Valery Yuabov
Everything Begins In Childhood

Old Courtyard

For my dear Mama

* * *

From the Author

I consider it my important duty and pleasant responsibility to express my tremendous gratitude to my dear friend and helper, Raisa Isaacovna Mirer, without whom this book would never have been created.

She not only encouraged me to write but also contributed her soul and enormous experience as a literary editor to our joint work.

* * *

In Place of a Foreword

The Bukharan Jews have deep literary traditions. However, at the end of the 1930s, they were forcibly interrupted. Creative literary work, along with the activities of all other artists in this multi-faceted ethnic culture, was strictly prohibited in the Soviet Union.

The revival of our cultural traditions began fifty years later when a large part of the Bukharan Jews moved to Israel, the United States, and other countries of the free world. Books by Bukharan Jews, both scholarly and fictional, have been published one after another. Memoirs hold an important place in this unprecedented outpouring.

The book the reader is holding belongs to this genre, yet it holds a special place outside that stream. There are several reasons why.

First, the majority of memoirists are people of advanced age. Their way of thinking was formed in their former life, pre-emigration. The author of “Everything Begins in Childhood” is rather young, around 40. He left Uzbekistan when he was 18. His worldview and mentality were, to a great extent, formed under the influence of the new culture. In other words, he had an opportunity to acquire his viewpoint from a distance. I think this circumstance will help readers understand many of the things depicted in this book. “I write… for my children and grandchildren who live in a different part of the world, in a different culture…” the author writes.

Secondly, and no less important, this book is notable for its beautiful writing style, which, from the very first pages, carries the reader away. The childhood impressions are vivid and three-dimensional. The characters in the story – parents, immediate and distant relatives, teachers, friends – are amazingly expressive. The author depicts them truthfully, with love, humor, pain, and sometimes with bitterness. Not every memoirist would dare do that.

At the same time, the book urges us to think about life. It allows us to imagine that terrible time when the ruling Communist ideology perverted the fates of millions of people in Uzbekistan and other parts of the Soviet Union.

I believe this book will serve as valuable material for historians and ethnographers who study the life of the Bukharan Jews in the 1950s-1970s.

In closing, I urge the author to continue his creative work and to use his talents to depict his life in America in the same way.

It goes without saying that this book should be published not only in Russian but in English as well.

David Ochildeyev

Ph.D. in History, Honored Scholar of Uzbekistan

Chapter 1. 6 Korotky Lane (Short Lane)

"Vale-e-ya-a!" I heard as I went out into the courtyard. I could see my two-year-old cousin Yura's little round face in a window across the yard. Although he was standing on his tiptoes on the windowsill, his head hardly reached the fortochka (a small hinged windowpane in the upper corner of the window). He couldn’t yet pronounce the letter “r” so he when he said my name “Valera,” it came out rather comically as “Valeya.”

"Vale-e-ya-a, my mama is beating me up!" he shouted mournfully.

It was an early April morning, and it was Sunday. Everyone in our courtyard was still asleep, as was the whole of Tashkent, so I was afraid that Yura’s yelling would wake our relatives and neighbors. At that moment, Yura’s mother Valya came up to the window. When she reached out her hand, it was not to spank Yura. Holding him by his little behind, she asked with a smile, "Why are you yelling? Everyone’s asleep.” My cousin didn’t need protection, of course. He was just making mischief, as always. But I wasn't outside to play with him. Mother and I were going to the hospital to visit my father.

"Yura, wait for me, all right? I’ll be back and we’ll play our war game." A smile spread across his little round face. He just loved to play our war game. Our three-year age difference didn’t keep us from being friends, from playing together, quarreling, and even fighting.

The kitchen door squeaked. Grandpa Yoskhaim walked out onto the porch with a knapsack on his back. Grandpa was a shoemaker. His hands told the story of his hard work – the skin so rough it looked like fish scales, the callused palms, the blackened fingertips covered with scars, and the twisted nails. But those disfigured hands were very strong. Sometimes, when an acquaintance had incurred his displeasure, Grandpa – and he was sixty-seven – could drive him to tears with his iron handshake. A person would approach him with a smile to say hello but leave doubled over.

Grandpa was tall, with broad shoulders. His thick eyebrows, – now gray, but once jet-black – his high forehead and dark eyes were evidence of some Iranian Jewish heritage. And he spoke with a slight, yet distinctive, accent.

I would say that Grandpa Yoskhaim’s life could be summed up in just two words – Torah and work. He prayed at home in the morning, worked from sunrise to sunset six days a week, and spent Saturdays at the synagogue. Like his father and his father’s father, he had only one concern –feeding his family. As to raising the children, he left that completely to his wife.

"A kelin, chi to et?! (How are you doing, daughter-in law?)," he greeted Aunt Valya in Tadjik, as always.

"I’m fine. Thank you. How about you?"

But Grandpa was already smiling and nodding to Yura. "Nagzi, Yura? (How are you, Yura)?" he asked slowly.

Grandpa enjoyed joking with small children. He pronounced the word “nagzi” with a long guttural “g” and drawn out “i.” As he was saying it, his face would become quite funny – his brown eyes opened very wide, his gray eyebrows went up, and his thick gray beard stuck up so much that I always felt an urge to tug at it. Yura broke into laughter and reached his hand through the fortochka, wiggling his fingers.

"Just look at the little one! He doesn’t love me. He loves my beard!" Grandpa was joking around, and I was annoyed that it wasn’t me he was playing with. It also crossed my mind that Grandpa had not brought us ice cream for a long time, oh yes, a very long time, since last summer.

"Grandpa! Grandpa!" I said, jumping up and down with excitement. "It’s warm already! Bring us ice cream! … Will you? … But not fruit ice. I want vanilla!"

"I’ll bring you ice cream when it gets warmer," answered Grandpa on his way out. "Hai, kelin, ravtam ma (I’m off, daughter-in-law)."

I ran to the gate, going around Grandpa. The air was filled with the aroma of blossoming trees. Our whole courtyard was in bloom – apricots, grapevines, Spanish sour cherries, sweet cherries, apples, and lilac. Water was dripping from the outdoor faucet, hitting the ground with a cheerful clinking, as pigeons cooed in the pigeon house. Even the eyes of Jack, our German shepherd, seemed more cheerful than usual. Yes, spring had arrived – everything was ringing, singing, and fragrant in our courtyard.

Clinking the keys, Grandpa unlocked the old wooden gate. Stepping over the lower crossbar, he waved at me and began his walk down our alley, his feet shuffling in his high boots. Clay courtyard fences formed our alley, narrow and long, and Grandpa’s slightly hunched figure could be seen between the clay fences for a long time… "Buy us ice cream!" I shouted. Grandpa did not look back. After a moment, he disappeared around a corner cluttered with garbage pails.

I shut the gate and approached the lilac bush. Its branches were covered with lush pinkish shoots, fragrant and tender. The lilac grew in the garden by the gate. The garden spread up to our neighbor’s fence. The outhouse was hiding by the fence among apple trees and winter vines. The shower we used in summer was next to it. The pigeon house was perched on a high pole in the middle of the garden, surrounded by white and red rose bushes.

The lilac was our courtyard’s calendar. Its first blossoms coincided with the arrival of the early spring. And when the branches of the lilac bush grew heavy with lush flowers, it meant that spring was in full swing. Now the bush was at the height of its splendor. I stood there for a long time, bathed in the aroma and the warm rays of the sun that broke through the blossoming branches to caress my face. When I squinted, I could see them gleaming in all the colors of the rainbow.

I heard our front door slam. It was Mama coming out with 3-year-old Emma, my little sister. Emma always ran with a bounce. Looking at her, no one would guess that she had recently spent a month in the hospital with yet another bout of pneumonia. She had rosy cheeks, chestnut hair, and a cheerful ringing voice… My little sister caught everyone’s eye.

Aunt Valya was again looking out through the fortochka. "Hey, Ester, how are you doing?"

"I’m all right, thanks," Mother answered.

Aunt Valya shook her head. "You’re very pale… Are you going to the hospital?"

Looking sad, Mother nodded. "Yes, to visit Amnun."

Grandma Lisa appeared at her front door. She was short and red-haired, and holding a black night pot in her hands. Out on the porch, she rinsed the pot, splashed out the water, and disappeared behind the front door.

"All right, Valya, it’s time for us to go," Mother said.

The plump Emma ran ahead of Mother toward the gate, but as she reached the cherry tree and the faucet, she stopped dead in her tracks. She was close to Jack’s territory – his doghouse was at the gate, and our watchdog did not instill trust in Emma. Jack was a Kazakh German shepherd. It is impossible to imagine a better watchdog. Jack looked imposing with his broad chest, dark snout, black mustache and curled-up tail. His senses of hearing and smell were amazing. Even when a stranger was a few dozen yards away from the gate, Jack sounded his combat alarm. His barking was frightening. Of course, Jack was not barking now – we were his people. He got up, stretched lazily and ambled up to my sister, but he couldn’t reach her – the chain wasn't long enough. Jack yawned, pretending he didn’t care, stuck out his long red tongue, above which his sharp white teeth gleamed, wagged his tail, and stared at Emma. He seemed to smirk, as if to say, “You can’t escape me, little one."

"Coward! Coward!" I shouted, laughing.

Ever cautious, Emma waited for Mother, grabbed her right hand to stay as far as possible from Jack and not even see him (thinking that if she didn’t see Jack he wouldn't see her). And in this way, under Mother’s reliable protection, she reached the lilac bush. Once she was there, Jack was no longer a danger, so the fleet-footed Emma darted forward again. But I was the first one to reach the gate. Standing in our alley, I once again admired with pleasure the chassis of the old car left there by one of our relatives. When the time comes for Yura and me to be allowed to play in the alley, it will be great fun to play in the chassis.

* * *

Mother held our hands as we walked to a streetcar stop by the Turkmen market. We had a long and difficult walk ahead of us, particularly for little Emma. We walked down our short alley to Korotky Lane. Before we turned onto the lane, I looked back. A large number drawn in white chalk could be seen on our dark-red wooden gate. I already knew – the number was called “six.”

Chapter 2. Hospital

Father didn’t notice our arrival. He was half-sitting on the bed with his back propped up on a pile of pillows, his palms resting on the mattress. His head hung helplessly, moving from one shoulder to another. His pale, thin face seemed very tired. His half-lowered eyelids protruded above bony cheeks. Each time he inhaled, his chest expanded with such difficulty and for so long that it was as if he was trying to inhale all the air in the room. When he exhaled, it became hollow as the air was expelled with a loud whistle.

Quite recently, only two years ago – I still remember that time – Father was a strong healthy man. Tall, well-built, wiry, a good sportsman, he taught P.E. at school and was a basketball coach. Sometimes, he took me along with him to his classes. It was clear that his students were somewhat afraid of him. Not only did they not dare to misbehave, but they were very quiet. There was no unnecessary talking. He was a stern teacher, even rude and harsh. If a student disobeyed, he might go over and hit him. He was also like that at home.

I was two or three years old when I first felt afraid of Father. I remember one episode in particular.

It was evening. Mama was putting me to bed. Father entered the room and began yelling at Mama right away, blaming her for something. She remained silent, as usual. He came up to her, waving his hands and cursing. I understood that he was hurting Mama and that he might be about to hit her. I had probably seen things like that many times before, but only then did I understand that Mama was in trouble. I was frightened, very frightened. I began to cry. Mama ran up to me and began to quiet me. Only then did Father stop yelling. He continued to grumble, but without yelling or threats.

I often heard about Father’s difficult personality from our relatives, first of all from Grandpa and Grandma, Father’s parents. Their son’s every word, each little thing, irritated them. The offenses were piling up, their relations were getting worse, and open resentment was brewing. Grandma Lisa knew how to demonstrate tenderness to her son (maybe maternal feelings did visit her now and then, but most of the time she put on a show). But Grandpa Yoskhaim was a sincere man. He always said to a person’s face what he thought about them, and he made no pretenses when it came to his son.

The main insult was an old one. When Father attended the Kazakh Institute of Physical Culture in Alma Ata, his parents supported him throughout his studies. They had a big family, with many children. Their son, certainly, promised more than once that he would help his parents when he began working, but they never saw that help. Their son married, then divorced, then married again – that time to my mama. Everything he earned was spent to support his own family. And now, every time they quarreled, and it happened often, Grandpa remembered that old promise and Father’s ingratitude. “We helped you a lot, didn’t we? Have you forgotten about it? We sent you money every month. So where is your help?” Quarrels, sometimes absurd and groundless, cropped up all the time. It happened only because of my father’s explosive, mean, quarrelsome nature, combined with his mother’s treacherous nature.

It was evening. Father was sitting under the apricot tree. Grandma Lisa came out into the courtyard. She took a seat on the porch, not far from her son, rubbing her lower back.

“Did you eat?”

Father, reluctantly, “Y-yes…”

“What did you have?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Can’t you just answer?”

Father, angrily, “Listen, just leave me alone!”

That was what Grandma Lisa could not tolerate.

She sprang to her feet, forgetting her lower back, waved her hands, slapped her thighs… and an argument began.

Grandpa used to say over and over to his son, “Nothing but arguments! No one can say a word to you. You’re just like your mother. Who can put up with you?”

And that was true – it was difficult to put up with Father. Only Mama managed to do that, but at what price…

She was a loving woman. She got upset, she suffered, but she invariably forgave the man she loved, the father of her children. On top of that, she was an Asian wife. In other words, just like every wife in any country in this part of the world, she had to endure all of her husband’s whims without complaining, all of his caprices, quibbles, derision, even beatings. Love may have ended, may have been exhausted, but patience, endless patience, remained inviolable.

The Bukharan Jews unfortunately adopted that custom, along with other centuries-old customs of their new countrymen. I don’t mean that it was like that in all Jewish and Uzbek families. Of course, it wasn’t. Take Grandma Lisa – no one dared to hurt her. Grandpa Yoskhaim was somewhat afraid of his wife. And a wonderful harmonious and loving Jewish family lived in the house next door. I often heard their merry voices, their laughter and jokes. It seemed that not only their voices, but the atmosphere of friendliness and peace reached me. Did I envy them? I don’t know, I don’t know. Certainly, I did compare our families from time to time.

There were six beds in the ward, located along the walls in two rows, three on each side. Father was in the one to the left of the door.

Mama sat down on the edge of his bed and put her hand on his forehead. Father opened his eyes slowly.

“During the night… there was… another… attack. They… gave… injection. They… gave… me… oxy…gen…,” he said very quietly, stopping to catch his breath.

I stood at the wooden bedside table at the head of the bed, looking in bewilderment at the dark red dots, many of them, that covered his arms from his elbows almost to his palms.

“I’ve brought you some broth. It’s still hot. Have some,” Mama said, taking out a glass jar wrapped in a cloth. She poured the broth into a bowl and began to feed Father, lifting the spoon carefully to his lips. The aroma of the broth, a very tasty aroma, spread throughout the room.

Frightened, Emma was examining the ward. She couldn’t understand – it was clear from the look on her face – why her papa was here, far from home, in this unfamiliar room with many beds. She was eyeing her father warily – she’d grown unaccustomed to him.

For some time, the intervals between asthma attacks had been growing shorter.

An accidental cold was the reason for that misfortune. Father used to go swimming in a mountain river with his friends. Once, in spring, after bathing under an ice-cold waterfall, he hadn’t dried himself properly before biking back home with his friend. He got bronchitis, which turned into a bronchial asthma, and the healthy person, the athlete, became an invalid. Asthma attacks are a very agonizing thing. During the day, Father would sit on a small chair in the courtyard with his hands resting on his knees. During the night, he would suffocate in his bed just as he was doing now in the hospital ward.

“My little girl…Let me touch your pretty curl,” Father said tenderly, trying to smile. He loved Emma very much. He used to beckon to her as he was sitting on his little chair. He pulled gently at her chestnut curls, hugged and tickled her, repeating a line from a rhyme he had once heard, “My little girl… let me touch your pretty curl.”

Emma smiled, embarrassed, clinging tightly to Mama’s knees and pressing her head against them.

It had grown livelier in the ward. Other patients were awake, some of them making their beds, others shaving. The rustling of newspapers could be heard.

“Doctor’s rounds have begun,” one of the patients announced.

Two women in white gowns entered. I recognized one of them right away. She was a registered nurse who attended to the patients in the ward. We often saw her when we visited Father. The second woman wore a stethoscope around her neck. I had already met her too. They both walked from bed to bed, stopping longer at some of them. Then they approached Father’s bed. Emma’s face shrank as if she were about to cry. White gowns reminded her of injections.

“Oh, we have most of the family here today,” the doctor said, sitting down by Father’s bed. She began examining him. Unfamiliar words could be heard, names of medications. There were many of them. Mama sighed quietly, standing at the foot of the bed and holding the scared Emma by the shoulder.

Chapter 3. Old Town

From the hospital we went to visit Grandpa and Grandma, Mama’s parents. We reached Koltsevaya (Circle) by trolley. It was near Starogorodsky (Old Town) bazaar. From there, we had to walk.

I liked Old Town with its narrow unpaved lanes, low clay adobes, ariks (watering canals) in which water could be heard constantly gurgling. I liked the women’s colorful silk ethnic dresses, the chaykhana (tea house) at the corner of Sabir Rakhimov Street, not far from Grandma’s house. Unlike other tea houses, it wasn’t noisy. Usually, there were only a few regulars sitting on the veranda sipping tea. We knocked hard on the gate since Grandma Abigai’s hearing wasn’t great. Besides, the courtyard was big. Grandma opened the gate. As always, she wore a long dress, slippers and a scarf wrapped around her head.

“Ah, Ester, byee (come on in)!” she exclaimed merrily upon seeing us. “Valera, oh, Valera!” And she covered me with kisses.

Grandma, like all elderly Bukharan Jews, spoke a dialect of Tadjik, sprinkled with words in Hebrew, which had become the native tongue of Central Asian Jews and was considered by some scholars to be a separate language: Bukhari.

Emma and I stayed in the courtyard to play. Just two apple trees and some poplars were growing in its clay soil. It was scarcely lit by the sun. A section of the outer wall constantly collapsed and needed to be rebuilt every year.

The gate slammed loudly, and Grandpa Hanan appeared in the courtyard. He was carrying his big sharpening machine on his shoulder. He was tall but skinny, and that load wasn’t easy for him to carry. On seeing us, he smiled and put the machine down.

“Your mama ai!”

Every time we visited, that joke was his greeting. Ai means “not good.”

“No, no!” I shouted hugging him and kissing his greyish beard. “Let’s sharpen your knives! Let’s get them sharpened!”

Curly-haired Emma stood aside sucking her thumb and enjoying the familiar game. Grandpa picked her up and kissed her, “Duhtori Bobo! Duhtori Bobo!” (Grandpa’s little girl), and he carried her to the house. I stayed behind to examine the machine. It was taller than I was. Two wheels, one on top of another, were connected by a belt. When you pressed the lower pedal, they began to rotate. There were several grindstones attached to the upper crossbar.

Grandpa returned with knives and a jar of water. The wheels began turning merrily. A knife was jumping from grindstone to grindstone. Showers of sparks shot out from under the blade. Now and then, Grandpa cooled the blade in the water, then checked its sharpness on his nail. Grandpa Hanan rocked back and forth, back and forth, pressing the pedal. The pedal tapped gently – tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. The grindstone produced its piercing tune – v-zh-zh-zh! v-zh-zh-zh! Emma and I joined in the concert, imitating the sound of drums, “Toom-ba-le-ka-toom! Toom-ba-le-ka-toom!” All that noise didn’t irritate Grandpa in the least. His tired face brightened up and he began singing something quietly.

Grandpa liked to sing when he was among friends, when no strangers were around. He sometimes sang something very sad. Perhaps he remembered the war in which he fought from the beginning almost to the end and lost many friends. When he returned home, he was sick. First, he had a bad case of bronchitis, then asthma. But he needed to feed his family. He who defended his homeland was given a medal and a small pension. He tried to earn extra money in different ways. He got himself mixed up in some shady business and ended up in jail. His son Avner and the son’s wife Sofia did their best to intercede on his behalf and succeeded in getting his sentence reduced. Grandpa spent two years in jail. When he was released, he had tuberculosis. He continued to do his best to earn a living and walked around town with the heavy sharpening machine.

Mama came out to the courtyard.

“Kids, we’ll be eating soon. We just need to buy bread.”

Bread, to be precise, lepyoshka (flat bread) was bought from an elderly Uzbek woman who lived nearby, across the street from the tea house. She baked them in the tandir (clay oven buried in the ground) under the awning. Small, plump, fragrant, with a crunchy crust, they were popular all over the neighborhood.

“Bir sum (fifty kopecks),” the Uzbek woman took fifty kopecks and gave Mama five flat breads that were still exhaling the heat of the oven.

Oh, how we wanted to eat them right away or to have at least a little tiny piece, but Mama shook her head.

“At home, at home, with dinner.”

At home, at the table, Grandpa sang the prayer. “Amen” we echoed, as always. Pilaf was served on a big platter. Dark rice with chunks of meat appeared almost to breathe, exuding steam. Heads of garlic stood out in all their splendor on top of the hill of rice. The adults traditionally ate without spoons. They pressed a small portion of rice with their fingers into the platter and then raised it to their mouths. Grandma served raisins and thinly sliced carrots for dessert.

Unhurried dinner conversation was underway.

“How’s your health, Papa?” Mama asked.

Grandpa only nodded in response. He didn’t like such questions.

“How’s Amnun doing?” Grandma asked.

“I lost my health in combat, and he – on a motorcycle…,” Grandpa meant the incident with which it all began. “Ah, young people, young people.”

“Sugar, and I want butter! Sugar, and I want butter!” was heard from the hallway.

Those words were accompanied by ringing laughter and the snapping of fingers… My aunts, Rosa and Rena, who never missed a chance to tease me, had arrived. I always sang those words, “Sugar, and I want butter!” when I was hungry. After kissing us, Rosa and Rena sat down at the table.

“Have you been to the bazaar?”

“Yes. Everything is more expensive again,” Rosa informed us. “Khurmati doozt (officials are thieves)! They don’t care about people.”

“How are things at the factory, Rosa?” asked Mama.

“They’ve raised the production quota once again. It was high enough to keep up with.”

“I know, I know. Meetings all the time. ‘Sew better, sew more.’ But our rate of pay is the same. It looks like they plan to raise the income tax beginning in May.”

