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He stood in front of my Mom, who had not yet had time to take her coat off. Then, while they stood, oddly still and silent, facing each other, something ungraspable happened to Dad’s hand, which, as if the only moving part in their frozen confrontation, broke the stillness by an awkward short slap against each of Mom’s cheeks.
Mom said, “Kolya! What’s that?” and she burst into tears which I had never seen.
Dad started yelling and demonstrating a saucer with cigarette butts which he found behind the blind on the windowsill in the kitchen. Mom tried to say something about her woman-friend neighbor, but Dad rebuffed in a loud voice that Belomor-Canal cigarettes were not a women’s smoke. He flung his sheepskin overcoat on and, before getting out, yelled, “But you swore to never ever even shit within a mile off him!”
The door slammed furiously, Mom went to the kitchen and then across the landing to her new woman-friend in the former Zimins’ rooms. I put on my coat and felt boots, and went to the rink again. On my way I met my sister-’n’-brother coming back home, I did not say anything to them about what happened there.
At the rink, I was hanging around until full dark. I had no wish to play, neither wanted to go back home, so I just milled about aimlessly or sat by the stove in the shed.
Then Natasha came up to me on the ice empty of anyone already, she said that Mom and my brother were waiting for me on the road and that at home Dad dumped the Christmas Tree on the floor and kicked Sasha, and now we were going to sleepover at some acquaintances’.
Under the desolate light of lamps above the empty road, the 4 of us walked to the five-story building, where Mom knocked on the door to an apartment on the first door. There lived the family of some officer with two children, I knew the boy from the school, but not his sister, who was from a too senior grade.
Mom shared some sandwiches she brought along, but I did not feel like eating. She went to sleep together with my sister-’n’-brother on the folding coach, and I was bedded on the carpet next to the bookcase. Thru its glass doors, I saw The Captain Dare-Devil by Louis Bussenard and asked for permission to read it, while the light from the kitchen was reaching the carpet…
In the morning, we left and crossed the Courtyard to one of the corner buildings, I knew that it was the hostel for officers though I never had entered it. In the long corridor on the second floor, Mom told us to wait because she needed to talk with the man whose name she mentioned but I've forgotten it entirely.
For some time, the 3 of us waited silently on the landing, then Mom showed up in the corridor and led us home. She opened the door with her key. From the hallway, thru the open door to the parents’ room, the Christmas tree was seen dropped on its side by the balcony door, splinters of smashed decorations scattered the carpet around it.
The wardrobe stood with its doors ajar, and in front of it there was a soft mound of Mom’s clothes, each one ripped from top to bottom…
Dad was away from home for a whole week, but then Natasha said that he was coming back and so it happened the following day. And we started to live on further again…
~ ~ ~
When the vacations ended, I found a newspaper package in my schoolbag, the uneaten sandwich stayed there from the last school day in the previous term. The rotten ham imparted the schoolbag a putrid stench. Mom washed it from within with soap and the fetor got weaker but still stayed…
At school, they held the contest between the pioneer grades at collecting waste paper.
After classes, the pioneers from our class, in groups of threes or fours, visited the houses of Block and the five-story buildings, knocked on doors, and asked if they had some waste paper. At times, they presented us with huge piles of old newspapers and magazines, but I never went to the corner building housing the hostel for officers. Instead, I proposed my group of pioneer collectors to visit the Detachment’s Library, where they gave us a sizable score of books. Some of them were pretty worn and tattered but others quite fresh as, for instance, The last of Mohicans by Fennimore Cooper with nice engraving pictures which only missed some 10 pages at the end….
One evening, when we were playing Hide-and-seek in the snow burrows along the far side of the ice rink, some senior boy said that he could lift five people at once, and easily too, with just one hand. It seemed so improbable that I bet. He only warned that the five people should lie down in a compact group for him to grip conveniently.
So, he and I, as opponents, and a few more boys went towards the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the light of lamps illuminating the rink and found a level spot.
