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(…laughter and fear go hand in hand and there is nothing more frightening than something you can’t make out what…)
And on Monday morning I went to the parents’ room to admit that at night I again peed in bed. They were already dressed, and Dad said, “Gak! Such a big boy!” And Mom ordered me to peel off my underpants and get into their bed. From a shelf in the wardrobe, she fetched dry underpants for me and followed Dad into the kitchen.
I was lying under the blanket still warm with their warmth. Even the sheet was so soft, caressing. Full of pleasure I stretched out as much as I could, both legs and arms. My right hand got under the pillow and pulled out an ungraspable coarsened rag. I could not guess its purpose in their bed but I felt that I had touched something shameful and shouldn’t ask anyone about it…
~ ~ ~
It’s hard to say what was more delicious: Mom’s pastry or Grandma’s buns both baked for holidays in the blue electric oven “Kharkov”.
Grandma Martha spent her days in the kitchen cooking and washing up, and in the children’s room sitting on her bed not to be in the way of our playing.
In the evenings, she read us The Russian Epic Tales, a book about hero warriors who fought countless hordes of invaders or the Dragon Gorynich, and for the rest and recreation after the battles, they visited Prince Vladimir the Red Sun in the city of Kiev. That’s when the iron bed had to bear the additional weight of the three of us seated around Grandma Martha to listen about the exploits of Alesha Popovich or Dobrinya Nikitich.
When the heroes had their moments of sadness, they remembered their mothers, each one his own, but to their different, absent, mothers they all addressed one and the same reproach: why those mothers weren’t smart enough to wrap the future heroes into a piece of white cloth while they were still just silly babies and drop them into the fast running River-Mommy?
Only Ilya of Murom and Warrior Svyatogor, who grew so mighty that even the Earth Mother could bear him no more and only mountain rocks still somehow withstood his movements, they never raised that mutual lamentation, not even when having the bluest blues…
At times one or another of the hero warriors had a fight with one or another beauty disguised in armor. Those fights ended differently but the defeated would invariably say, “Do not kill me but treat instead to good food and drink and kiss on my mouth as sweet as sugar.” With all of those epic tales heard more than once, I knew by heart when such combats with gastronomic outcome were near at hand and eagerly anticipated them in advance…
Grandma Martha named the bathroom “the bathhouse”, and after her weekly bath, she was returning to our room steam-heated to red glow and half undressed—in just a tank top for menswear and one of her long skirts. Then she sat down on her iron bed to cool off while combing and braiding her gray hair into a pigtail. On her left forearm, there was a large mole in the form of a female nipple, the so-called “bitch’s udder”.
In course of one of her after-bath proceedings when she seemed to notice nothing but the curved plastic comb running thru the damp strands of her hair, I took advantage of my brother-’n’-sister’s distraction by agitated playing on the big sofa and sneaked under the springy mesh in the Grandma’s bed well sagged under her weight. There I cautiously turned over to my back and looked up – under the skirt between her straddled legs wide and firmly planted in the floor. Why? I did not know. Neither was there anything to make out in the dusk within the dark dome of the skirt. And I crawled away, as carefully as I could, feeling belated shame, regret, and a strong suspicion that she was aware of my hushed maneuvers…
Sasha was a reliable younger brother, credulous and taciturn. He was born after the brisk Natasha, and his complexion startled all by purple-blueish tinge because of the umbilical cord had almost strangled him, yet he was born in a shirt, which was taken off him in the maternity hospital and Mom explained later that from newborns’ shirts they produced some special medicine.
And Natasha turned out a really shrewd weasel. She was the first to know all the news: that the following day Grandma was to bake buns, that new tenants were to move into the flat on the first floor, that on Saturday the parents would go to a party at some people’s place, and that you should never-never kill a frog or it would rain cats and dogs.
At the sides of the back of her head, there started two pigtails split by ribbons before reaching her shoulders to fix each braid with a lovely bow-knot at its end. Yet, neither of those bows survived for long before falling apart into a tight knot with a pair of narrow ribbon tails. Probably, because of zealous spinning her head on all the quarters to find out: what-where-when?.
