Читать книгу: «Everything Begins In Childhood», страница 30

“Are you trying to disrupt my class?” Margarita Vasilyevna asked in surprise.

The girls hadn’t returned to the classroom by the time class was over.

We later learned that, fortunately, none of them had gotten sick: they just had a minor allergic reaction.

* * *

Now, I am trying to understand: am I ashamed to remember that? I am, a bit, but, for some reason, not much. That was the way we were. Nothing could be done about it.

I remember one thing very well: when Dima was giving away caramels, I suddenly panicked – what if Larisa took one? “I won’t allow it,” I thought. “If she does, I’ll take it away from her.”

Chapter 55. “Child in Time” and Children of Our Time

The drums and bass guitar were the first to begin. They slowly sketched out the sad tune of a song, along with the organ. The organ was electric, attaching significance and depth to the tune.

More electric instruments used in rock music had appeared in recent years. Their new timbres and unusual sounds captivated us. And synthesizers! It was amazing what they combined into a common sound stream – voices, laughter, dogs barking, the hum of a flying helicopter. All that was interwoven into a tune and was punctuated by a rhythm – and the music gained new charm.

The tune flew and expanded. Here the voice of a singer became a part of it. What was he pleading for? What was he longing for? What was he complaining about? It really touched our hearts.

We were listening to the English rock band Deep Purple. We knew the title of the song, but we weren’t sure how to translate it into Russian: was it “Child in Time” or “The Child of Time?” We didn’t understand the meaning of the expression at that time. We had never heard it before, which was why it seemed mysterious, mystical. However, the more mysterious it was, the more interesting.

We were listening to Deep Purple at Andrey Baidibekov’s house, at his birthday party. We were five, not counting Andrey. He had appeared in our class this school year and very soon became everybody’s favorite. He wasn’t tall, rather thickset, with narrow eyes in a round face. I liked him a lot.

When Baidibekov listened to someone or simply looked over something, squinting his eyes, he looked very profound and serious. But he had only to laugh, and the narrow slits turned into wide-open hazel eyes, his eyebrows flew up to touch his black hair, thick, elastic and stiff, and his whole face became wonderfully artless and merry.

I felt very calm and safe next to Andrey. It seemed to me that our personalities had much in common. In a word, we became friends right away.

Andrey had come to Chirchik to live with his older brother, who had gotten a job here. Their parents and other siblings – it was a family with many children – lived not far from Tashkent.

The Baidibekov brothers settled in the building next to ours – that very building the construction of which had attracted us so much – in a cozy studio apartment. That was where we were celebrating Andrey’s fifteenth birthday.

I stood on the small balcony. The fearless construction worker had sat smoking, his legs dangling down somewhere around here above me. That had been about ten years ago.

Ah, how time flew. And now I was looking at the view the construction worker had seen from this balcony. I could see the crowns of trees and part of Yubileynaya beyond them. That was on the right. And on the left, I could see the hills beyond the buildings.

“Yuabov, where are you-u?!”

Sasha Lokshev didn’t actually need to yell: the table was right at the door to the balcony. It was either music or alcohol that had such an effect on Sasha.

“I’m here,” I answered and returned to the table, which was very festive, set by our own hands.

And we had also brought the food: Vitya Yarosh brought salads, I – pilaf made by Mama, Sasha Lokshev provided wine and vodka – yes, yes, we already considered ourselves adults. Lokshev had also provided female company: he had brought along his friend Vera, a tall, shapely girl who quite conformed to our favorite characterization – “a poet’s dream.”

“Dear Andrey!” the light-haired Sasha proposed a toast, raising his glass, “Good luck, bro… To you!”

We clinked glasses and drank. It must have been our fourth drink. Our heads were spinning slightly; the music was playing and playing… Sasha picked Vera up, and they began to whirl, stomping their feet and bending over. The bright flowers on Vera’s dress flashed by. She squealed. Sasha kissed his girlfriend on the lips and, as they continued to dance, swept her away to the kitchen. Well… that could certainly be good. But we felt great without it.

Deep Purple got worked up, increasing in intensity. The guitars, the organ, the drums, the voices – all blended together, becoming an outburst. And here it came, the moment when you didn’t notice anything around you anymore. The whole of you got absorbed in the music… You were in a different world… It was so good there. You felt you also belonged in that world, along with those by whom you were enchanted, with whom you would want to be… whom you would want to be… And then it seemed to happen.

