Treasure Hunting

When I was little, New Years was a very big holiday for us, just as it was for most people in the Soviet Union. Dad and I put up our fake New Years tree. We decorated our apartment, and I waited for presents from Father Frost on New Years Eve.

As far as tree ornaments went my mom loved large balls, and greatly preferred them over various figurines. Every December, despite the cost, she bought one or two of these ornaments for the tree. By February the decorations were wrapped in napkins, put away into large shoes boxes, and everything together with the fake tree went back to grandpa’s garage. There the treasure lay until next December. And there it lay untouched for many years.

Recently I realized that if I am ever to put up a Christmas tree in my house, I would like to have some of the ornaments I so dearly loved when I was little. Coming to Moscow this time I was determined to get to those shoe boxes and bring back a couple of those pretty balls my mom bought.

Our first attempt to get into the garage was rather unsuccessful. None of the three keys available turned the giant padlock hanging on the garage door. Since neither my aunt nor my cousin harbored any hopes of finding the right key, only one option remained—cutting the lock.

The next morning, my aunt and I headed to the market. The sales person knew exactly what we were up to when we asked for the magic combo of a padlock and a saw. When I told him that I was planning to do the job myself, laughter erupted behind me. A young guy just could not believe his ears and there was nothing I could have said to convince him. Men in Russia still expect their women to cook, launder and bear children, and to mind their business when it comes to such manly tasks as sawing.

Back at the garage, I got through about 3 millimeters of the lock thickness in about 10 minutes, but progress was slow. The saw we bought was missing a screw, and the blade kept slipping. So I walked over to neighboring garage where an older guy was putzing around with some instruments. He gave me a doubtful look, but added a screw to my saw. As I started to walk back, he offered to do the job with an electric saw. As determined as I was to prove Russian men wrong, I could not resist the electric saw. Our garage neighbor cut the lock off in less then 5 minutes, and doing it by hand would have taken me close to an hour.

Pawing through cobwebs my aunt and I ventured inside. She held a rickety ladder as I climbed up to the shelf under the ceiling to extract the boxes of ornaments I knew so well. The boxes were beat up and dirty, but inside the pretty sparkling balls lay untouched carefully wrapped in napkins as if packed away just a few months ago.

As I picked out a few favorites, our garage neighbor came back. He clearly started worrying that he just helped two strangers break into someone’s garage. He relaxed when he saw no car inside, but wondered if New Years came early this year.

The shiny new padlock contrasted with the rest of the garage front, mostly unused in the last three years with grass growing across its entrance. As we left, my aunt was hoping that she will not have to go through the lock cutting process again, and I was wondering how in the world I would pack my shiny pretty treasure to stop it from turning into a pile broken glass during our flight home.