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Then Dad left the Hospital and we started to live on further…
~ ~ ~
At school, our sixth grade was moved back onto the second floor in the main building. Because of uninterrupted book-reading and watching the television I had no time for home assignments but still remained a “good learner” just out of teachers’ inertia.
In the school public life, I played the role of a horse in the performance staged by the pioneers of our school. The role was assigned to me because Dad made a big horse head from cardboard and on stage I represented the horse’s head and forelegs. My arms and shoulders were hidden under a large colorful shawl, which also covered one more boy who crouched behind me gripping my belt because he played the role of hinder-parts.
The horse did not say anything on stage and appeared there only as the nightmare to scare an idler in his sleep and make him reform and study well. We performed in the school gym, and in the Regiment Club, and even went on a tour out of Zona—to the club of Pistovo village. Everywhere, the appearance of the horse sparked vivacity among the audience…
Besides the movies at the Regiment Club, I sometimes went to the House of Officers, asking the ticket money from my parents. It was there that I watched the French adaptation of The Three Musketeers for the first time.
Before the show, ominous rumors circulated in the thick confluence filling the foyer hall, people murmured that they failed to bring the film and would show some other flicks instead, so as to keep money for the sold tickets. I draw aside from the crowd ruminating the ugly hearsay and, to kick devastatingly grim contemplation, I…
(…being that I, the one from that period, I knew no Eddy Murphy yet and believed, in earnest, that we single-handedly defeated Germany in WWII because our Soviet people are always ready to die for out Soviet Motherland at a moment’s notice and without any second thought whatsoever…)
… sought shelter in the concentrated consideration of the huge portrait of Marshal Malinovsky screening half the foyer side wall by all the screwed, and pinned, and dangling items in the exhibition of his orders and medals. The collection was really enormous leaving no vacant spot on his ceremonial tunic where the medals of lesser denomination were hanging below the waist, from the groins, a kinda over-all coat of mail.
And I swore to the chain-mailed marshal, I wouldn’t watch anything else even if they did not give the money back. But it turned a false alarm and the happiness, lavishly spiced by the sound of ringing swords, lasted the whole 2 sequels, and in color too!.
The exploration of the Detachment’s Library was regularly bringing new achievements. Not only that I had long ceased to be frightened by the pictures in the wide anteroom, but I also became a seasoned shelf-hanger.
As the shelving of books crowded quite close to each other, I got the hang of climbing right up to the ceiling for which purpose the shelves both sides of the narrow passages became, like, convenient ladder-rungs. I wouldn’t say that on the previously unreachable shelves there were some special books, not at all, however, the acquired skills at mountaineering increased my self-esteem like after that occasion when Natasha called me from my sofa-readings because there was an owl in the basement of the corner building.
Of course, I immediately ran after her. The basement corridor was illuminated by a single bulb that somehow managed to survive the harsh times of the crook wars. At the end of the corridor under the opening to the outside pit, there sat a large bird on the floor, much bigger than an owl. Some real eagle owl it was who angrily shook his eared head with the crooked nose, no wonder that the kids did not dare approach.
My reaction was surprisingly deft, without a moment’s hesitation, as if handling maverick eagle owls was my daily routine, I took my shirt off and threw it over the bird’s head. Then, grabbing at the clawed legs, I lifted the bird from the floor. The owl didn’t resist under the cover of my tartan shirt. Where to now? Of course, I took it home, especially since I was not fully clad.
Mom didn’t agree to keep such a big monster at home although our neighbors, the Savkins, had a hefty crow in their apartment. Mom answered that Grandmother Savkin’s main job was wiping up the crow guano all over their apartment all day long, and who would do it in ours with all of us at work and school?
Reluctantly, I promised to take the eagle owl to Living Nature Room at school next morning because there already lived a squirrel and a hedgehog in their cages. Till then, he was allowed to sit in the bathroom. For the eagle owl’s refreshment, I took a slice of bread to the bathroom and a saucer full of milk. He gravely sat in the corner and did not even look at the food on the floor tiles. Going out, I turned the light off, in the hope that, being a night predator, he’d find it even in the dark.