I lay down on my back in the snow and, following his instructions, stretched out my arms and legs, for the four boys to lie upon them: one boy on each, all in all, five people.
Yet, he never tried to lift us. I felt fingers of a stranger unbuttoning my pants and entering my underwear. Unable to break loose from under the four boys who pinned me to the ground, I only yelled and shouted them to get off and let me go.
Then suddenly I felt free because they all ran away. I buttoned my pants up and went home angry with myself that I could so easily be fooled. Scored one more visit to the topmast with a teapot.
(…and only quite recently it suddenly dawned on me that it was not a practical joke as with “showing Moscow”. It was the check to verify suspicions aroused by my fancy dress at the New Year party.
However ridiculous it seems, it took almost a whole life span until I guessed what’s what.
And here lies the third but, probably, the most cardinal of my Achilles’ heels – belated grasping…)
On the way from school, my friend Yura Nikolayenko broke the news of the caricature they sketched my Mom in and pinned to the stand by the House of Officers. In that picture, she was tossing: to go to her husband or her lover?
I uttered not a word to answer but for more than a month, I couldn’t go anywhere near the House of Officers. Then, of course, I had to visit it because they showed “The Iron Mask” with Jean Marais in the role of D’Artagnan.
Before the show, with all my innards tightly squeezed by shame and fear, I sneaked to the stand, but the Whatman sheet pinned in it already bore a new caricature of a drunken truck driver in a green padded jacket, and his wife with children shedding blue tears at home.
(…it was unlimited relief at that moment, yet, for some reason, until now I can too vividly recall the caricature of my Mom which I have never seen.
She’s got a sharp nose in it, and long red fingernails while tossing – to which of the two?
No, Yura Nikolayenko did not describe the picture for me, he only retold the inscription…)
In early spring, Dad came home very upset after a meeting at his work. There was another wave of the redundancy purge and at that meeting, they said who else to make redundant if not him?
So, we started to pack things up for loading them into a big iron railway container, as other redundant people before us. However, the actual loading was done by Dad alone because the 4 of us left 2 weeks earlier…
On the eve of our departure, I was sitting on a couch in the room of the Mom’s new woman-friend across the landing. The woman and Mom left for the kitchen, and I stayed back with a thick book which I picked up from the piles of waste paper at the Detachment’s Library and later presented to Mom’s woman-friend.
Turning pages with the biography of some ante-revolution writer, I idly looked thru the seldom inset illustrations with photographic pictures of unknown people in strange clothes from another, alien, world. Then I opened the thick volume somewhere in the middle and inscribed on the page margin, “we are leaving.”
That moment, I remembered the principle of creating animated cartoons: if on several subsequent pages you spell some word—a letter per page—and then bend the pages and release them one by one so that they quickly flip one after another, then letters will form up the word you wrote.
And I inscribed separate letters in the corners of subsequent pages, “I-S-e-h-r-g-u-e-y-O-g-o-l-t-s-o-f-f-a-m-l-e-a-v-i-n-g.”
Yet, the cartoon did not work out as supposed. In fact, it did not work at all, but I did not care. I just slammed the book, left it on the couch, and walked away across the landing to a room with packs of things lined under its walls…
Early in the morning, a bus left the Courtyard for the station of Valdai. Besides the 4 of us, there were a couple of families going on their vacations. When the bus turned to the road of concrete slabs descending from Block, Mom suddenly asked me who we would better live with: my Dad, or the man whose name I absolutely do not remember.
“Mom! We do not need anyone! I will work, I’ll be helping you,” said I.
She answered by silence… And those were not just words, I believed in what I was saying, yet Mom was versed in the labor legislation better than me…
Down, at the foot of the Gorka, the bus stopped by the turn to the Pumping Station and Checkpoint. The man about who Mom had just asked me, climbed in. He approached her, took her hand, telling something in a low voice. I turned away to look out of the window… He left the bus, it slammed its door and drove on. In a couple of minutes the bus pulled up at the white gate of Checkpoint. The guards checked us and the vacationers and opened the gate letting the bus out of the Zona.