The two-year difference in age gave me a tangible degree of authority in the eyes of the younger. However, when Sasha taciturnly reran my climbing to the attic, then by that feat he, like, overtook me for two years. Of course, neither he, nor I, nor Natasha was capable at that time to put into words such a finicky deduction. We stayed at the level of emotional sensations expressed by interjections like, “Wow, boy!..” or, “Oh-oh, boy!..”
The unexpressed desire to reinforce my faltering authority and self-esteem or, maybe, some other inexpressible, or already forgotten, reasons led me to being nasty. One evening, with the light in the room already turned off, yet my brother-’n’-sister, laid to sleep with their heads on the opposite armrests in the huge leatherette sofa, still a-giggling and kicking each other under their common blanket because Grandma Martha couldn’t upbraid them while standing by her bed and whispering into the upper corner, I suddenly spoke up from my folding bed, “Tell you what, Grandma? God is a jerk!”
After a moment of complete silence, she erupted in threats of hell and its laborer devils and their pending job to make me lick a red-hot frying pan in future, yet I only laughed in response and, spurred by the reverent lull upon the sofa, showed no esteem for the awaiting tortures, “Whatever! Your God’s a jerk all the same!”
The following morning Grandma Martha did not talk to me. On my return from kindergarten, Natasha briefed me that in the morning, as Dad came home after his night shift, Grandma told him everything and wept in the kitchen and the parents were presently gone to a party at someone’s but I’d be let have it, and that’s for sure!
To all of my goody-goody attempts at starting a dialogue, Grandma Martha kept aloof and silent and soon left for the kitchen… A couple of hours sweating it, then the front door slammed, the parents’ voices sounded in the hallway. They moved to the kitchen where the talk became quicker and hotter. The door in our room prevented making out the subject of the heated discussion.
The voices' volume kept growing steadily on until the door flew open by Dad’s hand. “What? Scoffing at elders, eh? I’ll show you ‘a jerk’!” His hands yanked the narrow black belt from the waist of his pants. A black snake with the square chrome-flashing head flushed up above his head. His arm swayed and a never experienced pain scorched me. Once more. And more.
Wailing and wriggling, I rolled under Grandma’s bed to escape the belt. Dad grabbed the back of the bed and by one mighty jerk threw it over to the middle of the room. The mattress and all dropped down alongside the wall. I scrambled after the bed to shelter beneath the shield of its springy mesh. Dad was yanking the bed back and forth whipping on its both sides but I, with inexplicable speed, ran on all fours under the mesh jumping overhead, and mingled my howling and wailing, “Daddy! Dear! My! Don’t beat me! I won’t! Never again!” into his, “Snooty snot!”
Mom and Grandma came running from the kitchen. Mom screamed, “Kolya! Don’t!” and stretched out her arm to catch the hissing impact of the belt. Grandma also kvetched loudly, and they took Dad out of the room.
Crestfallen, with shallow whimpers, I rubbed the welts left by the belt looking away from the younger who huddled, in petrified silence, against the back of the big sofa…
~ ~ ~
In the Courtyard, we played Classlets.
First, you need a chalk to draw a big rectangular in the concrete walk and split it into five pairs of squares, like, a two-column table of 5 rows. Then get the bitka—a can from used shoe polish filled with sand whose enclosed mass conveys your bitka the required gravity, turns it a kinda tiny discus.
Now, standing out the bottom line of the first column, you throw your bitka into one of 10 classlet-squares and then go after it hopping on one leg (up the first column and down the second, 1 leap per square) to pick it up and proceed thru the rest of the table, also in one-legged hops, to leave the table of classlets by the final bound from the bottom classlet in the second column. A parabola-shaped mission trip is over.
(While going thru the table, take care your sandal never lands near any of the chalked lines or else the other players, closely watching your progress, would raise a hell of jeering shouts insisting that you stomped on it.)