“It’s the same with us – meetings to discuss output and alcoholism. I’m sick and tired of it. I have no more patience.”

“You’d better put up with it because there’s nowhere else to go. It’s the same everywhere,” Mama sighed.

Mama had three sisters and her brother Avner. They were good friends as they were growing up. When Grandpa was sent to the front, Mama was three and Avner was six. Grandma Abigai replaced her husband at his booth, working as a cobbler. Avner, as the eldest child, kept house – he frequented stores and the bazaar in search of food, took care of his sisters and even helped his mother in the booth, where he shined clients’ footwear. Mama told me that once he got hold of two rolls. On the way home, he was thirsty and stopped at a drinking fountain. He put the rolls down, had some water, and then saw that the rolls were gone.

“Valera, Valera!” Grandma Abigai sing-sang my name tenderly. “Oh, djoni bibesh. Ina gri (my dear, take this),” and she gave me a fat juicy piece of meat.

There was no limit to Grandma’s kindness. She always had a gift for her grandchildren in her modest house – be it a homemade toy or some sweets. And she always gave us her smiles.

It seemed to people who knew her that she was a very happy person. But I sometimes saw her and Mama crying together in the back of the house. They were very close, and when they got together, they talked without noticing the time.

“Burma,” Grandma winced as she tried a sour plum.

We often laughed when Grandma happened to put something sour in her mouth. She winced in a very funny way, her thick eyebrows came together over the bridge of her nose, her nostrils widened, but her eyes, on the contrary, became narrow slits, and her lips contorted as if she was about to cry. Even the scarf on her head seemed to wince.

Meanwhile, Rosa teased and tickled me.

“May I eat your eyes? How about your eyelashes?”

Seated next to me, she patted my cheeks and kissed my eyelids. My aunts liked my big eyes and long lashes. It seemed to me that they sometimes played with me as if I were a doll, and I got angry and embarrassed.

“Will you ever talk to us? I know what we’ll do to you. We’ll dye your lashes with usma.”

At that point I naturally couldn’t take it any longer. I broke free of Rosa’s arms and ran away.

* * *

Dying eyebrows was one of the favorite occupations of the women in our house.

They rubbed fresh usma sprouts between their palms and squeezed the juice out onto the bottom of a tea bowl turned upside down. Then they applied it to their eyebrows using cotton wool wrapped around a matchstick. Admiring their thick green eyebrows in a hand-held mirror, they repeated over and over, “How does it look?”

When the sisters had a free minute, they would turn on the radio to listen to Uzbek music. It was tender, slow, sad, and it was the only music they truly enjoyed, that touched their souls. The sisters would snap their fingers and rock in time with the music. They would also sing along to the songs they knew.

And Grandma liked to play cards, especially with her children and grandchildren, so she suggested her favorite entertainment. Her eyesight was poor, so she held the cards close to her eyes, squinting at each of them. She clicked her tongue, smiled, rocked from side to side and mumbled, “Ibi basardroya. I na bin. (Damn it. Just look at this.)” She cast cunning glances at us, as if to say, “Oh my, I think I’m in trouble.”

But if someone tried to take advantage of her poor eyesight, it didn’t work. Grandma kept close track, with her watchful eye, of which cards other players put on the table, and if she noticed cheating, she returned the cards to the violators. Grandma was always vigilant.

* * *

Our time at Grandpa Hanan and Grandma Abigai’s house flew by. We didn’t notice that it had grown dark. It was time to go home.

We said good-bye. The aunts walked with us as far as the tea house, and from there we walked to the streetcar stop.

“The Turkmen Bazaar,” the conductor announced. We got off, and the streetcar sped away, sparks flying as it left.

It was pitch dark as the sparse streetlights flickered dimly. There was that special stillness that one felt only at night. It was intensified by the rustling of leaves, the peaceful buzz of cicadas, and the sounds made by the tires of rare passing cars.

The Turkmen Bazaar was on the other side of the streetcar track. The huge market, which stretched for hundreds of meters, was silent now. It would come back to life at sunrise.

We walked slowly. Mama was carrying the lightly snoring Emma. It took us twenty minutes to get to Korotky Lane. The bulb above the gate lit the lane dimly. Jack barked gruffly and then felt silent as he sensed us.

Everyone was asleep in the house.

Mama unlocked the door. We could smell the sharp scent of dampness coming from inside. There was a loud click as she turned the light switch. The bright light suddenly illuminated the small room that served as a foyer, kitchen and place to entertain infrequent guests.

“Close the door, Valery.”

Standing on the threshold, I reached for the door handle. Then I looked at Yura’s windows. They were dark… The war game, I remembered. Yura must have waited for me for a long time.

Mama put Emma to bed and lit the stove.

I told her I was hungry. We had had dinner long ago. Mama opened the fridge. A lonely lightbulb revealed its empty shelves.

“It’s late, son. Let’s go to bed,” she said as she turned away.

“It’s all right, Mama. I’m full. It’s late. It’s late,” I repeated, holding back my tears.

Chapter 4. A Little Mouse from a Little Hole

Day was breaking. The first roosters had already crowed. Cows were mooing in the yard next door. Jack was dangling his chain.

“Kids, get up! You’ll be late for kindergarten!”

Mama turned on the light. The bedroom window faced the yard, so the sun didn’t visit us often.

After eating our sweet tea and bread, we walked into the yard. It was the hour when Grandpa Yoskhaim performed his customary morning grooming. With his drawers on and a jar of water in his hands, wearing galoshes but no socks, he shuffled to the wooden outhouse. After leaving the outhouse, Grandpa squatted near the vines and, patting his bottom, did his final thorough washing. Grandpa was very tidy. Following the Eastern tradition, he used only water, and he had an aversion to paper, for he considered it a harmful innovation. Everybody made fun of him saying that the biggest grapes grew where Grandpa washed his bottom. Then, Grandpa began to wash himself. Bending under the water faucet, he soaped his shaven head, neck and hairy chest, and poured cold water all over himself, snorting.

Even though the sight was all too familiar, Emma and I were ecstatic about it every time we saw it.

After saying good-bye to Grandpa, we set out for kindergarten. It wasn’t far – it took just twenty minutes to walk to Little Fireflies kindergarten.

Our group’s room was large and light. Before all the kids arrived, we were allowed to play. Together with my friend, curly-headed Grisha, we tried to catch a spot of reflected light that hopped back and forth on the wall. We failed to catch it. Grisha got angry. He grabbed a wooden mug from the shelf and, banging it against the wall, chased the agile messenger of the sun.

“It’s time for morning exercises!”

Our teacher Maria Petrovna, clad in a neat white overall, tall and gray-haired, was strict, and we were somewhat afraid of her. We took off our outer garments and did our exercises diligently. After the calisthenics, we had breakfast in the spacious cafeteria where each group had its own table, and each of us – an assigned seat.

Grisha and I quietly put crusts of bread into our pockets for we needed to feed our friend. “Little Mouse from a Little Hole,” as we called it, lived near the garbage bin next to the restroom. But we couldn’t visit it yet. Classes began right after breakfast.

We were sitting at small desks. Maria Petrovna began with the usual. “We live in a big harmonious country. What is it called?”

She waved her hands like a conductor, and we shouted, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!”

“And who was this country’s founder?” and, just in case, Maria Petrovna pointed to the portrait of a curly-haired boy, and we shouted as loudly as we could, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin!”

Grisha was particularly diligent. He loved to shout, and he used every opportunity to do so.

“How many brotherly republics are there in our country?”

“Fifteen!”

“In which of them do we live?”

“In the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic!”

Our harmonious and clear answers would have surprised only a very uninformed person. We repeated the whole thing over and over again very often, day after day.

Then we could play. When the weather was warm, we were taken to the pavilion. Grisha and I exchanged glances – at last! Doing our best not to be noticed by the adults, we ran to the garbage bin. We were agitated. Would Little Mouse from a Little Hole, our little gray friend, show up when we called?

After placing the bread crusts by the wall, we waited patiently for its arrival. And we were rewarded – first a black nose, then eyes bright as cinders appeared in the hole. Another moment, and our mouse ran along the wall…

“What are you doing here all by yourselves?” the voice of the kindergarten janitor sounded like a bolt from the blue.

We ran away as fast as we could. None of the adults knew about our secret friend.

“Has the janitor seen it?” Grisha whispered, his voice trembling, when we returned to the pavilion. “Oh look, she’s coming this way… She’ll tell everybody about us.”

Paralyzed by fear, we watched the arrival of the janitor.

“Maria Petrovna,” she called to our teacher. “They’ve delivered beef to the kitchen.”

“Is it fresh?”

“They say it’s all right. But they don’t have much of it. You’d better hurry.”

“Thank you. I’ll go see them.”

The janitor moved away. It had blown over this time.

Fair-haired Kostya came running to the pavilion holding up his index finger.

“Look what I have. I’m going to trick it now. Ladybug, fly to the sky. Your children are there waiting for the candy you’ll bring them,” Kostya sang.

And the trusting ladybug spread its wings and flew away to look for its children.

After lunch we all lay down on our cots. “Quiet hour” lasted a whole two hours. What a boring time it was. The only entertainment we had was listening to what the adults were talking about. People who worked at the kindergarten usually visited Maria Petrovna while we were supposed to be napping. They would sit in the corner talking quietly. Today, the cook, Zhanna Kirillovna, stopped by.

“How are you doing, Maria?”

“The same old story…”

“Perhaps you should forgive him. After all, you have your daughter.”

“I just can’t take it any longer. I don’t remember when I last saw him sober. There’s not one kopeck at home, and he’s drunk away the television set.”

“Drive his buddies away. Perhaps he won’t drink alone.”

“He drinks with his buddies at work. Can I possibly establish order there? Now there’s peace and quiet at home. No one runs wild, no one curses.”

Maria Petrovna began to cry quietly.

“I know what you have to put up with. It’s the same with mine… Sometimes he gets so plastered. So, what’s to be done, Maria? Men don’t drink because they want to. Life’s hard.”

“Who’s talking there?” the teacher asked threateningly on hearing someone’s whisper. “This is the quiet hour. You must all take a nap.”

“I understand that life is hard,” she resumed their conversation, “but what are their brains for? Our daughter is growing up. Who should she learn from? They should be ashamed of crippling so many innocent souls. Is life easy for women, Zhanna? No, but we don’t turn into alcoholics. No, I don’t want him back. I’ve had enough of him. We’ll manage without him somehow.”

“All right, Maria. God be with you. I’ll go get some beef. Don’t forget to stop by.”

“Alcoholics, alcohol-lics…lics…Cursecursecurse… Don’t want him back,” echoed in my drowsy brain for a long time. Then I fell asleep.

Chapter 5. Happy Birthday, Little Redhead!

That day, as I returned home from kindergarten, I saw Father in the yard. He was sitting on a chair under our mighty apricot tree, his hands resting on his knees. He looked as worn out as he had in the hospital. He was still breathing with difficulty.

Misha, Yura’s father, squatted next to him rummaging through a nice-looking blue thing. Wow, it was a car! It had wheels! And it was blinking – first its lights lit the apricot tree and the wall behind it, then they went out.

“I need to adjust the contacts,” Uncle Misha mumbled.

Then he saw me, sprang to his feet and shouted his usual greeting, “Look who’s here! How do you do, little redhead!”

Misha always greeted me with enthusiasm, never forgetting to remind me of my former hair color. According to his stories, when I was “little, redheaded and potbellied,” I would walk around the yard with my empty chamber pot in my hands, banging it against the walls. Misha would say, “Look, our rayis is coming,” hinting at my likeness to a local collective farm boss since, as a rule, they were potbellied.

“Happy birthday, little redhead! This is for you.”

Mesmerized, I stared at the blue pedal car in which he had just been rummaging. It had a black steering wheel, seat and wheels, and a blue body. It sparkled and shined all over in its novelty and freshness. And this miracle was mine! And today was actually my birthday – April 7th.

“What do you say?” Mama prompted.

I mumbled “thank you,” unable to tear my eyes from the car. I hardly had any toys, and definitely nothing like this.

Misha picked me up by the armpits and lowered me into the car.

“Vale-e-e-ya! What kind?” he sang imitating Yura and, at the same time, continuing our old game. That was how Misha always asked me about the skeleton of an old car that had long been sitting outside our gate. “What kind is it?” he always asked. And I always answered, “A passedger car.”

But this time my fascination with the present didn’t leave any room for our game.

“Well, little redhead, go!” Misha commanded.

But how could I go if my feet just dangled in the air and didn’t reach the pedals? I was desperate.

“I see,” Uncle Misha obviously hadn’t expected that to happen. “Well, that’s all right. You’ll grow soon enough. Meanwhile, let me give you a ride. Turn the wheel!”

The wheel squeaked, the pedals rattled, the steering wheel shook – I was taking a celebratory ride around the yard. The animals and birds were panic-stricken. The hens cackled in fright. The pigeons took flight. Jack stood motionless, staring at us in bewilderment. Uncle Misha zoomed around with all his might. The cherry trees, the water pipe, the kennel flashed by fast. That was some ride!

As I was having a great time, I heard a shrill shout, “Vale-e-ya!!!”

This time it wasn’t a plea for help. I knew my little cousin well. Everything new that appeared in the yard had to belong to him.

“Don’t give it away,” I commanded myself, ready for a quarrel.

“Yu-ya, come congratulate Valera,” Misha tried to prevent a conflict. “It’s his birthday today.”

Yura ran up to us. He didn’t want to listen to anything. He wanted the car, the car alone. He had to satisfy his wish and he didn’t give a hoot how he did it.

He could have yelled, stomped his feet, bitten or started a fight, ignoring the size of his opponent.

Only one person was capable of dampening his anger, though only for a short time.

Disobedience inevitably led to punishment – that was the rule established in the yard by my father. And he was the one who enforced it.

Yura was the one to whom my father would often give a flick on the forehead. He called that popping “champagne” for the sound it made, similar to that of popping the cork of a champagne bottle. He sometimes spanked him lightly on his bottom, which would send Yura flying across the yard. And when Father opted for ear-pulling, it was definitely far from pleasant.

All the children who visited Grandpa’s yard knew how strict “Uncle Amnun” was. His glance alone was sufficient to stop boys from dashing around the yard and make them tiptoe.

Naturally, they sometimes got carried away and started quarrels or fights. Father was always ready to ease the situation. He would beckon to the culprit, without a word, just motioning with his index finger, and dish out a dose of “medicine” to the guilty party.

While doing it, Father expected full cooperation from the punished one. At the sounds of “champagne,” they would count ten “flicks.” If a poor devil counted without enthusiasm, the whole thing was repeated. The memory of a punishment, long and bumpy, sat on one’s forehead.

When Yura saw that it was impossible to kick me out of the car, he grabbed hold of my hair but was immediately lifted into the air, where he remained hanging. It was my father who had lifted him by the scuff of his neck and pulled at his ear.

“And who did I beckon to?” he said quietly, drawing a breath with difficulty. “This is not yours. It wasn’t given to you. Go home immediately!”

My cousin walked away with a piercing cry.

The evening was spoiled for everyone. The parents started going home without saying a word. My car was left by the apricot tree.

“You don’t touch it either,” Father ordered as he went inside.

* * *

Relatives and acquaintances who didn’t usually visit us inevitably showed up for my birthday. Many of them, who didn’t find it necessary to greet Mama when they saw her, greeted her on that day as if nothing wrong had happened. Then they would come up to me, hug me tenderly and congratulate me, “Look at him, he’s so grown up,” they would say.

And I stood looking at them with wide open eyes. I just stood there, stared at them and tried not to answer. I waited for them to leave and never visit us again.

Grandma Lisa also arrived to congratulate me.

“A, bvi. Chi to et?” Mama greeted her politely as was customary.

“The spondulosis has struck me again,” she answered, kneading her lower back with her fist.

Grandma always uttered this complaint through clenched teeth, hissing and winking, as if someone had inflicted a terrible pain on her and wouldn’t give her any relief. In other words, she was demonstrating how much she suffered.

Mama invited everybody to the table. After sitting down, Grandma immediately began to make herself the mistress of the repast, a repast that was somewhat strange because she acted as if Mama and us kids were not at the table. It was just her and her son Amnun, who was in her good graces that day.

“Amnun, what will you eat? Amnun, do you want some more? Amnun, what will you drink?” was heard at the table. Papa nodded sullenly. He was ill at ease.

The person who was always kind to Mama and us kids was Grandma Lisa’s brother Abram. He visited us often. He also came that day. I was glad to see him. Once Uncle Abram gave Yura and me a blue scooter. It was homemade, welded from rails. It was very heavy but safe. The point was not just his presents. I think children are finely attuned to other people’s attitudes toward them. They even sense their essence. And Uncle Abram wasn’t just kind and nice, he was the person all the relatives were proud of.

Stories about his “adventures” in combat were legendary. Perhaps they were made larger by added details as they were told and retold, but the main points were definitely true.

After he had been taken prisoner by the Germans near Lvov, he managed to pass himself off as an Uzbek, escaped a few times, was hidden by tenderhearted Ukrainian peasant women and then taken prisoner again. That’s how he knocked around for three years. When Soviet troops began their offensive, he was beaten almost to death after another escape but was liberated by one of the army units. Abram survived, recovered, returned to combat, reached Prague, was awarded many medals and orders, and returned home.

I don’t remember him wearing them to show off. Only once, while sitting on his lap, I managed to hold those round circles that were delightfully jingly and heavy.

After the horrible trials and tribulations of the war, Uncle Abram didn’t grow bitter. He didn’t break down but rather remained charming and bubbling with life, an amazingly kind man. The number of people he helped out – some with money, others with work – was great.

He could do that because he was very respected in town, even though he was just a taxi driver.

I heard from Mama that Uncle Abram always supported his sister Sonia, whose husband had been killed in combat. Sonia was a widow with three children, and they lived in poverty.

Every time someone spoke about Abram, Mama shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t understand who she takes after,” and she would look askance at Grandma Lisa’s house. Grandma Lisa was truly the complete opposite of her brother.

It began to grow dark. Jack whimpered softly in the yard – someone must be coming home. It was Grandpa returning from work.

“Here I am. Who is the birthday boy?” he said cheerfully setting his shoulder bag down.

He’d had a long day of work behind him, but Grandpa didn’t look tired. He had always been like that – encouraging, energetic. He didn’t like to use mass transit. Walking was his natural way of getting around. And he was quite fast, too. Not many people managed to keep up with him. “Hey, you!” he would reproach a walking companion who fell behind. And, clenching his fist, he would explain, “An empty sack cannot stand upright. You should eat well!”

After rummaging around in his shoulder bag, Grandpa took out a package.

“Va-le-e-e-ya!” he cheered, aping Yura. “Here’s some vanilla ice cream for you… Where are you, you prankster? And for you, I have sherbet…

The ice cream was dished out and we, smacking our lips, began to devour it. I was sitting across from Yura. We ate, looking at each other. And, without a word, we understood that we were friends again.

It was April 7th, my birthday. It didn’t turn out too badly – I received a car, we had ice cream, but most importantly, Yura and I made up.

After all, we couldn’t live without each other.

Chapter 6. “Earthquake, earthquake!”

I woke up because my bed lunged under me. It lunged sharply as if it wanted to run away. Then it lunged again, not as sharply as before, and again, and again…

That was when I felt that everything around me was shaking and rocking.

Sleepy Emma was squealing in the dark. The floors were creaking, the dishes in the cupboard were clinking. The wall clock, long broken, began to tick-tock loudly, as the musical hammers suddenly started marking the time. The neighbors’ cows were mooing slowly and anxiously, hens were clucking. Jack alternated between howling and whining.

“Get up! It’s an earthquake!” Our parents threw blankets over me and my sister and took us running to the yard.

Grandpa and Grandma were already there.

“Zamin, Zamin!” Grandma Lisa shouted. She wore her nightgown and a scarf wrapped around her head. She was rubbing her lower back with her fist.

Grandpa, in his galoshes and drawers, which had slipped down to reveal his hairy stomach, threw up his hands in surprise. It seemed he was about to ask, “Where has it come from?” Grandpa had experienced many earthquakes throughout his life for they had happened in Tashkent before, but they had never been this bad.

Perhaps there were other relatives in the yard, but I don’t remember. I don’t even remember seeing Yura. I was too absorbed with what was going on around me.

In that pre-dawn hour, we, like primeval people, were alone against that natural phenomenon in our yard, on that small patch of land surrounded by the fence.

The earth continued to shake. Each vibration was echoed by a dull hum, similar to a remote clap of thunder.

It seemed that the outlines of the adobes in the yard leaned forward and jumped up like dancers on the dance floor, changing shape. The metal roof made strange sounds as if it had snapped and come apart at the seams.

Clinging to Mama, I bundled myself up in the blanket, covering my head so as not to see and hear it all. But the tremors seemed even scarier under the blanket, and it was stuffy in there.

I moved the blanket a bit and peered at the sky through a slit.

The vast expanses of sky ocean above my head were studded with blinking stars.

Dark against that background, the apricot tree with the outline of its spreading branches extended to the sky. It seemed to me that its top was planted firmly in the darkness of the firmament and held it up, swaying with each tremor. Maybe it was even telling the stars, “Don’t be afraid, I won’t let you fall down.”

An hour had passed since the earthquake began. The shaking grew weaker but could still be felt. The animals and birds were still anxious, and the shouting and crying of children could be heard from neighboring yards.

The day was breaking.

We could already see how our yards looked – the slanted chicken coop with its disheveled inhabitants, fragments of dishes on the table, pieces of the slate roof. Taught by bitter experience handed down from generation to generation, residents in our parts built their houses and even fences using saman. It was made of clay, cow dung and straw mixed with water. Adobes made of saman were much more pliant and less susceptible to destruction than bricks. But even houses made of saman could not withstand such a powerful earthquake.

Our house survived.

We didn’t yet know how lucky we were. Later, the broadcast on the radio announced that the earthquake in Tashkent the night of April 26, 1966, was magnitude 8. Thousands of houses were destroyed, tens of thousands of families were left homeless. The official announcement said eight people were killed, but that was clearly a lie. People spoke of hundreds who had perished.

We all went inside, but no one went to bed. Our parents wandered around the room, trying to tidy up. Mother checked first whether the gas stove was all right. Later they discussed whether Emma and I should be taken to the kindergarten.

“Do you think the kindergarten could possibly be open today?” Father doubted. “Let’s try. If it’s closed, I’ll bring the kids back home.”

