Funny Children's Stories. Bilingual Edition

Then Mom heard that our neighbor went to open the door. And suddenly our neighbor yelled, “Oo-ooh!” And Mom said that at that moment, she understood everything and bolted out into the corridor. That was exactly what she said, “I bolted out into the corridor.” And it was my dad.

There is another story that Mom sometimes tells our guests. She tells about the time she went to the market to sell Dad’s coat.

She went to the market to sell Dad’s coat because there was nothing left for us to eat. It was the first time that my mom went to sell something. She was very nervous. Even though everyone was telling her not to worry, “Everyone does it. It’s not a big deal.”

And so Mom went to sell the coat. She was standing there for a long time, afraid to offer the coat to anyone. And she kept repeating to herself that she should be brave because everyone sold things and no one worried.

Then Mom saw a young man. This young man seemed very nice. So, Mom found the courage to approach this young man and said, “Sir, do you need a coat? I have one for sale.”

Here, this young man reached into his pocket and showed Mom his ID. When he did this, Mom’s knees began to shake and her vision became blurry. Even though she did not understand what kind of ID it was.

The young man asked Mom harshly where she got the coat. And Mom answered that the coat belonged to her husband and that her husband was at the front. The young man said that he was assigned to keep watch on the market in order to catch all bandits and crooks like my mom.

Then he asked my mom what she would tell her husband about his coat when he returns from the front. At this point, Mom could no longer stand it and began to cry. And as she cried, she told the young man that she would somehow figure things out with her husband herself. And the young man finally let my mom go.

Later, Mom was always surprised that just about everybody sold just about everything at the market. But for whatever reason, she was the only one who got caught. After that, she never went to the market to sell anything again.

As for the coat that Mom tried to sell, it hung in our closet unused for a long time. It was only recently that Mom took it out, unpicked and turned it, did something else, and made a very fashionable coat for herself. And everyone kept asking her where she found such good cloth.

Mom also told our guests that during the war she was given two pieces of rye bread per day. She ate one piece and kept the second piece for the next day. At this moment of her story, Mom always paused. Because she knew that someone would definitely ask her why she received two pieces of bread.

And someone would ask her, and she would reply that one piece of bread she received for herself and the other for her child. “But the child did not need it because I (this my mom said about herself) — because I was nursing him (this was about me).”

So she hid the second piece of bread in our wardrobe in order to prepare a sort of feast for herself for the next day, meaning to eat all three pieces of bread at once. But after she hid the bread, she kept constantly thinking about it.

She kept thinking about that piece of bread, which she had saved for the next day. And she took it from the wardrobe and looked at it. And as she looked at it, this piece of bread began to seem uneven. So then Mom cut around the edges of the bread to make it more even. Whatever she cut, she ate and put the remaining piece back in the wardrobe.

Then Mom took it out of the wardrobe again. And again it seemed uneven and she thought that she did not trim the edges well enough. So she cut it again. And she continued doing this until she finished her second piece of bread.

There was another story that my mom told once. When we returned to our apartment after the evacuation, it turned out that all the locks on all the doors had been broken. And when Mom opened the door to our room, she saw that the room was empty. Not even a single chair was left.

And she began to cry because she did not know what to do. Then someone told her that she should rummage through other apartments in our building and see whether the neighbors had any of our furniture.

At first, Mom doubted that anyone would allow her to search through their apartment. She asked, “What am I supposed to say when they open their door? I beg your pardon, I want to check whether you have stolen anything from me?” But Mom was told not to worry too much about what she should say. In those days everyone did things like that.

So Mom went around the building to the other apartments. She knocked on the neighbors’ doors and asked them to let her in to see whether, by chance, they had some of our furniture.

I believe that in the very first apartment she went to, Mom saw our wardrobe. She asked the neighbor whose wardrobe it was. The neighbor answered, “How should I know whose wardrobe it is?” Then Mom said that it was our wardrobe. And the neighbor said, “If it’s yours, then take it.”