Now, safely out of the Classlets table, you have the right to throw your bitka targeting the next square in the parabola and repeat your hopping trip to carry it out. After your bitka visited, in turn, all of the classlets, you mark one of them as your “house” and further on in the game you may feel in it at home—put your other foot down and relax. Yet, if your bitka missed the proper square or landed on a line, or if you touched a line when hopping, another player starts their tries and you become a watcher…
There were ball games as well. For instance, hitting a ball non-stop against the ground, you had to accompany each strike with a separate word, “I! – know! – five! – girls’! – names!” At each subsequent hit at the ball, you called out one of 5 random names, no repetitions allowed. Then followed 5 boy’s names, 5 flowers, 5 animals, etc., etc., until the ball bounced out of reach or the player got lost in their enumerations…
Another ball game was not as intellectual. You just hit the ball against the faded-pinkish-washed plaster on the house wall (closer to the corner, safely away from the window on the first floor). Guessing the landing spot of the re-bounced ball, you jumped over it with your legs wide apart before it hit the ground.
The player behind you caught the ball to throw it back against the wall—this time for them to jump for you to catch. There could be more players in the game though, so you had to wait for your turn in the line of jumpers. I was enchanted by the game’s infinity. It was like those endless pictures on the red side of Fire Extinguisher…
We played outside the Courtyard as well, across the ever-empty road surrounding the twin blocks.
Atop the tilt towards the Recruit Depot Barracks, a tall board-fencing enclosed large garbage containers for all of our Block. Next to the fence, there stretched a level area grown with green grass except for a lonely sagging pile of sand by the enclosure, probably, a leftover from the construction times and later used like any sand by any children in any sandbox. Apart from all those uses, we played a special sand game though, which had no name.
You just scooped a handful of sand and tossed it up, trying to catch the returning sand into your palm, as much as you could. The catch was held in the outstretched hand and you pronounced the ritual formula, “So much—for Lenin!”
Then the sand in the palm was thrown up again and caught back once again. Over the second catch, the words in the formula changed the proposed addressee, “So much—for Stalin!”
After the third toss, no one cared to catch the sand, on the contrary, they hid their hands behind their backs to avoid the downing sand, and then even clapped to ensure not a random grain had any chance to keep stuck to the palm, “And so much—for Hitler! That’s that!”
Somehow, I felt ill at ease about not fully fair play in the game when you leave the last in the trinity without the tiniest speck of sand. And one day playing at the pile alone, I broke the rules and caught a pinch of sand even for Hitler although I knew he was a very bad one and even had a tail before they caught him…
Besides, we used the sprawling sandpile’s outskirts for constructing of “secrets”—small holes scooped out no deeper than a teacup—whose bottoms we floored with the heads from the flowers picked in the grass. A shard of pane glass put upon the petals of the heads pressed them down and imparted a look of somewhat melancholic beauty. Then the hole was filled up and leveled and we made arrangements over it “to check our secret” the following day, however, either we forgot or it was raining, and later we could not find “the secret”, so just produced another one…
One day the rain caught me in one of the round gazebos in the Courtyard. As a matter of fact, it sooner was crossbred of the outright deluge with a thunderstorm. Black clouds piled up over the entire Courtyard, all around got wrapped in the dark as if sunk a flushing night. The adults and children who happened to be in the gazebo scattered racing along the walks towards their houses. Only I tarried over a forgotten book with the pictures of three hunters roaming thru the mountain woods until the waterfall rushed down from the darkness above. It was unthinkable to run home thru that roaring flood, I had to only wait until it was over.
Thunder pearls erupted madly, the lightning tore the sky over Block crisscross and hither-thither. The gazebo bounced from the deafening rumbling, and the wind-driven sheets of water lashed the inside circle of the cemented floor reaching far over its center. I placed the book on the bench running along the lee side props but some crazy drops got even there. It was so scary and wet, and cold, and never-ending.
