Everything Begins In Childhood

“Where are you going? Get to the middle! C’mon, to the middle!”

“Man the helm! Take it over! Board the enemy’s ship!”

Red, sweaty and pushing each other, we dashed along the arik. The veins on Edem’s forehead bulged, and his eyes were about to pop out of their sockets. Did any of us look any better?

It’s funny that sometimes our ships seemed to obey our commands and perform the necessary maneuvers, but, unfortunately, not always.

My plane was, perhaps, one of the most refined competitors in the race. It was sharp-nosed, its wings pressed to its sides, just like the destroyers. It had a small keel, and a mast attached to the top of it. But, alas, all those improvements didn’t allow me to win the race. At the beginning, the plane bobbed from side to side, something in its design had made it too agile. At one of the turns, it bumped into the wall of the arik and lost its mast. I got upset, but the plane leveled out and began to catch up with its rivals. It wasn’t the first to finish the race, but, in the end, the defeat didn’t turn out to be disgraceful.

Sometimes, races were held for weeks. Then, we grew tired of them. Besides, there was nothing left of our ships. Eventually, we remembered something interesting that we had forgotten about during the time of the races, like, for example, tadpoles.

* * *

It was late. An angry reproachful shout was heard from a veranda, and one of us was summoned home. We began to part company.

“Hey, guys, the zoo is coming soon. Have you heard?” Kolya remembered as he was entering the building. “They say it’ll be here, on Yubileyny.”

Kolya, a teacher’s son, learned about the town news ahead of the others.

We were happy. “On Yubileyny” meant nearby. We could go to the zoo every day, if we chose. And we knew very well that we would. This traveling menagerie had visited Chirchik before. The last time it had been here was two years ago. It had been quartered quite far away, in the center of town, in one of the parks, and my friends and I had visited it a couple of times. And every time, it had left indelible impressions.

The first thing that amazed us was the stench, the acrid blend of manure and sawdust. The floors of the cages were covered with animal fur and bird feathers. At first, those smells seemed repugnant to us, but we soon grew used to them and even came to like the smell of the menagerie; there was something exciting about it.

Cages with animals, about fifty of them, were arranged in a wide circle. A few cages in the middle of the circle formed something like an island. We heard so many unfamiliar noises: snarling, strange shrill cries, the sounds of voices and people’s laughter. That’s what we ran towards. We forced our way through the crowd and saw the apes.

There were gorillas in the cage on the left. Big, dark and looking frighteningly like humans, they sat motionless, as if they had been frozen, looking at the people. The people, for their part, examined them closely, but the gorillas watched them with indifference, or perhaps disdain.

On the right were many small monkeys with long tails. They leaped adroitly among the branches attached to the ceiling of the cage, like gymnasts. They jumped elegantly. They didn’t seem to be having fun, and they also paid no attention to the people.

But there was a real circus show in the cage with two small long-haired baboons in the center. The baboons, with their long noses and multi-colored faces – the fur on their faces was blue, white and crimson, as if someone had painted them before the show – and bare red butts without tails, looked like clowns. And they behaved accordingly.

The simple-hearted visitors, adults and children alike, laughed loudly until they were about to drop. The clowns’ tricks were, to put it mildly, somewhat rude and not quite decent. They stuck their fingers into each other’s butts, and then they sucked them. If people had done it, hardly anyone would have watched it. Everybody would have been indignant. But monkeys were not people, and it was fun to laugh at them. Perhaps, it aroused a feeling of superiority in the people. We all found it very funny. It became even funnier when a mandrill picked up the cover of a tin can and began to ride on it around the cage, howling slightly with pleasure. It was even funnier when it used it as a chamber pot. The audience wailed, squealed, roared with laughter and stamped their feet, which didn’t differentiate them from the monkeys.

I wasn’t sure, but maybe the performer grew sick of the audience’s ecstasy, because it picked up the cover and tossed it toward the crowd. The cover hit the bars of the cage, splattering its sticky stinky contents over everyone standing in the front row. A young man not far from me got a lot of it. And he was so well-dressed, with a white shirt and tie. I heard how piercingly his girlfriend screamed. She rushed away from the cage, and the dandy who had got it stood in a stupor with his arms spread. Not only his shirt, but his whole face was covered with splashes and streaks.