But the kindergarten was open. It looked like a disturbed beehive. The teachers were setting up tents in the yard because the order had been given not to enter the building yet for fear of new tremors.

And not without reason – Tashkent suffered another earthquake during the night of May tenth.

The whole day was spent in bustle and worry.

The concerned teachers ran back and forth sharing news.

A few military men visited. They explained something to the teachers and scrutinized the premises through field glasses.

A radio was heard crackling in the yard. Announcers were broadcasting about the day’s events, alternating between Uzbek and Russian. However, they didn’t report anything new. People learned the news from each other.

“As I was passing the square, I saw a crack in the ground… just like an abyss, must have been a few dozen meters.”

“Have you heard about the Young Pioneers Club and the Puppet Theatre?”

“All of Kashkara is ruined. What’s happening there is awful.”

“They keep taking more and more people to hospitals. Will they have enough beds?”

“They continue to dig people out… Are they all alive?”

“I don’t know. You could still hear shouts and moans coming from ruined buildings this morning.”

The adults didn’t have much time for us that day.

We played in the sandbox, listening to their anxious voices.

I tried to imagine what the huge crack in the main square of the city looked liked, in that very square where parades were held on national holidays. How, I thought, would people walk there, how could cars pass? And was it possible to cover that abyss with something, to fix the square? But the square was eventually fixed, and not only the square…

Though the consequences of the earthquake were concealed from the public, they turned out to be so enormous and terrible that it was impossible to hide the

Besides, seismologists all over the world had determined the precise scope of the disaster. People in every country of the world knew about it.

That was why Brezhnev and Kosygin gladdened the people of Uzbekistan’s capital with their arrival the day after it happened.

This time, the city received considerable aid from the government.

Chapter 7. Coal

As Mama and I were coming back home from the kindergarten, I suddenly saw a big black pile, almost as high as our neighbor’s house, at our gate.

“They’ve brought coal!” Mama exclaimed.

Trying not to get soiled, she took Emma and me down the narrow passage to the gate. Coal dust stuck to the soles of our shoes.

The yard was empty. Only Father was sitting near his favorite apricot tree.

“They brought a ton and a half,” he reported. “They wanted thirty rubles to transfer it to the storage room.”

Thirty rubles was a worker’s weekly salary.

“It’s all right, Papesh. We’ll manage ourselves,” Mama said.

Mama was eleven years younger than Father. She always addressed him very respectfully. “Papesh” was a respectful form of “Papa.”

Naturally Mama was concerned. It wasn’t easy to transfer such a huge pile of coal single-handedly.

But, as always, she did her best not to let anyone notice. She was a master of hidden feelings. No matter what blows life inflicted on her, no matter how hard and painful they were – and it happened often – she tolerated everything with dignity, without a word of complaint. And only when her patience was completely exhausted, did she cry quietly in a corner.

We bought coal once a year. It was kept in the storage room near the apricot tree.

Mama brought a few pails and a shovel, and we set to work. Mama carried two pails filled to the brim with coal, panting and walking heavily. I followed her carrying the two or three pieces that I could lift.

Coal dust stuck to everything – the sides of the pails, the walls of the house, our clothes, our skin. It penetrated our nostrils and got under our eyelids. The black trail made by our footprints traced our path from the coal pile in the lane to the storage room.

The pile diminished very slowly. The sun was setting. The long shadows of the trees grew paler, merging with the gathering dusk. The pigeon coop grew quiet. Cats began running around the attics, their green eyes sparkling here and there.

No one came to help us. A few days earlier, Father had quarreled with his mother yet again.

The quarrel was, as always, baseless and stormy. All the inhabitants of our yard took part in it, dividing into two camps.

When it happened, Grandma, as an experienced “military leader,” inspired her supporters, mostly her own children. As soon as they showed up, she gathered them together around the table, setting forth the reason for one more quarrel and distorting the facts without any pangs of conscience.

Grandma understood perfectly well that her stories added fuel to the fire and made the atmosphere of our community, which was far from friendly, explosive. But that was exactly what she delighted in.

Grandma Lisa was a virtuoso of squabbling. After stirring up trouble, she would step aside to watch innocently as the uproar developed. After enjoying it, she would take on the role of peacemaker and act as if she had nothing to do with it. In other words, she also somehow attempted to ennoble herself.

For precisely that purpose, she brought dinner for Papa to our place only two days after she had quarreled with him.

Mama understood perfectly well what fuss Father would raise on seeing the plate. That was why she put it at Grandma Lisa’s window.

Retribution followed right away.

“Mama!” Father’s younger brother Robert yelled. “This swine has brought the dinner back!”

“Where is this bitch?!” Father’s sister Tamara yelled as soon as she entered the yard. She had already been informed about Mama’s “crime.” “Where is she? I’ll…” And obscene cursing followed.

Aunt Tamara loved to use foul language. She kicked up a row with someone almost every day.

“Hey, you ignoramus!” Uncle Misha called to Mama with disdain.

He was a schoolteacher. He taught physics, while Mama was a common factory seamstress.

They all quarreled with Father, but it was impossible to understand why all the hatred was vented at my mama. She had no place to hide from them.

Even during the hardest times, she didn’t egg my father on. She didn’t influence him against his mother, brothers or sister. She kept silent when she found herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. She was quiet and patient.

That’s how she had been raised. She was calm and reserved by nature, even withdrawn. She was not in the habit of and didn’t care to interfere in the private lives of those around her, to denounce anyone, to gossip. She didn’t find it interesting. Besides, she had no free time.

Her husband’s illness didn’t allow her to have a normal life. She had to take care of him, to look after him, to feed him. In other words, she had to work from early in the morning till late at night. There was never enough money and she had no help.

* * *

It was past midnight. The moon, clear and bright, was high in the sky. All the houses shimmered silvery in its light. Every unevenness, every small detail in the yard was clearly revealed.

It was a splendid night, and it was very, very quiet.

Only Mama broke the silence. The shovel continued its scraping. Chunks of coal rattled as they fell into the pails.

One last batch, and we finished our work. Sweat, thick and fast, was streaming down Mama’s face. Her face, hands, legs, dress, apron – all were coated in a solid, heavy, coarse black armor.

We had to wash ourselves at home. A visit to the bathhouse would come the next day.

Mama began to heat water. She had to do it as fast as possible because tomorrow – actually, it was already tomorrow – early in the morning she would have to go to work, and I to kindergarten.

I think I fell asleep sitting on a chair. I don’t know how my poor mama managed to undress and wash me.

Chapter 8. A Very Good Day

It must have been a holiday, I don’t remember which, but that morning we were all at home – Mama, Emma, and I. All but Father; he was at the hospital again. I was about to play when a singsong call was heard from the yard.

“E-e-e-e-e-s-the-e-e-e-e-r!”

Mama’s name was heard from the yard. It sounded like a song, like a serenade. It sounded so melodious and clear, as if an opera singer were performing an aria consisting of just that one name. I knew that singer very well. His voice could not be confused with anyone else’s. Even though it was a man’s voice, it was amazingly similar to my mama’s.

But of course, it was Grandpa Hanan! He didn’t like to knock on the door. He preferred to announce his arrival by walking between our door and that of Grandma Lisa and singing something.

In his black coat and bright skullcap, with a small bundle in his hands and his face with its greying beard turned up, he was waving the bundle and telling the whole neighborhood about his arrival and his love for his daughter.

“E-e-e-e-e-s-ss-th-e-e-e-r! E-e-e-e-e-s-th-e-e-e-e-e-r! Look who’s here, E-e-e-s-the-e-r!”

When my Grandpa Hanan was singing all by himself or among friends, he didn’t notice anything or anyone around him. He might walk back and forth for a long time.

“Mama! Grandpa Hanan is here!”

Mama was already running to the door. She smiled at me over her shoulder. Oh, what a smile it was! Mama gave us such a smile only in rare moments of happiness. She would put one hand on top of the other and bow her head slightly. The corners of her closed lips would rise, and the line of her mouth would curve. That changed her face in a miraculous way – it looked brighter and younger. Her hazel eyes grew bigger, brighter. A secret light lit them beautifully and reigned above her smile. The sharp arcs of her thick eyebrows, that almost touched over the bridge of her nose, surged like waves, and above them, two little birthmarks went up like little rowboats.

Our mama was a beauty. I think she was the kind of beauty that the great poets of the East extolled. Tall, slender, with a gentle face and thick black hair so long that when it hung loose, it streamed down her back to her thighs like a waterfall. She was definitely the embodiment of Eastern beauty.

I liked to watch Mama comb her hair. Seated at a small round mirror, Mama would slowly comb her hair, one strand after another. It streamed and shone even in the light of the dim bulb that lit Mama’s bedroom. She would stick the comb into her thick hair at the top of her head and drag it slowly down a strand to its very end. She did it over and over again, until the strand became elastic, until every hair separated easily from the next. Only after that did she begin on the next strand.

A small wisp of hair would remain on the comb after she finished with a strand. Mama didn’t throw these away. She neatly wound them up into a ball, a kind of bun, which grew bigger by the year.

At last her hair was combed, and it was time to arrange it. First, Mama placed the bun at the nape of her neck and began to roll the strands around it in amazingly graceful movements. That was how a big springy bun appeared at the back of her head before my very eyes. It was the hairdo that I considered the apex of perfection.

Mama threw the door open, and I rushed toward Grandpa and jumped up into his arms. He lifted me and, pressing me against him, began to turn slowly.

Oh, what fun it was. Everything floated past me – the cherry tree, the apricot tree, the vegetable garden, Jack’s kennel, and Jack himself with his long tongue sticking out. It seemed to me that his tongue was floating after me like a long pink ribbon. How could it possibly fit into his mouth? The walls, the windows, the tulle curtain in Grandma’s bedroom floated past me.

The curtain shifted just a bit. Grandma was at home. The window was her observation slit through which she could see the whole yard. Grandma Lisa was watching us secretly now.

When Grandpa Hanan visited us, she didn’t open her door and didn’t come outside. Grandpa didn’t expect her to for they had nothing to talk about.

We were still turning and turning, and Grandpa was singing. I sang along. How wonderful I felt! Besides, I was the only one he was twirling, for Emma was asleep.

As I flew, I thought – how did the skull cap stay on his head? It must have been glued to it. It never fell off. Grandpa even scratched his head in a special way, without taking it off. He lifted the back of it with one hand, like one valve of a shell. His other hand went under the cap and a rustling sound could be heard. Much as I tried, I never managed to look under the valve of that shell. What if something valuable, unusual, something Grandpa carefully protected and hid from everyone’s eyes was kept in that hiding place?

“All right, that’s enough. Let’s go.”

Grandpa put me down, picked up his bundle, and we went inside.

Mama greeted her father in a restrained manner. It was the custom in Asia. You could hug and kiss your mother, but you had to treat your father with respect and restraint. True feelings could be displayed only when misfortune struck. Mama, for example, took care of Grandpa twenty-four hours a day when he had bad fits of asthma.

Grandpa sat down at the small table in the corner and opened his bundle carefully. It held a small pot of hot food wrapped in a cloth. Oh, how delicious was the smell coming from the pot. We hadn’t had anything to eat today. It was true that the day before I had managed to eat illegally, so to speak.

Yesterday, Grandma Lisa cooked meat dumplings. Their aroma filled the yard. Mama and I were the first people the aroma reached. We were sitting at the table near the cherry tree where Grandma had brought the dumplings. But it didn’t mean that we were invited to have dinner. Father was at the hospital. Daughter-in-law and her children could not expect to be treated to dinner when he was away. If we wanted to sniff how the dumplings smelled, we were welcome to do that.

“Robert, come eat!” Grandma shouted. Robert didn’t answer. Grandma called him another time, then she ran to the house for her son.

I stood near Mama who was sitting at the other end of the table. The fragrant steam tickled my nostrils. I was staring at Mama. Suddenly, she stood up. She took me by the hand and led me to the platter of dumplings. She grabbed a hot dumpling and stuffed it into my mouth. Oh, how tasty it was! It was very hot, but I didn’t care, so tasty was it. Oop… and she popped another one into my mouth… and another…

That’s how I had dinner yesterday. But naturally, today my stomach didn’t remember that. Seated in Grandpa’s lap – after all I was a little kid, and it was all right to spoil little kids – I gobbled the tastiest food with delight. Grandma Abigai was a first-rate cook. My mama had learned from the best. Except now she didn’t often get the chance to use her skill.

“How are the children doing?” Grandpa asked.

This short question deserves special comment. Firstly, Grandpa couldn’t stand it when someone asked how he was doing. That was why he didn’t like to ask such questions. Secondly, he had known for a long time that his daughter Ester’s life was far from good. She would answer such a question, if asked, as she had been taught as a child, “Thank you, Papa. Everything is fine.” So why ask? And what could Grandpa do apart from what he and Grandma Abigai had already been doing for us? The question “How are the children doing?” was the most painless.

I learned the truth about my parents many years later. My Mama’s parents, Grandpa in particular, were against the marriage. Perhaps, they knew something about the groom.

“Do you also sew at home?” Grandpa asked.

“Sometimes, when they allow us to take work home.”

A Zinger professional factory sewing machine was standing across from the dinner table. After Grandpa’s sharpening machine, it was the best rattling machine in the world. As she sewed, Mama pressed its pedal to the floor – what a great sound it made, endless, ringing, clear-cut, like a burst of machine gun fire. It was better than at the movies! I used to hide behind the doorpost and, standing on one knee, I was ready for battle, and I would open fire.

“Rat-a-tat-tat… Rat-a-tat-tat…” I was firing at my enemies without missing. I was destroying unit after unit. Come nearer! I’m not afraid of you. It was a pity I couldn’t have too many of those battles for Mama didn’t often sit at the sewing machine at home.

* * *

Grandpa left. Emma woke up. Mama fed her and turned on the radio. Uzbek music was playing. My curly-haired little sister, well fed and satisfied, whirled in a dance. I followed her. Mama began to sing and snap her fingers. We moved our heads and shoulders, tapped our feet. It was a whole orchestra playing for us.

Emma was whirling so fast that she tumbled to the floor, and the dancing stopped. And I, taking advantage of the moment – Mama was in a good mood and she was with us – sat down on her foot to have a ride.

Up and down, up and down… Mama sat with her legs crossed moving her foot. She herself was also moving to the same rhythm. I sat on her foot like a rider on a jaunty horse. Wow, how fast my horse was galloping. Everything was flashing by and my head was spinning. I had to try not to fall from the saddle.

At the peak of my bliss, Emma began to squeal – she also wanted to take a ride, and immediately. Just try and prevent her.

“Oop-la! Oop-la!” Mama repeated as the curly one went into gales of laughter. I could also hear Mama’s quiet laughter. The three of us had such a good time.

What a great day that was!

Chapter 9. Macaroni

“Ester, did Eshaim bring you two rubles?” Grandma Lisa asked loudly for everyone to hear.

Hands on her hips, she stood on her porch with the kitchen door wide open.

It was Sunday morning. Grandpa had just knocked at our door and given Mama two rubles before leaving for work. After casting a sidelong glance at their windows, he mumbled, “Don’t forget to write it down.” He had been ordered to do that. In other words, Mama should remember that the money had been lent.

“So, did he bring it?” Grandma asked again, informing the inhabitants of our yard about the situation in the family. “Go to the bazaar and buy a chicken leg and rice for Amnun. Cook broth for him. Also buy a flatbread and a big tomato, this big,” and she spread the fingers of her right hand for fear that Mama might buy a not-big-enough tomato.

When Father was sick one had to go to the bazaar quite often. On Sundays, Mama took us along.

The way to the bazaar was familiar, down to the very last detail. Korotky Lane was connected to Shedovaya Street by a short lane of about two hundred meters that was wider in some places and narrower in others. It was no more than two or three meters wide at its narrowest point. The walls of the houses that formed that narrow passage were propped up by massive brick buttresses. Thick at the base, those supports held the houses up during earthquakes.

An old man and an old woman, as they say in fairy tales, “Once there lived an old man and an old woman…,” lived in one of the houses. When the weather was good, the old woman usually sat on a little wooden chair at the gate selling sunflower seeds. Just toasted, they were piled in a small bowl and smelled very appetizing.

The old man and the old woman didn’t have children. Sometimes, they invited local kids to visit and treated them to sunflower seeds. Their one-bedroom apartment was very poor – a table, a couple of chairs, a bed and a wardrobe, though they had a television.

I liked Shedovaya Street very much. It was wide and paved and had ariks on both sides. Stately oaks grew along the ariks. Somewhere up there, high above our heads, their branches came together forming a thick leafy arch.

It was particularly nice there when it rained or during a thunderstorm. Bolts of thunder could be heard, lightning flashed, rain drummed on the roofs and treetops, but all that was outside. I was in a different world where leaves didn’t rustle, the wind didn’t blow, and not a single drop of rain fell. I was protected by the giant oaks.

Shadov Street and our neighborhood were densely populated by Bukharan Jews. Our relatives also lived there – my grandpa’s younger brother, his nephews and their many children. We didn’t see them often, but on days of festivities or grief most of the extended family got together.

I had known since childhood that I, Mama, Papa, and our whole family, were Bukharan Jews. But I didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant. Only when I became an adult did I ask myself, “Who am I, after all? Why are people who have never lived in Bukhara are called Bukharan Jews?” The explanation turned out to be quite complicated. It took me very far from Bukhara, from Uzbekistan to ancient times.

* * *

In 586 B.C. an event took place that became one of the most important in the history of the Jewish people. That event was the Babylonian captivity.

The troops of the ruler of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed Jerusalem, and most of the population of Judea was driven away, to Babylon. Half a century later, Babylonia was conquered by the Persians. Jewish prisoners were allowed to return to their homeland. However, it is known that the majority of them stayed in Babylon. Throughout the centuries a distinctive ethnic commonality appeared. They didn’t assimilate with the Persians. On top of that, when the Romans finally defeated Judea, Babylonia became the world center of Jewish culture and science. The historical consciousness of the Jews was founded and developed there. Judaism became firmly established. Its spiritual culture expanded. It’s enough to remember that the Babylonian Talmud was developed there.

But our ancestors were not destined to make their new homeland there. Beginning in the fifth and sixth centuries A.C., events took place in Persia that brought many cruel persecutions against the Jews. A considerable number of Persian Jews gradually migrated to different countries, including the cities of Central Asia, Tash and Shash, as Tashkent was called in the ancient times, as well as Samarkand and Bukhara.

Bukhara was the center of a big powerful khanate in the Middle Ages. Commerce, crafts, arts, and sciences all thrived there, and it was where the largest Jewish community in Central Asia gradually came into being. I read somewhere that the first mention of it was in the thirteenth century.

That was possible because Bukhara was the resplendent capital of the largest Uzbek khanate. Much later, at the end of the eighteenth century, the name of that Jewish community, “Bukharan Jews,” came to refer to all the Jews of Central Asia, including Uzbek Jews.

Even if we begin counting from the eighteenth century, the Jews settled among the Uzbeks quite long ago. How could they not get along with each other? The Bukharan Jews adopted many Uzbek traditions. Their looks and behavior were similar to those of the Uzbeks. In our time, they could be educated in local schools and institutes. They took an active part in all spheres of the life of the Republic. But still… Bukhari, based on Farsi, which is related to Tadjik, remained their native tongue, while Uzbek belongs to the Turkic family of languages. The Jews spoke Bukhari at home and did their best to pass it on to their children. And they continued to practice their religion, Judaism. They observed ancient customs as much as they could. They settled close to each other, if possible, creating Jewish mahalli (communities). In a word, the Bukharan Jews did not turn into Uzbeks, they did not blend with them but created another distinctive ethnic community, another branch of the tree of nations.

The Yuabovs, my father’s parents, were among the Jews who had stayed in Persia and had not left during even the hardest of times. There had been quite a few people like them. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did my great-grandfather migrate by camel to Central Asia and settle in Tashkent.

* * *

But let’s return to Tashkent from our travels to the past… Mama and we reached Pedagogicheskaya Street, went down it and found ourselves in the very center of the city, crowded and bustling. Many streetcar and trolley lines crossed there. Taxis scurried around. The Central Department Store which towered over the center was surrounded by kiosks, canteens, and various repair shops. The Turkmen Bazaar was a stone’s throw from the center. It was not the biggest bazaar in town, but it was considered one of the best. It was strikingly clean. The air in its passageways, sprinkled with sand, was cool. Outdoor shops stretched, row after row, for about three hundred meters. Only collective farm members were allowed to open businesses there. Butchers, gardeners, craftsmen, and others had their stalls behind them.

The bazaar began operations very early and immediately turned into something of a beehive. The bazaar buzzed monotonously like a swarm of bees, and high thin voices soared above it. Those were tireless salespeople haranguing shoppers.

“Hey, opa, look at my strawberries. They’re so tender they’ll melt in your mouth! Try them!” a gardener tried to attract buyers.

“Come over here, folks! Everything’s from my own garden, as sweet as honey!” another gardener praised his fare.

Most sellers were elderly Uzbek men. They wore very similar attire –skullcap, chapan (long, quilted coat) and soft leather boots.

To say that it was customary to bargain at Asian bazaars is an understatement. It was a special ritual, a sort of skill, a game that spiced up the monotonous life. A price given by a seller was not just challenged. One needed to present an argument about why a price should be reduced. At the same time, the dignity of the seller and the produce was never debased.

Mama had a great command of that skill, and her Uzbek was perfect. She spoke it so well and grammatically correctly that people who conversed with her had no doubt that she was Uzbek. And generally, Mama who was tall and slender, with jet-black hair, was considered Uzbek at first sight. It often helped her get better prices. And it did help us that day.

* * *

We returned home after shopping. Mama had just started cooking when Emma began to whine and act capricious. She was sluggish on the way home, her cheeks red, her eyes crossed. It was clear without a thermometer that she had a fever.

Emma was often ill, now with the flu, now – pneumonia.

Seeing that Emma wasn’t well, Mama ran to bring the doctor, who lived nearby and visited us often.

“It’s the flu, a viral flu,” she said. “She must have got it at the kindergarten.”

She gave Emma an injection and warned Mama that she needed a shot every day. Seeing the doctor to the door, Mama gave her a bag of macaroni.

“Please, take it. I don’t have any money. It’s so embarrassing. We bother you so often.”

It was customary to pay visiting doctors or give them presents. But we had neither money nor nice things.