A black-haired soldier grabbed hold of a white-paint-coated rod in the gate’s grate while floating by behind the glass in the bus window.
I realized with absolute clarity that never again would I ever see the familiar gate of the Zona, neither that unknown soldier next to it, however, one thing I didn’t know yet… It was my way of leaving childhood.
~
~
The Adolescence
(…and, probably, that’s it. Enough is enough. It is time to roll the potatoes out from among the glowing ashes before they turned firebrands too. Yes, they told me that coals are crammed up with kilocalories, still I am not quite sure about the taste of those critters. Besides, it’s getting pretty dark and I’d rather not overeat at so late an hour. “And leave your dinner”, said some sage dietitian, “to your enemy”. Which is a pretty useless piece of wisdom in my case. Where could I possibly get them those enemies at all? I've been raised and carefully formatted for life in a society where each man is a friend, a comrade, and a brother to any other man…
Damn, but it’s so tempting to share the bullshit you once were fed with (and in ladlefuls too!) up to your ears. So, one day I poured a podcast homily to your step-sister, Lenochka, like, being good and kind is the innate feature of mankind at large, regrettably obscured by their ignorance of how immensely good they are deep inside, a sad pity!
She listened silently and same night my perversive stars flogged me Shakespeare’s “Richard III” on TV. What a treat! She stuck in the tube and watched, mesmerized, how all those good and kind people (sadly, uninformed of their hidden goodness) were strangling and shredding each other and cutting throats for a change. And sure enough, the next morning she watched the rerun too because Shakespeare isn’t a knickknack you can give the shake, it’s classic. Since then, my political line regarding the TV is that of armed neutrality.
Well, so much to emphasize the fact that, if I chance to come across an accidental enemy, I’d sooner give them my last shirt but not my dinner, moreover, the potatoes baked in the fire ashes.
The moment you break their charred crust and pour a pinch of salt into the steamy core, you see the light of Truth that no oysters, nor lobsters, nor any other fancy kulebyaki can hold a candle to them. Oh, no! Not a chance.
For their sake, all freaky nourishment leave willingly I to abstruse gourmets ‘cause we, uncouth and simple-minded garlic eaters, have no use for neither calipash nor calipee – nope! Our modest goal is an ample simple grub and plum dough, we’re not after excessive luxuries.
And were I a younger man but not a Negro advanced in my years and pressed by all kinds of problems which the struggle for life brims with, then to them, and them only, would I dedicate an ode of love and gratitude—to potatoes baked midst the fire ashes.
No wonder, that in the most poignant episode in all the pulp fiction series by Julian Semenov, his main protagonist Stirlitz, aka Soviet secret service agent Isayev, turns up the sleeves of his spiffy Fascist uniform and bakes potatoes in the fireplace of his Berlin apartment to celebrate the Soviet Army and Navy Day.
However, with all due admiration at his culinary patriotism, no, sir, dat’s ain’t da thin’. To really enjoy the taste of baked potatoes, you need to sit on the ground, under the open sky, with an evening like this one here around you…)
In Konotop, Grandma Katya kissed us all, in turn, confusedly, in her kitchen, and cried. So
Mother started comforting her and talking out of snivel, before she noticed two kids’ heads that peeked from behind the door to the room and asked if they were her sister’s children.
“Yes, here we have our Irochka and Valerik. So big kids already. The girl is 3 years old and he will soon be 2.”
When their father, Uncle Tolik, came home from his work, I for the first time saw, not in a movie but in real life, a man with a bald patch extending from the forehead to the back of his head, however, I tried not to ogle too obviously. An hour later he and I went out to meet my Aunt Lyouda. The food store she worked at closed at seven and, coming home, she always carried bags of chow from work.
