Почетная профессия

В субботу в нашей большой исландской семье свадьба - женится последыш, мамин мальчик, красавец и умниц, архитектор и пианист, в общем, плачьте невинные, шансов больше нет, фата не пригодится. Но я не об этом, а о насущном, женском, ежемесячном и вечном - о парихмахерской. 

на фото: жизнерадостность парихмахера - наше всё!

В России у меня была Оксана - красавица, которая за полчаса превращала разрозненность на моей голове в виде волос разного типа и цвета в прекрасную прекрасность, с приобретением чего хотелось жить, петь и даже тайно в ванной танцевать.

Но с переездом в одну маленькую, но гордую страну, наша тесная ежемесячная связь с кудесницей филировочного искусства прервалась: по понятным причинам нам пришлось расстаться - наши отношения не выдержали проверку расстоянием.

Много слез было пролито в подушку, много нервов мужниных было вымотано, прежде чем после очередной стрижки-покраски услышал он: "ну, да, ничо вроде" и не поверил своим собственным ушам. А я затаила истинные чувства, как и должно женщине хитрой, и решила для сохранения узов брака и мира во всем мире существенно занизить порог качества и собой довольства.

В Исландии и Дании (про другие страны не скажу, зуб даю только за это) на парикмахера учатся пять лет. ("Пять лет, ё-мое!" - каждый раз восклицает в отчаянии мой мозг после стрижки/окраски, в то время как лицевые мышцы под стальным контролем выдают зубастую улыбку "спасибо, как всегда... очень хорошо..."). Это же как full bachelor with masters on top. Как хорошая аспирантура с написанием кандидатской на двести десять страниц со списком литературы, приложением и красочными картинками.

И это еще не все! Потом у них наступает вроде как интернатура с ординатурой - работа пару лет в качестве ученика и еще пару как начинающий специалист под контролем более опытного. Если есть желание быть не просто парикмахером, а парикмахером-стилистом, то потребуется еще три года.

В парихмахерскую я хожу дважды, в сложных случаях, трижды за раз. Прийду домой, осмотрюсь - всегда, всегда, всегда справа длиннее, чем слева, а тон краски всегда отдает красным... Если не отливает красным, значит вообще не тот.
А уж когда голову вымою и падут все маски, и откроется вся правда, то бывает и четвертый раз не поленюсь, схожу. Они это знают, ждут меня, относятся с пониманием, видят, соглашаются, ах, да, как же так, да... и все равно "бац-бац-и-мимо".

В общем, резюмирую, учись - не учись, а парикмахер - это как художник - либо есть талант, либо в поле овец стричь. А что, тут, в Исландии, это тоже очень уважаемая и востребованная профессия.

Copyright © 2015 by Olga Johannesson 

in the driver´s seat

As a mother of two - one baby and one toddler -  I am always on the wheels: prams, all sorts of strollers, tricycles, what not, and most often, of course, I am using our car. 
It´s interesting how we get used to the cars - in a way it becomes our second home - a personal space which we keep clean or fill with all sorts of personal indispensable garbage, a small reflection of our home.
Last week I passed a driving test second time in my life and remembered the cars and experiences I had. 

On the photo: one of the rare Reykjavik traffic jams in Buðstaðavegur 

My relationships with an automobile started long ago: I got my first driving license in 2000 but actually started to drive my own car only seven years later.

I cannot remember now for what reason whatsoever I decided I needed a driving license in that hot summer fifteen years ago. Still a student, with no perspective of obtaining a moving vehicle of any type or condition at all, I had absolutely no necessity to start learning to drive a car. And despite all the human logic I entered a driving school in June and started the process.

If my memory does not fail me it was the only driving school in Arkhangelsk at the time (my native city in the North Western Russia). The class comprised about three dozen of men, representing all walks of live and three young women.

They made the school from the remnants of a bankrupt military or paramilitary organisation (I think it was something to do with DOSAAF ) - the transformation scheme so familiar and rather common for the wild Russian nineties. All of those so-to-say "teachers" were retired colonels and majors in their late fifties-sixties with no experience of actually what can be called teaching. They were loud and disrespectful with the male learners, awkward, uneasy and sweaty with us, pretty and young. And to make it more difficult for them it was a hot summer that year.

Anyway, every Tuesday and Thursday, six to nine, we were there - in a stuffy room with high ceilings of a stalin-time building and dark green walls ornamented with with soviet tanks pictures and posters instructing on five slunk positions of a gas-mask. The walls adorned by the occasional white crater of a dry broken paint, our studies crawled with the snail speed under the monotonous voice of the teacher.

The driving classes were, however, the fun in its essence. I am not joking. My driving instructor was a perl, a find which I have been remembering warmly with a smile for already fifteen years. He was one on those retired as well. In contrast to the classroom shabby guys, mostly political (propaganda) commissars in their past, that one had been a pilot. But... he had a peculiarity uncombinable with piloting - the thing was, let me put it mildly, he often found himself "thirsty". On some days more thirsty than on the others, sometimes even so thirsty that it took weeks to quench the thirst. Understandably, that avocation moved him out of the brave pilots´ regiment, consequently, out of  heartbreakers´ cavalry and set him into the driving instructor´s seat.

