I don't remember anything from Lucha, although some still remember something that happened there three years ago. They say, for example, that they threw some pots of boiling water, including my father. So strings of scarring spread over his arms, and for the rest of his life he wore long sleeves. All I know about Lucha is what I heard from my parents.

We were living in one of the workers' houses. In a one-story house, located in the "Amalka" camp, which was built forty years ago. The camp was just one long street of similar, neighboring houses. Our house was in the middle of those houses. My mom appears in photos from those days very skinny. Perhaps she was exhausted from striving between the nursery and the store on the one hand, and frequenting my father at the bar on the other. Maybe she was fed up with life in Lucha for this reason. She has never found real work in her major. She studied the art of sewing women's clothes. But the women of a mountain village did not need such a profession. The citizens of the village wore the same clothes. They only have one shirt and one spare pants they wear to party rallies. A single store for ready-to-wear clothes was sufficient for their wives, and next to it was a newspaper outlet, a blacksmith's supply store, and another for haberdashery. Sometimes my mom would knit clothes at someone's request. She used to say that she would be home on Tuesdays and Thursdays from eleven to four o'clock to receive orders. She wanted to name this salon, but the rumors started circulating. Dad returns from the bar one day, furious at trying to emerge as a great businesswoman, and tells her to stop immediately. Sure, it was men who pushed him into it. All my mom told me was that after a while she quit the sewing profession for the sake of my father, and it ended there.