Walking by the side of Uncle Tolik, I marked the way to the Underpass, which Konotopers were calling Overpass… Some vague recollection retained a long wait in front of a railway barrier, lowered to block off the overpass made of smeared wooden sleepers bridging the gaps between the rail-heads, then the barrier went up stirring agitated commotion in a ruck of people, who rushed from both sides to cross the railway, a couple of horse drawn telega-carts and an odd truck in their midst… That time we were going from Konotop to the Object… In my absence, they built a deep concrete tunnel under the multi-track railway, hence the official name—Underpass—but folks still named it the way they used to—Overpass…
On the other side of the Under-Overpass, long red streetcars were running from City to the Station and back. The Konotop’s central part named “City” was never defined officially so that Konotopers could entertain different ideas about the area’s size and borders but the Station, located within the City limits, did not belong to City, which subtleties I still had to learn.
Before Aunt Lyouda arrived by one of the streetcars from City, Uncle Tolik talked me into coming up to her under the rare lamps over the tilt into the tunnel of Under-Overpass, but he would keep out of sight, and I had to grab one of her bags and ask in a husky voice: “Not too heavy for you, eh?” But she recognized me even though Uncle Tolik had pulled the peak of my cap down to hide my eyes.
The 3 of us walked back to Nezhyn Street, and Uncle Tolik carried the bags loaded by Aunt Lyouda at the store to be squared up for at her payday.
On climbing up out of the Underpass, we crossed Bazaar along the wide aisle between the rows of empty at that hour counters under the tall lean-to roofs above them, like, lined-up abandoned gazebos, and after walking for another 10 minutes, we turned into Nezhyn Street; a couple of distant lights on far-off lampposts in its depth made it look different from the rest, unlighted, streets….
In Konotop, we arrived at the start of the last quarter in the academic year and both I and the twins became students at School 13 which very conveniently stood right opposite Nezhyn Street, across field-stone-cobbled Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street. Old folks called it “Cherevko’s school” because under the Czar, a certain rich man from the nearby village of Podlipnoye, Cherevko was his name, built a brick two-story pub-house, but the then authorities didn’t allow him to operate it because the would-be pub’s stood too near to the only factory in the city, threatening to make drunks of the local working class en masse, so Cherevko donated the building to the city for arranging a school of four classrooms in it… In the Soviet era, the morality of workingmen rocketed up so that the present-day pubs moved two-three times closer to that same industrial unit and “Cherevko’s school” got expanded with a long one-story building in the pronounced barrack style, also of bricks. The addition stretched along a quiet side street slanting toward the Swamp named, interchangeably, the Grove, that separated the village of Podlipnoye from Konotop or vice versa.
Going to school for the first time, I couldn’t get the meaning of canvas pouches hanging-dangling alongside the schoolbags or sizable leatherette folders of the students walking in the same direction.
I was surprised to learn that in those pouches they carried their ink-wells. It felt a little out-of-date because the schoolchildren at the Object had long since started using fountain pens with an inside ink-tank whose capacity allowed for refilling it no oftener than once a week if you did not write too much. Ha! Kinda getting from the era of gasoline engines back to the epoch of post stages, yet the very next morning same pouches did not look as something overly striking anymore.
Protracted deafening ding-and-dong of the huge electric bell filled the long corridor in the one-story building, plus all the yard of the “Cherevko’s school”, and 3 adjoining streets in the vicinity. If it signaled a break, everyone went out into the wide schoolyard with an ancient tree in its center and the low building behind it, which comprised the Pioneer Room, the workshop for Handicraft classes, the school library and, as I was too late to learn at the moment, the ski storage room.
The gym, with its windows grated from inside to prevent smashing the panes by ball hits at PE classes, abutted the far end of the barrack-like building at the right angle. Opposite the blind end wall of the gym, there stood a detached hut of toilets of whitewashed brick.
All the break long, a swarm of students hung out at the high stoop of three stairs by the entrance door. The horizontal handrails in the stoop’s landing were congested by perched boys until a maverick teacher would shoo them off and they reluctantly comply only to again light up the moment the teacher’s back vanished in the doorway.