On quite some occasions I could distinctly smell his last night moral laps in the dilapidated synthetic interior. But what was interesting about him - he talked. He talked nonstop. It was only comparable to the Northern Korean radio (I could only assume) - radio with no music, no commercials - just monotonous talking. For sixty minutes he elaborated on his past, present and his versions of future, he dwelt upon politics, presidents, resurrection of Christ and chicken farms, reincarnation of frogs, of planes, of women. In a way it was amusing. In those days I learned what was a glide-slope track for the rest of my life.

His working horse, his Sleipnir and my first car was a red Lada 3. Once bright and attractive with scarlet lipstick, cheap perm in the hair, lots of makeup and rather gaudy outfit, with all her ostentatious looks aiming at attracting sailors and salesmen. That girl became old, alone and forgotten quite fast and then was picked up by my old drunkard, once a fearless pilot and a heartbreaker. If you think of that, they actually made quite a couple, those two.

Lada by large had problems with her health: coughing and rattling sounds of the engine were the least to worry about. The old broad had a hard steering with no hydraulics which I had to put all my weight to make a timely turn. At my first class I was warned that in case the brakes failed, I had to use the hand brake. The transmission lever worked every other time, which to say no more, fell off completely at the exam. Still I passed it. We passed it. Sometimes I wonder what happened with those two.

Seven years later I bought my first car, a silver Opel Corsa D, and, while expecting it from Germany, called another driving instructor to refresh driving techniques long forgotten by that time.
Sergei was a retired traffic policeman who was unofficially giving driving classes to the needy and then using his contacts in the appropriate institution to help the student to ensure he passed. It required minimum hours of driving and an immoderate gratification.

Having already had driving license I clearly bore no interest for him as a client. Of his interests I cannot say much. I remember the man had a young wife and most of the time he spent of the phone talking to her, continuously questioning her geolocation, where subsequently we would drive to prove her wrong. Apparently the woman was very bad with directions. On some days she would not pick up, and then, after finding some sad rock on the radio in quiet melancholy we would drive to the hardware shop, where he would buy planks of wood, nails, screws, roofing felt and the like. He was building a house.

My Opel became my friend, my company, my girl for the next four years. She was young, honest, hardworking, a bit fancy, compact and fast. I took care of her, she took care of me on all sorts of the roads. In the cold harsh winters she never failed me, starting from half a turn of an ignition key after spending several nights outside in -36C, under the pained watch of the neighbours when their Toyotas and Fords were being taken by the tow-tracks.

Iceland, the country of ice and fire, put me into a dark blue Skoda Octavia station. I mention the colour intentionally as then I was fully sure it was the most boring car colour. I slammed the door and felt my fancy single youth days were over. Quite fast somehow I became a mother of two. In return the car immediately impregnated itself with two baby seats. I cut my hair and filled the wardrobe with colours which hid the traces of burping and dried formula. Suddenly blue did not seem that bad anymore. Again I was in the driver´s seat but on a rather different road - quiet stable middle class life with a big family.

Thinking of that, now I believe this type of a car could have been designed specially for Iceland, an outdoor family country. When we travel with two kids to my in-laws to the North, we take a pram and a stroller, feeding chair, four bags, a suitcase, and a huge pumped gymnastic ball (an indispensable parental item). Packing all that I usually think we would have managed to put a sheep there, provided we had any.

I know I was not perfect driving my Skoda - out of the most outrageous manifestation of stupidity I backed into the pillar at the Rekstravörur - a wholesale warehouse in Reykjavik. And as painful as it was, there was absolutely no necessity to park backwards out of two main reasons: I had never done it before because I could have not been able to (proved myself right though) and I had an intention to buy two huge boxes of stuff and loads of paper towels, which, no doubt, would have been only normal to park the car with an accessible trunk. But no. I pressed gently into the pole, made a dent, broke the paint on the rear bumper and with shaking hands entered the store. It took days, no, weeks to come clean with my husband, but he is a good man.

A month ago I decided to stop my lengthy violation of the Icelandic law and change the driving license. This statement needs an elaboration: as my husband took a woman from an exotic country outside the boarders of EEA, among other disturbances, her driving license was valid only for 90 days. Apparently, something was expected to happen to those people upon the expiry. Blindness?

Anyway, I took it. It was my second driving test fifteen years after the first one. Everything was different. More to say, everything was the opposite: I took it in the shiny white brand new Mercedes Benz C220 with the 250 kilometers of milage. I don´t know whether it was the composed and calm instructor or the horror of hundred thousands of euro scratch that pushed me through it with no mistakes, but let me tell you, thanks to them finally one thing I learnt very well - parking backwards.