When, nonetheless, the storm let up, the clouds of darkness broke asunder revealing the blue of the sky as well as the fact that the day was far from being over yet, and that my sister Natasha was running from our staircase-entrance with the already needless umbrella because Mom sent her to call me home.
“We knew that you were here”, she said panting, “You could be seen at first…”
~ ~ ~
(…it’s not that I have any special knack for nosing out conspiracies, yet the unyielding confluence of chance circumstances would mulishly bring me smack-bang to the scene of some secret scheme a-brewing…)
When in kindergarten three boys of the senior group began to exchange clandestine hints, something like:
“So it's today, eh?”
“We’ll definitely go, yes?”
“After kindergarten’s over, right?”
I felt unbearable bitterness that some adventure was obviously underway while I stayed with the usual same plain everyday. That's why I approached the leader in the gang of 3 and asked him directly, “Where are you going to?”
“To steal tomatoes in the Where-Where Mountains.”
“May I go with you?”
“Okay.”
I had already a vague idea that stealing was bad but in my whole life I hadn’t seen yet any mountains, only the low hillock of the overgrown with Fir-trees Bugorok-Knoll whose sandy drop-off side was facing the grassy level grounds by the garbage bins enclosure for our Block. However, first of anything else, I desired the wonderful tomatoes from the Where-Where Mountains. In my mind’s eye, I already could see their round ripe sides gleaming with solid red.
So it was a whole day of waiting for the hour when adults start to come after their children, when I promptly declined going home with someone else’s mother, “No, thank you, I go with the boys to reach Block sooner.”
The 4 of us went out of the gate but we didn’t take the short trail thru the forest. Instead, we turned left to follow the wide dirt road on which there never appeared any vehicle. The road went uphill and then dived with a tilt, and I kept looking out around and asking the same question about when the Where-Where Mountains would stand out. However, as the answers were getting more and more curt and reluctant, I kept down the eager question not to put at risk my taking part in the tomato adventure.
We went out to the road with the streaks of melting black tar over the joints of concrete slabs in the road surface. I knew that road which went down from the Gorka blocks towards the House of Officers. We did not follow it though and only crossed into the thicket of supple bushes cut with a narrow trail which brought us to a house of gray logs with a sign hanging above its door for those who could read.
The boys did not go any farther. They started dawdling aimlessly between the bushes and the weathered-gray logs in the house walls until an adult unclie came out of the door and crossly ordered us away. Our leader answered his parents sent him to pick up the newspapers and mail, but the unclie grew even more angry, and I went home well taught what they mean by mentioning the Where-Where Mountains…
Yet, I still believed that adventures and travels would certainly come my way and getting ready for them was the must. That’s why, spotting a maverick box of matches upon the kitchen table, I grabbed it without a moment’s hesitation or delay—you have to train yourself to get the knack at vital arts, right?
A couple of initial attempts proved that lighting a match against its box side was something easy indeed. And there at once popped up the urge to proudly demonstrate to someone my newly acquired skills. Who to? To Sasha and Natasha, sure thing, they would be much more impressed than Grandma. Besides, my authority by them called for repair and restoration after all the recent flops.
(…however, this list of motives is made by me in hindsight, from the immeasurably distant future—my current present over this here fire loaded with potatoes to bake.
But then, in that immeasurably distant past, without any philosophizing and logical justifications, I perfectly knew that…)
I should call the younger ones to some hide-out and show them my apt control of the fire. The most suitable place was, of course, under the parents’ bed in their room, where we crawled in the Indian file. At the sight of matches in my hands Natasha oh-ohed in a warning whisper. Sasha kept silent and watched the process closely.
The first match caught fire but went out too soon. The second developed a good flame, yet all of a sudden it swayed too close to the mesh of tulle bed cover hanging down by the wall. The narrow tip of the fire bent forward, the upturned icicle of yellow flame burst thru the tulle forming a black, ever-widening, gap. For some time I watched the scene before I guessed its meaning and shouted to my sister-’n’-brother, “Fire! Run away! Fire!” But those little fools stayed where they were and only boohooed in duet.