A lively trickle of students kept flowing to and from the toilets in the yard corner, yet the majority of boys (and boys only!) veered before reaching the toilets hut and turned round the gym corner. There, in the narrow passage between the gym and the tall fence of the neighboring garden, life ran high in a brisk cash game for ready money, the game of Bitok at the school Las Vegas grounds, where the average stake was about pyatak, 5 copper kopecks, and no less than 2. If you had nickels, say, 10, 15, 20 or even fifty-kopeck in one piece, it’d be exchanged before you say “knife”.
The stakes stacked on the ground in a tiny neat tower—one atop the other, each coin heads up—the bitok comes into play.
What’s a bitok? It’s hard to say, every player had his favorite hunk of iron—a bolt, a railroad spike, a polished ball from a huge bearing—no limits in the game, you could use whatever you wanted, be it even a stone. And even the absence of any gear was no problem—anyone would readily lend you his bitok for hitting.
Hitting what? That stack of kopecks, silly!. Any coin turned over by your hit and showing their tails is now yours. Collect them into your pocket and hit the remaining stubborn heads, one by one. When no coin turns over, the next player starts his tries.
And who is to open the game? Quite logically, the one who enters the biggest share of kopecks the stack…
At times, the warning cry of “shuba!” from the gym corner signaled the approach of some male teacher. The money vanished right away from upon the ground into the pockets, cigarettes hid inside the capped palms. However, the alarm was always false – the teachers turned to the toilet where beside the row of common holes in the floor there was the boarded cabin for Director and the teaching staff.
In just three games, I lost fifteen kopecks, that Mother gave me for a cabbage piroshki from the school canteen. This was no wonder though because the bitok virtuosos were training their hands at home with their favorite bitok pieces while I had to hit with a borrowed one. Maybe, that was even for the better, leaving no time for me to get addicted…
(…the Konotopian “shuba!” takes roots from thief slang “shukher!” that takes roots from Yiddish “zukher!” each of which means “cheese it!”. The school slang “atas!” at the Object meant exactly the same yet derived from the French ”l’atantion!”. Traditionally, Russian gentry were taught the French…)
~ ~ ~
On my first day at school, Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, planted me next to a skinny red-haired girl, Zoya Yemets. I never used Zoya’s inkwell, yet Sasha Dryga, a grown-up double repeater with a greasy forelock down to his eyes, resented my presence at her desk and, after the classes, he didn't omit informing me of the fact…
And on the way home I made friends with my classmate Vitya. His last name sounded a bit scary, yet it’s a fairly trite one among the Ukrainian family names – Skull. Our on-the-fly friendship had sound foundation though because we both were walking along one and the same Nezhyn Street, and he also lived on it, only farther, next to the Nezhyn Store which was halfway from any of the street’s ends. The following day I asked Albina Grigoryevna for moving me to the last desk in the left row, to be seated next to Skull, because we were neighbors and could help each other with home assignments. She respected so weighty reasons and I left Zoya’s side.
The desk in front of me and Vitya was seated singly by Vadya Kubarev, which situation immediately gave rise to our triple friendship.
The last names at school were, naturally, used by only teachers, while among the students Skull would surely turn Skully, Kubarev become Kuba and so forth. What handle did I get? Goltz or Ogle? Neither. If your name happened to be “Sehrguey”, they did not bother about vivisecting the last name and everyone started to call you “Gray” by default…
Friendship is power. When the 3 of us were together, even Sasha Dryga refrained from bullying… Friendship is knowledge. I shared the pieces of poetry never included in school curriculum but firmly memorized by all the boys at the Object, such as “To get insured from the cold…”, and “The light was burning in the pub…”, and “Vaniyka-Halooy went to the fair…” as well as other short but flowery instances of rhymed folklore. And in the context of cultural and philological exchange, my friends explained to me the meaning of popular Konotopian expressions like “Have you fled from Romny?” or “It’s time to pack you off to Romny.” As it turned out, the town of Romny, about seventy kilometers from Konotop, was the seat of Regional Psychiatric Hospital for nuts…
~ ~ ~
That morning the gambling bouts at Bitok ran low behind the gym. On that clear April morning, the lads stood arguing and waiting for the confirmation of so welcome rumors that the Central TV news program “Time” was grossly mistaken the previous night. Because some guy heard from guys from School 10 that last night some man landed by parachute in the Sarnavsky forest near the Konotop outskirts. And now Sasha Rodionenko would arrive from City, his family had recently moved over there but he still attended our school, just let's wait him come, he should know for sure, he would confirm…
I remembered the flight of Gagarin and as soon after him Guerman Titov was orbiting all day long to say in the evening, “Bye, for now, I’m going to bed.” And Dad chuckled with delight and replied to the radio on the wall, “That’s a good one!”
