Whence comes the trait of one people or another as neatness and the instinctive striving for a clean everyday life? We traditionally take an exaggerated pride in our whitewashed country houses and are used to comparing in our favor the Ukrainian villages with those in Russia but not with those, say, in Germany (it is very important to know how to choose an object of comparison). This is why many people do not even suspect the existence of any problem with everyday tidiness, sincerely considering themselves showpieces of it. Moreover, there are some mitigating circumstances, such as constant privations, when you have things other than cleanliness and hygiene to care about. From which it proceeds that “genteel poverty” is a purely abstract notion and a belles-lettres hoax, at least in this country. For well-being and neatness are produced by the same generator without which neither is possible: the habit of doing regular uninterrupted and purposeful work.
These thoughts were provoked by quite a common scene I happened to witness in a grocery store. A store department had just been supplied with frozen fish pressed into large heavy briquettes. Before the fish was put on the counter, a handler would take a briquette by both hands, lift it high above his head, and then violently thump the fish onto the floor, so that the saleswomen found it easier to separate the frozen briquettes. It was just raining outside, so the shoppers had brought in a lot of slush with their shoes, which was splattering all around with each thump. Sometimes pieces of fish chipped off the briquette, and the sellers, of course, carefully picked up and put them on the shelf after shaking the mud off them. The shoppers, who also found fish under their feet, helped also. I will only add that the handler’s hands were incredibly dirty, and the condition of his once white coat raised a suspicion that he had delivered the fish direct from a coal mine.
I could not hold myself back and expressed to the saleslady my attitude toward this methodology, well-aware this would hardly make a stir. In reply, I was philosophically advised to familiarize myself with what was going on at food warehouses and only then to cut in. All went according to the long-established pattern. What I did not expect, though, was the reaction of the women customers who were also watching the “processing” of the briquettes. They looked on my interference as out of place: “Look, can’t you possibly wash the fish clean at home? What’s the difference? Why are you upsetting people?” What surprised me was that the ladies did not feel disgusted.
A universal truth was confirmed yet again: everything around us always depends on our personal standards. In particular, on the demand for cleanliness we make on society, the authorities, and retail trade. It is we and nobody else who sanction the sale of foodstuffs from the ground and from under somebody’s feet, primarily by buying them. It is we — and not the peasant women who deal in sour cream, cheese, and butter — who must bear the blame for the fact that they draw their wares (before our eyes) from some old, shabby sacks full of dirty rags, as well as for the fact that milk sellers simultaneously sell unwashed eggs and take with their unwashed hands both eggs and cheese from the same basket. It is only the complacency of customers that explains why salespeople always wear stained clothes which often bear apparent signs of working in a cattle barn. Everyone knows how hard farm work is, but far from everybody knows what is the difficult culture of trade with all its special gloves, sterile serviettes, snow-white aprons, and head scarves. It is not the sellers but we (even when in our own kitchen) who have not yet understood that everything connected with foodstuffs should not raise the slightest doubt about cleanliness, let alone the aversion we often feel in a marketplace or a retail store.
I am inclined to explain all our irregularities in direct sales (and not only them) by one universal factor: the lack of effort put forth. In particular, the cleanliness of trade and everyday life requires so much painstaking effort that it is far easier to think that such fastidiousness is simply unnecessary. Just ease your mind and keep things simple, especially if you are not going to buy that frozen fish. Let them keep on thumping it on the muddy floor.