Copyright © 2015 by Olga Johannesson 

The art of making good coffee

Dogs barking, chasing each other, kids chasing dogs, chasing each other, laughter: high pitched, childish, crackling, elderly. Single shrieks, a distant cry of a toddler, a mother hurrying across the lawn. Couples talking with other couples, husbands barbecuing hamburgers and sausages, sipping from sweating in the sun cans of Miller light, unnecessary, unhurried manly talk. Folding chairs, white plastic tables, blankets thrown everywhere as motley pools on the green grass, transparent air, sunlight of a usual spring midday.

She was sitting on the ground, reading a book, shoulders wrapped in a dark brown plaid; she was leaning on a veteran oak, almost varnishing on the background of its rugged bark, unwelcomely pressing its flesh into her shoulder.

He was drinking beer, casually talking to one of the barbecuing guys.

A couple of dozens of humming people between them.

Suddenly she felt he was talking to her, eyes froze on the page. She did not have to look at him to know that. She felt he was there and he was talking to her. Clearly, he was talking to her.
The reality froze, she thought, as they did it in the movies sometimes, when one layer lost its colours and sounds, being still and silent, half seen through, making a plain background for the other plane. He was looking at her.
She knew that. She slowly put up the eyes and looked back at him.

Silence.

"Hi", he said, eyes smiling.
They had hardly met before, probably, once or twice at some party, she searched memory for his name.
"Steve", he said.
"Hi, Steve", she smiled back.
Someone came up to him, he turned his back on her, she tried to concentrate on reading again.
"Hey, it´s not polite, eh? I am still here",  his voice didn´t let her read.
She looked up, puzzled, as he was still talking to the same person, still with his back to her.
She chuckled, eyes down.
They never came to each other at that early spring picnic party, none of them really needed that.

A large Ford was leaving the parking space, crushing gravel by its massive wheels and taking the last people from the place. She came out to the parking lot, talking on the phone, heading to her car.
He was there, leaning on the ugly bulky bumper of his Chrysler Ram, waiting for her.
She paused for a moment, finishing the talk, staring at him with a question in the eyes.

"Come", she read the order in his eyes.
She obeyed and walked to him with every step wresting, forcing gravel to moan under her feet. Hypnotized, she could not divert her eyes from his, he pulled her, dragged her to him. She submitted.
Inches apart, their eyes locked, nothing was around them: no space, no time, no sounds, no colours. One heartbeat for two was hitting the ears, crashing their lives with every beat, their present and future, erasing their past. They looked into each other´s souls and saw abyss. They saw the end.

Deprived of all her will, a small girl yet again, she raised herself on the tiptoes, her nose genlty brushed his unshaven cheek and froze, afraid to breathe, her cheek hardly touching his, still balancing on the tiptoes. A tiny trace of aftershave, clean cotton collar, his body... Slowly, slowly, as an animal escaping the beast of prey, eyes closed, she started to breathe. She read him all, tall and strong, mocking and ironic, strong and ... suddenly weak. She opened the eyes, startled by the discovery.
"Yes", he proved, eyes closed. He was breathing her lavender skin, her fresh bitter hair, her freedom, her life. Bound to each other so strong, they didn´t need to touch.

They both heard the low sound of a string breaking, long and thick sound filling the air.
"Violin", she thought.
"No, guitar", he answered.
She gently and slowly, as if afraid to scare the birds up, moved her face against his unshaven cheek, until their lips met for a second, the sensation of knowing each other, of sudden closeness, of inevitability ahead got so strong that she recoiled, and another, higher string broke in the air.

She looked up at him, asking, begging, searching for the answer in the depth of his eyes.
He cradled her face into his hands, warm and pacifying, and gently kissed her on the lips: "everything will be fine".
She startled by the first words said out loud. Unable to believe what she was doing, she turned away from him. As she made every step away, three strings broke one by one, sounds growing higher, maddening by their unknown origin, filling the air around them. Gravel shrieked, wailed and howled under her steps, the wind suddenly started to torture the crowns of the trees, spring disappeared: she walked away, never turning back, leaving him behind in a starting blizzard.

Three steps to the car, one, two, three, I am free; cracking sound of the lock, bones broke; she was in. The door slammed, the last string ruthlessly torn, screaming desperately into the growing wind. She started the car, pulled out, mercilessly mincing the gravel with the tires.

He heard that last string breaking, pointing up the wailing, roaring cacophony of the tempest. He did not move. Did not look at her car. He was watching the gravel.

Automatically, shielding herself from the storm, she turned on the wipers, washing off, erasing his face. One mile, two, the turn to the highway. The sun was shining. In groceries´ she had to buy butter, milk, coffee and Cheerios for the kids.

It was warm, the birds were singing, nothing changed in the mild and sunny weather of that early spring day. Only, when he finally stood up from his silence, the flock of the birds startled from the forest, alarmed, into the sky.

----
In the kitchen she made coffee for both her husband and herself. She was never good at making coffee, but that time she made her coffee right. So she thought.



Copyright © 2014 by Olga Johannesson

"That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run..."

Distance: 21 kilometers
Time: 2 hours 1 minute (one minute, for God´s sake...)
Average Speed: 10,4 km per hour
Most Encouraging Information: 1277 calories burnt 
Personal achievement:  and a completely new feeling of knowing myself better.  