First thing in the morning, I checked and saw that the eagle owl hadn’t pecked a crumble of his supper. He also partook none of it while I had breakfast though the light in the bathroom was left on for the purpose. So, I clutched his bare legs and carried him to school.
Probably, owls do not like hanging upside down because that eagle owl constantly tried to bend his head up as far as his neck let it go. At times, I gave my schoolbag to my brother and carried the bird with both hands in the normal position. When from the hillock top opened the distant view of school, the owl’s head dropped and I realized that he was dead. I felt even relieved that he wouldn’t have to live in the captivity of the smelly Living Nature Room.
I veered from the path and hid him in a shrub because once I saw a hawk hanged from a thick bough in the old tree atop the Bugorok-Knoll. I didn’t want them to feather or somehow mutilate my owl, even though dead as he was…
Later, Mom said that the bird died, probably, of old age that’s why he sought refuge in the basement.
(…but I think all that happened so that we would meet each other. He was a messenger to me, it's only that I haven’t understood the message yet… Birds are not just birds and ancient augurs knew that well…
My house in Stepanakert is located on the slope of a deep ravine behind the Maternity Hospital. It’s the last house in a dead-end, a very quiet place indeed.
Once, coming home, I saw a small bird, the size of a sparrow, in the withered late-autumn grass by the footpath. In fumbling unsteady steps, it trailed thru the brittle grass as if severely wounded, dragging the wings in its wake.
I gave it a passing look and went on, burdened by too many problems of my own… The next day I learned that right about that moment a young man was butchered a little deeper in the ravine in a brawl of junkie bros.
That small bird was the soul of the murdered and there’s no chance to make me step back from this belief…)
~ ~ ~
In the autumn following the separately spent summer vacations, the senior part of our family became fans of mushroom harvesting.
Of course, the mushrooms at the Object were always there, just take a couple of steps to any side away from the trodden school path and there’s russula growth for you, or solid portabella, long-legged enoki, or oily agarics, it’s only that too busy passers-by had no time for mushrooms… But when they give you the permit paper to get out the Zona for a whole Sunday and also provide a truck to take the mushroom-pickers to the out-of-Zona woodland, the “noiseless hunting” takes on much more attractive looks. Probably, all those conveniences were always there for the Object dwellers, only my parents did not use them until they needed a firmer reconciliation after the split-up summer.
(…though I did not think about such things at that time and was just all too happy to go with my parents to the forest for mushroom harvesting which term is more correct than “looking for”. However hard you look for, there’s no way you’ll find it, even before your very nose, until it calls you. Without the call you pass not seeing – it waits for someone else. It took me a life to understand it’s not about mushrooms only but any not-living (Ha!) inorganic thing…)
Especially for those Sundays, Dad made three pails of sturdy cardboard, lightweight and capacious. In the forest, the mushroom-pickers from the Zona parted and wandered everyone by themselves at times exchanging distant echoes of “ahoy!” by which you couldn’t guess who it was.
I liked alerted roaming in the silent autumn forest wet from the drizzle and fog. Of course, we didn’t pick too brittle russulas, but portabella or agarics were a good find. Dad made a small knife for each of us, so as not to spoil the mycelium, besides, on the cut, it’s seen at once whether the mushroom had worms.
The best sort of the mushrooms were “the whites”, or porcini, but I never came across any of them. The unfamiliar ones I took to Dad, and he explained that those were shiitake, or morels or simply poisonous throwaways.
At home, the mushrooms were poured from the pails into a big washing basin and kept overnight in the water, then Mom cooked or marinated them. All that was delicious, no doubt, but hunting them in the woods gave more delights…
One Sunday when the parents went on a visit somewhere, the three of us started chasing each other all over the apartment, just for fun. The merrymaking was cut short by a sharp knock at the door. On the landing, there stood the new neighbor from the first floor who said that our parents’ absence was not a reason to kick up such a bedlam and, when back, they’d be informed we couldn’t behave if left alone.
