to celebrate our first Christmas at home. In our small room in previous years we had only a green pine-branch with a candle. There were some symbols of Christmas, mainly from the ever-caring Elfie, our German "sister”. They sent us their traditional Pyramid, a conical device with candles and propeller-blades, with tiny angels with stars in their hands and small pines. It is a child’s play, but it makes your soul feel fine.
This time we started a new tradition, to celebrate Christmas Eve at home together, not with our families, as before and waiting for the very rare tram to go home in the cold. The next day, and the next again, we could visit all of them, to take presents to them and collect ours there. And it would be the same with New Year’s Eve. Since that year, we have always celebrated it at home.
At Christmas the year before, I got a fine present from my wife, a real expensive one, she bought it for her two week’s pay: the book "Tutankhamen”. This year we both had enough gifts from the other. And there was something new. From that time, it was not necessary to save her from getting pregnant.
Soon the time came, when she said:
"I might be pregnant. It is late.”
"Thanks to God, at last”, I answered.
It was awkward to see that first she has not been very happy with the discovery. She might have lost her courage in the nearly seven years of delete. But as it became sure that she was expecting a baby, she turned content and happy.
As I have mentioned, that year was a hard one for her sister E. Her husband, L., has got into the net of a Gipsy woman and a colleague of his on the vegetable market. He left his wife with their daughter. E. did not want to divorce him. She not only hoped for a positive turn in happenings, she calculated also well, that her salary could make enough money only in ten years to carry on the life he ensured her with his six months’ pay. She decided to outwait that "bitch”. At last she would succeed, but his adventures would cause his daughter, Erika, a lot of trouble with her half-sister.
There were gossips that the woman was also pregnant. It seemed she would deliver around the time my wife was to do so.
Erika was 6 in that year. Her baby things had been packed up in case, another time they would be necessary. As E. saw that my wife would need them, she was taking them to her one by one. To buy a pram was a little more difficult. They had given it to another relative, soon after Erika was out of it. My wife was reading through ads in the newspapers, but somehow she has always been too late. At last an acquaintance of hers helped to get a second-hand one. Its case was similar with bed for the baby. We would get a used one and would be giving it further, when we would not need it any more.