I got out from under the bed and ran across the landing to the Zimins’ where my Mom and Grandma were sitting in the kitchen of Paulyna Zimin over the tea she treated them to. On my skimble-skamble announcement of fire alarm, the three women dashed across the landing. I was the last to reach our apartment.
Under the ceiling of the hallway, leisurely revolved fat curls of yellowish smoke. The bedroom door stood open to the show of half-meter-tall flames of fire dancing merrily upon the parents’ bed. The room was filled with a white-blue mist and somewhere within it, the twins were still howling.
Grandma pulled the mattress and all from the bed down to the floor and joined the number with the brisk step by her slippers over the fire accompanying the lively kicks by loud calls to her God. Mom yelled to Sasha and Natasha to get out from under the bed mesh. The fire jumped over onto the tulle curtain of the balcony door and Grandma pulled it down with her bare hands. In the kitchen, Paulyna Zimin rattled the saucepans against the sink filling them with water from the tap. Mom took the twins to the children’s room, came running back, and told me to go over there too.
We sat on the big sofa silent, heeding the to-and-fro racing in the corridor, uninterrupted swish of water from the tap in the kitchen, the stray exclamations of the women. What now?
Then the noise little by little abated, the hallway door clicked behind departing auntie Paulyna. From the parents’ bedroom there came the sound of mop taps as at the floor washing, from time to time the splash of water poured down into the bowl was heard from the toilet room.
The door opened. Mom stood there with a wide seaman belt in her hand. “Come here!” she called without giving any name, but the 3 of us knew perfectly well who was summoned.
And then there reigned silence—some complete, suspended, silence… I stood up and went to catch hell… We met in the middle of the room, under the silk shade from the ceiling. “Don’t you ever dare, you, piece of a rascal!” she said and swayed the belt.
I cringed. The slap fell on the shoulder. It was just a slap, not a blow – no pain at all. Mom turned around and left. I was stunned by so light a punishment. It’s nothing compared to what I’d be surely shown by Dad when he comes home from work and sees the bandaged hands of Grandma after applying vegetable oil to the burns…
When the door clicked in the hallway and Dad’s voice said, “What the… er… What happened here?”, Mom hurried over there from the kitchen. All that she said was not heard but I made out these words, “I’ve already punished him, Kolya.”
Dad went into the parents’ bedroom to estimate the damage and very soon entered our room. “Ew, you!” was all he told me.
For a few days, the apartment had a strong smell of smoke. The runner from the parents’ bedroom was cut up into smaller pieces. The remnants of the tulle curtain and burned bed were taken out to the garbage enclosure across the road. A couple of years later I could read already and whenever coming across a matchbox with the warning sticker: “Keep matches away from children!”, I knew that it was about me too…
~ ~ ~
This question puzzles me till now: what at that tender age made me so cocksure that in future they would be writing books about me. The certainty was spiced by a pepper-hot pinch of shame that set my cheeks a-glow at the thought that future writers when touching my childhood years would have to admit frankly that, yes, even being a big boy, a first-grader actually, I sometimes peed in bed at night, though Dad just couldn’t hold back his exasperation because at my age he no longer made puddles in his bed. Never!
Or take that terrible occurrence when on the way from school my tummy got squeezed by unbearable colic which made me run home to the toilet room, but there everything stopped halfway, in spite of all my straining, until Grandma, terrified by my heartrending howls, rushed from the kitchen to the toilet and, snatching a piece of newspaper from the bag on the wall, ripped the stubborn turd out.
Who would ever dare write things like that in a book?!..
(…already in another—my present—life the current wife of mine, Sahtic, went to a fortune teller in the war-destroyed city of Shushi when our son Ahshaut fled the local army because of harassment by his company commander and regular beating up at the guardhouse.
In the year of Ahshaut’s birth, the USSR was ripping apart at all seams, some new life was promising to start, instilling hope that before he grew of age there would be no army drafts but only contract enrollment of volunteers. And why not? “You never know the Devils’ next joke,” quoting a Russian byword. Well, in my dream’s case, the SOB was not in the mood for joking.