The spectators scattered in all directions, shouting and cursing. Only we stayed. We laughed loudly looking at the mandrill. We thought the show had been a great success. The mandrill seemed to think the same. It bared its teeth merrily, grabbing hold of the bars of the cage.

After that, we wandered around the zoo for a long time, not missing a single cage, but nowhere else was it as merry as by the baboons. Most of the animals seemed sad and indifferent, like the gorillas. The sad elephant, a giant with thick tusks, didn’t even look in our direction. Its small eyes were turned downward. Visitors, especially children, were always trying to offer it something tasty, but the elephant didn’t hold out its trunk even once. It just moved it from side to side, as if saying, “Thank you, but I don’t need anything from you.”

“Why doesn’t it run away?” Vitya whispered, poking me in the side. “Look how badly it’s tied to the peg.”

The elephant stood in the pen behind the metal fence, which didn’t look strong enough. A thin chain attached to a small peg was wound around its rear leg. All the giant needed to do was dart away, and the chain would either break or the peg would be pulled out. Now, the way the elephant stood made the chain tauten. When it moved forward a bit, it seemed that the chain might snap.

Well? We held our breath. Would it at last pull harder? No, it didn’t. On the contrary, it backed up, and the chain loosened.

“What a silly thing!” We were disappointed. “It could at least try.”

* * *

I learned the reason for such strange submissiveness much later. An elephant, when it first arrives at a zoo, is restrained with a thick chain. It can’t break away, but it keeps on trying. It pulls that damned chain, bustles about and trumpets furiously. This desperate struggle for freedom lasts a few months, but then the elephant gradually loses hope. It no longer tries to break away and stops pulling on its chain after half a year, its will broken. At that point, the thick chain is replaced by a lighter one.

I don’t know why that incident is etched so sharply in my memory. I was just a child, and it couldn’t have dawned on me that we humans actually also lived in a zoo and, in a certain sense, we were very much like elephants. We were “trained” in one way or another all the time, inured to subservience. Our will and belief in the possibility of achieving freedom were systematically killed. And when our trainers had succeeded, they allowed us to frolic about on a long leash, for they knew we wouldn’t run away.

Even more amazing is that we did it to each other, to those like us. In other words, some of us are tamers, others – animals. So, what is this thing called humanity all about?

* * *

But I digress…

The other animals and birds were not exactly cheerful. Even the peacocks didn’t boast about their splendid tails. They didn’t parade majestically as they often did. It’s not accidental that we sometimes say about a person, ‘proud as a peacock.” We didn’t notice any pride in those peacocks. A bear sat with its mouth open, swaying constantly, back and forth, back and forth. A tiger paced across its cage, from left to right, then from right to left. Only the frivolous monkeys were not distressed in captivity.

We remembered them with pleasure. We were also entertained by a donkey who, for some reason, was in the zoo. It wasn’t in a cage but rather tied to a tree. It was a nice little donkey, with clipped ears and kind eyes. But we made fun of it because, sticking out between its hind legs was… No, it wasn’t its tail, it was another long thing. Something must have agitated the poor donkey. Can you imagine how exciting it was for the boys to see such indecency?

On the way home from the zoo, that was all we talked about, not about how sad the animals were. We also discussed how all the animals were fed. How much fodder was necessary to feed such a huge crowd? We also argued: was it true that the zoo bought donkeys and horses for slaughter from local residents? Somehow, it seemed ridiculous that they would buy animals to feed other animals. It didn’t seem strange to us that we people ate meat and slaughtered animals for that purpose: just a small detail pertaining to the question of how one’s thinking is formed with the aid of one’s habits. We soon went to the zoo again, and this time we learned what the animals were fed. The lion was working over a thick bone, cracking it with its mighty teeth. Was it a goat?

We admired the royal meal – the lion was large with a big mane, the real king of the beasts.

We were about to leave when one of us shouted, “Look!”