“Oh, c’mon, Ester,” the doctor was embarrassed. “You mustn’t.”

Pressing the bag of crunchy macaroni to her chest, Mama said, “I don’t have money to pay for injections. Please, send Emma to the hospital.”

An ambulance arrived in the evening. Emma understood that she would again be parted from her mama and began to cry, “Mama! Mommy! Don’t send me there alone! Please! Come with me!”

It was terribly noisy in the yard. Emma was crying and shouting. Jack was barking and straining at his leash. Confused, Valya and Misha were looking out of their window.

Mama, of course, couldn’t stand it any longer. She grabbed me by the hand, ran to the ambulance and persuaded the medics to allow her to accompany her daughter. We rode away.

I didn’t see the final scene, but I can reconstruct it for I had witnessed many of them.

It grew still. The yard went back to normal – a quiet, happy yard in which nothing was happening. Grandma Lisa walked slowly onto the porch.

“Misha! Valya! Why was the dog barking? Was someone here?”

Chapter 10. We shouldn’t live like this any longer

Tashkent was changing rapidly. Even I noticed it. Teams of construction workers from all the Republics in the Union came in after the earthquake. The city was overgrown with scaffolding. Cranes rose everywhere. It seemed to me that their booms looked like the barrels of huge cannons. Etched high against the sky, they spun from side to side as if looking for their target somewhere far away on the horizon. Each crane had an operator who would direct it to the proper place when prompted by a worker standing on the ground. A large curved hook would pick up a huge slab of reinforced concrete, and the crane would raise it to the very top of a building, rocking it like a swaddled baby. Their cables looked like very thin threads from afar, and it seemed that the loads they carried stayed in the air, held up by some magical force. I could have watched that amazing spectacle for hours.

The whole city was obsessed with the ongoing construction work. The radio broadcast the achievements of construction workers almost every day. And that was the truth – their help was very noticeable. The Soviet government knew how to demonstrate its might, which it unfortunately chose not to demonstrate when it was needed to take care of its people. It demonstrated its might only when it was possible to brag, to show off to the whole world.

No matter what achievements were made in construction or how fast they were carried out, it could not solve the housing problem, which had been really critical even before the earthquake. It was just as critical as in any big city in the Soviet Union. And now, after the disaster, it seemed that all people could think and talk about was housing.

People who were left without a roof over their heads formed “live lines” at every agency. There was a crowd of people at one of the buildings near Turkmen Bazaar, which housed the commission that evaluated apartments to determine how safe they were, and people, concerned and worried, would wait there to learn how their fate would be decided. Those whose apartments had been damaged were offered the option of leaving Tashkent. They were offered apartments in other, less populated cities in the Republic, or even beyond its boundaries.

Summer arrived, and it was hot and dry, as usual, though it seemed abnormally sultry. Our yard would become a desert by ten in the morning. Quiet birds hid in the crowns of the trees. Jack, trying to escape the heat in the shade of his kennel, lay with his tongue out, breathing heavily. Even flies didn’t fly above the extremely hot, soft asphalt.

Father couldn’t stand the heat. For people with asthma it’s usually easier to breathe when the weather is dry, but he would gasp for breath. He was so weak he couldn’t walk. He was taken to the hospital again.

And since, before that, Father had managed to quarrel with Grandma Lisa, the old story began again – Mama was once again the target at which all arrows were shot…

“Hey, you, ignoramus!” my “intelligent” Uncle Misha called to her. “Rent an apartment somewhere else. I’m willing to pay your rent.”

Mama would only shrug her shoulders in response. She was ready to move anywhere, even to the ends of the earth. But where? And how?

Father was feeling better at the hospital. Once, when the doctor was making her rounds, she saw Mama and said with satisfaction, “Well, he’s feeling better and better. You can take him home.”

She expected Mama’s usual reply, “Oh, I’m so glad. Thank you, doctor.” But this time Mama proclaimed decisively, her voice unusually sharp, “I have nowhere to take him.”

“What do you mean?” the surprised doctor asked.

“Our apartment was damaged. We’re staying in a tent in his parents’ yard.”

It was my turn to be surprised. What tent were we staying in? Fortunately, I didn’t ask Mama about it.

“Why don’t you stay with his parents?” the doctor asked.

And Mama answered – this time in her normal voice – and it was the truth, “Who has need of him, ill as he is? They’ve turned him away.”

I looked at Father. He bent his head low and didn’t interfere in the conversation. And what could he say? He knew that Mama was right. It was necessary to move away, at all costs.

“All right,” the doctor said after a pause. “Summon an official from the Evaluation Commission and bring us a certificate. Then we’ll decide what to do about it.”

We went from the hospital to Turkmen Bazaar, and Mama applied for an inspection of our apartment.

Then we went home, and I was thinking that I would see the tent Mama had spoken about, but it wasn’t in the yard.

I stayed outside to play near the summer shower. The big yellow tank was filled through a hose attached to the spigot. Besides the shower head, it had a faucet below. It couldn’t be turned off properly and there was always a small puddle below it, which I found very useful. Pigeons drank water from it. It was also good for playing.

I was having a great time at the puddle when I heard muted blows. Boom-m… Boom-m… Boom-m. They were becoming louder and more frequent. They were coming from behind our door. Frightened, I rushed to the house and threw open the door. The blows, now very loud, were coming from the bedroom. I looked inside.

Mama, my mama, was standing on the bed, wielding an axe, which she held in both hands, rocking back and forth and smashing the wall with it.

To be precise, that wasn’t my mama; it was someone else. My mama was always kind, tender and quiet. The one who was banging the axe against the wall was mean, scary and dangerous. She repeated some sort of incantation in a voice that wasn’t like Mama’s at all as she continued smashing the wall, “It’s impossible… It’s impossible… It’s impossible…”

Plaster was flying in all directions. White dust covered the floor, the beds, the windows. Dishes rattled in the cupboard. The broken wall clock began ticking again, as if it remembered that scary night in April. I stood by the doorpost, my body trembling with every blow of the axe.

Mama sat down on the bed, panting. Her breathing returned to normal as her distorted face smoothed out and became my mama’s face again. She looked at me, almost calmly, and said, “Well, Son, now we have a damaged apartment. We’ll stay in a tent in the yard.”

She chuckled and looked around.

Cracks gaped in every corner of the bedroom and on the damaged walls.

Shouting could be heard in the courtyard. Grandma Lisa burst into the bedroom. Her bedroom was next to ours behind the wall. The axe blows must surely have been felt there. But when she ran into our bedroom, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“Ibi, ne muram! Chi kari?! (God, prolong my life! What have you done?!)” she shouted.

Mama picked up the axe and walked right past Grandma.

“At least now I’ll be rid of you.”

Chapter 11. We have moved!!!

Something Mama had been dreaming about for a long time happened on one of the first days of December,1966. It was a miracle, performed by her will and her hands – we left the old house. We also left Tashkent. We moved to Chirchik.

That town was only 30 kilometers away from Tashkent. Father had chosen it himself. Firstly, it was not far away, and if something had happened to him, his relatives – at least that’s what he thought – would help Mama. Secondly, Chirchik was a town of new construction projects, so it wouldn’t be difficult to find work. And, sure enough, Father soon began teaching P.E. at Secondary School 19, and Mama was hired as a seamstress at Guncha knitting factory.

We took up residence in the settlement of Yubilayny – that was the name of a micro-district of Chirchik. We had our own apartment! It was new, in a new building. We had three rooms and a veranda enclosed in glass. We were allotted a garden plot in front of our windows near the entrance to the building, as were all the other ground floor tenants. There was a rose bush, a cherry tree, and a poplar in our small garden.

However, I wasn’t very interested in the garden. I was filled and overwhelmed with new impressions. There was a Greek family in the same building with us. A Ukrainian family, the Kulikovs, was above us. There were Crimean Tatars, the Zinedinovs, on the third floor, and above them, the Ilyasovs… In a word, our part of the building, just like all the other parts was a bit international. That was something new for me.

Naturally, the neighbors all made each other’s acquaintance quickly, and soon there were gatherings at the entrance every evening. The exchange of news, and gossip, of course, began. Dora, an elderly Greek woman who lived on our floor, was the principal gossipmonger. In the evening, when the weather was warm, she emerged from the building, without fail.

Dora, a corpulent woman, used to plop her heavy body onto the bench and begin grinding coffee or black pepper in a small hand-held coffee grinder. She delighted in chatting, over the whir of her grinder, with anybody who showed up. She definitely had the gift of a street orator. Not a single resident of our building passed her by without stopping to listen and being drawn into a conversation. It would become noisy. Curious faces would appear in windows and on verandas. The meeting would become not only well-attended but also multi-storied.

My mama was the only one who avoided those gatherings. She had never cared for discussing other people’s affairs, and the conversations under the windows always took on a personal nature, thanks to Dora. I soon learned that my father’s personality was discussed on a regular basis. I heard it myself many times while hiding behind the open window of our veranda. Alas, no kind word about him ever reached my ears.

Soon, I had new friends in Chirchik. They were the Kulikov brothers, seven-year-old Kolya and six-year-old Sasha from the apartment one flight up. The Zinedinov brothers, Rustem who was a first grader, and six-year-old Edem, the same age as Sasha and me, lived above the Kulikovs. Five kids from the same entrance – what could be better? We immediately found common interests and figured out what games we enjoyed the most. One of them was certainly “the war game.” But apart from that old game, familiar to children all over the world – and unfortunately, not only children – I learned a new, no less absorbing game called Cracker.

In the spring, as soon as water appeared, clay would begin to accumulate at the bottom of the ariks. We would make something like a flatbread out of it, putting a shallow dent in the center of it. That was a “cracker.” Then, you just needed to lift it with the dented side down and throw it on the asphalt with all your might. Pakh-kh! It sounded like a gunshot. And if the five of us threw two crackers each, at the same time… a burst of machine-gun fire was nothing compared to that. The ground where we played was between two buildings under construction, with a distance of about forty meters between them. It formed a kind of echo chamber, and the noise resounded like thunderclaps.

Our “shooting” could hardly have pleased the adults, but that didn’t bother us. On the contrary, if any of the neighbors dared to reproach us for such pranks, a particularly loud and long cannonade would be heard under their windows.

We gradually began to familiarize ourselves with the new town. It took a quite a while.

Unlike Tashkent, Chirchik was a very new town. It had appeared in 1935 with the consolidation of a few workers settlements created for the construction of the Chirchik Hydropower Station and the chemical plant, but construction was not limited to the plant, the first chemical plant in Uzbekistan. They also built a plant to process metals with high melting points and a plant that manufactured electric transformers. Footwear and sewing factories appeared. By the time we arrived, Chirchik was a big industrial center with about 25 industrial enterprises. There was also the din of tanks, the muted thuds of shots fired, reverberating through the wide valley speckled with hills on the outskirts of town when field exercises at the tank school, the largest in Uzbekistan, would take place.

That was the extraordinary town we had moved to. Our building, just like the whole of Chirchik, was multiethnic because even people from other republics moved there when they heard there was a new town with big construction projects underway, where workers with various skills and professions were in demand.

The town was dominated by the chemical plant, which was located not far from the entrance to town on the Tashkent side, surrounded by a high brick wall topped with barbed wire. Poisonous yellow smoke spewed out of its chimneys, day and night. On windless days, a column of smoke rose permanently into the sky like a thick twisted rope, or rather like a monstrous brush that painted the entire firmament with its poisonous yellow hue. That yellow hue accumulated to form paunchy, festering clouds.

When a north wind would begin to blow, and that happened quite often – for the valley studded with hills didn’t protect the town from cold winds – an unpleasant pungent odor spread throughout Chirchik. It would cause a tickling sensation in the throat and make your eyes water. The grass and leaves would turn yellow after a rain. And trees and small gardens in the vicinity of the plant were an absolutely unnatural shade.

All the citizens knew that the plant’s exhaust was poisonous and that there were no filters on the chimneys for protection. I never heard about any attempts by citizens to do anything to stop the plant from poisoning them. Workers at the plant were happy to receive free milk at work. Any protest was out of the question. The all-powerful plant had strategic significance. If necessary, it could be easily switched over within a day to produce military raw materials.

* * *

But for the smoke, Chirchik was a rather cozy and attractive town. It was divided into two parts by the Chirchik River, or “the canal,” as it was called there. Its banks had been coated with cement inside the city limits to prevent erosion. The Chirchik was a turbulent mountain river generously replenished by snow that melted on the spurs of the Tian Shan mountains. As soon as high water arrived in the spring, brooks, torrents, and waterfalls gushed down, flooding and carrying along everything in their path. After turning into a river, the stream rushed about like an anxious mother who had lost her children and was prepared to search every nook and cranny and overcome every obstacle. That was why they had to cement the banks of the river within the city limits.

Leaves rustled on trees, the roses were fragrant, and water babbled merrily in the ariks that ran beside paths and sidewalks. I would notice all of that later, when I grew up. At that time, we were little kids and traveled only as far as our kindergarten or school.

Emma’s and my kindergarten, which was named Buratino (Pinocchio), was not much different from the one in Tashkent. We had the same kinds of classes and were taken outside to play in similar pavilions. Of course, there were no get-togethers with our favorite mouse anymore. But a golden eagle, a proud bird, lived in a big cage in the yard. It peered at us with disdain, turned away from us haughtily when we tried to talk to it, and paid little attention to our attempts to feed it bread. Those attempts were unsuccessful because the holes in the wire cage were too small.

Mama worked two shifts at the factory. The first one started at eight in the morning. In order not to be late for work, Mama would take Emma and me to the kindergarten very early, around six o’clock. It was winter so we arrived when it was still dark, and we paced around in the snow for an hour or an hour and a half in front of the locked building. There was a lot of snow that winter. It sparkled beautifully, streaked with silver when the moon was out. And the moon was also very beautiful and very, very big. It seemed so close that we could touch it with our hands.

We weren’t scared because we were together, but we often ended up with wet feet, and our teachers had to change our clothes.

Chapter 12. Guncha

For as long as I can remember, I knew my mama was a seamstress. “Quota,” “output,” and “plan” were among the first words I remember. Mama would mutter them angrily. I heard familiar words in Chirchik because Mama also worked at the Guncha sewing factory there. However, Mama spoke about her work with less irritation than before. Something had changed. Of course, I didn’t understand what. I was too little to understand production processes and relations. I grew to understand that much later. As a child, all I had were impressions. One memory that stuck in my mind was once when Mama took Emma and me to the factory where she worked.

Our kindergarten was closed for a quarantine that day. Mama had been at home that morning, and as she was getting ready to leave for her night shift, she said, “You can’t stay home alone. You’ll be better off sleeping overnight at the factory.”

We took a long ride on a bus. It puffed heavily and let out a roar as it went up hills. There were many of them. The twisting road ran now up, now down, and new four-story apartment buildings crowded together, some on top of hills, others at their feet. Some of the buildings still had scaffolding. The fourth micro-district – that was what this part of town was called – was under construction and growing. That was where Mama’s factory was located.

Cool air embraced us as we entered the wide lobby. A large chandelier sparkled on the ceiling. There were many bright posters on the walls. Among them, there was a board crowned with red letters that had photographs on it. Suddenly, I noticed Mama on one of them. I stopped and grabbed her by the sleeve, “Mom, what is it?”

“It’s the board of honor.” She laughed, but her face had a contented look.

We approached a door with a glass plaque. Mama adjusted Emma’s dress and knocked on the door. “We’ll be seeing the manager. Say hello to him,” she whispered.

The manager wasn’t scary at all. He called us bogatirs (Russian epic heroes), but when Mama asked his permission for us to stay in the workshop overnight, he waved his hands, “Oh no, Ester, we can’t do that,” but, when he saw that Mama was upset, he grunted and ordered, “Put them on a pile of rags in the corner, away from the machines. Got it? And they shouldn’t run around.”

We walked up the steps leading to the workshop. Something upstairs was rumbling and chirping and rolling loudly. It seemed that something swift and huge might dash out onto the staircase toward us. It was the sewing workshop that was making all that noise. It was crammed with sewing machines, 20-30 of them in each row. It took my breath away – there were so many of them there. The foot pedal Zinger sewing machines seemed so splendid to me. The shift began, and Mama sat down at one of those wonderful machines.

Guncha was a knitting factory, and they mostly made knitted jackets there. So, what was actually being sewn? Making the jackets included many operations, from cutting them out to sewing on buttons: many short, clearly delineated, strictly limited operations that didn’t require any imagination but demanded precision and concentration and didn’t allow for any minor deviations.

The team in which Mama worked attached collars. That operation was divided into a few stages. Mama performed the first stage – she had to attach the middle of the lower part of the collar to the back of a jacket’s collar line, right in the middle. Everything else was based on that first positioning. If Mama made a mistake, the whole jacket would be ruined, and it would be classified as defective merchandise.

Someone brought a cart piled with jackets to the end of the row. Mama snatched a jacket and a collar. Oone, and a jacket flew into the machine. Twoo, Mama turned it so fast with her hands that I didn’t even notice its color. And I didn’t notice how the collar ended up in the right spot. Thrree, it was done, and the jacket flew on to the next seamstress… Mama’s machine was chipping and chirping. She sat with her head down, rocking slightly. Her feet moved without stopping, her hands made fast, precise movements. She was absorbed in her work. It seemed she didn’t notice either the rumbling of the workshop, the rattling of carts passing by, or her children who sat in the corner on a pile of multi-colored scraps watching her… Well, I was the only one who was watching Mama. The pile of bright, soft scraps was a real treasure that any girl would have envied. It was hard to imagine that such treasure was considered trash at the factory. Emma rummaged through the scraps, mumbling something, snatching and twisting them, tying them together, trying them on. She made a scarf, a shawl, or something that looked like a harlequin’s outfit. In a word, she was very busy.

But I could not tear my eyes away from the assembly line. I watched how fast the jackets moved along it, but my eyes always returned to Mama’s machine, to her hands. And what I soon noticed was that Mama was working faster than the others. She would pass a jacket to the next seamstress, who had not yet finished with the previous one. Someone called from another part of the workshop, “Ester, take a break! Slow down!” But Mama seemed not to hear; she didn’t raise her head.

Mama was a wonderful seamstress, a virtuoso. She couldn’t possibly do bad work.

But that was not the only reason. At Guncha, unlike at the factory in Tashkent, they paid according to one’s output. Mama’s earnings depended on her hands, on her craftsmanship. Mama’s restless hands kept Emma and me fed.

Only here in Chirchik, Mama felt that her work was valued. Before long, she was awarded the Order of Labor of the Third Degree. Only five people in town had received that award. Mama was certainly proud of it. Perhaps, she was even very proud. Mama’s work was exhausting, her speed, efficiency, and concentration required an enormous output of energy and produced nervous tension. Good heavens, but did she ever think of herself?

When apprentices showed up at the factory, they were taken to Mama. Who could possibly teach them better? Who could demonstrate to them more patiently, many times over, how to do the work? They sometimes brought defective items to her, and she repaired them with the skill a surgeon would use operating on a seemingly hopeless patient.

Probably, a true master in any field is one who possesses emotional generosity, as well as skill.

…The time passed, hour after hour. The workshop rumbled ceaselessly. Emma had fallen asleep long before, buried in her pile of treasure. I was falling asleep too, but I gave a start and woke up because silence fell over the workshop. A break began. I don’t know if there was a cafeteria at the factory, but many seamstresses had a snack at their machines. They plugged in their hand-held water boilers. The sound of paper rustling could be heard as they unwrapped their sandwiches. Now and then, women ran up to Emma and me to treat us to candies or cookies. They had kind, tired faces, scarves tied around their heads, wearing aprons covered with bits of thread. Then, Shura Cheremisina, our neighbor, came up to us.

“Good! You’ve brought your kids,” she told Mama. “Let them see what we do here.”

“We work like mules,” Mama’s answer was short. She sat down near us. There was a piece of thread hanging from her lower lip. Almost every seamstress had a piece of thread on her lip. It helped them concentrate while sewing. Every part of them participated in the work process – hands, feet, eyes, even lips.

Chapter 13. “Our Neighbor Is a Greek Woman…”

“Kids, get up! It’s time, it’s time!”

I opened my eyes and squinted right away. After our rather dark Tashkent bedroom, I was not accustomed to the bright light that streamed into my eyes. Here, the two big windows faced the vegetable garden in the back of our building and an expanse of open space with towering hills beyond. The sun set behind them in the evening, and in the afternoon, it visited our bedroom, flooding it generously with its rays. Mama had had bars installed on the windows so that we wouldn’t climb through them while we were busy playing.

I stayed in bed for another minute or two, admiring the bedroom. It had delicate blue walls onto which little gold striped diamonds had been rolled. When I looked at the wall for a long time, I would get the feeling I was in outer space, surrounded by stars. One could also admire the floors, which were freshly painted and almost even.

The radio was on. In the morning, Father put the radio on the windowsill in the living room so that Emma and I could do our morning exercises. We did them for fifteen minutes to the sounds of music. We enjoyed doing them and even had time to be naughty and make faces.

“Emma, can you do this?” I asked, winking each of my eyes one after the other. I was cunning. I knew perfectly well what would happen next. She couldn’t wink each eye individually, even though she had tried many times.

“No, not like that! Look!”

I pretended I was trying to help Emma. She was trying to learn how to do it but would end up exhausted from trying. Sometimes, she would run to Mama to complain.

We finished our exercises, so I washed myself quickly with cold water, got dressed and sat down at the table.

“Just a minute,” Mama said as she was slicing lettuce. “I’m about to serve breakfast. Papesh, I need to go to the bazaar today.”

“Go,” Father answered.

“How about some cash? We’ve already spent my salary.”

“I don’t have any,” Father snapped.

It was his usual answer. It had happened many times. Mama would grow quiet and run to neighbors or acquaintances to borrow money until a payday, naturally, hers.

* * *

When I remember my father, when I try to imagine what kind of person he was, I envision someone with two personalities. And I wonder – which of them was actually him?

Father, like his brother Misha, was a teacher. One knows that a teacher is a model to imitate, to be held up as an example. That was exactly how the brothers were at work. They enjoyed respect. They did their best to earn it. They attained authority. They needed that for their careers. But at home they were absolutely different, as if they shed their masks. They claimed to be the sole authority and demanded respect. They were despots.

At work, the brothers were building their careers, and they yielded to the rules that facilitated that. At home, such rules were considered superfluous. Wife and children had to obey them, to tolerate everything, to forgive.

