the most final
concluding work

Besides the pigeons, I also liked holidays, especially the New Year. The Christmas tree was set up in the parents’ room in front of the white tulle curtain screening the cold balcony door. The plywood boxes from postal parcels received long ago and presently full of fragile sparkling adoration came from the narrow storeroom: all kinds of fruits, dwarfs, bells, grandfathers frosts, baskets, drill-bit-like purple icicles, balls with inlaid snowflakes on their opposite sides and just balls but also beautiful, stars framed within thin glass tubes, fluffy rain-garlands of golden foil. In addition, we made paper garland-chains as taught by Mom. With different watercolors we painted the paper, it dried overnight and was cut into finger-wide colored strips which we glued with wheatpaste into lots of multicolored links in the growing catenas of our homemade garlands.

Lastly, after decorating the tree with toys and sweetmeat—because a candy with a thread thru its bright wrapper is both nice and eatable decoration which you can cut off and enjoy at Xmas tide—a snowdrift of white cotton wool was put under the tree over the plywood footing of one-foot-tall Grandfather Frost in his red broadcloth coat, one of his mitten-clad hands in firm clasp at his tall staff and the other clutching the mouth of the sack over his shoulder tied with a red ribbon which hid the seam too sturdy to allow actual investigation of the bumps bulging from inside through the sackcloth.

Oh! How could I forget the multicolored twinkling of tiny bulbs from their long thin wires?!. They came into the Christmas tree before anything else, and those wires were connected to the heavy electric transformer also hidden under the wool snowdrifts, Dad made it himself. And the mask of Bear for the matinée in kindergarten was also his production. Mom explained him how to do it and Dad brought some special clay from his work and then on a sheet of plywood he modeled the bear’s face with its stuck-up nose. When the clay got stone-hard, Dad and Mom covered it with layers of gauze and water-soaked shreds of newspaper. It took two days for the muzzle to dry and harden, then the clay was thrown away and—wow!—there was a mask made of papier-mâché. The mask was colored with brown watercolor, and Mom sewed the Bear costume of brown satin, it was a one-piece affair so you could get into the trousers only thru the jacket. That’s why at the matinée I did not envy the woodcutters with the cardboard axes over their shoulders.

If the big bed in the parents’ room was taken apart and brought to our room, it meant that later in the evening they would haul tables from the neighboring apartments and set them in the freed bedroom for guests to sit around. The neighbors’ children would gather in our room to play.

When it got very late and all the visiting children gone back to their apartments, I would venture to the parents’ room filled with the smarting mist of thinly bluish tobacco smoke and the noise of loud voices each of which trying to speak louder than anyone’s else. Old Morozov would announce that being a young man he once oared no less than 17 kilometers to a date, and the man by his side would eagerly confirm that proves it was worth it and all the people would rejoice at the good news and laugh happily and they would grab each other and start dancing and fill all of the room with their giant figures, up to the ceiling, and circle along with the disc on the gramophone brought by someone of the guests.

Then they again would just speak but not listen who says what, and Mom, sitting at the table, would start singing about the lights on the streets of the Saratov City full of unmarried young men, and her eyelids would drop and shut half of her eyes. Mortified by shame at that view, I would get onto her lap and say, “Mom, don’t sing, please, don’t!” And she would laugh, and push the glass back, and say she did not drink anymore and go on singing all the same. In the end the guests would go to their apartments taking out the tables with them and still talking without listening. I would be sent to our room where Sasha already sleeps on the big sofa but Natasha alertly bobbing from her pillow. In the kitchen, there would sound the tinkle of the dishes being washed by Grandma and Mom, and then the light in our room would be briefly turned on for the parent bed parts to be taken back…

Besides her work, Mom was also taking part in the Artistic Amateur Activities at the House of Officers which was very far to go and I knew it because at times the parents took me to the cinema there and made the twins envy so dearly. All the movies started by loud music and the big round clock on the Kremlin tower opening a newer newsreel “The News of the Day” about black-faced miners in helmets walking from their mines, and lonely weaver-women in white head-clothes pacing along the rows of shaking machine tools, and giant halls full of bareheaded clapping people. But then one of the news frightened me to tears when showed jerky bulldozers in fascist concentration camps whose blades were pushing heaps of naked corpses to fill deep trenches and press them down by their caterpillar tracks. Mom told me to shut my eyes and not watch and, after that, they didn’t take me to the cinema anymore.