We saw the familiar donkey. We recognized it right away: the same kind eyes, the same little ears. Its head was the only thing left of it.

* * *

The zoo was coming to Chirchik again. We learned that it would be located close to us, in our neighborhood. We thought that was great luck. The monkeys were a nice entertainment, and we could see the elephant, even though sad, every day. We were impatient to have the zoo back.

Coming home from school, we heard the humming, clinking and roar of engines. There were many trucks in and around the clearing. A crane was unloading them with a rumble… Those were cages. A dozen of them were already in the clearing.

“Why here? Why are they here?” I asked.

I didn’t know whom I was asking, but I thought all the boys understood me. All our puddles, down to the last one, disappeared under the wheels of the trucks and were now under cages. It would make us ecstatic anywhere else, but not here.

There was almost no one but us in the clearing. And we weren’t looking at the animals but rather down, under our feet. What if one puddle with tadpoles had survived? No. There was only earth dug up by wheels, only wet, rumpled, torn up grass.

“Look here,” Vitya Smirnov said. He squatted and looked under a cage. Yes, where there had been our puddle, our breeding farm yesterday, there was now a cage with a bear. The big, brown, shaggy bear hadn’t changed since we last saw it. It was rocking back and forth and nodding its head, its mouth open, exactly as before.

We stepped away from the cage and went home.

* * *

We didn’t even listen to the frogs’ concert that night. I heard it later. I was in bed by the open window, and I was falling asleep when I heard the familiar roll call through my drowsiness. It appeared to me in my drowsy state, when I wasn’t quite awake any longer that our tadpoles had survived and that the transformation, which had always amazed us, had already happened, and they had become tiny frogs. How many of them were there? They hopped and hopped from the puddle to the arik, jumping up the grass like little greenish peas. Hey, you, brave little ones! I laughed from joy in my dream. And it seemed to me that those were our grown-up tadpole-frogs singing at the arik. They were singing for me.

“Koo-aa-a! Koo-a-a-a! Hello! Everything’s all right with us!”

Chapter 49. Soldier’s Lake

“You guys are lucky to live close to the hills!”

Vitya Yarosh and Sasha Parkhomenko, the lucky ones, only smiled in response, but their faces were beaming.

The new residential area behind the school where Vitya and Sasha lived was at the very edge of town. There was an abandoned lot beyond it, beyond which hills rose, ridge after ridge. Those ridges, a bit misty, seemed endless when seen from the roof of our building, from which we watched training battles. Many boys envied us too.

However, today the tank school wasn’t holding training. Today we were off to the hills for munitions. On the way there, we picked up Vitya and Sasha, as agreed. They both were sons of officers, so they were considered worldly-wise. They knew where the pillboxes were, where it was better to look for cartridges, and other such things.

* * *

We decided to take a hike to the hills yesterday morning on the way to school, maybe because yesterday was a somewhat special May day. It was the kind of day when you longed to go somewhere, to do something unusual.

I was dumbfounded as I stepped out of the building in the morning, perhaps from the smell, most of all. As I stepped off the porch, I was enveloped in a warm, velvet, fragrant wind. It seemed to me that we had never had such a fragrant wind before. I could smell the delicate aroma of cherry trees in bloom, and the sweet scent of roses, along with the pungent acrid smell of herbs coming from the hills.

The spicy, fragrant wind blew from the green hills down through Yubileyny settlement.

It blew on me and rushed farther and farther, up, up, to the spurs of the Tian Shan and beyond them, ignoring borders, throughout the world.

I stood with my face turned toward the wind, breathing, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted nothing but to breathe and look at the trees, from which white petals, like butterflies, fell and flew away, carried by the wind, at the branches on which two black crows sat conversing right above me. They looked kinder than usual, enjoying spring. It seemed to me that their shrill voices sounded milder today, calmer than in winter, that they weren’t arguing but rather talking, that their round hazel eyes, usually malicious, had a kinder look. Here, a flock of noisy sparrows flew off the upper branches. They always argued like bazaar dealers, but today their hum sounded more cheerful, “How warm it is, how nice, how warm is the sun, chiv-chiv-chiv!”