Father liked to pose as a well-off man. He didn’t like being thrifty. Why take a bus if you could take a taxi? It was so nice to toss money around, to spend it for his little pleasures, not for boring household needs. It’s true that he sometimes bought clothes, a book, or a toy for Emma and me. When he was in a particularly good mood, he would give Mama some money for shopping at the bazaar, but most of the time he answered as he did that day, “I don’t have any.” But this time Mama didn’t keep silent. I heard her quiet, tense voice:

“So, where does the money disappear to?”

Father raised his brows angrily. He wasn’t used to such questions, but an even less familiar question followed.

“If you don’t give me money for shopping, why do you eat the food I provide?” Mama asked in the same voice.

Father didn’t answer. He jumped up from the table, ran to the stove and knocked the pan with the cutlets in it onto the floor.

The front door banged – Father left. Mama cried, covering her face. I sat in a stupor, but my heart was pounding as if someone were hitting my chest with a hammer.

We went to the kindergarten without having eaten anything. What happened next is difficult for me to describe, for I learned about it from Mama much later. But perhaps what she told me became so strongly intertwined with my childhood impressions, with my intense feeling of pain for Mama, that sometimes it seemed to me that I didn’t spend that day at the kindergarten but instead went with Mama to the factory. There she walked, so thin, pale and unhappy, whispering, “Why me? Why me?” She had hoped that after leaving Korotky Lane and getting rid of Grandma Lisa’s spite, she would live a normal family life. But no, that didn’t happen. Grandma Lisa dogged her, like a shadow. She was nearby even now, in her son.

Here was Mama at the sewing machine. Rocking in time to its rhythm, her head lowered, she whispered something as if she were talking to her breadwinner. The machine understood her and answered sympathetically. “R-r-r!” its motor was terrified. “What for? What for?” the pedal squeaked indignantly. “Prick-prick-prick! Prick-prick-prick!” its needle hurried to the rescue. “I’ll prick him, I won’t allow him to hurt you.” Even the jacket, obedient and soft, gliding under the needle like a skater on ice, tried to ease Mama’s suffering. But her tears continued to fall onto the soft fabric.

“What’s wrong, Ester?” Katya, the seamstress who sat behind Mama, came up to her and hugged her by the shoulders. “What’s happened? Is something wrong at home?”

Mama nodded. Her story was short and muddled. On hearing it, Katya exclaimed, “Let’s go see Sonya, as soon as possible, during the break!”

Sonya, the head of the factory’s Trade Union Committee, was a sharp woman, the kind of woman whom the saying “Be on your guard when she’s around” suited well. She was compassionate. She acted decisively, using all the energy built up inside her, when she could sometimes help workers without antagonizing the management. And Mama’s misfortune afforded her just such an opportunity.

“You’re so silly, Ester. Why have you concealed it for such a long time? We’ll show him… If he doesn’t want to behave, we’ll exchange your apartment for two… It’s impermissible for a teacher to behave like that. I would understand if he were an alcoholic… All right! We’ll go to your place after work!”

Sonya had made a decision. Everything was clear to her. And Mama stood in front of her with her tear-stained face, thinking, was she really ready to flee again? What would she have done if her co-worker and friend hadn’t taken her to Sonya?

Certainly, it’s very important to know that one is not alone. Perhaps, that was the most important thing. But still… Now I think that it was a different Ester in Sonya’s office that day, not the one who humbly tolerated her husband’s cursing and beating and the insults of his relatives. Something had been building up in her and it broke through on the day she took an axe and smashed the walls of the hated house. Her first victory, moving to Chirchik, gave her strength. Was it possible that the respect she enjoyed at the factory and the fact that she was earning more had boosted her self-confidence? It must have been so…

Mama looked at Sonya.

“Yes. Let’s go after work!”

Then we were at home. We, because Mama picked us up from kindergarten on the way home. We were in our room because children should not be around when adults have serious conversations. But our door was cracked. I could see and hear everything. Mama and an unfamiliar woman were in the living room. And where was Father? He was in the bedroom, dressing hurriedly. I was quite worried, for I did understand something, after all. What would Father do? I saw him go to the front door, for some reason, with an axe in his hands, and head for the vegetable garden. He began chopping branches, as if to say, “See? I have work to do here.” But Sonya wasn’t the kind of person one could play such games with. She came out onto the veranda and began her attack.

“Comrade Yuabov, you have visitors in your house, and you’ve walked away. That’s not polite. Come on! We need to talk!”

The adults sat around the table. I could see Father’s face. I had never seen him look like that. His face was pale. That I had seen often. His lips were clenched and distorted. That I had also seen – his lips were always like that when he was angry and quarreled with Grandma or Mama. His big nose, curved like an eagle’s, was close to his lips. I had seen that too. But his eyes… yes, it was precisely his eyes that changed his face, made it unfamiliar. Father stared at the visitor, and his glance betrayed his confusion and fear.

Sonya had already introduced herself. She was calm and focused. This situation was not unusual for her. She had taken part in such encounters many times. She was the one to give orders and make decisions: she and she alone. But for Father… Everything was upside down for him. Perhaps, this meeting at the table reminded him of the schoolteachers’ meetings he had attended so many times, but not in this capacity. There, he was an eagle attacking lackadaisical students. Here, Sonya was the eagle. She looked at Father, her glance icy, and asked sternly, “How can you explain what has happened?”

Father was silent, beating the table with his fingers.

“If you don’t want to live together, no one is forcing you,” Sonya continued ruthlessly. “The apartment can be split. You’ll be given a room.”

Silence.

“You’re a teacher, aren’t you?”

Father nodded as he continued beating the table with his fingers, the same grimace on his face and his legs crossed.

“So, this teacher thinks that he can humiliate, beat and harass a defenseless woman. And the school principal probably thinks he has an angel working for him… I’ll visit your principal. I’ll talk to him…”

“One…” Father began to say. He must have decided to answer. “One of our neighbors is a Greek woman…”

Sonya just looked at him in bewilderment, then she turned to Mama. What did this have to do with the neighbor? Sonya didn’t know Father’s trick. When he was cornered, he would blurt out some nonsense to confuse the person who was talking to him, pretending to be a simpleton, to shift the conversation in a different direction.

But it was impossible to confuse Sonya. Without waiting for him to continue his story about the Greek neighbor, she reminded him calmly, “I’m asking you for an answer. Do you want a divorce, or are you willing to live normally?”

“Everything’s normal with us here,” Father mumbled.

“Beating your wife, throwing food on the floor? What’s normal about that?”

Father mumbled something unintelligible again. But the visitor inflicted blow after blow, calmly and persistently breaking the P.S. 19 teacher into even smaller pieces.

Father sat there, drumming the table with his fingers. No, he wasn’t sitting at the table, he had been knocked down, defeated. Sonya was an experienced fighter. She knew that people like my father, self-confident, merciless with the weak, had to be taken by surprise and pinned down.

After casting a last stern, contemptuous glance at Father, Sonya stood up.

“All right, this conversation is over. It’s up to you to decide what will happen next.”

In the morning, my parents talked to each other. Father was calm, polite and nice. We all felt good. Mama even smiled. All was well… for a few days.

Chapter 14. The First School Bell

Finally, it was Sunday night. It lasted too long and didn’t want to make way for the long-awaited tomorrow. It would be the next day, September 1st, when the most important event would happen – I would go to school. Something utterly unimaginable was happening in my head, so nervous was I.

Any events that interrupt the usual course of life provoke nervousness in me, almost as if I were sick. My heart was beating as if it wanted to burst out of my chest. My cheeks were on fire. My fingers would always move by themselves, but I had never been so nervous as this time.

One thing that helped me cope with it, to some extent, was carefully organizing my school gear, all those new things I needed for class that I had received over the summer.

I decided that I should check one more time whether everything was all right. I wouldn’t have any time to do it in the morning. I picked up my new shirt and began to examine it. It was a nice pale-blue cotton shirt. Mama and I had spent so much time looking for a shirt. We had also spent time buying everything else – textbooks, notebooks, a briefcase. In Chirchik, just as in every other town, stores were very seldom supplied with goods. Everything sold out fast. Customers waited for the next delivery, lying in wait for weeks for the things they needed. Lines looked like huge earthworms, and people would run up to them like restless ants with questions: “What was delivered today? What are they selling?”

It’s difficult to imagine anything drearier than store shelves in between deliveries. We stopped at the bookstore and saw that it mostly carried newspapers and brochures with boring covers. As for the newspapers, they were all like members of one big family: Pravda (Truth), Komsomol Pravda, Pravda Vostoka (Truth of the East). We visited the bookstore over and over again, until finally we were rewarded – we were able to buy an ABC book. It was new and smelled pleasantly of paper, paint and glue.

After much effort, we also obtained a briefcase. I scrutinized and admired it endlessly. It smelled like a real leather briefcase. It was unimaginably shiny, and I loved the way it squeaked. It had three compartments – for textbooks, notebooks, and rulers, and a pen case. No words could express how wonderful its lock was. It clicked like a gun trigger. Hey, you out there, beware!

All the objects I had in the briefcase were splendid, particularly the white porcelain inkpot with its blue trim on the top, known as nevilevaika (non-spilling), because ink wouldn’t spill out of its cone-shaped opening, even if you turned it upside down.

Extra pen nibs in a special section of the pen case gleamed like little mirrors. I would soon have a chance to learn that their behavior could be treacherous. You would dip your pen into the inkpot and begin to write without wiping it on the edge of the opening, and… plop! You’d have an inkblot, an ugly navy-blue spider on a clean sheet of paper. There was no way to erase it with an eraser. You would only make a hole. But those treacherous pen nibs squeaked so wonderfully.

After placing all my treasures in the briefcase, I finally went to bed, but my impatience and anxiety kept me from falling asleep for a long time.

* * *

Mama and I approached the school early on the morning of that sunny and cloudless day.

Construction of P.S. 24 had been completed by the time we arrived in Chirchik. It was located next to Pinocchio Kindergarten, which I had attended before. There was a short fence and a pedestrian path between them, the path that I was now symbolically crossing. By the way, I was crossing it prematurely. One was supposed to be seven to start school, and I was six. But my father had carried out an offensive operation to secure my enrollment in school ahead of time, and he had been successful.

The four-story school building glittered in its whiteness. The posters and banners seemed especially bright against the white walls. The large portrait of Lenin, with his arm outstretched, calling upon arriving students to study diligently, had been placed above the door where it was impossible to miss. The square in front of the school was filled with adults and children carrying bunches of flowers in their hands. I was glad to see familiar faces, my kindergarten friends – tall skinny Zhenya Gaag, stout Sergey Zhiltsov, and the Doronin twins, Alla and Oksana. My nervousness eased a bit when a muted but frightening voice echoed through the air: “Dear parents… you and your children… today…” I didn’t realize at first that the words were being spoken by a tall man in a dark suit standing at a microphone. He was the school principal, Vladimir Petrovich Obyedkov. He spoke for a long time. I calmed down and became distracted. Then I saw that the tall man held a pair of scissors, with which he cut a pink ribbon stretched across the entrance to the lobby. An orchestra struck up a tune. The copper of the trumpets gleamed. We were all invited to enter the school. The corridor on the ground floor, along which we were ushered to our classroom, was so long that it seemed endless. At every door I thought, my heart skipping a beat, “This one must be ours.” But the door of our classroom was the very last one.

We were seated. My seat was at the first desk in the middle row, right across from the teacher’s desk. I had to turn my head very fast not to lose sight of Mama and not to turn away from the teacher for too long. Besides, I had someone to look at sitting at my desk. I shared the desk with Larisa Sarbash, my secret kindergarten love. She was tall and thin with light hair and wonderful freckles sprinkled over her little nose. Shy Larisa didn’t look at me. She sat staring at the blackboard so intently one would have thought it was a movie screen. But I cast glances at her now and then and admired her braids with big white bows that were so fluffy I wanted to grab and squeeze them.

Our teacher, Yekaterina Ivanovna, not very tall and somewhat plump, with short chestnut hair, had a tender singsongy voice and a kind gaze. She said she would be our teacher for three years and that in first grade we would begin studying arithmetic, reading and writing, and we would need to bring to school… At this point, she turned to the blackboard, and for the first time in my life I heard the magic sounds that would later become so familiar: Took-took-sh-sh-sh, took took-sh-sh-sh-sh… And white, straight, beautiful lines began to appear, one after another, with incomprehensible swiftness on the blackboard. I already knew printed letters, but these characters were quite mysterious.

How unexpectedly, how loudly the bell rang in the corridor. It was rhythmic and distinct. It was very special. It wasn’t just a bell but the melodious trill of an unfamiliar bird. The bird seemed to be with us in the classroom, hiding among the desks, and when our first school day was over, it sang out loudly, with joy, as if saying, “Toodle-loo! Congratulations! You’ve become school students! And now you may run home! Toodle-loo!”

Chapter 15. The Dugout

We noticed puffs of black smoke on the way home from school. They were pouring out from where building number fourteen, next to ours, was under construction. Kolya Kulikov and I exchanged glances. Everything was clear without words – they were smoking tar for the roof. We’ll have something to play with today.

Classes at school were over at two in the afternoon. At that time, the school looked like a crowded bazaar right before closing time, or the schoolyard before classes and during the main recess. Boys and girls who walked home from school the same way would get together at the school fence near the road. The events of the day, any interesting incidents, were passionately discussed. Teachers were still of great interest to us first graders.

“My teacher is very strict, awfully strict,” Vitya Smirnov complained.

“Do you mean Maria Grigoryevna?” Vitya Shalgin was surprised. “She’s not strict at all. I know her better; we’re neighbors. You should have mine. No one can even budge in class.”

“And my teacher, Yekaterina Ivanovna, is kind,” I bragged.

“Do you mean the Fat Lady?” Zhenya Zhiltsov, who lived in the military housing, asked.

It had only been a few weeks since school started but we already knew or had thought up nicknames for our teachers. The stout physics teacher was Molecule, the slightly bald drawing teacher was the Immortal Kashey (a folk character who has the secret to eternal life), the slow, plump auto class teacher was Zaporozhets (a car model). Yekaterina Ivanovna had two nicknames, Fat Lady and Kolobok (a fairytale character who is a little roll), because when she walked around the classroom, she waddled like Kolobok rolling down a forest path. Was it the need to embellish our humdrum school existence that aroused our imagination? That way, we spent part of the school day in some sort of fairytale, the characters of which we often made up ourselves.

We walked home chattering and laughing. Of course, we didn’t walk down the asphalt road like everybody else. “Like everybody else” was not for us. We walked across the dusty field, across the abandoned vegetable garden, diagonally, to shorten the distance between school and home.

We didn’t think about why we did it. We were drawn to playing, and the most important thing in our games was overcoming. Each of us felt that everything was in his power. There were no obstacles. And it was absolutely not important that we were the only ones who knew about it.

Here came Vitya Smirnov, a future test pilot. Clear skies, fast plane and altitude were on his mind… and Sasha was a future builder. “I’ll erect a building all the way up to the clouds,” he used to say. We were not so sure, “There are no cranes that tall.” Sasha only chuckled, “I won’t need cranes. What are helicopters for?”

And I dreamed of becoming an archeologist, and a paleontologist at the same time, and digging out the skeleton of the biggest dinosaur somewhere in Africa.

My colleagues and I will dig in the sands of the Sahara for many months, excavating that monster, bone by bone. I will grow dark skinned like a Papuan. I will put the dinosaur together and bring it to Chirchik. I’ll ride in a huge truck through the main streets of our town to the sound of fanfares. My dinosaur will be on the bed of the truck, and I will stand next to it. The city council will declare that the dinosaur will remain in town for good. It will naturally be installed on the playground near my building. Oh, how boys from neighboring buildings will envy me!

The boys, one after another, said good-bye as they reached their buildings. Kolya and I arrived at ours.

“Come out by five,” he reminded me. I nodded.

* * *

It seemed that they had decided to construct Building #14 especially for us. We could see something amazingly interesting there at any moment. Here came a dump truck loaded with slabs of reinforced concrete. And right after that, a crane rolled up to it along the rail. It picked up a slab with its mighty claw, lifted it to the floor under construction and tossed it onto that floor effortlessly. Up there, they were waiting for it; they were ready. With our faces raised, we watched how a slab, as if all by itself, without any assistance from the people whose movements seemed so easy, ended up in its place.

Vitya Smirnov watched the operator manipulating the boom of the crane with envy.

“Ah,” he sighed, “if I were him, I would lift the whole dump truck.”

“Are you serious? A crane couldn’t hold such a load. It would topple over.”

An argument ensued. Each of us defended his opinion because we all dreamed of becoming an operator and testing the power of that machine. Of course, we wanted to do it immediately, but if worse came to worst, we planned to enter the special technical school we knew of where they taught that profession, after we finished eighth grade. Meanwhile, each of us pretended to be the master of the crane, capable of moving all those wonderful levers, pushing buttons, switching lights on and off. Just move the lever and the hook would turn. Press the pedal, and the giant would smoothly glide down the rails. Push a button and a load would be lifted. And you just sat in that tower enjoying your omnipotence. You were up there all alone, with just the blue sky and the birds around you. Down below, people wearing helmets scurried back and forth like ants in search of food. Here, they surrounded that crawling caterpillar, the dump truck. They swarmed around it, waiting. Who were they waiting for? Of course, they were waiting for you. You sailed up to them in your enormous crane and attacked that caterpillar…

“It will turn over!” “No, it won’t!” That was us with our hearts in our throats from the fear and ecstasy of watching the team that worked all the way up there, a construction worker who made himself comfortable on the edge of the wall to smoke his cigarette. What could he see from there? Wasn’t he scared?

It was hard to say what was more interesting – observing the frenetic life of the construction site during the day or sneaking to the site after five in the afternoon, when the workday was over.

It only seemed to the builders that the construction site was resting without them. In fact, it was living a secret life from five in the afternoon till late at night. Boys came running like cockroaches from all over the neighborhood. It was dark. Without watchmen and guard dogs, we were the masters with absolute power there.

The construction site was covered with pebbles. We used them as hand grenades. We used tar as camouflage paint, piles of sand became shelters and the cabin of the crane an observation deck. It goes without saying that real “war games” took place right there. Though we sometimes thought up other games or simply wandered around, taking pleasure in our secret ownership of that wonderful place.

Later in the evening when it was pitch dark, high school students often went there. We could hear their voices and see the flickering lights of their cigarettes.

That night, our group crowded around the big blocks of tar. The sun had softened them during the day, and we hurried to tear off large pieces for chewing. We didn’t have any special recipe for doing this. We would just chew pieces of tar, and soon they’d became really soft and elastic in our mouths. It’s true that some experts and gourmets would add paraffin, and that chewing gum was undoubtedly softer and tasted pleasanter. We were all working diligently, chewing our tar. The blocks of tar looked like huge prehistoric hedgehogs.

Then we heard voices. Two tall guys were approaching us.

“Hey, Sipa, is that you hanging out with toddlers? That’s something!” one of them yelled.

Sipa – Sergey Cheremisin, a fifth-grade student from our building – was embarrassed. He had really been enjoying chewing tar in our company. Now he was ashamed of us. But Oleg, one of the guys, displayed magnanimity. “Come with us,” he said waving a bottle he held in his hand. Who would turn down such an invitation? Besides, Sergey vouched for us, “They won’t sell us out.” And he trudged along with the big guys.

A rather deep pit had been dug at the edge of the construction site, a perfect dugout for five or six people.

“Go get some plywood,” Oleg ordered. And we, racing one another, rushed around in search of large, clean pieces of plywood.

“That’s good,” our new leader said approvingly. “Now cover the pit… That’s my boys! Now into the dugout… Wait, wait… We’re one too many.” Oleg glanced around at us and nodded to me. “You’ll stand guard for now. We’ll replace you later.”

Before I had time to utter a word, Oleg had given me a wooden object.

“This is your machine gun. Keep a sharp eye out!”

And they dove into the dugout.

So, I began to walk back and forth, protecting the dugout from a surprise attack with great seriousness.

Time passed. The crimson ball of the sun slid behind the faraway hills and almost disappeared. The outlines of the trees were becoming blurred in the twilight… It grew colder. I could hear laughter coming from the dugout. They were having a good time eating something tasty. It was warm in there.

At last, I made up my mind. Bending over the hole, I shouted, “Hey, it’s been too long! It’s time to replace me!”

“You’re on guard duty!” I heard Oleg’s voice. And then he said, softer, to his friends, who must have been sitting next to him, “What else is a Jew good for? Only to be a guard.”

And I could hear laughter coming from down there. It was sickeningly repugnant, disgusting laughter. It was so far and at the same time so near. It rang in my ears, growing louder, louder and louder. It vibrated my eardrums till it hurt. And I continued to hear in that laughter “Jew… Jew… Jew…”

I was just six, but I knew what it meant. I had heard the word “Jew” when adults talked. I heard about hostility toward Jews in our “harmonious and united” country. But those were conversations about something abstract, about something that was out there, outside my life and had nothing to do with me, couldn’t cause me harm or pain.

Up until today, until this very moment, in this dugout.

My heart began pounding violently. I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I threw down my machine gun and rushed away.

And the laughter raced after me…

Chapter 16. Dog Eaters

I was on the way home from school, skipping and singing. I was singing loudly so that passersby could hear. Let them guess what happy event had made me sing! Today, I received my first grade, and it was an A, for good behavior. It wasn’t difficult to be an A student, I thought. Behave yourself, and that’s it.

My joy wasn’t disinterested. Father had promised that I could go to Kislovodsk in the summer if I finished the first school year as at least a B student. Of course, I dreamed about that trip. And now, the first step had been taken. I had already made some sort of progress in my mind, and Kislovodsk seemed a reality. Really, it was just two… three… eight months before summer, and then I would be there! I could already see the mountains in front of me, the camp hidden among them, the lake, the boats and other wonderful things.

Transported to Kislovodsk, I didn’t notice that I had reached my building, where I saw a bunch of boys at the entrance. Squatting, they surrounded Leda, our yard dog. Her clever eyes always shined like two sunny orbs during the day and two twinkling stars at night. Her raised tail would wag back and forth. Leda was very friendly. She enjoyed our company, and we enjoyed hers. We were generous with caresses. We would pat her little snout and kiss her cold black nose, but we really had to keep an eye on what was going on around us for we didn’t want our parents to see this. We were told all the time that it wasn’t hygienic to kiss and pat a yard dog, or even to play with her. It was useless to argue with adults. It was better to pretend that we sometimes forgot those rules. Besides, our parents were illogical, since many of them liked Leda very much and fed her and all that.