We were not at the table in Andrey Baidibekov’s apartment. We were the rock group Deep Purple. The bright rays from colored floodlights, moving and gleaming, lit us, the stage, the outdoor space where we were performing.

There was a sea of heads in front of us. That sea swayed, made noise, roared, raged like a sea in a storm. Thousands of eyes were fixed on us. We saw them and we didn’t at the same time. We heard the enthusiastic roar and we didn’t. We were working. Each of us had his favorite instrument, his role.

“Sweet child in time.” That’s what Vitya Smirnov, who was also Ian Gillan, was singing. Vitya got into his role as Ian so much that he even resembled him. Just like Ian, he shut his eyes slightly and moved his head. His long hair fell onto his face… Of course, he couldn’t reproduce his voice, but he definitely rendered his manner precisely.

“Toom-m… Toom-toom-toommm…” And that was Andrey. He played the drums, drums and cymbals, twelve of them. He manipulated his spoons no worse than Ian Paice did his drumsticks. He could also create different sounds. He could beat the rhythm so gently that it sounded like a nightingale’s trill. But he could also bang down so hard that it felt like artillery bombardment.

Now, Andrey, along with the bass guitarist Vitya Yarosh, played quietly and slowly. They played background accompaniment, which was very important. Keeping that in mind, they exchanged glances in order to play in coordination.

I listened to them with my eyes half-closed. My turn hadn’t come yet.

But here, the sounds of the percussion were getting louder and more powerful. Andrey was totally enraptured. He got a kick out of it. Andrey shook his head – up and down, up and down. And the spoons in his hands worked to the utmost, slicing the air.

Vitya Yarosh stood, his head thrown back, pressing the strings of the guitar with the fingers of his left hand. His right hand was down at his waist, and he ran the fingers of his right hand over the strings and tapped the guitar: “boom-m, boom-m, boom-m-m.”

And then Lokshev ran out of the kitchen.

So, the organist Jon Lord had heard everything. He had missed just a minute of it. Bending over the table, Sasha ran his fingers over the keys of the organ.

The singer fell silent, only the music sounded, the musicians played to the max, at the fastest tempo, with all their hearts.

And at last, the long-awaited moment had come – the guitar solo was to be played. And I was the one to play it. Richie Blackmore’s guitar was the heart of the rock band. Gentle, leisurely, clear, it usually created a special lyrical mood. But now, the guitar had to be different: it had to be lightning fast, reaching the highest notes, creating tension…

Yes, it was my turn to play. And I struck the strings. My eyes couldn’t follow my fingers, which ran over the strings so rapidly. The guitar… The air appeared to grow dense, I felt the weight of its wooden body. It seemed to me that I was the musician and the guitar at the same time. I shook my head slightly, raised my leg and jumped up and down. My eyes were half-closed. I, like all the others, didn’t need sheet music or conductor.

We felt both the music and each other. We were a unified organism.

That was all… The last chords sounded. The percussion grew silent. We stood, swaying slightly. Only now did we feel how tired we were.

Our hair and shirts were wet. Sweat was streaming down our foreheads and into our eyes. And the crowd of spectators was still making noise, roaring and screaming in front of us.

Some of them jumped, yelling, others whistled, some shook their fists, some tried to get closer to the stage, stepping on shoulders and heads. A forest of swaying hands flew up.

That was fame. And who doesn’t want fame at fifteen?

Well, it takes a lot to achieve fame.

We turned off the tape recorder. Andrey dried his wet face and waved to Yarosh – time to fill the glasses… We had a drink, sat in silence, still filled with the music.

“It would be great to go to a rock concert,” Vitya sighed.

‘Oh, yeah, to a Russian folk choir… or a Soviet pop singer, who was popular in the 50s,” Sasha giggled. “Keep on dreaming.”

We all laughed, but it wasn’t merry laughter.

There were concerts in Chirchik sometimes, but they had nothing to do with rock music. We couldn’t even dream about it. Rock music was considered a “Western plague,”, a “demoralizing influence,” and so on and so forth. They wrote about it in the newspapers, yelled about it on the radio, spoke about it in schools.