“Valery, the glads have blossomed!”

That was Mama. She stood at the open veranda window.

The gladioluses in our garden grew along the wooden fence. They had just begun to blossom – their lower buds had opened. Their leaves and stems were covered with sparkling drops of dew.

The first stem crunched as the knife cut through it; transparent juice seeped from the cut. I immediately began to cut a second one. They would continue blossoming in Flura Merziyevna’s vase.

Then Edem and Rustem, Kolya and Sasha came out into the yard. They giggled when they saw me holding flowers, “Who are you going to give them to, Romeo?” When I told them that the flowers were for Flura Merziyevna from my mama, they grew silent. We all knew that the head teacher of our class would not return to school the next year. She would leave Chirchik for Kazan. She would go there not because Kazan was her hometown. Flura Merziyevna had been driven out of our school. Why? She was nice and kind. Was it because of Drunk Hedgehog? We couldn’t understand it.

But it was impossible to be sad for long on such a morning. We joined the stream of white and blue shirts that billowed in the wind. Red ties could be heard flapping loudly. It became noisy and merry. We forgot about Flura Merziyevna, and we decided that we would go hiking in the hills tomorrow, our day off. Kolya reminded us that shooting had recently been heard from there, so there should be lots of loot after the maneuvers.

* * *

First, we walked across the abandoned land. That was what we called the dreary space that stretched for about a kilometer between the settlement and the hills. There were shrubs and even a small grove of trees there. The land was dotted with pebbles through which grass was forcing its way. Obviously, when the new settlement was under construction, there was an area where construction equipment and various trucks were parked at its edge.

Soon, more delightful places came into view. We reached a little winding river whose source was high in the mountains, and we took a path running along it. Its banks were made of clay, which was why the water was murky. Then the river ran to the right, and we crossed a bridge and found ourselves right near the hills.

The hills stretched to the horizon like a big herd of prehistoric animals. We now walked among them close to the base, then ran up the slopes. We looked down from their high crests. Every time we did so, our neighborhood, our buildings, and the entire town grew smaller and smaller, its outline blurred.

It was nice and not difficult to walk and even climb the steep slopes. Green grass, thick and soft, like the fur of an animal, stretched under our feet. Yellow dandelions and scarlet wild poppies looked especially bright and beautiful. Now and then, a tumbleweed rushed by, now rolling along the grass, now flying up with the wind.

We climbed one of the highest hills, then stopped. We talked endlessly as we were climbing up the hill but fell silent at its top.

We were in the middle of a rippling green ocean. The warm wind pounced on us in gusts. It enveloped us and immediately raced down the hill like a skier dragging a wide invisible net behind him. From the foot of the hill, the skier went up to the next crest without stopping to catch his breath. Where he passed, the grass bent for a moment under the weight of the net.

And the wind continued to blow. A skier with a net raced down every hill. There were dozens of them, hundreds. They went up hills, one after another, and the green ocean swayed and swayed, and my head was spinning.

* * *

At last we reached the top, where Kolya looked around and said:

“The embrasure should be over there,” and he pointed at the slope of a hill that was higher than the others.

No matter how hard we peered at it, we failed to see anything. And only when we reached the foot of that hill did we notice a spot that was darker than the grass around it. That was the embrasure of a pillbox covered with a layer of turf.

Our experts, Vitya and Sasha, explained that the pillbox was very old, a few decades old. They took us to the beginning of an open trench that started on the other side of the hill.

I don’t know about the rest of the boys, but I was somewhat scared when, following the trench, we reached the underground entrance to the pillbox. After watching movies and reading books about the war, I imagined quite vividly how we would enter the pillbox and find the skeleton of a dead soldier. But it was nothing like that in the pillbox. It was a dark damp concrete space. It was so small that we barely fit into it. A narrow ray of light illuminated the earthen floor through a crack in the embrasure. The slope of the neighboring hill appeared to be a narrow green vertical tunnel when we looked at it through the crack. I bet it wasn’t easy to sit here hugging a machinegun, even during maneuvers, to say nothing of a real war.