Our relations with Leda had become even closer recently – she’d had pups, and not for the first time. Leda had pups almost every year. It was always a big event for us. She would spend her time in the basement where she kept the pups. Leda seldom left her pups, so some of the boys would visit the dog family. They went there to admire the pups or, when they remembered that it was necessary, to feed Leda. However, those were the older boys, and only a few of them, because it was spooky in the basement. Today, Leda came to the entrance herself, and not because she missed us. Her empty nipples were hanging from her skinny stomach. She needed to fortify herself to feed the pups. Leda was often hungry nowadays. Unlike other dogs, she didn’t wander around the garbage bins in search of food. Leda was squeamish about garbage. She was our yard dog, a member of our society, so to speak, and she knew that. She understood that she got her allowance from building #15.

Each building had its own yard dog, but ours was the best. We were proud of Leda, who was always groomed, without burrs, her coat shiny. She walked in a special way, not like other mongrels, who moved sideways at a hurried trot, looking around cautiously, their thin tails between their legs. Leda was a refined lady, she never hurried, she walked straight and had a bold air about her. Sometimes she allowed herself to waddle, wagging her bottom. If male dogs could whistle, they would undoubtedly have whistled upon seeing that flirtatious beauty, “Wow, what a looker!”

Yes, Leda was attractive. Perhaps that’s why she had pups every year.

We were watching with pleasure as Leda swallowed pieces of sausage when we suddenly heard a piercing cry, “Dog eaters!”

Vitya Smirnov, disheveled and flushed, came running to our entrance with that shout – he lived in the neighboring building – and ran away, probably to inform his own people. Indeed, not a moment had elapsed when a small truck appeared around the corner. It was a disgusting truck. We hated and feared it along with those who drove it. They were “dog eaters,” a team that went around catching stray dogs: that was what our Leda was considered.

Apartment buildings had no right to keep such dogs. Residents couldn’t even protest against these treacherous raids. That was the problem. We boys were the only defenders of the animals.

We knew the hustlers in the truck very well. They called on our parts quite often. We waged a “guerrilla war” against them year after year.

The guy with the indifferent blank expression on his round physiognomy was behind the wheel. He was short and moved around clumsily on his bowlegs, as if he were about to stumble on the smooth surface and take a tumble. His buddy, his face covered with stubble and a crumpled cigarette between his lips, always wore high boots for some reason.

Many a time we watched with disdain the way the dog eaters acted. After siting yet another victim, they would pop out of the truck and try to throw a kind of lasso made of thick, twisted wire over a dog’s head. The noose smelled of death. It looked especially terrible when it was around a dog’s neck.

The residents of our building could hardly be gladdened by that sight, except the secret sadists among them. Dog eaters were cursed at. Attempts were made to shame them.

“What do you teach kids? To kill animals?” someone asked mournfully from a veranda.

“I’m sure you use soap,” the unshaven one usually answered.

“And what will you say if one of them bites your child?” the dimwitted one asked.

They said the dogs were used to make soap. The boys thought it was nonsense. Couldn’t they possibly come up with a different way to make it? So many things had been invented, and soap must have been made of chemicals. And if it was true that dogs were used to make soap, it would be disgusting even to touch it. You would wash your hands and think, “These suds could be our Leda.”

Besides, we kids had a serious suspicion. To be precise, we were sure that the dog eaters were catching animals in order to feast on their meat. That’s why we called them dog eaters.

“Why not? It’s very simple,” we discussed the cause of dog eating. “There’s often no meat at the bazaar. That’s why they try to catch poor dogs. They skin them and chop the meat into pieces. They eat it themselves and take some of it to the bazaar. Just try to tell dog meat from mutton.”

Aroused by such ideas, our hatred of the dog eaters grew boundlessly. Unlike the adults, all of us, especially those who were older, did not limit ourselves to verbal altercations with our enemies. We devised different methods of defense and keen plans for revenge. While the dog hunters were trying to catch their prey, we boys would either puncture the tires of their truck or stick matches into the ignition. Once, we even managed to open the truck and set almost a dozen dogs free. And later, hiding in the hallways, we writhed with laughter as we watched the dog eaters’ growing rage.

Of course, as they were arriving, our first task was defense. We had to make our plans in advance, and they had to be carefully thought out. Today’s tactic was clear – hide in the basement, that very basement where Leda fed her pups.

We retreated, like the Spartans, forming a triangle, holding our briefcases out like shields, with Leda in the middle. We safely reached the third entrance, where there was a staircase leading to the basement. Going down there with Leda was not as scary as going by ourselves, but still… many of us, including me, were afraid of the basement. Its dark expanse stretched under the building for its entire length and was lit only by sunlight streaming through small windows in the back wall. Besides, the ceiling was low, and we had to bend over to walk.

The darkness and desolation made the basement a perfect refuge for all kinds of riffraff who would stay there overnight, or sometimes even live there. An alcoholic who was drinking like a fish stayed there until he sobered up; a homeless hobo lived there for a month or so until he was chased out. It would be all right if it were just that, but the high school students talked vaguely about evil spirits and ghosts.

“Once I stood there…” Sipa was telling us, “smoking. Suddenly, I looked around and saw ‘it’ staring at me with its glowing eyes. And it was mumbling as if it had been wounded… I don’t know how I managed to escape.”

“That was a homeless drunk,” his friends laughed at him. “He was asking you to help him cure his hangover, but you didn’t understand him you were so scared. You can’t be serious!”

They laughed all right, but it gave us the creeps.

* * *

Leda ran in front of us as we walked in single file, looking around, even though it was absolutely dark. We hadn’t equipped ourselves with flashlights – that was a big mistake, since it was difficult to walk in the basement without stumbling, even with flashlights. You could come across anything there – pieces of pipe, chunks of cement, bottles, various types of garbage, not to mention dried up human excrement. But we walked and walked and walked. Leda’s shining eyes showed us the way that she knew very well.

The pups, all seven of them, lay on the rags by one of the windows. We could get a better look at them there. They were tiny, and they poked each other with their wet little noses, yelping softly. How aminated they became when they smelled their mother. Pushing each other impatiently, they crawled to her belly. It wasn’t far to crawl. As soon as Leda reached them, she would sniff them without fail and lie down on her side.

We grew quiet. All we could hear was the smacking of their lips.

Suddenly, a match was struck a few steps away, by the wall. Someone uttered a cry. We didn’t even have time to get scared, as the flame illuminated Oleg’s face.

“Who are you guys hiding from?” he asked.

“From the dog eaters!” and we began to tell him about our recent “battle,” interrupting each other.

Leda was a participant in the conversation. She whirled at Oleg’s feet, yelping quietly and wagging her tail. Leda liked Oleg. He had been ready to fight to defend her many times. Dogs can discern people’s good qualities better than some humans.

“We should have burned their shed long ago,” Oleg mumbled, after listening to our story about the dog eaters.

The idea received enthusiastic support, but he never got a chance to burn down the stand.

Saying good-bye to Leda and the pups, we never imagined that we were seeing our dog for the last time, but that was what happened. Leda disappeared the next day. No one knew what had happened or how it happened. And the dog eaters never showed up again.

We ran through all the yards in the neighborhood. We asked everyone, children and adults, but no one had caught sight of her. We managed to give two of her pups to nice people, but the other five had to be drowned. Of course, the adults did it, not us.

We didn’t adopt another stray dog. It just didn’t work out. We also didn’t want to be unfaithful to Leda, for we hoped she would come back one day.

Chapter 17. A Gulp of Life

The caterpillar tracks of tanks rattled, booming shots rumbled, the barrels of cannons gave off smoke. It was just another exercise underway on the training ground of the tank school. We watched the “battle” with agitation, ecstasy and envy from the roof of our building.

We were really lucky to live in this building. We were so lucky that all the boys in town envied us. A huge plot of vacant land began behind our building and stretched for a few kilometers up into the hills. The tank school was located at the edge of that plot. The training ground where the tank exercises were carried out wasn’t far from the school. Well? Is it clear now why we were lucky? We could watch that wonderful spectacle – which was sweeter for us than any movie about war – from the roof of our building, as if from the stands of a stadium. Were we capable of simply watching? Actually, we were not on the roof but on a hill from which, as representatives of General Headquarters, we directed the battle.

“Where… Where the heck are you going? Get in position to intercept them! C’mon!” Vitya Smirnov yelled, peering into the distance through field glasses formed by his curved fingers.

We heard muted submachinegun shots… then single pistol shots…

“That was a Kalashnikov… Now it’s tracer bullets…” it was Kolya Kulikov explaining what was going on as he sat with his eyes closed. He was a real expert. Kolya rocked to the rhythm of the shooting, hugging his knees and straining his hearing till he had a sharp pain in his ears. It was as if he were sitting somewhere in a concert hall, enjoying classical music… “Three… four… five…” he counted. “They’ll be done shortly.”

A sixth revolver shot rang out, and a short period of silence fell, both on the training ground and on the roof, but the events continued unfolding in our imagination. Here was an officer lying in a trench. He was wounded, and he was outnumbered. He had no more bullets in his pistol. They were surrounding him… and…

“That’s the end,” Kolya exhaled. He wasn’t rocking any longer. There was suffering in his eyes. “That’s the end. He’s been killed.”

But still we were listening, waiting… what if…

There it was! Bang-bang-bang – single shots were heard.

“No, he hasn’t been killed,” Vitya declared triumphantly. “He was changing the cartridge clip. Kolya, you always panic.”

Yes, of course, we were representatives of General Headquarters on the hill. But we’d rather have been down there, on the battlefield, dashing forward in pursuit of the enemy, or seated at the levers of military vehicles. Forward, always forward!

Sweet dreams…

Many boys in our town dreamed of becoming military men. They were a special caste in Chirchik, held high in our esteem. They were full of merit, both inner and outer. They knew how to show off their bearing. An officer would walk, clad in his impeccably ironed tunic with stars sparkling on the epaulets, his shoulders thrown back, his chest well-developed, his feet moving springily and rhythmically as if he were marching in formation. He certainly knew that children’s shiny eyes, and perhaps girls’ eyes too, followed him closely. But his strict gaze was fixed on the distance. He absolutely did not notice anyone. Of course, he noticed those of senior rank, and he saluted them precisely and handsomely.

It would be nice to befriend a military man’s son. Such a boy’s life was far more interesting that ours. Now and then, his father would take him along to a military school where he could get close enough to tanks to touch them, or he might even get to hold a submachinegun in his hands.

The exercise came to an end. The tanks, one by one, turned their turrets toward the hills and headed back to their encampments. We were also about to disperse.

The roof of our building was flat with a slight incline. It had no railing around its perimeter. Only a few brave boys dared to approach the very edge. They knew how to adjust a television cable or knock down icicles that were a danger to pedestrians. My knees would begin to tremble at the very thought of going near the edge of the roof.

We were about to leave the roof when the Oparin brothers came through the door leading to the stairs – Vova, who was my age, and Gennady, who was older. Their father was a military man, and Gennady had already decided he would enter military school after he graduated.

“What are you doing here?” he asked angrily, in surprise. “Get out of here!”

“The leaves have already dried!” Zhenya Andreyev shouted and was the first to dart to the door.

The roof was an observation post for us, but it served as a kind of production area for older boys. Hand-made cigarettes rolled from cherry tree leaves would be hung from the antennas to dry. Hemp, secretly grown behind the garage, was often dried on a secluded corner of the roof. Was it possible that Gennady thought that we, the younger boys, didn’t know about it? And why did they, the older boys, skip watching the exercises, those fascinating spectacles? We discussed this for a long time before we split up to go home.

Father was sitting on the bed, breathing hoarsely. He had once again suffered a severe asthma attack. He was so weak that he couldn’t leave “the concrete coffin” – as he called our apartment – to sit on the bench near the entrance. He called to me in a barely audible voice.

“Do you remember where the hospital is? Go there and get some oxygen…” and he gave me the oxygen pillow with its breathing tube. “I called them… The doctor is expecting you.”

One could get to the hospital by bus, but I decided it would be faster to walk. As I was walking, I remembered with annoyance that the entrance to the hospital grounds was at the far end of the fence. That meant that it would take me at least half an hour to get there. At last, I arrived. I found the doctor on duty and held the pillow out to him. The doctor looked at me over his glasses, with an expression of great surprise.

“Who are you with?” he asked. “Where did you get this pillow?”

“My papa gave it to me for you to fill …”

“What papa?”

“From Yubilayny settlement,” I answered, scared now.

Father had told me, “The doctor is expecting you,” but this one didn’t expect me at all. What if he was the wrong doctor and wouldn’t fill the pillow?

“It must have been your father who called an hour ago,” the doctor figured out at last. “Yes, he said ‘My son will come over.’ But I thought his son was an adult… How old are you, kid?”

“Six,” I answered, with no inkling that we were practically reenacting the dialogue from a famous poem by Nekrasov.

The doctor was silent. Then he cleared his throat.

“Your mama must be at work now, right? And your papa… You see I don’t have a car at the moment… Nurse!” he suddenly shouted, “Fill it quickly, but not quite all the way.”

Oxygen began hissing into the tube. The doctor squatted and gave me the pillow.

“Here it is… You don’t smoke, right?” he stroked my hair. “Carry it carefully. Remember – it’s a gulp of life for your papa.”

I grabbed the pillow and rushed home as fast as I could.

Chapter 18. With a Forelock

Our class was discussing the terrible news. Renat Khabiyev had injured his hand. Three fingers had been blown off. The two remaining ones had been disfigured.

Yesterday, after classes, Renat and a few high school students had made their way to the training ground. There was no need to explain that they had gone there to collect cartridge cases. Renat was lucky – he had found an unexploded military cartridge. It was a very valuable find because you could remove the capsule from a cartridge, and a capsule was… Well, you know what I mean. When he returned to the yard, he got down to business. Of course, he couldn’t do it at home.

“He was separating the capsule from the cartridge,” Zhenya Zhiltsov was telling his agitated listeners, “when it exploded… right in his hand!”

Tall Zhenya always hung out near the fifth graders, and he always knew all the news.

The boys were silent. Obviously, almost every one of them tried to imagine what horrible pain Renat had felt. Expressions of suffering appeared on many faces. Timur Timirshayev stared at his palm and pressed three fingers to it, wincing.

“At least it’s his left hand,” Sergey Bulgakov broke the silence.

He belonged to the same group as Zhiltsov. They were not known for outstanding academic achievement. They were useful when it came to either beating someone up or “giving a warning.” As for Renat, he wasn’t a mischief-maker, and he had gotten into that group accidentally. Renat belonged to a poor Uzbek family with many children. They didn’t live in one of the new buildings but rather in a clay house in the settlement. He sat quietly at the last desk in class. He wasn’t among those who always raised their hands, eager to demonstrate their superior knowledge at the blackboard.

Yekaterina Ivanovna entered the classroom. We rushed to our seats.

After laying her briefcase on her desk, she paced the room for a long time. She was silent and didn’t look at us. She didn’t have the usual smile on her round, good-natured face. She had such a sad expression that all of us grew even more ill at ease.

“Well, first graders of Class B,” she said as she stopped walking. “Have you at last excelled? Who was with Renat at the training ground yesterday?”

Naturally, the class was silent. Even if someone had been at the training ground, was he foolish enough to inform her about it? And if anyone knew with whom Renat had gone to the training ground, they would never betray their friends. That was for sure.

Yekaterina Ivanovna directed her stern looks at Zhiltsov, Bulgakov and Gaag. They were silent like everyone else.

“How can they allow such naughty children to join the ranks of Young Octobrists?” Yekaterina Ivanovna reproached us.

It was true that we had been wearing the pins for two weeks, the little stars of the Octobrists, and we were very proud of it. But was it against the Octobrists’ rules to play war games and stock cartridges for combat operations? Of course, Renat’s misfortune scared everybody, but at the same time, he was considered a war hero, injured in combat.

No, Yekaterina Ivanovna’s reproaches didn’t arouse our remorse. The class was silent…

After scolding us a bit more, Yekaterina Ivanovna at last told us something worthwhile.

“Tomorrow after classes, we’ll go to the hospital to visit Renat. Who can come?”

So many hands were raised that they formed a dense forest. The class began to buzz, completely forgetting its recent inability to speak.

As always, a few of us walked home together. Khobeyev’s name was on everyone’s lips, and, yes, we felt sorry for him. But we cast glances in the direction of the training ground without a sense of fear. The training ground became even more desirable.

Here we were near building #14, in other words, near the former construction site. Oh, how we missed that construction site! We felt as if something had been taken from us, a thing that had been the principal delight of our lives. How many adventures we had had there! As for the new building… Well, what about it? It looked like a big freshly painted poster – meticulously cleaned glass sparkled in white window frames, the freshly painted dark red entrance door shined. The stairways smelled nicely of whitewash. Joyful new tenants stomped up the steps carrying their baggage.

If there was anything that attracted us to the new building, it was the chance to make new friends. Also, a new barbershop had opened at the end of the building.

And we stopped in there today. Kolya remembered that the director of studies had reprimanded him, “Your hair is too long. You look sloppy.” Edem and I decided to keep him company.

The spacious, well-lit barber shop, which occupied one of the corners of the building, was furnished modestly: just two barber chairs and three seats for waiting customers. The fan, with its rubber blades, was buzzing, and soft music could be heard on the radio. Both barber chairs were occupied by customers. We sat down on the seats and became spectators to this most interesting show. The actors, that is the barbers, wore white gowns, like doctors. The older one, who undoubtedly played the leading role, manipulated first clippers, then scissors, skillfully. His hands flashed up and down, to the left and to the right. He spun around the barber chair like a figure skater in a rink. His fat belly didn’t allow him to get close enough to the barber chair, so he stretched out his arms in a comical way as he worked. Maybe that was why it seemed that he cut hair by touch, without looking at his customer’s head. “What if he cuts off the customer’s ear?” I thought. He could cut it off and not even notice. Then he could cut off the other ear. Then he could let the customer go, and the customer would stand up without noticing anything. After all, everything would still be symmetrical. He wouldn’t even realize that he was deaf. I thought that was what would happen if one’s ears were cut off. And he would just nod, “Thank you, it’s a very nice haircut. Nothing is sticking out.” And he would leave.

The second actor was young and not as agile. He must have been a novice. He wasn’t in a hurry and, after clicking his scissors a few times, he’d take a few steps back to examine his customer’s head.

The master was the first to finish his work. His chair was vacant. He looked at us and motioned to us invitingly, pointing to his barber chair. We looked at each other. It was scary for some reason. We grabbed hold of our chairs. We felt as if we had not been invited to sit in a barber chair but rather to climb onto an operating table. And the doctor, or rather the barber, froze while he waited for us to respond to his invitation, “Well, who’ll be the first to make up his mind?”

The first one was me, even though I didn’t want to at all. I was sitting in the middle between Kolya and Edem, and they, unexpectedly and treacherously, pushed me off the chair. I thought they were my friends. I had no choice but to go and sit in the barber chair. And while the barber was wrapping a white sheet around my shoulders, I imagined in dismay how the blood would run down it. A scared yet quite likeable little boy with a tidy hairdo, not at all shaggy, looked out at me from the mirror. His eyes were pleading: “Please, don’t do it! It’s a mistake. You have the wrong boy.”

“Which hairstyle do you prefer, young man?” the barber asked with condescending politeness. “I think you’ll go for the one with a forelock.”

I nodded without saying a word. The choice was limited to With a Forelock, Skin Fade and Youth. I wasn’t old enough for the youth style. I didn’t like the skin fade because I would look like a prematurely bald child with a fur cap on my head. With a forelock was the only option left.

The scissors began to snip, the clippers began to buzz, and I became tenser and tenser, cringing as I felt the barber’s fat belly rubbing against my arms. I wanted him to finish quickly. It was too much. I could see the famous forelock on my forehead. It looked like we were done. The barber glanced at the mirror and turned my head from side to side. Now he would set me free, but no, he grabbed the clippers again and began to expose the back of my head. V-v-zh-zh, v-vzh-zh, the clippers rumbled like a car going uphill. It seemed to me that I was about to go deaf, yet the Professor of Barber Affairs continued torturing me. He pushed the clippers hard into the back of my head as if trying to drill into it. Perhaps he had already done so, and now he was scraping it the way you scrape asphalt with a shovel.

I was covered in sweat. My cheeks and ears were on fire. I could see my friends behind me in the mirror. They were shaking with soundless laughter, grabbing the cushions of their chairs with their hands.

Suddenly, everything was quiet. I took a deep breath. I was relieved. That was it. And right away, I lurched forward, as I got a shock, an unbearable burning sensation – the master generously wiped the bare scratched-up back of my head with eau-de-cologne.

I stood up, dumbfounded, and shook my head. I saw a billiard ball rocking first to the right and then to the left in the mirror. The forelock and a small wisp of hair that looked like a little island in the ocean were glued to the top of my head. But my ears were intact, all the more noticeable since they were still on fire.

“Do you like it?” the potbellied master asked with a kind smile. I nodded. If I’d said I didn’t, he might have dragged me back into the chair. I wanted it to stop so I could sit in peace and enjoy the show. It was my friends’ turn now.

After some slight jostling, and without any exchange of words, – Kolya nudged Edem, Edem nudged Kolya – it was Kolya who landed in the master’s chair. Edem rushed to the chair of the novice, which had just become available.

“Skin fade, please,” Kolya requested. He wasn’t amused any longer. He remembered my suffering.

“A skin fade wouldn’t be right for you,” the master answered. “You had a forelock before.”

Kolya was at a loss and, as always in such cases, he twisted his lips to the side and began to mumble something incomprehensible.

“What? A forelock?” Mr. Potbelly responded eagerly. “That’s good!” The scissors immediately began to click. Kolya didn’t even have time to shout “Ow!”

Now it was my turn to have fun. Now I was the one bursting with laughter as the destructive clipper grabbed hold of the back of Kolya’s head. It munched on his light hair like a hungry dog opening a wide path for itself. Aha! Now it was scraping like a shovel. I gazed with malicious pleasure at the back of Kolya’s head and at the mirror in which his tomato-red face was reflected. Now and then, I would cast a glance at Edem, for whom matters were no better – a forelock was already looming on his forehead.