Our cosmonauts were always the first and we, elementary school pupils, were arguing who of us was the first to hear the radio announcement about the flight of Popovich or Nikolayev, or the first cosmonautess Tereshkova…
Sasha Rodionenko came but he didn’t confirm anything. So the Central TV news program “Time” was not mistaken. And the sun faded in grief…
Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov…In the landing module…
Entering the dense layers of the earth’s atmosphere…
Perished…
Then Father came and he was followed a week later by the railway container with our things from the Object that arrived at the Freight Station and moved from there on a platform truck to 19 Nezhyn Street, both the wardrobe with the mirror on its door and the folding couch-bed, and the two armchairs with wooden armrests, and the TV set, and all the other implement-utensils. Even the old-fashioned leatherette sofa arrived for which there was no room in the khutta.
(…now I can feel nothing but horror at the thought: how could 10 people—2 families and their mutual Grandma Katya—to fit into and live in 1 room and 1 kitchen?
But at that time I didn’t think of such things at all because since it was our home and we lived there the way we lived, then it couldn’t be somehow different, everything was as it should be and I just lived on along and that’s it..)
For the night, Sasha and I readied the folding couch-bed and shared it with Natasha, who lay across at our feet with a chair put next to the couch for her legs. My brother and I had to keep our feet pulled up to the middle of our bed, otherwise, Natasha would grumble and complain to the parents on their bed by the opposite wall, and tell on me and Sasha for kick-fighting. Nice news, eh?! She could stretch her legs out as far as she wanted, and rebuffed my offers to swap our places… The family of Arkhipenkos and Grandma Katya slept in the kitchen.
Parallel to Nezhyn Street, about three hundred meters off, there ran Professions Street one side of which was just one endless wall of tall concrete slabs fencing the Konotop Steam-Engine and Railroad-Car Repair Plant, which name was commonly eschewed and substituted by the short and nice KahPehVehRrZeh. Because of that plant, the part of Konotop outside the Under-Overpass was named the KahPehVehRrZeh Settlement, or just the Settlement.
On the Plant’s opposite side, the same slab-wall split it from the multitude of railway tracks in the Konotop Passenger Station and the adjacent Freight Station, where long freight trains were waiting for their turn to start off to their different destinations because Konotop was a big railway junction. The marshaling yard of the Freight Station with freight cars running down the hump, both as loners or in small groups into the sorting lines, sent forth the shrieking screech of wheel chocks, bangs of cars against each other, indistinct screams of loudspeakers with reports about that or another train on that or another sorting line. However, in the daytime the marshaling yard symphony was not too overbearing, its racket whooped it up against the background of night quietude after the noises of day-life subsided…
Regardless of any time of day, whenever it breezed from the nearby village of Popovka, the distillery there permeated the air by its unmistakable stink, which atmospheric phenomenon the Settlement folks christened “From Popovka with Love”. Not that the reek was totally lethal, yet you were better off if shunned to sniff at it attentively, anyway, to have a running nose on such days was kinda blessing…
Nezhyn Street connected to Professions Street by lots of frequent lanes. The first of those side streets (counting from School 13) was called Foundry Street because it led to where the former foundry was located inside the Plant and now not seen because of the concrete wall.