No matter how hard numerous mentors tried to turn us away from rock, it had already become a part of our lives. We were children of our time, and the times were the most powerful mentor. Rock captivated us. It became not just another infatuation but something much more important. Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin – our favorite groups were often the subject of our conversations. Those who managed to get original records were considered very lucky. But there were only a few of them. Everybody else coaxed disks out of their owners and ran to a sound studio to tape them. That one tape would be recorded over and over.

It was one of those tapes that had been recorded from the disk of the concert performance by the rock group Deep Purple that played at Andrey’s apartment today.

“It would be great to get good equipment,” I said, running my fingers over the tape recorder. “By the way, where did you get this one?”

“I borrowed it from an acquaintance,” Lokshev said.

“Has it overheated?”

“Seems it hasn’t…”

Two big reels with tape were turning on the Dnipro tape recorder. The Dnipro was considered portable, but it was terribly heavy and most certainly outdated. However, we were glad we could use it. Needless to say, none of us had his own tape recorder, and at that point we didn’t all even have a record player.

So, what was it about rock that captivated us? Perhaps the secret lay in the fact that it emancipated us. It gave us a feeling of freedom, freedom from irksome and presumptuous teachers, from boring classes, from parents who watched over us obtrusively – in a word, from everybody and everything.

* * *

We might ask ourselves – why rock? Why didn’t classical music or concerts of the famous Soviet pop singer Magomayev create the same sensation? Perhaps rock could convey the feelings that gripped a teenager. It gave vent to energy that raged inside you, drew you into its realm, turned you into a participant in an event. It’s not accidental that members of the audience scream at rock groups’ concerts. They all are very young. They badly need to “blow off steam.”

I still like rock. To tell you the truth, it scares me that this “madness” often knows no bounds. Rock turns into something like drugs, except that a person doesn’t need anything else and isn’t interested in anything else. Sometimes I think, at famous rock groups concerts, “Good heavens, is this yelling, screaming crowd listening to performers?” It seems that the music is for them only a signal for some sort of altered state.

Perhaps, I’m wrong – does that happen because I’m already past a certain age? But I know one thing for sure: it didn’t happen to us, my friends and me. We loved music and knew how to listen to it. We could dismiss the imitations and make the right choice – classic rock.

From time to time, I take out albums of our old favorite songs, go through them and listen with pleasure: “July Morning,” “Belladonna,” “Hotel California,” “Let It Be.”

And I remember our “musical repasts.” It seems to me – maybe my words are much too high-sounding – but it seems to me that our improvisation wasn’t just a childish affectation but a creative action. No? You don’t agree with me? Then try, just for half an hour to imitate a rock group, without instruments, reproducing the music with your whole body, every muscle, every cell.

Bulat Okudzhava, a famous bard of the 1960s, sang in his song “The Musician”:

I wasn’t simply curious; I was flying the sky.

No, I wasn’t bored at all, I was hoping to understand

how these hands could possibly make these magic sounds…

* * *

Something like that also happened to us.

Chapter 56. The Torture

“Remember, in fifty minutes, not before that,” Uncle Avner said sternly as he left the porch, walking after Mama. Mama turned around, nodded to me as if confirming his words, and sighed deeply.

I closed the door behind them and lingered there. Oh, how I didn’t want to return to that room. How scary it was to hear her groans… They weren’t quite groans but slow plaintive entreaties:

“O-oy, I can’t take it anymore. O-oy, Valery, I can’t. Where are you? Untie them.”

It was Grandma Abigai moaning and groaning. Pale and haggard, she was sitting up in her bed. Even though she was leaning against the pillows, her posture was tense, unnatural. That was because Grandma’s legs were bandaged to a board.

Grandma Abigai had had problems with her knees for a long time. I had heard about it so often that I had grown used to Grandma’s illness and her inability to walk properly, as if it were something totally natural. All old people had health problems… Mama, of course, worried, suffered and was eager to go to Tashkent. But I… When I heard about it, I felt sorry for her, but it would immediately leave my mind.

Two years after Grandpa Hanan passed away, it had become more than she could bear. She would spend practically the whole day in bed with her legs bent comfortably at the knees. Nobody had a clue about the consequences of such immobility. Her knees ceased to bend at all after a few months. And Grandma couldn’t walk.