Later in the evening, Natasha ran in from the landing with the alert alarm: the parents were coming home already but stopped on the first floor by the neighbors from the apartment under ours. Oh-oh, we’re going to get hell!
How come she was at the right time in the right place? Quite easy. The landing was, like, the apartment’s extension wide for us to play balloon-volleyball, and Mom even started to use it as a gym, going out there in the evenings, when she was not at work, to jump a skipping rope. We followed her example, but I wasn’t as good at it as Natasha who practiced much oftener, and so she did at the moment of our parents’ intercepted return.
When they entered the hallway, Dad’s face was very angry. Without taking off his coat, he headed to the kitchen and brought a stool to the parents’ room, where he moved the rug aside and smashed the stool against the floor. “Keep quiet, eh?!” shouted he to the floorboards and squarely banged them once again with the stool’s seat, “Is it okay now?”
I realized that we would not be punished, but something still was somehow not right….
When leaving for school, we took along the sandwiches wrapped by Mom in newspaper sheets so that during a break we would take them out of our schoolbags and eat. For Sasha and Natasha, she put two sandwiches in one package because they studied in the same class. And before leaving for school, we also had breakfast in the kitchen.
However, on that particular Saturday, I left without my schoolbag and alone because that day the senior students were having a military game for which reason the classes for junior schoolchildren were canceled.
The game participants belonged to the competing groups of “the Blues” and “the Greens”, and for the start, they were to march into the forest in different directions. Their goal was to track down the opponent forces, surprise them, and capture their banner. Each trooper had to wear paper shoulder straps whose color indicated the group they were from. A gamester with one shoulder strap torn off became a prisoner of war while missing both meant they were "killed"…
That morning, I came to the kitchen late for breakfast because normally I got up wakened by the rise of the younger ones, but they enjoyed their day-off at the moment. Secondly, the previous night till late I kept sewing the shoulder straps onto my jacket with tiny, frequent, diligent stitches so that they would sit close to hinder tearing them off because of which military preparations I went to bed about midnight…
Now Mom was already leaving for her work and said there remained some pasta cooked for the previous day dinner or, if so be my wish, I could boil an egg for my breakfast.
I reminded her that I knew nothing about cooking eggs, but she answered it was as easy as pie: to have a soft-boiled egg you boil it for a minute and a half while three-minute boiling makes it hard-boiled. She even brought the alarm-clock from their room and put it on the windowsill next to the mushroom jar before taking a hurried leave…
Such three-liter jars were kept in almost every kitchen at the Object and they were filled with a mushroom that had nothing to do with the forest. It looked like some greenish slime upon the water in the jar and, in spite of the ugly looks, it turned the water into a tasty drink reminiscent of effervescent kvass, even though they called its producer ‘tea’-mushroom. When the jar contents neared their end with the mushroom wisps scratching the bottom, the jar was simply refilled with water and put aside for a couple of days to prepare the drink again. Women were gladly sharing pieces of the mushroom among themselves because when grown too thick it left no room for refilling the jar.
So, marking the time by the alarm clock next to the mushroom jar, I poured water into the small pan indicated by Mom before leaving, loaded it with an egg, lit the bluish springy fire in the gas stove and put the pan on it…
After exactly a minute and a half of waiting, the water around the egg did not look like being hot, so I decided, okay, let it be a hard-boiled egg. Additional one-and-a-half minutes past, some scanty vapors did start to rise from the pan, besides, the pan’s walls underwater developed lots of small bubbles, and I turned the gas off because I had exact instructions on how to cook boiled eggs…
(…the byword about the first pancake in the batch turning out a sorry lump can be safely expanded with “the first boiled egg is a slushy mess”…)
The military game participants were mostly in sportswear and noticeably reluctant to enter the school building. So all of us crowded together in the yard idling the time in small separate groups. In the one I was with, everybody appreciated the minuscule stitches that kept my shoulder straps in place. I proudly patted the one on my left shoulder—no way to grab at it, eh? Nothing like by those boys who fixed theirs by just a couple of stitches and now their shoulder straps stuck out like a cat's arced back asking to be torn off with just your pinky finger.