Then three boys were walking home. As they walked, they scratched the shaven backs of their heads. They walked without talking, thinking about the same thing – how tomorrow in the yard and at school, boys would delight in thinking up nicknames for them, repeating the word “forelock” all the time and giving them flicks to their foreheads, which were known as “initiation.” Who knew what else awaited them?

One thing they knew for sure – they would never again go to the new barbershop.

Chapter 19. The Residents of Our Building Gossip, Laugh and Cry

The bench near our entrance was the setting for a kind of court that was continuously in session, where any gossip might turn into a long-running hearing.

But today, as I approached the entrance, I noticed something unusual – there were more than the customary number of adults there. None of them were sitting on the bench. Instead, they were all standing and whispering, and they all looked sad. Sasha Kulikov came out of the building.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said, seeing that I was observing the gathering with surprise. “Haven’t you heard… that Ilyas drowned?”

“Ilyas… today… no, not today. I didn’t see him at school today… I didn’t see him in the yard either.”

Ilyas lived on the fourth floor of our wing of the building. He was a fifth grader. We kids respected him very much, and not just because he was older. All the boys respected Ilyas. Hardly anyone could compete with him when he played soccer in the yard. He was skilled, fast, and frisky. He never bragged about his achievements. He never bragged about anything, and he was very fair, for which he was especially admired. He would halt arguments, even fights, and, on top of that, he would reconcile the boys so that they didn’t ruin a friendship just to nurse a grudge.

Ilyas… How did it happen?

Sasha had heard that Ilyas and his friend Petya supposedly went for a walk by the canal. Ilyas slipped and fell on the concrete edge. He must have been knocked out, slid from the edge into the water and never resurfaced.

We moved closer to listen to what the adults were saying.

The accident had happened the day before, Sunday, in the afternoon. Ilyas’s parents grew anxious when their son didn’t return home by late evening. And his friend – what a pathetic coward he was – was scared and didn’t tell anyone what had happened. Only when Ilyas’s parents called him and began to ask him questions did he break down and tell them the truth. He said he had hoped that Ilyas was playing a joke on him, that he had gotten out of the canal downstream and run home, but he was afraid to find out. Sasha and I were indignant – what a coward he was! What a scoundrel! Ilyas would never have done anything like that!

We discussed the tragic event for some time.

There was always something happening that would attract the attention of everyone in the large apartment building. Our entrance, like the whole building, the whole micro-district, like any other community, called a mahalla in Uzbek, lived from one event to another. The number of people drawn into the whirlwind of an event depended on one thing – the scale of what had happened. Heavy drinking and the escapades of drunkards were basically local events. There were so many drunkards, and their behavior, with rare exceptions, was so predictable and boring that they barely aroused any interest. At least one drunk would inevitably catch one’s eye every day – on a bus, at a movie theater, on a bench near a building entrance, under a bench, or in a dry arik that seemed a particularly cozy place to catch up on one’s sleep.

“Vasilyich drank himself into a fog again,” a woman informed her neighbors. “He thrashed poor Veronica again.”

“She’s such a foolish thing. She should have called the police long ago. He hasn’t been to the sobering-up station for a long time.”

In fact, there was nothing more they could add to that conversation for it had all been discussed more than once.

Scandals and fights – much more exciting events – attracted the attention of the entire building. They happened quite often and invariably evoked interest. The news would spread immediately and be the topic of heated discussion near every entrance.

“Ester! Shura!” Fat Dora waved her hand urging my mama and her factory friend to join her. “Have you heard about it? You mean you haven’t heard?” and she would inform them, accompanied by the whirring of her coffee grinder. “Vova Oparin broke Vasilyev’s window. It was such an awful fight!… No, between the fathers! They bloodied each other’s faces!”

It was worth watching Dora when she reported an incident. Her pupils, magnified by the thick lenses of her eyeglasses, would widen to supernatural size. Her eyes seemed about to pop out of their sockets and run to the scene of the fight. She would forget to blink; it almost seemed as if she would forget to breathe. Her big body seemed to inflate like an oxygen pillow. She didn’t want to waste precious time inhaling and exhaling but instead used it to speak non-stop.

Someone’s death was a much more significant event that brought together the residents of neighboring buildings and the whole mahalla.

Funerals took place quite often in the Yubileiny settlement. They always ended up with a procession on the street that was sometimes silent, other times resounding with the wails of women mourning the loss of the deceased. No matter how sad it was in itself, for us boys, a funeral was an important diversion – a lot to see and hear. And, in general, where else, apart from parades, could you see such a gathering of people?

It was strange that the death of Bogeyman, a person who had perhaps less claim to respect than anyone else in the mahalla, was the cause of the deepest sorrow, mixed with remorse, that my friends and I experienced.

Bogeyman – his nickname was uttered much more often than his name, Anatoly – had been a man of about forty-five who lived in one of the buildings nearby. He was a degenerate drunk whom we hardly ever saw sober. It was true that, unlike other drunks, Bogeyman didn’t run wild and didn’t curse. He used to zigzag unsteadily down our street, and when he had no more energy to walk, he would lie down on one of the benches near our entrance and take a peaceful nap. With his cheek on his hands and his knees bent, he would snore softly as if in a comfortable bed.

Perhaps, no one would have bothered him, but… he gave off an appalling stench.

“Hey, Bogeyman, get out of here!” enraged tenants, tired of his odor, would shout from their verandas. “Hey, Bogeyman, get lost!”

“A cannon ball wouldn’t wake him up!” someone echoed from another veranda.

“He’s quarreled with his wife again!” Dora would add. She always had the latest news.

“Anyone would drink living with such a bitch; even a dog wouldn’t want to live with her,” was another neighbor’s brief yet accurate opinion about Bogeyman’s wife Marya, as loud as the whole bazaar. “Leave the poor thing to his nap, we can put up with it.”

The “hero of the occasion” would smile in his dreams and sniffle peacefully as he lay on the bench. Perhaps, among his sleepy drunken thoughts was the following one: “I have wonderful understanding neighbors who pity me, an unfortunate man.”

Alas, Uncle Anatoly – that’s how we sometimes called him – would forget that “understanding” neighbors had children who were not at all wonderful or understanding. On the contrary, they were capable of carrying out cruel and unpredictable pranks.

That was what happened once when Bogeyman was unfortunate enough to fall asleep on the bench near the entrance of the building where the Oparins lived. Around that time, the Oparin brothers walked out of their building as a group of kids, including Rustem and me, were passing by. Naturally, we all surrounded the bench on which Bogeyman was snoring softly. After all, he was something to look at, if we could ignore the stench.

“He couldn’t find a better place to stink?” Gennady asked angrily. He never missed a chance to demonstrate his valor and other qualities of a future officer. “Just you wait, you’ll be hopping around soon. Guys, let’s make a ‘bicycle’ for him. Who has paper? Run! Get some paper!” he commanded, pulling some matches out of his pocket.

His younger brother was gentler and more compassionate, either because of his age or his disposition. He tried to prevent the inevitable.

“Hey, get up! Please, get up!” he pleaded in his thin voice, shaking the unfortunate drunk and pulling at his sleeve.

“Get out of here, what are you? The Red Cross?” Gennady pushed his little brother away. “You shouldn’t feel sorry for this piece of rotten carrion…” and he quickly got down to business, with all the experience he had.

After checking whether anyone could see him through the windows or from the street, Gennady took Bogeyman’s shoes off. Naturally, he wasn’t wearing socks. His dirty, swollen toes were exposed. One of the boys tore the newspaper into long strips and twisted them into braids. Gennady inserted the braids between Boogeyman’s stained toes. Now, the soles of his feet looked like two tattered brooms made of twigs. A match was struck, and the brooms turned into candles with little purplish crowns of flame, pale in the daylight.

I watched what happened next from the entrance hall of our building where we were hiding. I had retired there before anyone else, for I hadn’t the heart to stay through to the end. Poor Bogeyman woke up from the pain and rolled off the bench with a moan… Now he’ll run, we thought, watching him in horror and excitement, through the crack. He would run and, since he was half awake, he wouldn’t understand what had happened to him and why his toes were on fire. His feet would look like the violently spinning wheels of a bicycle with burning spokes, since he would be running in a state of panic. That was why the boys called this operation “bicycle.”

Yes, we had practiced the operation, and we are very ashamed to admit it, on unfortunate cats. But Bogeyman was more quick-witted than the cats. He bent over and pulled the burning “bicycle spokes” from between his toes, shook his burned fingers and, after looking around, stared at the entrance. His fiery red cheeks and crimson nose, along with his wide red eyes, were such a scary sight that we couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Take off!” tall Gennady was the first to yell, and we dashed out of the entrance with the speed of a bullet. We heard “Take off!” after we had already done so, for fear is a great motivator. It can turn a lame person into a sprinter.

I was running toward the garbage bins. I wasn’t running, I was flying. I could hear his tramping and heavy breathing behind me… He could catch up with me… So what if I hadn’t taken part in the evil prank but had only watched and giggled? He didn’t know that.

“I’ll never do it again… I won’t…” I repeated to myself, since I felt just as guilty as Gennady Oparin.

That was how I made it to the garbage bins. I looked over my shoulder and didn’t see anyone. What I heard must have been my own stomping and heavy breathing.

My heart was pounding so hard that it echoed in my ears. My cheeks were on fire. My face, hair and back were drenched in sweat. Before I had time to catch my breath, I heard heavy running again. Now it was Rustem running to the garbage bins with Bogeyman chasing him. He ran, stomping his feet heavily. He ran fast with no zigzagging, as if he weren’t drunk. Everything now was exactly as when I had imagined I was running from him.

I darted behind the garbage bins. I could see Rustem dashing to the left near the arik. Bogeyman turned too. Then Rustem, without stopping, jumped over the arik, but Uncle Anatoly, running at top speed, plopped into the water.

I groaned. The arik was narrow… Heavy Bogeyman must have hurt himself… but he didn’t. Here he was, wet all over, climbing out of the arik.

To continue chasing Rustem was out of the question. We felt it was inappropriate to laugh. We felt as if we had been doused with water too.

What a strange feeling remorse is. With adults it sometimes works in time to prevent some not quite honest action. A kind of momentary analysis takes place when all pros and cons are pondered. It’s quite different with children, as far as I know. Conscience and remorse begin to torment them after something happens.

That was what happened to us.

The soaking wet Bogeyman stood by the arik looking around. Then he trudged along home.

We also went home without saying a word to each other. We all, even Gennady Oparin, were ill at ease.

* * *

That very Bogeyman, or rather Uncle Anatoly, passed away suddenly. It happened approximately a year after we played that cruel prank on him. We would certainly come across Bogeyman from time to time after that, but we tried to avoid him. Then I heard that he had passed away… How – I didn’t know. The circumstances of his death were the subject of heated discussion among residents of our building and the neighboring ones.

Uncle Anatoly was Russian, and Russians, as everyone knows, have the most pompous funerals: music, flowers, and all that, not like the Tatars or the Jews, for example, who wrap a body in a cloth and carry it quietly to the cemetery… For us boys, and probably for the adults too, it was much more interesting to participate in a Russian burial ceremony.

We were looking forward to Uncle Anatoly’s funeral with excitement mixed with no small measure of fear. A person who has passed away is alive in your memory, provided you knew the person. At the same time, a frozen face in a coffin and a terrible, nagging sensation somewhere between your chest and stomach remind you – that’s not him lying there, he’s gone… How is it possible to comprehend that terrible enigma?

The funeral wasn’t held in the morning, but rather in the afternoon, after the end of the school day. It was a sunny autumn day. Our whole group, talking very animatedly, set out for the building where Uncle Anatoly had lived. It wasn’t far, just a fifteen-minute walk. We passed the corner of our building where we had harassed Bogeyman. Here was the arik, the garbage bins… We shouldn’t have done it. There had never been a more harmless alcoholic than he… We looked at each other and grew silent, but not for long because the subject of the conversation was very interesting: what had caused Uncle Anatoly’s death?

“Some people say he poisoned himself with vinegar,” Zhenya Andreyev, my classmate and friend, presented one possibility.

“Deliberately…”

“Stop lying, you’ve gone too far!” Oleg was outraged. “Not deliberately, he simply didn’t have any cash to buy vodka.”

“Oh no,” Vitya Smirnov interrupted. “Bogeyman poisoned himself deliberately, in other words, in-ten-tio-nal-ly… because of his wife. You can be sure of that. It was all because of her. Just imagine drinking that filth…” At this point, Vitya stopped speaking and winced as he imagined himself drinking vinegar. “As you drink it, it burns into you, a living creature, but you continue drinking and telling yourself, ‘I’ll prove to her who I am! I will!’”

We grew silent vividly imagining the horrible scene of Bogeyman’s death. We envisioned him in a new heroic light.

Drawn into this heated discussion, we didn’t notice that we had arrived at our destination. Uncle Anatoly’s building was indistinguishable from ours. An open space spread behind it. Hills could be seen in the distance. Local boys had one advantage – there was a shooting gallery nearby. It was not a portable one in a van but a real military shooting gallery, a very big one, the size of half a soccer field, sunk five meters into the ground. Even we could hear the sounds of shots when members of tank crews practiced shooting their handguns, and the boys from that building sometimes managed to see shooting with their own eyes.

A big crowd, bright with women’s head scarfs, had already gathered at the entrance by the time we arrived. They were expected to bring out the coffin at any moment.

Someone was heard weeping near the entrance. A plump woman clad in a dark dress, her hair hanging down and her tear-stained face swollen, sat on the bench. She rocked from side to side and exclaimed now and then, “You’ve abandoned me, my dear, and I’m all alone.”

Obviously, she was that very Marya, Uncle Anatoly’s wife. We boys had no sympathy for her. We decided that she looked like Baba Yaga (the Wicked Witch). If she had lost some weight, she would have looked exactly like Baba Yaga, disheveled and disgusting; all she needed was a broom to fly on.

Women were fussing around Marya, holding her by the shoulders, trying to console her, but her weeping and cries continued, “Oh-oh-oh, how shall I live alone?”

Zhenya Andreyev shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh yes, now she won’t have anyone to yell at.”

“She’s ruined such a man,” we nodded, utterly ennobling Bogeyman in our imagination, though Rustem suddenly remembered Uncle Anatoly’s insignificant shortcoming and whispered frighteningly to us, “Hey, guys, how will they bury him? He… stinks so terribly.”

We looked at each other, imagining that when they carried out the coffin, the familiar smell, the one we all knew, would fill the air.

“Well, they normally bathe the body,” Zhenya remembered. “Perhaps, it’ll turn out all right.”

Meanwhile, a great many people had gathered at the entrance. Boys, particularly those who, like us, had come without their parents, scurried through the crowd. No one paid attention to them for everybody was occupied in their grippingly interesting conversations. The words “vinegar,” “poisoned,” “while drunk” were frequently heard. Spiritual nourishment, to be further savored and digested, was being cooked up in the crowd. The residents of our mahalla would have a good reason to live tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, even a week later. People would ponder this subject on benches, in pavilions, while playing dominos, at bus stops. Uncle Anatoly’s death would be discussed and embroidered with details and fabrications, turning into a legend, almost a myth.

* * *

A wide panorama opened beneath the branches of the oak tree my friends and I had prudently managed to climb. We could observe the sea of swaying heads, bright head scarfs, caps, bald heads, skull caps, boys’ forelocks, girls’ braids. The muffled buzzing of voices now and then drowned out Marya’s lamentations by the entrance.

“They’re bringing him out!” Gennady Oparin shouted.

The crowd froze. The coffin cover was carried out of the building, and, almost immediately after, an open coffin with Uncle Anatoly’s body in it floated out on the shoulders of four men. The coffin was placed on stools.

The shouting became louder. Now, it was not just Marya lamenting. For some reason, all the women joined her cries. Marya rushed to the coffin to hug her husband. She was followed by one woman, then another, and a third. They were all weeping right into the dead man’s ears. We exchanged glances. Did they all love Uncle Anatoly so much? And where had they been before, when he had been drunk and lying on benches?

At last, the women stepped away from the coffin. Someone pulled the wailing Marya away. The men lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and carried it from the entrance. The crowd swayed, lined up and followed. Now came the procession. It moved slowly down the middle of the street. As it pulled even with our tree, we bent down and, motionless on the branches, stared at the coffin, not taking our eyes from it. Here it was, right below us… Who would now call him Bogeyman? He looked so smart in his white shirt and black suit. His light hair, no longer disheveled and stuck together, but neatly combed to the side, gleamed in the sunlight. His well-shaven face was frozen into a meek smile… as if he had done everything himself – bathed, shaved, combed his hair, changed his clothes and then looked at himself in the mirror and, satisfied with his new appearance, lay down quietly and died.

After the coffin passed, we tumbled down from the tree and rushed forward, overtaking the crowd. We knew that the funeral would be accompanied by music on the main street, Yubileynaya. Here were the musicians! They were waiting, and as soon as the front of the procession drew even with them, funeral marching music rang out.

That was the moment we were especially looking forward to.

Both sides of the street were crowded with people. People were looking out of windows, doors and balconies. It was as if someone very important, a government official, was being buried. It was amazing how fast people came running to the sounds of the band, like soldiers to the sound of a bugle. They looked at the band, the coffin, the crying relatives, at the whole procession and, consequently, at me, for I, in order to draw attention to myself, walked like a close relative, with my head bent low, as if stricken with grief, but my eyes darted to the left and right in order not to miss anything.

That was how I walked, slowly, taking small steps, along with the whole crowd. It felt like a huge caterpillar crawling along, and the coffin with the dead body was its head. It was a colorful head, decorated with flowers. Wreaths on the sides of the coffin were the multicolored eyes of the caterpillar. The crowd, swaying slightly to the sounds of the music, was its body.

Ba-boom, ba-ba-ba-boom! The drummer beat the rhythm. The drum was so big that he carried it attached to very wide straps, wider than those on a school backpack. And he carried it not with its top up, like a normal drum, but with its top and bottom facing sideways, so he had two surfaces for drumming. Watching the drummer from afar, one saw a man with a huge belly, and his belly must have been so stuffed that it was difficult for him to walk. So, he was pounding on his belly with drumsticks to beat it down.

It wasn’t just the drummer but all the musicians, playing from the heart, assuming that the louder they played the better. Here, for example, was a man with a pair of cymbals. They crashed so loudly that one would jump every time he struck them together. No way a blacksmith with his hammer and anvil would be heard here.

Then there was the violinist. He wriggled as he dragged his bow over the strings for all he was worth. Sweat was rolling thick and fast down his face, the sound of his violin piercing and mournful. Women who walked close to him wailed to match the violin’s tone.

In a word, we boys were ecstatic about the band. It was the accordionist who didn’t win our approval. He didn’t show enough diligence. He didn’t seem to realize that he was playing at a funeral… Heavy, serious, mustachioed, he was squeezing the bellows of his accordion effortlessly, as if they were opening and closing all by themselves. His face remained absolutely impassive and motionless, so we decided that he was a bad musician. One had to play with feeling and sadness at a funeral.

Suddenly, the procession stopped. Was it really over? Yes, it was. A small truck could be seen at the intersection, its sides lowered, its bed covered with carpets.

It was this truck onto which the coffin bearing Uncle Anatoly’s body was placed. The band stopped playing, the crowd split into groups and began to disperse. The truck and a few cars carrying relatives and friends drove off to the cemetery.

We, in turn, set out for home. It was a long walk, but the impressions we had would be enough for a long walk.

Ilyas’s funeral was quite different, and we didn’t feel the same about it as about Uncle Anatoly’s. Perhaps, it was due to the fact that the feelings we had for Ilyas were more full-fledged and humane. Whether it was that or something else, every time a conversation about the upcoming funeral started, we felt sad. We were sorry for Ilyas. And still we were going to attend his funeral, overwhelmed by that very unquenchable childish curiosity we couldn’t conceal. Ilyas didn’t just die, he drowned. Poor Ilyas was found a week after he had fallen into the arik. His body floated to the surface further downstream, by the fence of the reservoir near the hydroelectric station. We went to his place right away to bid him farewell, not on the day of the funeral but a day before.

To allay our fears, we showed up at his place in a large group – Kolya, Sasha, their sister Lena, Edem, Rustem, Vova Oparin and I. One of the adults took us to the bedroom. Our friend lay on the mattress, covered by a spread up to his waist. His head rested on a snow-white pillow, against which his face stood out distinctly. We squatted near the mattress in silence, trying to keep our eyes off the swollen blue-and-white bubble on which his slanted eyes were not visible, where his nose had slid down to his mouth, which had become tiny. A thin lock of hair could be seen on the upper part of the bubble. That was all that remained of Ilyas’s thick jet-black hair.

I was drawn to look at Ilyas, but as I did, I wanted to avert my eyes, and when I averted my eyes, I could picture Ilyas’s former face very clearly.

* * *

I remembered well a day when that face seemed especially nice, handsome and kind to me. On that day, two years before Ilyas’s death, the preparations for a ceremony were almost complete in the school cafeteria, which also served as an assembly and concert hall. We first graders were to join the Octobrists, and the third graders, the Young Pioneers. All the tables and chairs were piled on top of one another in a corner, which made the cafeteria look bigger. It seemed as if its walls had expanded. Sunlight poured through the windows and was reflected in the floor, polished to perfection.

The class on duty, 3A, was responsible for the ceremony. The third graders, wearing red armbands, ran around the hall, their faces concerned, carrying ladders, sticking posters on the wall, inflating balloons, helping set up microphones on the stage.

And they were all mumbling something. We could hear… “I give my solemn oath…to fulfill all the rules and customs…” Today they, the third graders, would have red ties tied around their necks.

But first, it was our turn.

All of us future Octobrists had been brought to the hall and directed to form three circles, one inside the other. The third graders stood inside the circles. The principal was saying something on the stage, but I was so nervous that I couldn’t understand what it was until I heard, “Future Young Pioneers, pass your batons to your young comrades!” And then, the third graders ran to us. I was so excited that it seemed to me they were not running but floating slowly and smoothly on a cloud. Someone floated to Zhenya Andreyev, who stood to my left. Someone approached Galya Bektashova, who was on my right. They were saying something, their hands flashing. Everything was happening in a fog; my heart was pounding, fear mixed with my excitement. Why hadn’t anyone run up to me? Maybe they had forgotten about me.

At that moment, a figure floated in my direction. Ilyas Ilyasov stopped in front of me. He undid his Octobrist star slowly, pinned it to my blue shirt and patted me on the shoulder.