It was not before my body had completely gotten over the torturing experience of running for good two hours non-stop;

It was not before I had generously helped loading it with tons of chocolate, pies and sugar in the following month with two birthdays of my daughter´s and my husband´s;

It was not before a month had passed, 
when I actually felt ready to come out and talk about it publicly -
- my first and largest masochistic experiment - taking part in the Reykjavik marathon. 

It started at 8:40 am on a most boring and wet late-August typical Icelandic morning. I will abstain from the chronology and detalization of the events, but will instead share my experiences and interesting moments of taking part in that "most unnecessary and disturbing" (thank you, mom) event.

My moderately handsome husband was running full marathon (for those blessed who do not know, this means 42 kilometers of pain, misery, blistered feet, and occasional self-pity) that day. We started together and he, in a rather gentlemanly manner, was accompanying his lady the first ten kilometers, until, of course, he felt rather bored and got tired of, actually, walking.

After the first five, I got a recurrent thought circling in my mind, measuring the distance: God bless Drinking Stations and good people working there. This is the actual measure for a runner, an occasional oasis of life and hope, not the abstract kilometers which seem only growing longer with every step.

A half-conscious crowd sharing a common blurred state of mind, hardly seeing anything through the pain in the lungs and with the leg muscles dying with every step, can hardly be expected to observe the manners and etiquettes and avoid throwing paper cups under the feet, but miracles happen: a moderately handsome gentleman of mine was actually running with his cup in the hands for a good mile looking for a trash bin, under the judgmental look of his not-so-well-mannered spouse, until one of the cheering people took it from him. Apparently, manners are always manners.

People standing outside and cheering was the highlight of the trail. Honestly. Thank you all for being there! If you haven´t been at any side of the path, just try to imagine how all those people got up on an early cold and wet morning, went out with the kids and occasional water and pastry, were standing outside in the rain, clapping, smiling, playing music, encouraging us, to get over ourselves, to keep on going, to believe we can do it. (When I stop running, I,  hereby, in this piece promise to all of you - witnesses reading this - I will put up all my grumpy, irritated and sullen kids at 8am and go out at every marathon to cheer and support those crazy courageous people). Here and now I can only say, thank you. Probably, you have no idea how much it mattered!

Other words of gratitude I should address to my brave and determined step-son just only for the fact that he, in his teenage anarchic-nihilistic prime, put himself out of a warm bed at 8am on Sunday morning, went out alone into the cold rain and wandered for hours in the streets of Reykjavik with a camera, trying to catch us on the trail to take good pictures... Indeed, that day was full of personal victories.

A rather (believe me, this is just a literary understatement) lean Japanese man was running somehow around me most of my twenty kilometers - overtaking lazily and lagging behind for taking pictures of the most beautiful scenery and places that we were passing by, until he quite (again, understatement) easily and gracefully turned into the full marathon path and lost himself for his next 42 kilometers with more pictures to be taken with grace and ease of running. Speaking of the cultural labeling.

Interesting (I am not sure it was the exact emotion of the spur of the moment) it was to see the cocky sporty super guys running already back fresh and frisky when me, my pain, both of my lungs and each and every of my leg muscles were only hardly finishing our first ten.

Rather amusing was to realise that both feet started to blister on the 12th kilometer (9 km more to go). In my defense - I did prepare! I did read all those numerous advice web-sites about how to prepare for the marathon. I did put on my old comfy running shoes and all-proven professional socks. I just failed to take into consideration the high dampness of the day, and on several occasions in the beginning, when we all were still running in one big crowd, I stepped into the water and that irrevocably for weeks, for many a painful shower, settled the sorrowful destiny of both of my feet. The professional running socks, eventually, were the only serious loss of the day.

People show their true colours in the long distance running. Or is any demanding situation working as a touchstone and depriving us of the craftiness and pretense? Spending two hours with more or less the same people around you, one can see how different we all indeed are. Someone runs pushy, overtaking and stepping just in front of you, someone steps into the big pool and makes the feet of everyone around a wet mess, and someone (there was one guy) completely exhausted, sweating and already hardly running, who saw a glove drooped by a guy running in front of us; with everyone just passing, he picked it up and followed the guy for six more kilometers unable neither to get up to him, nor even to shout anything, but just carrying his glove.

Finishing the last kilometer with the rain in the face was not what a girl with a makeup on the eyes would dream of (you know exactly what I mean, sisters), especially with the full awareness that my step-son would be waiting for me to take pictures of me beautiful finishing. Nothing doing... Passing by Harpa (a national opera house) - a grandeur manifestation of the small and proud nation´s self-consciousness - encouraged me to hold my head high and whole-heartedly believe Christina Aguilera that we are all beautiful... no matter what.

I do not consider myself an emotional person to weep in the movies, on books or cute stories but going through the finish line, at that very moment, I blessed the rain washing down stuff from my eyes.

I did it.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

An Always Within Never

"Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart and my stomach all like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that´s what life is about: there´s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It´s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. 
Yes, that´s it, an always within never." 