At that moment some unfamiliar boy, maybe from the parallel class, started a scrap. He spread me on the ground and tore my shoulder straps in tatters.
(…I never knew how to fight, neither do I now.
Most likely, I just called him “fool!” and ran away into the forest—back home…)
In the forest, I took my jacket off… Instead of the shoulder straps, there only remained a dashed, serrated, frame-like paper-strip under the tight close stitches by a doubled black thread.
I plucked the paper scraps out and scattered over the fallen foliage. Maybe, I even cried full of resentment at being killed so unruly, prematurely, before the start of combat actions, shattering my eager dreams to capture the adversary headquarters…
For some period, my favorite pastime at classes became producing blueprint drawings of my secret shelter located in a cave inside a mighty impenetrable cliff like that one lived by people in The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. Yet, unlike their case, you could get to my cave only by the underground passage which began far from the cliff, in the depths of the surrounding forest. Well, and the cave itself had an additional passage upward, into a smaller cavity equipped with narrow crevices in the wall to peek out and see what’s going on around…
A grim mask alike to those stone idols in the Easter Island decorated the butt-end of the pencil which I drew my designs with… The skill of pencil carving was also obtained at school, it’s as easy as pie and all you needed was a razor blade.
At the pencil’s butt-end, scrape 2 lengthwise parallel grooves, about 1 centimeter long, 3 mm wide and 2 mm apart to produce the ridge of the would-be nose. Connect the grooves with a deep cross cut to mark off the nose tip.
Now, from about a centimeter down the nose start a wider scrape towards the cross-cut, it makes the nose stick out and also becomes the lower part of the face. The notch across that wider scrape passes for a thin-lipped mouth, and two short slits, one in each of the long grooves on both sides of the nose, are the idol’s eyes.
Just be careful about the razor blade, it’s horribly sharp and would cut your finger pads at once if wielded inattentively… The instrument for carving was picked up, as needed, from the tiny blue-paper pack of razors kept by Dad in the bathroom. The blue top bore the brand-name “Neva” and the neat drawing of a black sailboat above it. Each razor in the pack was wrapped in a separate blue envelope embellished with the same sailboat and inscription…
When the winter sat in, the skin on my hands began to peel off. At first, there formed some small spots of dry skin and, when rubbed and pulled at, it would go off in patches. I didn’t tell anyone about it and in a week took off all of the skin there, like a pair of tattered gloves, up to the wrists. Only the palms’ skin remained in place. And beneath the peeled off patches, there was new skin already…
(…I have no idea if there is some scientific explanation for such a case, yet, in my humble opinion, the phenomenon was caused by the book which I met on the shelves of the Detachment’s Library titled The Man Is Changing His Skin. I never borrowed nor skimmed it but the title was remembered and, being an impressionable child, I checked the possibility of the announced change…)
Both naivety and impressionability were my innate Achilles’ heels… Impressed by a record on a 33 RPM disc, I felt a naive desire to write down the lyrics of the song, although it was in a foreign language.
My attempt at copying never went further than the first line of which result I also had rather grave doubts. Played once, the line distinctly sounded as “azza latsmaderi”, yet at the following audition it somehow turned into “esso dazmaderi” and no matter how long I listened to the record those variants elusively substituted each other impeding a clear-cut decision. But it’s not possible for a recorded disc to swap the words on the fly! Anyway, the project was derailed.
(…many years later I heard the song again and readily recognized when Louis Armstrong sang up from a laser disk:
“ Yes, sir, that’s my lady…)
The skating rink across the road was from the very start meant for playing hockey. Over time, it got bounded with compact plank fencing, and two hockey goals popped up at the field’s opposite ends.
After snowfalls, the boys cleared the field with a pair of wide metal sheets resembling the bulldozer blade. Each shield had a long horizontal handle above it and no less than two or three boys were needed to push the contraption.