The commander of the company, handled Chokha, picked on Ahshaut because of his own dissatisfaction with the unfair arrangement of life—after the Karabakh war his combat bros became generals with hanging stomachs and personal Jeeps equipped with drivers while he, Chokha, was still rotting at the front line.
After Ahshaut was missing for eight days, Sahtic went to Shushi, to the popular fortune-teller who assured her that everything would be alright. And so it happened. Ahshaut came home, we took him back to the place of his service, to higher ranked officers in the chain of command than Captain Chokha, and our boy was transferred to another regiment, in a hotter spot, where he served the remaining year, though already without the sergeant stripes in his shoulder straps…
So then, in the process of seeing the future, the seer shared additional information, kinda a bonus for turning to her, that my Grandma, though in the other world already, was ill at ease on my behalf and lighting up a candle on her behalf in this here world would relieve her over there. My Grandma’s name (so the fortune teller) was almost like that of Maria, only a little different…
I was utterly flabbergasted by the accuracy of the extrasensory guess. Maria and Martha are indeed very similar names of the two sisters from the Gospel. Leo Taxil assures that even Jesus Himself sometimes confused the chicks…
And when my Grandma turned 98, she also began to forget her own name. On such days she sought her daughter’s help, “Lyaksandra, I keep wondering lately—what could my name be?”
Well, yes, Aunt Alexandra was also a good sort, “Oy, Mom! But I can't recollect either! May it be, Anyuta?”
“No … Somehow different it was…”
And three days later she would triumphantly announce to her daughter, “I remembered! Martha, I am. Martha!.”
No wonder the fortune teller couldn’t deliver her exact name…
However, by this flashforward, I jumped ahead way too much because it’s me who had to serve in the army first, but in this here letter to you, I’m still at the kindergarten senior group.
I think I’d better turn off the tap that pours profound hooey on infantile megalomania, and return to the period when kindergarten was completing its share in the formation of my personality…)
Now, back to the pivotal 1961… What is remarkable about it (besides my graduating the senior group at the Object’s kindergarten)?
Well, firstly, whichever way you somersault this figure it'll still remain “1961”.
Additionally, in April the usual flow of programs from the radio on the wall in our room cut off yet didn’t die transmitting static for quite a while before the toll-like voice of Levitan chimed out that in an hour there would be read an important government declaration. Grandma started sighing and stealthily crossing herself… However, at the appointed time when all of the family gathered in the children’s room, Levitan gleefully announced the first manned spaceflight by our countryman Yuri Gagarin who in 108 minutes flew around the globe and opened a new era in the history of mankind.
In Moscow and other big-time cities of the Soviet Union, people walked the streets in an unplanned demonstration, straight from their workplaces, in robes and overalls, some carrying large paper sheets of handmade placards: “We are the first! Hooray!” And at the Object in our children’s room full of bravura marches by orchestras from the radio on the wall, Dad was impatiently driving it home to Mom and Grandma, “Well, and so what’s not clear, eh?! They put him on a rocket and he flew around!”
The special plane with Yuri Gagarin on board was nearing Moscow and, still in the air, he got promoted from Lieutenant straight to Major. Fortunately, the plane had a stock of military outfit and at the airport he descended the airplane stairs with a big star in each of the shoulder straps of his light-gray officer’s greatcoat to march in parade step, fine and proper, along the carpet runner stretched from the plane to the government in raincoats and hats. The laces in his polished shoes somehow untied on the way and whipped by this or that loose end the carpet runner at each stomping step, but he did not lose his demeanor and in the general jubilation no one even noticed them.
(…many years later watching the footage of the familiar newsreel, I suddenly saw them though before that as, probably, all other viewers, I could only stare at his face and the well-trained marching in.
Did he notice himself? I don’t know. But all the same, he came up so confidently and, holding his hand to the peak of his forage cap reported that the mission assigned by the Party and Government had been successfully accomplished…)