However, when the Artistic Amateur Activities performed in their concert at the House of Officers, Dad took me along. Different people from Artistic Amateur Activities came on stage to sing by the accompaniment of one and the same button accordion and the audience clapped so loudly. Then the whole stage was left for just one man who talked for a long time, yet I couldn’t get it what about even though he made his voice louder and louder until they started clapping from all the sides to send him away. And so it went on with singing and talking and clapping in between, but I waited only to see my Mom up there. At last, when a lot of women in the same long skirts came to dance with a lot of men in high boots, Dad said, “Aha! Here is your dear Mommy!” But I could not make her out because the long skirts were all alike and made the women so too similar to each other. Dad had to point again who was my Mom and after that I looked only at her so as not to lose.

If not for that intent attention, I would have, probably, missed the moment which stuck in me for many years like a splinter which you cannot pull out and it’s just better not to press the spot where it sits…The women dancers on the stage were all spinning quicker and quicker and their long skirts also swerved rising to their knees, but my Mom’s skirt splashed suddenly to flash her legs up to the very panties. Unbearable shame flooded me, and for the rest of the concert I kept my head down never looking up from the red-painted boards in the floor beneath my felt boots, no matter how loudly they clapped, and all the long way home I did not want to talk to any of my parents even when asked why I was so pouty.

But, hey! Really, what’s the point in those concerts at all if there was a shiny brown radio box on the wall in our—children’s—room? It could both talk and sing, and play music, we knew it very well that when they broadcast Arkady Raikin you should turn the white knob of the volume control to make it louder, then run and call everyone in the house to haste to our room for laughing all together back to the box on the wall. And we learned to hush the radio or even turn it off when there was a concert for the cello and orchestra, or if someone was telling how good was the news about the victory of Cuban Revolution in Cuba which made him so happy that he turned out 2 daily tasks in just 1 shift for spite of the revenge-seekers and their leader Adenauer…

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Yet, the May Day celebration was not a home holiday at all.

First, you had to walk a long way by the road going down past the Block’s corner building and there, at the foot of the Gorka upland, to keep walking on and on. Not alone though, there were lots of people going the same way, both adults and children. People greeted each other cheerfully, in their hands they carried bunches of balloons or pliant twigs with handmade leaves of green tissue paper fixed by black threads spun fast and profusely, or long pieces of red cloth with big white letters spanned between 2 poles, and also portraits of different men, both bold and not too much so, set upon stubby separate sticks.

Like almost all the children, I had a short square pennant in my hands, on a thin—like a pencil, only a tad bit longer—rod. In the red pennant, the yellow circle crisscrossed with yellow grid stood for the globe, and a yellow dove soared above it, yet not as high as the capture of yellow letters: “Peace be to the World!” Of course, I couldn’t read at that time but those pennants remained unchangeable year after year for decades, they abode for latecomers and slow learners as well.

And while we all walked on, in the distance ahead of us, there emerged music. The nearer the louder it sounded and made us walk quicker and drop idle talks, and then we passed by 2 rows of soldier-musicians with shining trumpets and booming drum, and past a tall red balcony with people standing still upon it in their forage caps but, strangely, that balcony had no house behind it…

After one of the May Days, I felt like drawing a holiday so Grandma gave me a sheet of ruled paper and a pencil… In the center of the sheet, I drew a large balloon on a string going down to the bottom edge of the sheet. It looked good, so big and festive. However, I wanted more than that, I wanted the holiday be all over the world and, to the right from the balloon, I drew a stretch of blind wood fencing behind which there lived not ours but Germans and other enemies from the newsreels in the House of Officers, only all of them invisible, of course, because of the fencing.

Okay, Germans, let it be a holiday even for you! And I drew another balloon on the string rising from behind the fence. Lastly, to make it clear who is who and who is celebrating where, I added a fat cross in the enemies’ balloon.

The masterpiece accomplished, I briefly admired my work of art and then ran to share it, for a starter, with Grandma… At first, she couldn’t figure out what is what, and I had to explain to her the picture. But when I got to the point that let even Germans have a holiday—we are not meanies, right?—she stopped me sharply and vented severe criticism. I should have learned since long, said she, that because of my those cross-adorned balloons the “black raven” vehicle would stop by our house and take my Dad away arrested, and she asked if that was what I wanted.

I felt sorry for Dad and terrified by the prospect to stay without him. Bursting in sobs, I crushed the ill-fated drawing and ran to the bathroom to thrust the crumpled paper ball behind the pig-iron door of the water boiler Titan where they lighted fire when heating water for bathing…

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