The snow was moved to the fence opposite the locker-room shed and shoved out of the field with large snow shovels of plywood. That’s why behind that fence there accumulated a tall snow ridge all along the ice rink. Those artificial hills of snow were burrowed by boys and became an ever-growing system of tunnels with ramifications, dead ends and stuff as if following the blueprint drawings of my secret shelter.
In the evenings, we played Hide-and-seek in those tunnels full of the ink-black darkness because the lamp posts were only put along the fence on the locker-room side of the ice rink. But when you switched a flashlight inside a burrow there jumped up white glacial walls holding numberless sparks in their murky depth…
~ ~ ~
The year was ending. In the tear-off calendar on the kitchen wall by the window, there remained but a few palm-sized pages. Such tear-off calendars contained as many pages as there were days in their year and initially the thick mass of hundreds of pages squeezed by its glistening tin spine had a look of solid importance. Each page bore its unique date in bold and, in regular type-set, it informed of the exact time both sunrise and sunset on that particular day as well as symbols and numbers showing the current phase of the moon, and all that compactly printed wealth of information was meant to be torn off and thrown away to keep pace with the time flow. To make the loss still bitter, together with the information the page’s visual design was also condemned to annihilation. The data on the movements of celestial bodies were placed at the page bottom keeping its center for the portrait of one or another Member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who was born on that day, and if all Members missed being born on that day, there was a portrait of this or that hero of the Civil War or of the Great Patriotic War. On the reverse side, you could read their biography, but briefly because of the petit page size. Once in 2 months, you could come across a crossword in the calendar (yes, cues on their back), besides, there were four dates printed in red because they were holidays: the New Year, May Day, the Great October Revolution Day, and the Constitution Day.
However, later Mom started to buy tear-off calendars for women, where instead of Members’ portraits there were pictures of Birch-trees upfront and the sewing patterns on the page back, or recipes for pies, and other useful tips.
From one of those tips, I learned how to wean your husband from his propensity for spirits:
“Pour a quantity of pulverized burnt cork into a glass of wine and treat your husband to it before the guests’ arrival. When all got together, the burnt cork will demonstrate its impact making the carouser unable to restrain the pressure of gases in his stomach and he’ll start to fart and feel ashamed before the guests which embarrassment will make him abandon the disgraceful habit.”
I shared the method to Mom because at times she scolded Dad for his propensity. However, Mom was reluctant to use the advice.
(..I couldn’t understand her then – why to complain if you don’t want to eliminate the cause of discomfort?
Coming of age I understood my Mom, but now I cannot understand those who could print such idiocy.
See? My comprehension works like that crane from a fable wallowing in a marsh mire who pulls his neck out free, but a wing gets bogged down, the wing is out—oops!—a leg got stuck.
Or is it about my comprehension only?..)
A week before the winter holidays Class Mistress announced that at the school New Year Eve Party would also be the contest for the best fancy dress so our class should do our best to win it. I was thrilled by the task at hand and right away conceived the idea of an unbeatable carnival dress – no bears or robots anymore, I’d dress up like a gypsy girl! Mom laughed when I shared my plan, yet promised to help because she had connections at the Dancing Amateur Activities…
At my cautious inquiries in the class—what disguise did they intend for the contest?—the boys invariably answered that no one cared about making any fancy dress and they would attend the party in their casual wear. The dismal prospect distressed me not a little because at a New Year party everything should be as in the movie “The Carnival Night” with streamers flying crisscross thru the snowfall of confetti… I sought consolation in a soothing thought that it was silly panicking just like before “The Three Musketeers” which show did take place, after all. Well, and if the boys had no intention of wearing fancy dresses, then there remained other guys especially from the senior classes who you could rely on…
Mom made me a mask like that of Mr. X in the movie “Mr. X”, also of black velvet only she added black gauze strip hung down over the lips. Now, no one would recognize me because from the Dancing Amateur Activities Mom brought a real wig with a long black braid reaching to the waist, a red skirt, a fine blouse and a black shawl with big red flowers.