(Muriel Barbery "The Elegance of the Hedgehog")


Have you ever stopped completely absorbed by the moment? It could have been anything: a purity of nature, a breathtaking landscape, a stunning sunset, a pale sunrise, a piece of music, a line of a poem, a frailty of a flower, a tenderness of a bird´s singing, anything? As if, in this particular moment, we get the revelation of life, if only we could read through it...

Have you ever been able to almost physically feel the bliss of a perfection, a unity of the nature and a human, a state when everything around you and inside you come together despite the most disturbing circumstances, states, dispositions, griefs, sorrows, concerns - everything gets washed away leaving you cleansed and pure, ready to absorb this momentarily gift of the universe - the gift of being.   

...by its definition to make a day perfect something special should designate a senseless 24-hour existence or even a better definition would suit a chain of desirable events (to cover a 24-hour senseless existence) in such a way so that by the time one is ready to hit the pillow and send oneself into the oblivion one actually feels (for once) accomplishment and a positive attitude which justifies the meaningless dwelling and fulfills unyielding all-human existential Angst (at least until a warm encounter with a cup of coffee, appeasing with the harsh reality of the following morning).

My perfect day started at 5:30 am, with the sun still enjoying the nap, and my own daughter slapping me by my own pillow into my own face. As the weekend morning are primarily my duty to wake up before dawn with our smiling early bird, with the angels still sleeping, I greeted my usual 5 am friend, the devil, who was already dancing in my head, running shivers through my body and with a tender whisper tempting me to run away and join the circus (until it's too late and everyone wakes up).

I took the smiling happy angel out of our bed and let my lucky bastard moderately handsome husband watch his I-am-using-my-laser-to-kill-all-aliens-in-space dreams (I, quite groundlessly and naively, still choose to believe it is only scenario that is running under the warm cuddling blanket in the sweetness of early mornings since his age of fourteen).

At 5:30 am I went out of a warm bedroom into the coldness of an abandoned living room to face the unbearable brightness of being in the five electric lights with the demon of electricity (seriously, what is this thing?) snapped out into the human world by a switch.

And that was still long before God created coffee that day...
Or roosters had finished with the demons for the third time that lonely September morning...

Holding the thought of the roosters, demons and a protective happy baby in the arms I have proceeded to open the balcony door to see... an Eden - a quiet, completely calm, warm September morning - air standing still, motionless; thin salty smell of the ocean layering the gray transparent air, like the jasper seaweed curls gently threading through the solid waters of the ocean; and all was peaceful, still: houses, trees, posts. Grass, roofs, tarmac saturated their colours with the sprinkles of mildew and turned up ever so bright and sharp in the dullness of the air. Beauty.

I packed my angel into the overalls and we went out. We walked to the playground in the complete silence of being. While the little one was quietly exhilarating herself on the swings, tuned into the common mood of the nature and the city around (babies are strangely sensitive to the nature talking), I looked at the damp jade thickness of the shrubs circling the quiet playground and sheltering our bliss. Time stopped. We were in a parallel universe, standing in our quiet transparent world in the middle of the noisy and loud playground, children running, shouting, mothers chatting with an occasional yell for a bully to stop or a toddler's cry after falling on the ground - and at the same time - only me and my daughter, in the silence and tranquility of the damp morning, and a raven cawed harshly three times, flying pass by above our heads, pronouncing our fates, and us, blessed in our ignorance, incapable of knowing...

When we came back home I had my morning coffee. Many things happened through that ordinary September Sunday, none of them would seem obviously special. But the perfection lies in simplicity, and the beauty in the eye of the beholder, doesn´t it?

It is just about a beautiful morning, a smiling baby-daughter, a loyal husband, safe home, and a good coffee. And once, an always within never.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

"Pretty woman walking down the street..."

We live in a world of stereotypes - we are born into it and by that same fact of birth we acquire a predetermined inventory of characteristics. Then having absorbed with the mothers milk the core attributes of femininity or masculinity on a long road of maturity we are becoming more of what the society expects of us: "Aren't you a boy to be whining like a girl?", "You have to be clean and pretty - you are a girl!"

And, gradually, chiseled by everyday judgments we are shaped into what we have to be: pretty, clean, shy, weak, or strong, decisive, rugged and ambitious - you know, sort of blue or pink, skirts or trousers.
As a Russian woman ("pink", "modest", "timid", hmm... "pretty"? , "blushing", "with long hair", "coy" and "shamefaced" (whatever that means) living abroad I want to discuss intercultural gender misunderstandings that I faced being brought up "in a pink-bow-Russian way".

source of photo
In one famous and most revered Russian (Soviet) movies ever, which got most of the all possible prizes abroad - "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" - the plot is banal and as conventional as it can be: three simple girls came to Moscow from the province in search of a better life in the middle of the 60s. The obvious embodiment to a better life was a fortunate marriage which could establish a position of a woman and secure the rest of her life.

