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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 1^st, 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…