That’s when Uncle Avner became alarmed and rushed to see doctors…

* * *

It turned out that there was nobody but Uncle Avner to take care of Grandma. Her three older daughters had long had their own families and moved away. Marusya lived in Bukhara, Mama in Chirchik, and Rosa had five adopted children. It was only twenty-year-old Rena, the youngest daughter, who still lived with Grandma Abigai. But Rena, the heavenly bird, could hardly take care of her mother for she couldn’t take care of herself. It was hard for Avner, but he didn’t complain. Avner had always helped his parents. And he loved his sisters. Perhaps, their difficult wartime childhood had brought them closer together. It seemed to me that he was particularly attached to my mama. Even his voice changed when he talked to her. Grandpa Hanan loved his daughter very much. How gaily, affectionately and melodiously he would say her name, Ester, every time he visited us. But still, Uncle Avner managed to say her name much more tenderly and gently.

As for Mama, she wasn’t as close to anyone else in her family as she was to her brother. It’s not enough to say that she loved Avner; she admired him. She admired his honesty and kindness, his abilities, energy and achievements.

After serving in the army, Avner graduated from the Institute of National Economy and very soon became an important administrator. By the time Grandma fell ill, Avner was the manager of the meat facility attached to the Military Trade Center. That was a senior position, and, as anyone who lived in the Soviet Union will know, a very advantageous one. In a country where it wasn’t easy to get a piece of good fresh meat, who wouldn’t want to do a favor for the “Meat King.”

I was too young to wonder whether Uncle Avner used those advantages and possibilities. Of course, I heard that there were spiteful people who envied him – anyone in his position would have had such critics. They tried to mar his reputation as much as they could. But Mama always repeated with pride: Uncle Avner was a really hard worker, and not the kind who spent long hours in jacket and tie in his office. He always preferred to wear overalls. He would put them on, go to his army of workers and soldiers and, working along with them, unload goods and arrange them in refrigerators and warehouses.

In a word, he didn’t behave like a boss. He behaved like a real, diligent administrator. And the enterprise worked very well.

But those weren’t Uncle Avner’s only merits. Like his father, Grandpa Hanan, the Meat King had a sunny poetic soul. His father had nurtured his love of music and singing.

The Bucharan Jews have a kind of old folk music – an instrumental-vocal genre called shashmakom. It consists of cycles of songs that incorporate verses by different poets, including famous ones like Alisher Navoiy, Omar Khayyam and Ganjavi Nizami. The cycle is set to folk music. A cycle consists of six parts, which is why it is called shashmakom: shash meaning “six” in Tadjik and makom meaning “part.” Humorous, wedding and, naturally, love songs are included in the cycle. When performed, they’re accompanied by Tadjik percussion and bowed instruments. The songs have a distinctive and complex vocal structure. One must sing higher and higher to reach the highest notes and then descend slowly. A singer needs a very wide vocal range to cope with such an arc.

By the time of the revolution, that wonderful skill had almost been forgotten. Surprisingly, it was the Bukharan Jews who remembered it and began to revive it. My Grandpa Hanan was one of them.

Grandpa Hanan was one of those wonderful people referred to as “queer birds.” Fortunately, there were quite a few of them among the Jews. He was so kind and generous that he would give the shirt off his back to a person he felt sorry for. He often caught hell from Grandma for doing that because it was she who had to figure out how to feed the family. Even into old age, Hanan was capable of working up enthusiasm for the most unexpected things, such as, for example, shashmakom.

In a word, Uncle Avner received a wonderful inheritance from his father, which included, apart from lofty emotional qualities and an understanding of beauty, a love for shashmakom and a collection of old records. It’s no wonder that Uncle Avner’s elder son Boris became a musician.

* * *

But let’s return to Grandma Abigai’s illness. I don’t know what doctors Uncle Avner consulted about Grandma’s illness, but he hoped that her bent, practically petrified knees could somehow be brought back to normal.

On one of our visits from Chirchik, Grandma was being treated royally to massages, thermal treatment, medications and, among other things, a terrible procedure resembling medieval torture, which I saw with my own eyes on that day.