Consequently, in a rather archetypal and fairy-tale manner, one gets married to a simple worker, the second in an ongoing search of something better ends up alone having lost her quite a decent husband to alcoholism, and the third, having been knocked up by some ambitious charming scunk, after 15 years turns into a self-sufficient director of a huge and successful plant, sort of a self-made woman - bitter, cold and decisive single mother in well-made Soviet pants, spending her scanty free time with a married lover - quite a widely-spread and accomplished image these days.

The movie touches upon many issues (if you come across a version with English subtitles - as a winner of a Golden Bear in Berlin 1980 and an Oscar in 1981, it should most certainly exist in  English - I implore you - watch!), the main being the fate of a woman in a society.  

None of these women is happy without a man, the successful one being utterly unhappiest of all three. Envied by many, she confides into her friends: "Just don't tell your sons that when you get everything in life, the only thing you feel like doing is to howl as a lonely wolf" (- Только ты пока ребятам не рассказывай, что как раз когда всего добъешься в жизни, больше всего волком завыть хочется"). 

Until (of course - this movie got an Oscar) she meets the real man - sort of a Soviet Mr. Big - who sets the priorities right - "And by that remember: from now on, everyday, everything is decided only by me. With one simple reasoning that I am a man". (- А заодно запомни, что всё и всегда я буду решать сам. На том простом основании, что я - мужчина").

And what happens with that forty-year-old woman, the head of an enormous industrial enterprise in Moscow, the strong woman in man's pants? She weeps with happiness - I am not joking!

In a society like Russian, despite all the hard work of Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, life, still in many respects, is organized around good old Domostroi (a 16th century book or a code of a patriarchal rules of family life), of course, changed and adopted by the compliments of the XXI century. But a woman - in a notion of a woman - is supposed to be pretty, skinny, well-dressed, high-heeled, red-lipsticked, long-and-polish-nailed, educated (preferably, but not to use it), smart (optionally), good cook, good mother, good friend, good (inventive) lover, strong, fit, and by all that - stand by the side of a man. Just a man. With no attribute.

All that, no doubt, made a Russian woman a proverbial model wife all over the world with no obvious realization and acknowledgment from her side. Because we are brought up this way, we find nothing special in being a woman.

When my moderately handsome boyfriend, back then, was visiting me in Russia, I found it so rude that even stopped speaking to him for 30 minutes or so, after he left the bus ahead of me without offering me a hand. Then, this uncultured (so I thought) schmuck went through every door in a city first, never waited for me to take my place in a taxi, never offered (of course I would have declined gracefully, but still) pay a bill in a coffee shop. Never. never, never. So that eventually my inner lady-in-pink felt so cheap and neglected that I even considered an immediate break up.

Now it seems like charming memories from the past. But still the difference exists. We are, in our personal imaginative way, princesses in an ebony tower waiting for our knight in a shining armor (preferably on a white horse, produced in Germany). Even if we never admit it.  

And we let them think we are a bit stupid, naive and weak because...
we are not.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

Christ has risen!

On the holy day of the Orthodox Easter, Sunday, 5 May, indeed as the situation required, I thought of God. Then I thought of the seventy years of the soviet times when the Mighty Position had been secured by Vladimir Lenin with a twenty-year interim intermission of the ever more almighty, loving and punishing - Stalin.
Thinking back into the history, Russians have always had an extremely grievous and hard relationship with God, which, combined with the inherent mysticism and fatalism as parts of the national character, engraved religious traits even on the all-negating stoned stance of the atheists.  

In the Orthodox religious tradition the icons - the depictions of God and the saints - were present in every house. According to the rule they were positioned in the so-called "red corner"  ("red" in the old Russian language meaning "beautiful", "honorary" - c.f. the Red Square). The icons were supposed to be in the Eastern corner of the house, as praying, sending our thoughts and talking to God we face the appearance of the sun and, thus, symbolically greet the Advent.

In the Soviet years religion becomes quite a dangerous puppet in the hands of the master - just think what a believer may do for the God. Some clever man, unfortunately the history keeps his name a secret, offered - no, no, not just to abolish God - that would be impossible for the country where religion was so tightly intertwined with the everyday life - but to replace Him. And who comes into the picture?

The decision was exceptionally smart and worked for many decades. Even the honorary red corner was kept to fit yet another deity.

The portraits of Lenin were adorning the walls of every institution, every establishment, every official room, on a frequent occasion enforced by the bronze or gypsum busts, the honest and strong look coming from the different sizes. The Bible, the Testaments and the Gospels were banned, instead we were given the Stories of Lenin - now I cannot tell what part of truth was there, but looking back I realize how much of a hagiography or menology (the lives of the saints) it reminded of and certainly served the purpose well. There was even a children's version of the Acts with pictures - just like Noah's Arch story.

Interestingly, the religious rituals were still kept going - we baptized children, painted eggs for Easter. But the pure religious meaning of them was a bit tarnished - baptism, for example, started to bear more of a pagan belief of the holy water protecting a child from the illnesses. Still, most of the children were baptized - secretly, at home, by an isolated priest. Consequently, we even had a mummified deity (whose remains are still by the way kept uncommitted to earth in the Red Square, the spirit haunting economy and politics - so far the only obvious, undeniable, unquestionable explanation of the ongoing Russian misfortunes), a religious doctrine - a successful mold of communism and spiritism, a set of rituals - books, learnings, common meetings, portraits -"icons", in other words, even when we didn't have it, we had it all.

