the most final
concluding work

We lived on the second floor and our door was followed by that of the Morozovs, pensioner spouses in a three-room apartment. Opposite to them across the landing, there also was an apartment of 3 rooms, yet only 2 of them were dwelt by the Zimins family, while the third one was populated by single women, now and then replacing one another, at times there happened couples of women, who declared themselves relatives after meaningful smiles at each other.

The dead wall between the doors to the Morozovs’ and to the Zimins’ was outfitted with a vertical iron ladder reaching the ever open hatchway to the attic where the tenants hung their washing under the slate roof, and the father in the Savkins family—whose apartment was smack-bang opposite ours—kept pigeons after he came home and changed into his blue sportswear.

The wooden handrail supported by the iron uprights ran from the Savkins’ door towards ours without crossing the whole landing though, because it turned down to follow the two flights of steps to the first-floor landing and from there four more steps down—to the staircase-entrance vestibule. There you pushed the wide entrance door held closed by a rusty iron spring, big and screechy, and went into the wide expanse of our block Courtyard, leaving behind the vestibule with one more, narrow, door that hid the steep steps into the impenetrable darkness of underground basement.

Deducing from my subsequent life experience, I may safely assume that we lived in Flat 5 though at that time I didn’t know it yet. All I knew was that the most numerous population in a house were its doors. Behind the first door with a large handmade mailbox screwed up to it, there would open the hallway with the narrow door of the tiny storeroom to the right, and the partly glazed door to the parents’ room on the left, where instead of a window was the wide balcony door, also glazed in its upper part, viewing the Courtyard.

Straight ahead from the hallway started the long corridor to the kitchen, past two blind doors on the right, the first, to the bathroom, followed by the toilet door, while in the left wall immediately before the kitchen, there was just one, also blind, door to the children’s room that had two windows, one of which faced the Courtyard and the other presented the view of murky windows in the plastered butt wall of the next, corner, house in the Block. The only window in the kitchen was looking at the same wall in the adjacent corner building, and to the right from the kitchen door, up under the ceiling, the matte glassed square of the quite small toilet window was also filled with the same murky darkness unless the lamp there was on. Neither bathroom nor the storeroom closeted behind its white door in the hallway had any windows at all but, in the ceiling of each of them, there hung an electric bulb—just click the black nose jutting from the round switch by the needed door, and step inside without angst because, as it turned out, all the doors in a house opened inside the rooms they serve…

Entering the toilet, first of anything else I spat on the wall to the left from the throne and only then sat down to go potty and watch the slow progress of spittle crawling down the green coat of paint, very vertically, leaving a moist trail in its wake. If the glob of the snailing saliva lacked sufficient reserves to reach the baseboard, I would assist it by an additional spit in the track, just above the stuck locomotive. At times the trip took from three to four spits and some other times the initial one was enough.

The parents were lost in perplexity as regards the spittle condensing under the toilet wall until the day when Dad entered immediately after me, and at the strict interrogation that followed I admitted doing that yet failed to offer any explanation why. Since then, fearful of punishment, I blotted the traces of the wrong-doing with the pieces of cut-up newspapers from the cloth bag on the opposite wall but the thrill was gone.

You feel yourself kinda Almighty when reconstructing the world of a half-century ago, adjusting the details to your liking with no one to rub your nose in it even if you muck up.

However, you can fool anyone but yourself, and I am ready to admit that now, from the distance in fifty years, not everything is falling in just nicely. For instance, I am far from certain that the pigeon enclosure in the attic had anything to do with Captain Savkin. The mentioned structure could as easily belong to Stepan Zimin, the father of Lyda and Yura… Or maybe there were two enclosures?

Frankly, at the moment I am not sure about the presence of pigeons in one or the other enclosure (but were there two of them?) on the day when I ventured to climb up the iron ladder towards something unknown, indistinguishable in the murky square hole of the hatchway above my head. And it is pretty possible that I simply remembered the remark overheard in my parents’ chat, that Stepan’s pigeons also fell victim to his unrestrained booze binges.

On the whole, just one thing stands beyond the shadow of a doubt – the tremulous ecstasy on the doorsill to revelation when, leaving behind my sister’s dismal divination of the pending manslaughter of me by the fatherly hand and, next to her, the silent stare of my brother watching closely each my movement from the landing down there, which diminished at each ladder rung as I climbed into the brave new world that any moment now would unfurl before me beneath the grayish underbelly of the slate roof… A few days later Natasha came running into our room to proudly herald that Sasha had just climbed up to the attic too.

Taking into account all of that, it is quite probable that the pigeons were gone from the attic enclosure, but in the Courtyard, there were hosts of them…

The Courtyard’s layout presented a systematized masterpiece of pure unalloyed geometricity. Inside the big rectangular formed by the 6 two-storied buildings, the ellipse of the road was inscribed and accentuated by the knee-deep drenches along its both sides, bridged by albeit short, yet mighty overpasses minutely opposite each of the 14 entrances to the 6 houses in our Block.

Two narrow concrete walks aligned at right angles to the ellipse’s longitudinal axis cut it into three even chunks, the resultant rectangular in between the walks and the road ditches was further divided into three equal segments by one more couple of concrete walks parallel to the above-mentioned axis to connect the walks also mentioned already.

The intersection points formed four corners of the central segment, from which the rays of 4 additional concrete walks traversed the Courtyard diagonally, each one projected in the direction of the central entrances to the respective corner buildings, the line between adjacent ray-starting points served the chord of a concrete arc-walk described about a round lumber gazebo, 2 of them all in all, so that, on the whole, it presented the model of perfection reminiscent of the Versailles’ design, only of concrete.

Of course, there were no fancy waterworks in our Courtyard, neither trees nor bushes. Maybe, later they planted something there yet, in my memory, I can find not even a seedling but only grass cut into geometric figures by the walks of concrete and loose pigeon flocks flying from one end of the vast Courtyard to the other when there sounded “…gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil!.” call.

I liked those looking so alike, yet somehow different, birds flocking around you to bang the scattered bread crumbles away from the road on which you’d never see a vehicle except for a slow-go truck carrying, once in a blue moon, the furniture of tenants moving in or out, or a load of firewood for Titan boilers installed in the apartments’ bathrooms.

But even more, I liked feeding pigeons on the tin ledge out the kitchen window. Although it took a long wait before some of the birds would get it where your “gooil-gooil” invitation was coming from and hover with the swish of air-cutting wings in the relentless flapping above the ledge covered by the thick spill of breadcrumbs before landing on it with their raw legs to start the quick tap-tapping at the offer on the hollow-sounding tin.

The pigeons seemed to have an eye on each other or, probably, they had some kind of intercom system because the first bird was very soon followed by others flying in, in twos and threes, and whole flocks, maybe even from the other block. The window ledge submerged into the multi-layer whirlpool of feathered backs and heads ducking to pick the crumbs, pushing each other, fluttering off the edge and squeezing in back again. Then, taking advantage of that pandemonium, you could cautiously put your hand out thru the square leaf up in the kitchen window and touch from above one of their moving backs, but tenderly, so that they wouldn’t dash off with the loud flaps of the wings and flush away all at once…

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