“Congratulations, Valery! Now it’s yours. You’ve become an Octobrist.”

A smile lit his face as he turned around and began to walk away. It seemed as if he were floating, just the way he had approached me.

* * *

I saw his olive-skinned face with its broad smile and white teeth as I sat in Ilyas’s bedroom. And I didn’t want to think about what had happened to that face; I couldn’t.

Other people arrived to say farewell to our friend, and we left the bedroom. We sat on the bench near the entrance; we just sat there silently, swinging our feet. We didn’t feel like talking.

“The funeral will be tomorrow,” Rustem informed us. We knew that the funeral would be the next day.

What if this funeral were with music, like Uncle Anatoly’s.

“Uncle Anatoly,” I said pensively. We hadn’t used his nickname Bogeyman since he died.

“Is there justice in this world?” Vova Oparin echoed. “There’s no justice.”

We wordlessly agreed with him.

Even though there were many people at the entrance on the day of the funeral, it was very quiet. People talked in whispers, no one lamented. Ilyas’s mother didn’t wail and cry. Her face remains etched in my memory. It was absolutely motionless, as if it weren’t alive. Her eyes were sunken with black circles around them. People supported her on both sides, but she could still hardly walk. A stretcher was brought out. Our poor friend, wrapped in a dark cloth, lay on it. And all that was in silence, without music, crying or lamenting. It seemed strange that, with so many people around, it was so quiet.

Just as at Uncle Anatoly’s funeral, the procession moved toward the main street, though there was no coffin, just a stretcher, and a strange silence hung in the air. It was still silent when it reached the place where a van awaited. There were no musicians with instruments waiting for Ilyas.

It was a nice autumn day, still, quiet and clear. There were no dust devils swirling through the streets as so often happened at this time of year. It seemed that even the weather knew that it needed to play its role in sending Ilyas off on his last journey, in accordance with Tatar customs.

Chapter 20. We Don’t Give a … Spit

A gob of spit sailed down smoothly from above, moving in an arc until it plopped onto the asphalt below my window. It was accompanied by a sound I knew all too well. A second one followed, then a third, and so on, without stopping.

The frequency of the spitting allowed me to determine exactly how many members there were in the spitting party up above.

I, along with my friends, was so often engaged in that fascinating occupation that I had studied all its stages in detail, the speed at which the gobs fell and the sounds they made.

Now, my friends, the Edem brothers and Rustem, were engaged in spitting on the third floor, and I sat at my window on the ground floor and watched them play, without annoyance or envy.

“Aaaa-khem” was heard from above.

I knew very well what would follow.

That aa-khem sound, for instance, had just come from Rustem. I knew that he stood, holding the window frame with both hands like a gymnast holding onto a bar. He leaned back, threw back his head and snorted like a horse. Why did he do that? To get more saliva in his mouth… He now bent down to the very edge of the window and spat with all his might.

We boys had a different name for a gob of spit, we called it a kharchok. Consequently, the game, which was a competition to see who could spit the farthest without leaning out of the window was called kharching. It wasn’t a pleasant-sounding name, but… that was what we liked to call it.

So, why wasn’t I taking part in that wonderful competition today but rather sitting on my veranda as a detached observer?

I hadn’t been invited. It had been two days since the boys stopped playing with me and talking to me: they were ignoring me completely. Even though we hadn’t quarreled, I could guess what the matter was, and, though suffering from loneliness, I couldn’t force myself to ask for a truce.

We hadn’t quarreled, but our fathers had.

Ball playing near our entrance had been the cause of the quarrel. A big group of boys including Edik, Rustem and Kolya had been playing. In general, ball playing near the entrance was forbidden, but the boys broke that rule every now and then. Most often they would break the rule near our veranda. Perhaps that was what made the game especially delightful.

My father was the most explosive and intolerant adult in our building. That meant that the players enjoyed every opportunity to drive him crazy and listen to his yelling.

Perhaps that was the reason why most of the time a ball tossed into the air wouldn’t hit the asphalt, the door of the building or Dora’s veranda but rather our window.

That was the reason I would watch the game from the veranda with a feeling of dread and not join them outside.

Our window had already been broken several times. I didn’t enjoy seeing Father fly into a rage, so I tried to stay away from the players.

When the ball smashed into our window, I had just enough time to jump aside so the broken glass wouldn’t fall on me.

Before the clinking and clanking could die out, I heard the stomping of feet – the frightened boys rushed away in all directions. It was safer to listen to Yuabov’s raging from a distance. I looked around. There was the black rubber ball I knew so well among the fragments of glass on the floor of the veranda. This time, the ball looked somewhat smug. It would be fun to draw eyes and a nose on it with chalk, and a mouth would appear all by itself, smiling broadly, as if to say, “There are no obstacles I cannot overcome.”

I held the ball in my hands, then laid it in the corner. There was no one to return it to since the boys were hiding. And, as I later understood, I didn’t want to do them such a favor – after all, they had broken our window.

All right, it can stay here for now, I decided. Let them come over to get it themselves. As a victim, I sort of sided with my father. I took malicious pleasure in the thought of the inevitable punishment the boys would be subjected to and didn’t think about the possible consequences of my choice.

In the evening, there was a knock at our door. Vasily Nikolayevich, Kolya and Sasha’s father, entered. In our part of the building he was considered an important person – Vasily worked in retail, and he would help some people obtain foodstuffs that were in short supply, like meat, for example.

That didn’t apply to our family. Hardly anyone ever wanted to help my father.

Vasily remained in the hallway, exchanged a few words with Mama and asked her whether Amnun was home. Father walked into the hallway, and they exchanged greetings.

“Please give me the children’s ball,” the neighbor requested.

“Yes, I have it,” Father said slowly. “But first let’s have new windowpane installed.”

At this point, Kolya’s father looked at me as I stood quietly at the door to my room.

“My kids stay in their room when the adults talk,” he informed me.

I had no choice, so I went into my room and closed the door. It goes without saying that I pressed my ear against it.

At first, the voices sounded quite calm.

“It’s our ball, it’s Kolya’s… My kids didn’t break your window. They say Server from the next entrance did it,” Vasily said in his deep voice.

“I don’t care whether it was Server or not … They were playing together, right? So, they are all responsible. I’ll return the ball after the glass is replaced,” Father answered in a monotone.

“Listen, Amnun…” Vasily said with irritation. “I’ve already explained that Kolya had nothing to do with it.”

Explaining anything to Father was a lost cause. He was stubborn and never made concessions for the sake of maintaining good relations with people, even when it was an issue regarding children. He just didn’t know the meaning of concession, magnanimity, or negotiations.

Father was an athlete and a coach, and he most likely viewed any conflict as a contest where he was facing an opponent. And an opponent had to be defeated. No compromises!

“I’m not going to give it back. Get it?”

“Don’t you understand…”

The voices were getting louder. Shouts and stomping of feet were heard. I craned my neck and stuck my head out into the hallway. The fathers were grappling at the door. Mama ran out of the kitchen shouting, “Papesh, stop it! Vasily Nikolayevich, how can you?” And, naturally, she got it too. Infuriated, Father pushed her so hard she almost hit the wall. That was probably what brought Vasily to his senses. He mumbled, “What a nut! Ester, I’m sorry…” and he left, slamming the door behind him.

After that, Kolya and Sasha, whose ball it was, stopped hanging around with me; Edem and Rustem too.

Seated close to the open windows of the veranda, listening enviously to the kharks, without realizing it I began thinking about our relationship.

It wasn’t the first time the boys had quarreled with me. Sometimes they stopped hanging out with me even without quarreling. Quarrels and fights among boys are a normal thing. They might fight or quarrel, and an hour later they’ve forgotten all about it.

But this time it was different; it was something else.

And then I realized – it was because of him just about every time we quarreled, because of my father. Of course… why I hadn’t I realized it before? As soon as he would quarrel with one of the neighbors, one who had kids, my friends would begin to shun me. And he quarreled so often! Perhaps the boys heard their parents discuss it at home, talk about my father… I couldn’t imagine what they might say about him. I always understood that Father’s character was known to everybody in our building, that people were afraid of him and tried to avoid him. I knew better than anyone else how he treated Mama and us kids, and I had also seen many times how he treated other people.

I would call Father’s character unpredictable. He could help a person and he could be generous, but then he would stop talking to that person for some unknown reason, without explaining anything. And he always had to have his own way, never listening to reason, demonstrating utter stubbornness.

Yes, they didn’t like my father in our building. But what did that have to do with me?

Standing on the veranda and listening to the spitting, I bitterly pondered all of that.

I knew that we would make up soon, that the boys would come up to me and begin to talk to me, ask me to play with them. But that didn’t make what I felt now any less bitter. We would make up, but then would they refuse to hang out with me again later? When would it happen? And how many times would I have to put up with insults? Didn’t the boys understand that I myself suffered much more because of my father than any of them did?

Aa-khem, aa-khem could still be heard from the third floor, as if my friends who were standing up there were saying, “And we don’t give a … spit.”

Chapter 21. Sunday Delights

“Mi-i-il-k! Sweet and sour mi-il-k!” A melodious voice was heard ringing outside the veranda window. It was the milkwoman Faruza, an old acquaintance. It was not even eight in the morning, but she showed up like clockwork on Sundays. Emma and I dashed after Mama, racing each other to open the door. Here she was on our doorstep, with her amiable face and dark weather-bitten cheeks. She effortlessly set down her very heavy milk cans – it must have been really hard to carry then all over our neighborhood on foot – and greeted Mama, “Yakhshi mi siz, opajon?” I loved to watch Faruza pour milk neatly into the one-liter jar provided by Mama. She did it so adroitly that a steady stream spurted into the jar, and not a single drop was spilled. The milk can seemed so light in her hands, but I knew that I would not only be unable to lift that rock but wouldn’t even manage to move it. Faruza-opa reminded me of the Bagdad oil sellers whom I had read about in a book about the Medieval Middle East. They poured oil into vessels so skillfully that a ring placed on the narrow neck of a clay jar would remain clean…

After pouring the milk, Faruza smiled tenderly at Emma and me. She loved children; she herself had many.

“Do you like my milk?”

We nodded hurriedly. We liked the milk and we liked Faruza. Her jet-black hair was plaited into many braids that hung down her dark-green velvet jacket, her bright wide silk pants were tied at the ankles, revealing slippers she wore without socks. As to her milk, Mama thought that Faruza’s cow gave the most wonderful milk. We agreed with her. Mama would boil the milk, put a pot in the fridge, and in the morning, it would be covered with a thick ivory-colored skin – cream. Nothing in the world was tastier. And how beautiful the skin was, how rhythmically it swayed on the surface of the milk. It was a pity to touch it, but acute desire surpassed pity. The cream skin was mercilessly broken and put into bowls. Ah, how fast it disappeared into our mouths along with pieces of bread.

“Shall I pour more milk? Do you want more?” the temptress asked, filling a jar. She could read perfectly well what was written on our faces. Faruza was tactful and understood everything – after all, Mama was not made of iron.

Then, the milkwoman was gone, and her milk can could be heard rattling on the next floor. “Sweet, sour mi-il-k!” echoed through the stairwell.

The door had just been closed when another knock was heard. This time it was the plumber, Uncle Tolik. Mama had asked him to fill the crack between the edge of the bathtub and the wall. Emma and I, naturally, forgot about that traitorous crack while taking a bath, and we usually stepped out of the bathtub, not onto the floor but into a big warm puddle, in the middle of which the colorful wet mat, looking like a little island in a bog, made squishing sounds.

Potbellied Uncle Tolik bent over the bathtub, groaning. Even though he was not yet forty, he was rather clumsy because of his corpulence, and he often couldn’t reach the right spot because the bathrooms were not exactly spacious. Light-haired Uncle Tolik had a very kind, round face. If Mama had asked him to get under the bathtub and fix the pipe, I thought, looking at him, he would have done it, but he would certainly have got stuck there… Uncle Tolik’s legs would stick out from beneath the bathtub, and he, lifting the bathtub on his fat belly, would unscrew the drainpipe as the puddle near the tub grew bigger and deeper. The ship of the bathtub would float, rocking on its waters. Uncle Tolik would no longer be Uncle Tolik but a whale on whose back, or whose belly, it made no difference, that ship would be sailing. Emma and I would be on that ship, asking, as we squealed with delight, “Uncle Tolik, let’s go to Africa! Please, to Africa to visit Doctor Doolittle and the hippopotamuses!”

This time it was much more mundane. Uncle Tolik fixed the crack and the broken faucet. Mama paid him.

“Soon it will be cold,” she sighed, counting out some rubles. “Will we have hot water?”

“I don’t know, Ester dear. They’re planning another repair in the boiler room.”

“In the winter?” Mama was terrified. “But does that mean we won’t have heat for two months again?”

“Does the management care? They’ll have heat.”

After expressing his opinion about the management, the plumber left. Mama called us to have breakfast.

Our kitchen was small, but a table for two fit into it. Emma and I sat down at the table, and Mama served breakfast – sweet cheese curds with raisins. Mama cooked very well, but for Emma and me, none of her culinary miracles compared to the sweet vanilla cheese curds from the dairy store. Those cheese curds were the most desirable and delightful delicacy. The smell of sweet cheese curds mixed with vanilla was wonderful. Its whiteness speckled with dark raisins was beautiful. And the taste was superb.

Mama cut the cheese curds and put them into bowls. Emma grabbed her bowl and examined its contents, comparing it with mine – what if Mama had divided it unevenly and I got a bigger part? Her inspection was successful. We ate slowly, savoring each piece, trying to prolong the pleasure.

Meanwhile, Mama appeared behind Emma holding a comb. The kitchen was certainly not a beauty salon, but it was so difficult to comb Emma’s curls that she needed to seize the proper moment to do it, like now, when Emma was enjoying her cheese curds and was willing to put up with any torture, even that one. Her very thick chestnut hair became so tangled during the night that it would have been easier to cut off some of the little knots than try to comb them. But Mama handled the comb skillfully, patiently combing out one strand after another.

“More!” Emma demanded, licking her bowl.

“Please, give me more,” Mama corrected her. “Don’t forget that you’re a big girl. You’re five.”

Emma repeated her request, and she got a second helping. There wasn’t enough cheese curd for me to have more, though I received a tender glance from Mama. It was more than a glance. That expression on Mama’s face could assuage all my sorrows and quiet my whims. The corners of her lips rose in a tender smile, her thick brows merged into a smooth wave… “She’s just a little girl, son. We must forgive her.” That was what her glance and her face conveyed, as if unifying us in our concern for Emma.

It was all right. I would be able to settle scores with my little sister later. Meanwhile, she was enjoying her second helping, and Mama ran her comb through Emma’s now obedient curls, taking fluffy little balls of hair off the comb and setting them on the windowsill. Was it possible, I thought, that Mama would style Emma’s hair in a hair bun one day? Oh no, that wouldn’t be at all becoming on Emma. Mama was a different story… And I squinted, trying to imagine how unattractive my little curly-haired sister would look with a bun at the back of her head.

They both finished their work. I awoke from my reflections and suddenly noticed that my sister was smacking her lips as she stared at me. Why was she staring? Did I look like sweet cheese curd? Oh, well, let’s do it.

It wasn’t the first time that we played the game – who could out-wink whom? Emma always lost, but she often seemed to forget that. I usually didn’t perform my principal trick right away. At the beginning, everything seemed quite innocent – first I squinted, then, quite the opposite, I stared wide-eyed so that my eyeballs almost popped out of their sockets. I followed that by glancing all the way to the left, then to the right, then up and down and finally rolling my eyes. And could she do that? Yes, Emma could, and she obediently repeated everything after me. I was about to reach my goal. I began to flutter my lashes very fast. Emma did too, but it wasn’t easy for her. And then I resorted to my foolproof move – I began to wink one eye at a time. That was what Emma couldn’t do at all. She squinted, winced, moved her nose, even her upper lip, all in vain. Oh, what despair was reflected in her face! That was what I had been waiting for. I even knew how it would end. Emma jumped out of her chair, stomping her feet and squealing. And it was quite a squeal! She didn’t just squeal at the top of her lungs. Her squealing was so loud, piercing and continuous that it must have been heard all over the building.

All little kids go to great lengths to get what they want. But my sister had extraordinary abilities. She outdid all the girls in our building with her squealing skills and her loud voice. I thought about it as I savored my victory. Of course, I felt a bit sorry for my little sister. It wasn’t difficult to quiet her down. All I would have to do was pity her, hug her, and kiss her on the cheek. She was such a sneaky thing. Did that mean it was I who had to apologize? No way…

So, I sat there as if nothing had happened. Why was she doing it? Had she gone out of her mind? Had she had too many cheese curds?

I just sat there shrugging my shoulders and looking innocently at Mama, with the smile of a tolerant grown-up on my lips, “She’s just a little girl. We must forgive her.”

Chapter 22. Once in the Evening

It was the day before that evening, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And the evening was simply wonderful.

At first, I sat drawing on the veranda. After placing a sheet of paper on the windowsill, I began to draw snowflakes. I was using a thick red pencil with a soft waxy core. It was a wonderful imported pencil. The snowflakes turned out so beautiful.

“What are you doing there?”

It was Dima calling to me from outside.

Our verandas shared a common wall so Dima, who lived in entrance number six, was my closest neighbor. That was why we were almost friends, even though Dima was three years older than I. Besides, he had reason to act important – his father was an officer.

“Look,” I said proudly, showing Dima my artwork. I had to bend over and lean out of the window frame. “Look how beautiful it is. Do you know why the color is so bright? It’s because I moistened the pencil with saliva.”

My achievements in the field of fine arts didn’t impress Dima. Quite the contrary, he grimaced as if he had seen something disgusting.

“Aren’t there better things to do? The weather’s so nice. Let’s go play officers.”

The weather was really splendid. It was autumn. My first summer vacation had recently ended. The unbearably hot summer days were also over. The sun no longer scorched from its zenith. Its light was mild and gently embraced everything. It was certainly a day to be outdoors.

I sighed. Mama was working the second shift, Papa was due back home at eight, and it was close to five now. That meant I would have to stay locked in the apartment for three more hours. Emma and I were forbidden to go outside when out parents weren’t home.

“I don’t have the keys,” I informed Dima sadly. “And Mama locked the lower lock.”

“What floor do you live on? Have you forgotten?”

Of course, I hadn’t forgotten. I had climbed out the veranda window many times; it wasn’t difficult. Something else was bothering me – how was I to deal with Emma? She was also at home. Of course, nothing would happen to her. She could stay home by herself. She was a big girl. But the little tattletale would tell our parents about it.

I stood on the veranda pondering the situation. Kids’ voices and laughter could be heard from the street. They were getting ready for the game.

“Well? C’mon!” Dima urged me.

So I made up my mind. After casting a furtive glance at the door of the room, I put my leg over the window frame. Dima stood by, raising his arms. At that moment, Emma darted out onto the veranda.

“I’ll tell Mama everything! I’ll tell her!” she yelled, hopping around. Her short dress inflated like a little parachute, her curls bounced, her eyes sparkled. It’s amazing – why do girls enjoy tattling so much?

Hanging onto the window frame outside the window, I shook my fist at my sister and jumped down. Let her yell for a while; she would soon get tired.

I fumbled around in the bushes near the vegetable garden and extracted a good, well-polished stick, straight and with no hidden splinters, exactly what was needed for playing officers.

Not far from the entrance, on a site beyond the sidewalk, everything was ready for the game. Seven parallel lines, approximately two meters from each other, had been drawn precisely and clearly. The first one was marked “Soldier,” and each subsequent line was marked with the next military rank, ending with General. The goal of the game was to reach the highest rank. There was a tin can placed on bricks in front of the General line. If you knocked it off with your stick and returned uninjured from the battlefield, you attained the next rank. Boys are real masters at devising complicated military games. Battered knees, bruises and other injuries don’t scare anyone. They only bring fame.

Ten boys from our building and the neighboring one lined up on the Soldier line. We had to select a guard whose job was to protect the tin can. He was an important figure, a dangerous opponent to those fighting for higher rank. And he was selected the same way, by knocking the can off. The one who knocked it off immediately avoided the hard and unpopular role of guard.

“I’ll knock it off with my first throw!” My pal Vitya Smirnov took aim. Holding his stick, he drew his arm back… and threw. No, he was not up to it. The stick flopped onto the ground two meters short of the tin can. Poor Vitya was very annoyed. The farther a stick was from the target, the greater chance one had of becoming the guard, and no one wanted to be the guard.

“Look out!” Oparin roared. He failed to knock the can over, but his stick fell closer to the target. Vitya’s shot was the least successful out of the ten, so he had to take his post at the tin can.

And then the battle broke out.

We all lined up at the starting point on the Soldier line. Stick after stick was thrown, but the can remained on the bricks, as if bewitched. That time, I was lucky. Beside myself with delight, I watched as the can flew about seven meters from the bricks, but I had no time to enjoy it. All the boys darted forward with wild cries, overtaking me. “Hurray, hurray!” Now, each of us had to retrieve his stick before the guard could return the can to its place. Anyone who failed to do so would be in trouble, because as soon as the can was in place, the “close combat” would begin. Vitya Smirnov was leaping around the can and, like a pack of wolves, we surrounded him. His task in this combat was to graze at least one of us with his stick. Retrieving one’s stick was quite a feat! If Vitya managed to graze someone with his stick and then knock the can off, he would be the winner. The one who was grazed would become the guard. Our objective was to dodge, avoid being grazed, and knock down the can, leaving Vitya at his post as guard.

The close combat was a picturesque and noisy show. It might seem to passersby who were unfamiliar with the game that we were having a real brawl and that they should let our parents know about it or even inform the police. As we got carried away, we screamed like madmen and brandished our sticks so hard that we brushed them against each other, screamed in pain, swore at each other, crossed our sticks and raised columns of dust.

“Hey, Kolya, be bold!” Oparin yelled at Kolya Kulikov.

“What a goat you are, Sturgeon! Protect me when I attack!” Sipa instructed his partner Server, nicknamed Sturgeon.

“Where are you aiming your stick, you macaque! It should be between the legs!” Server, in turn, reproached Edem, the third member of their unit.

Listening from a distance, one might think that different types of animals who had mastered human speech were shouting to one another – sturgeons, goats, macaques. Who said there was no zoo in Chirchik? Of course, there was, and the most diverse in the whole of Asia.

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