Nowadays, the busts are on the dump, the pictures faded in the cellars. With the life so cruel and grim, fiercely grinding people by its millstones, people are seeking for the alleviation and looking for God once again...

In Russia on the holy day of Easter we greet each other with the traditional words: "Christ has risen!" and for many He has finally risen indeed.




Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

What doesn´t kill you makes you stronger?

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - persistently was persuading me Kelly Clarkson, as I was trying to mutilate myself on a treadmill, finding pain in the parts of the body which were dormant for most of my life and feeling aching organs that I had no idea existed in my body before.

Source of photo (and an interesting blog about running)

Being half-conscious, to divert my mind from the pain purely out of survival precaution, I started thinking if is that really so - do we really need pain to grow? Does a person, who is blessed by a peaceful and quiet life, undisturbed by any sorts of turbulence, come up as an physical, emotional, spiritual cripple? And to follow the other extreme: going to the hell and back creates, basically, a superman? (oh, sorry, I meant a superwoman).

What happens if one doesn't get enough pain through life? Lets say, there's a moderately happily married life with 10 years on the back and two kids on the front. Then, one day there comes a realisation that the chest starts sliding down and actively forming a paunch, social networking becomes the most exciting thing, beer and caffeine have replaced water, in general - things have got out of control.

And there it starts - subconsciously,  persistently,  methodically we start to generate our own suffrage to get out of the couch and back on a horse: to be emotionally fit one gets an unobtainable love object - the wife of a neighbour will do, a colleague with its regularity of meetings is even better. After all the person doesn't matter - it is just is to train emotions, as Robbie Williams was confiding into my ears: "just want to feel real love, feel the home that I live in".  Next step is to ruin the family, get a divorce, see kids once a month, live alone and start looking for the meaning of life - all of these  to be spiritually fit and growing even further.

But what if we stay motionless in your moderately happily life? We stop being interesting to people - the absence of drama makes us lose colours and mimicry with the life itself. The most interesting people, writers, artists, politicians, actors, even "that nephew of the guy who lives next door", are the people with the wretched life and an ongoing crisis.

And we still think we are going for pleasure? That's our eternal shallow delusion, a trick formed by our refined inventive artful psyche, which wraps a bitter pill into the sweetness of a minute pleasure. "Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure" - floated the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald somewhere in my already half-conscious mind.

By following our unnecessary immediate wishes, overindulging in foods, sweets, tastes, with all sorts of social infidelities, we are methodically paving the way to our own abyss, so that later we would have a chance to apply all our strengths to get out of and become stronger, fitter, smarter. Or drown and die.

So, stating the obvious for everyone but me, I came to a conclusion, which helped me to finish those last minutes on the treadmill - that we need regular injections of pain, leading to suffrage, produced by our internal striving for crises. "Everything in moderation" - refrained Ancient Greeks in my head to beautiful Kelly, and I decided that was enough for the day.  

The song ended, treadmill stopped, I took out the earphones, and with a feeling of standing on the way to perfection, went home thinking about mundane things as what to cook for dinner for my moderately handsome husband who was babysitting our inquisitive beautiful baby-daughter, secretly thanking Providence for all that boring uneventful life that I was blessed with, hoping I was done with my pains at least till my next gym.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

Hi, I am Olga and I am a barbarian!

This Friday, the 8th of March, in the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk, an atrocity of the prehistoric range happened in the open daylight as a pack of stray dogs tore apart to death a 7-year-old boy.
(for the Russians and other interested here's the link to the news).

    Source of photo
The boy was torn apart in minutes, as witnesses (obviously standing and watching, but who would easily dive into a hellball of swirling mad dogs, and a screaming little fellow, really, guys?) claim, the head was bitten out, the ambulance, which came later, had nothing more to do as to pick up together the blooded remains from the ground. The dogs disappeared. And, oh, Dear God Almighty, I have not made this story up.

Being a long-time dog-lover and having been following the news ever since it happened, I still cannot decide what I am shocked by the most: by the fact of an unbelievably monstrous, brute and nonsensical death of a child, by the horrors which actually happen on the streets of a more-or-less european city in the broad daylight, by the fact that it actually happened in the twenty-first century, by fact that the animals are still in the open, by the reaction of the witnesses, by the reaction of the authorities, by the reaction of the people, or by the mentality of my tribe in general.

For several days by now the discussion has been going on, and the dogs are still there, only two of them having been found and shot. As the mayor still sleeps peacefully undisturbed by the events, the society divides now into radicals and more radicals, who now raid the streets with air guns and deadly rat poisons, giving no chance to any animal, dog, cat, rat or armadillo, if they find any. Add up here slightly and not-so-slightly mentally disturbed people and possible dangers coming from them holding guns and rat poisons. Add up also numerous wounded dogs and dogs dying from the poison in the worst possible agony, hiding their corpses which no one attends. On the other side of the trench there are poor bullied animal protectors, who, within a night, have become the scapegoats.

