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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.