But we were here together. After we got used to the dark and crowded conditions, we began pretending that we were soldiers. Edem began to imitate shooting a machinegun quite skillfully. As he was doing it, he chuckled to let us know that he was joking, for we were already past the age when kids imitated the sounds of shooting as they played. But, obviously, Edem couldn’t refrain from doing so. Kolya also got carried away and exclaimed that one could remain on the defensive as long as necessary, and the assailants wouldn’t even be able to get close. Sasha Parkhomenko stated with authority that that was nonsense: they would surround the pillbox and then shower it with grenades. And if they couldn’t surround the pillbox, we should remember the war hero Alexander Matrosov who covered the embrasure with his body.

We didn’t find anything in the pillbox but intense impressions. There were only pieces of rusty metal on the floor, no cartridges or cartridge cases.

“Let’s get out of here!” Vitya Yarosh said and headed for the exit. “I just remembered that there’s a training ground not far from here.”

We went around a couple of hills and spied the training ground. The hills had fallen away here, giving way to a valley. It was quite wide and so long that the end of it disappeared around the bend and was hidden by distant hills. It was covered with furrows made by the caterpillar tracks of tanks.

That was quite a training ground, with recently made furrows of caterpillar tracks and embrasures on the hills. The only things missing to complete the picture, were moving and stationary targets, which were placed in the valley and on the slopes during training. They had been removed, but there was plenty of shrapnel and cartridges where they had stood.

We pounced on the spoils like a group of mushroom pickers who had come across a clearing studded with mushrooms. The quiet valley resounded with our triumphant shouts.

“Tracer bullet shell!” I yelled, picking up an oblong shell.

“A TT pistol shell! Another one!” Yarosh shouted. He lay on the ground and groped around with both hands.

Kolya informed us that he had found cartridge cases… and more of them… still more…

The tank school cadets carried out their exercises far from the residential area, away from town. The training ground was prepped and cordoned off during big exercises. Information was sent to schools, and teachers warned students every time, reminding them of the dangers and emphasizing the possible consequences. But still someone managed to sneak into the area of exercises now and then. Naturally, those who were caught had a hard time at school and at home.

This place was extremely attractive for us adventurers. It seemed that the spirit of battle still hovered over it. And, of course, we had our loot. The hunt for ammunition had turned us into participants in a battle. Our pockets were stuffed; there was no room for more trophies. We were tired. We climbed the nearest hill and lay down in the grass. Some of us scrutinized and sorted the spoils. The others, like me, lay looking up at the sky. And I suddenly saw that it was bottomless. I had read in books that in ancient times people thought the sky was solid. It was bottomless, blue… Where does this blue color come from? Yes, we were told about the composition of air in class. But there were so many different hues! At times it was a milky blue, as if enameled, or it might be glowing, like today, or perhaps a dark, almost navy blue so that it seemed thick, or maybe cold and greenish, almost clear.

And the clouds were always different in the sky. I’d like to know if anyone has ever seen two cumulous clouds of the same shape. The day before, I had seen one of them resembling a castle fly by, and a dragon with its mouth wide open, a ship, a gigantic head with a flying beard. Is there an artist up in the sky who models them? But how does he know what castles, ships or human faces look like?

Something mysterious happens to clouds on windless days. Here they are, wavy, light, spread across the sky. You pick out a row of them, stare at it and wait. Shouldn’t it move at least a little bit? Shouldn’t it fly? No, it doesn’t. It just sits there as if it were asleep. You look at the sky an hour later, and everything has changed.

Now, there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. I lay there looking up and it seemed to me that my glance penetrated farther and farther into the firmament. It was a strange feeling. It felt as if I were not looking but rather flying into that vastness, picked up by the wind. I was weightless. I wasn’t scared. I enjoyed the sensation. I didn’t know how to express it in words, and I didn’t even try. Now, I think that it could be called the feeling of freedom, of total freedom.

A lark began to sing somewhere up there, and its song was heard everywhere, as if it was sung not by a little bird but by the sky, the whole sky…