The old table was set in front of the window. From where I was standing, I could see the playground, basking in the morning sun. The playground where I bruised my knees so many times and where I cried over my broken heart as the boy I liked, gave gum to another girl. At that time, the playground was my safe haven.
It was still early as almost everybody I knew was enjoying their morning slumber.
Fina, from apartment 9, was out there smoking her usual cheap cigars, wrapped in stolen labels, while she was graciously drinking her miracle cancer concoction, as she called it. A mix of herbs from the black market. Little did she know that, at that point, it did not matter if she were to drink just plain water or miracle herbs, cancer already burned her bones.
And as many people of her age, communism brought her to its knees before time. She was a thin, young woman that lost her way somewhere between her two heart attacks and the impediment of living her life as she wanted.
On that particular morning, she seemed happy.
That day, we had no food in the fridge and I had no time to dwell on this as I was used to minimal access to food. These were harsh times when even I, as a child, acknowledged that we were passing through a bad period.
All my grandparents had to offer to me that morning was a piece of stale bread with some sort of gooey orange paste that they told me it was called marmalade.
I was 6 years old when I ate for the first time marmalade.
Little did I know that marmalade was stolen by my grandfather, as I found out later in life, just because he thought I deserved to eat something sweet and different, rather than the usual bread with sugar on it. He used to help me dip the bread in warm tea, so it would be easier for me to eat it as I was imagining it was a slice of cake.
Little did my grandparents knew that stolen jar of marmalade would mean so much to me now, at 28 years old, as all the pieces in my head connected this morning.
On a chilly October day, the adult Ema realized that sometimes the past leaves indelible marks on your soul and everything makes sense now, including the jars of jams and marmalade that I obsessively buy and have now in my fridge, how my dad can't sleep if he doesn't have 3 loaves of bread in the house and how my husband has 30+ pairs of only white socks.