After I changed into all those things, Mom and her new woman-friend who moved into the Zimins’ rooms laughed themselves to tears. Then they said, what if someone invited me to dance? I had to have some practice beforehand. On their advice, I picked up a chair and slowly span keeping it hugged under a waltz record. They laughed even more and said I needed female shoes, my boots did not suit the red skirt. The shoes were also found but they had high heels because you couldn’t wear sandals in winter. Walking on high heels was more than uncomfortable but Mom said, “Practice your patience, Cossack, and get trained while the time allows”.
One hour before the New Year party, my carnival costume was packed in a large bag, and off I went to school thru the dark night forest.
At school, I sneaked up to the second floor, where even the light was not turned on, and in one of the dark classrooms, I changed into my fancy dress. Descending to the first floor, I held onto the railing because walking in high-heel shoes was no better than having skates on your feet.
Both the vestibule and the first-floor corridors were lighted rather scantily, yet there was enough illumination to see that everyone, including the guys from senior classes, wore, albeit not the school uniform, yet nothing like carnival costumes.
They all stood in small groups or ran back and forth and fell silent when I clap-clapped the shoe heels past them over the parquet flooring, then over the tiles of the vestibule and the following parquet in the next corridor. And where was the celebration then? Where were the streamers and confetti?.
A couple of senior boys talked in a whisper to each other and approached me, “Could you tell the future, gypsy girl?”
At that moment School Pioneer Leader appeared and took me with her to the gym. The hall was crowded with rows of seats up to the New Year Tree and farther back on both sides of it to accommodate the audience for the performance of a prepared play. So, all my waltzing that chair at home was just useless, the school New Year party program foresaw no dancing whatsoever.
School Pioneer Leader seated me in the first row facing the still closed blue curtains. Then she left briefly and brought a masked girl in a Harlequin suit—another stupid fool like me. The girl was placed in the chair next to me, and we were the only mummers in the gym.
The curtain fell open and the ninth-graders presented their production of Cinderella. They had good costumes though, I especially liked the tartan cap of the Jester… The performance ended, everyone started to clap and I realized that now even the Jester would change into his pants and jacket.
I left the gym and went upstairs to the dark classroom, where I had left my clothes, and changed back. What a bliss it was to get rid of the hatefully painful high-heel shoes and get into my long-longed-for felt boots!
Exiting the school, I met my Mom and Natasha who came to admire my masquerade triumph. I shortly warned them that there was no carnival, and we went home thru the same night forest.
(…the trick for being happy all the time is pretty simple: avoid looking back and let the memory do its job quickly – it will forget and erase your blunders, sorrows, and pains. Just keep looking forward to pleasures, successes, and holidays…)
~ ~ ~
Though the New Year celebration party fell so flat, ahead still was the long winter vacations with seventeen TV sequels of “Captain Tankesh” where he’d ride his swift horse, and swash his saber, and make fools of the Austrian occupants of his Hungarian Motherland.
In the parents’ room, as always, the Christmas Tree was touching the ceiling with the ruby star on its top, and among the shiny decorations there also hung chocolate candies “Batons” and “Bear Cub in the Forest”. After the lead-balloon carnival, life smiled again…
On the New Year Eve, Dad worked the night shift so that the garland lights would not fade in the Christmas trees in homes at the Object. And on the first morning of the New Year, Mom left for her work so that water would flow steadily from the kitchen taps…
That morning I woke late when Dad was already home from work. He asked who visited the previous night, and I answered that Mom’s new woman-friend from the former Zimins’ rooms came for quite a minute.
Then I read, went to the rink, played hockey in felt boots and came back again to the books on the big sofa… I was watching the concert of Maya Kristalinskaya on the TV in the usual wide kerchief around her neck—to hide the traces of her personal life drama—when Mom came from work. I ran from the parents’ room to the hallway, and Dad was already there from the kitchen.
