The earrings episode in Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” and its basis in the 1941 evacuation

In Tarkovsky's "Mirror" there is an episode with the doctor's wife, played by Larisa, Andrei's second wife, with Maria Nikolayevna, played by the director's mother Maria Ivanovna, and with an exchange of earrings. The business of the earrings, it turns out, has real roots. In the summer of 1941 Tarkovsky, with his sister and mother, was evacuated to Yuryevets on the Volga, where the mother's stepfather Petrov had once served as a doctor. They lived there in great poverty, on half of his father's military allowance and their grandmother's pension. They were forever bartering something, and one day Maria Ivanovna swapped a pair of gold earrings, set with turquoise and engraved with sayings from the Quran, for a bucket of potatoes. The earrings themselves had been brought back at the end of the nineteenth century from Jerusalem by her mother's aunt, who had gone there to bow before the Holy Sepulchre but instead married a prison doctor, a Greek named Mazaraki.