As Mama and I entered the house, heat hit our faces. Grandma had always been afraid of catching cold, and she saw to it that there was no draft in the rooms. But now it was unbearably stuffy in the house, particularly in the kitchen. A woman in a white gown stood at the stove and, bending over a pot, dipped a long strip of fabric into it. A strange smell rose from the pot along with heat, as if dozens of paraffin candles were burning. The woman in the white gown, a registered nurse, was preparing paraffin bandages to warm Grandma’s knees.

Grandma, pale and exhausted, sat in her bed. I had not seen her look that way before. Her bare gaunt knees stuck out like two solitary toothpicks. She nodded to us and whispered to Mama:

“Cover my legs, cover them… I’m cold.”

The nurse entered the room, carrying the pot and began to bandage Grandma’s knees with hot, soft paraffin strips. Uncle Avner and I went to the porch. That’s when I learned that he and Mama needed to leave to attend to some urgent business, and I would have to stay with Grandma for an hour, but not just stay. Grandma’s legs would be tied to a board after they were warmed up. I would need to unbandage them in fifty minutes.

That was the torture I was watching now. Yes, yes, I felt like a warden, an executioner. It seemed to me that I had read about similar tortures in historical novels, where people’s feet had been stuffed into “Spanish boots.”

Grandma kept groaning and pleading, “Untie them, untie them.”

And I repeated, “You’ll just have to bear it. It won’t be much longer.” And terrified, I glanced at the clock: there was nothing of “not longer” about it. The minute hand seemed not to move at all.

I tried to distract myself by looking around.

Disorder is particularly noticeable in a sparsely furnished house: a table from which dirty plates hadn’t been removed… a worn, sooty kitchen caldron… a chair pulled away from the table standing askew… trash littering the floor… scattered things… Every trifle emphasized the desolation. That’s how neglected Grandma’s unlived-in room, previously so cozy, seemed to me now. Since she had taken to her bed, there was no one to take care of the house. Grandma’s bed was the only place where order prevailed, the territory accessible to her, so to speak. The pillows were fluffed, the blanket spread out neatly. Small towels and rags were arranged in a neat stack on the chair near the bed. And the cord of the telephone receiver there had been straightened out, even though it was twisted and tangled in almost every house.

Grandma fell silent, her eyes closed. “Has she fallen asleep? That would be good…”

But she looked so worn out. Her dark headscarf was pulled down to her eyebrows, her eyelids had become swollen, and her lips were dry. She kept licking them…

“Something to drink. Valery, give me something to drink…”

I leaped to my feet. Here was the thermos. I poured hot tea into a bowl. Grandma drank everything hot because she was mortally afraid of catching cold. She had a warm dress on with a wool cardigan over it, even warm socks in this hot weather. And her felt boots stood near the bed. Why would she need felt boots now? Perhaps to walk to the bathroom… How could she stand such hot weather? I, in my summer clothes, sat there covered in sweat.

“Oy, Valery, untie it… I can’t stand it… Djoni bivesh. Untie it. What do I need this for? I’d rather die…”

Grandma was looking up at the ceiling, perhaps through the ceiling, at the One she addressed, to whom she poured out her soul. And she kept mumbling something. She spoke, as usual in Bukhori, the Bukharan Jewish dialect. And even though I didn’t speak it, I could understand Grandma. It came across to me in a somewhat incomprehensible way that Grandma was asking God why he had sent those tortures to her, and her appeal, couched in subtle Eastern turns of speech, and with Biblical wisdom and tragedy, was woven into it.

From whom and how had Grandma absorbed the colorful speech of our forefathers? I didn’t know. I wouldn’t be able to translate what she was saying word for word, but I was listening to her with agitation. During those moments, I felt for the first time – perhaps vaguely, but still I felt it – how tragic old age was.

Grandma’s voice broke as she began to groan again, hoarsely and slowly. Tears began to flow from her lowered eyelids and roll down her hollow cheeks.

I bent over her and shouted, “Just bear it a little longer! It won’t be long!”

I shouted because she couldn’t hear with her right ear, and she didn’t hear well with the left one. But maybe I shouted because I felt terrible and wanted to do something to help her, something, at least.

Grandma opened her eyes slowly. They were so cloudy and full of suffering. Her lips moved. From the way they moved I understood, “Joni bivesh… untie them.” I looked at the clock… How much longer? Another twenty minutes? Well, that’s enough! That’s it!

I clenched my teeth, threw the blanket aside and began untying Grandma’s legs.