A bit more educated people have dipped themselves into homey coziness of the vasts of the Internet and deliver aggressive or not-so-aggressive comments into the Universe, taking part in numerous polls and voting for "taking poor animals into the animal shelter".
Here, I would like to make a small diversion: of course there is a dog shelter in a 300 thousand city. The shelter with 180 dogs (currently) is going on despite everything due to the persistence and good-will of several volunteers. Minimally it costs 150 rubles (5 USD) per dog per day, and it is not financed by the city at all. On the other hand, there is no proper service for capturing stray animals as well. No one wants to take a stray home, very few want to seem brutal and unfair to the animals. So we have a full circle and an eaten boy.

And I am no better - in the homely Internet, typing out my shock of what has happened and the frustration of why it has happened. Why there are so many stray animals in my city and in every city in my country? Why we learned to brush teeth in the morning and use the toilet, but not to take the responsibility for an animal? Why is it possible that teenagers put a fireworks detonator into the dogs muzzle and blow it "just to see what happens"? Or burn a kitten, or throw the dog from the top floor onto the tarmac? What has gone wrong with people? Why no one is responsible for the death of a child?

It is deeply sad and hurtful to write all this about my people. Or we are just a tribe and under the cover of the night we all have become barbarians...



Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

On the experience of touching burning issues or why I am never going to make a politician

Yesterday for the first and the last time in my life I joined a discussion in a social network.
The topic was strange to me (Racism in Iceland), immigrant people´s comments seemed overly angry and unfair (in my subjective opinion, of course) and so I pressed a "post" button and jumped.

Source of photo

My point was that I don´t see it as a problem in Iceland (seriously, compare that to the rest of the Old Europe or even the rest of Scandinavia). And that basically everyone is responsible for his/her own choices, therefore, for the consequences and their personal welfare. Basically it was it:
"I really don´t understand this, but maybe I am meeting "wrong" people here - I have been in Iceland since August and there was not a case/situation when I felt discriminated. Russian origin has its drawbacks in Europe, but I never felt it here. Yes, it is a closed society as anywhere else in Scandinavia, but isn´t it like coming to the other people´s house to live? I mean, you can expect support, but don´t you have to do something in return? Like at least try to learn culture and traditions and language before coming here and not whine about them not giving money for your language classes or not hugging you straight away? After all, it´s we who made the choice of leaving our home and coming to live in theirs."

In about two hours several people (understandably not of an Icelandic origin) lashed at me, accusing me of everything starting from xenophobia to not having a slightest idea that a racism actually was.

Previously a guy from France complained of being refused to take a loan as he called himself in the post "being a dirty foreigner". Another one from Spain said that he´s paying his rent, taxes and living expenses and still being racially discriminated, as "racism is Iceland is subtle but all over the place".

Particularly fascinating comment came from Mongolian-origin (am I being a racist or just descriptive here?) woman from Kazakhstan, previously in her comment claiming of being constantly harassed on the streets of Reykjavik, who said that she "with her Slavonic soul regarding Iceland her home".. "went somewhere wrong"... apparently, as people like me still exist.

And then I stopped and thought why is it so difficult to take a responsibility for your own life and not to blame parents, society, fate, the more lucky neighbour, anything else?

I come from the country which had most of its calamities and revolutions coming from the mouths of shouting petty people, and inheritantly, unconsiously  I fear deeply all sorts of shouting on the corners in the streets - shouting for "democracy", "equality", all sorts of "freedoms", because generally nothing good comes out of anger, jealousy and hate.

Someone may argue that it´s not these three, but then can I ask you, if it´s possible that a good-natured, kind, talented, and giving person could be willingly involved into something like that? Did Bunin, Nabokov, Brodsky, Stravinsky, Azimov, Dovlatov and many others bother themselves of this unproductive, self-degrading time-consuming shouting in their most miserable years of immigration?

I am not saying you have to shut up, but then again if you conveniently start to call a foreign country your home and, therefore, consider it proper to make your own rules there, putting a hiking tent in the place where a dining table stood for centuries, and if, in this case, being politely refused, start to shout about bleeding wound of immigration consciousness, then I call it plain manipulation.

And then again what happened with a good old constructive dialogue? What happened with respect for your counterparts and, first and foremost, respect for yourself? What happened with the universal values of honest work, respect for the world around you, benefiting and learning from the target culture, combining that with the source culture? I guess opportunities for this are enormous in Iceland.

I felt confused and disappointed about wasting time to being involved into such unproductive exchange of thoughts. So, I read a book, and called a friend, and sent a small present to my other friend, and had a small talk in Icelandic with a post woman, and smiled to the cashier in Bonus, and finished sawing a skirt, and cooked supper, and learned some Icelandic.
Tomorrow I will try to do something else for peace and balance, if not in the lives of the humanity and in the name of fight against racism, but to built a little bit more of my small life here in Iceland, as this was my decision and, therefore, my primary responsibility.


Copyright © 2012 by Olga Johannesson