Petya

Petya

I do not have too many photos from my childhood. My father died when I was a little girl... and didn't leave us a camera. After his death the little money we had, went to the grocery and for paying those monthly bills. Anyway, those photos I have... most of them were made by Petya. I do not really remember when was the first time that I met him.

His official name, as far as I remember was Peter... but everybody called him Petya. He lived alone in a far away town. I heard that once he had a beautiful wife and a lot of children... but all of them died during WWII.

I remember many instances when he was at our home... going around with his cameras hanging on his neck. He used to look into all of our rooms, taking images from our furniture. After a given time he would sit down next to hour 'guest' table, and drink herbal tea which my mother prepared for him.

He used to tell stories to my mother about people that they both knew. My sister and I didn't really were interested in those stories... we didn't know the people they were talking about. So after one or two minutes of politely sitting next to the table... we went out to our garden to play. While playing, we saw Petya came outside and took a lot of photos about whatever we were doing.

Generally about two weeks later that Petya were visiting us, we used to get on the post a big fat envelope -- full of photos he were taking about us. We used to invite over all of our friends... and used to look at those images hours and hours. We didn't get tiered looking those photos till the next time Petya visited us. After Petya left, for about two weeks we weren't looking at any of the old photos -- and just were waiting excitedly for the new ones to arrive.