the most final
concluding work

The hardest thing in the morning is getting out of bed. It seems you'd give anything at all for another couple of minutes lying undisturbed by their yells it’s time to go to kindergarten.

On one of such mornings, the pillow under my head felt softer than a fleecy white cloud in the sky, and in the mattress yielding under me there developed such an exact mold absorbing my body in its gentle embrace that a mere thought of tearing myself away from that pleasure and warmth accumulated overnight under the blanket was simply unthinkable. So I went on lying until there popped up the frightening knowledge – if I would not shed off that blissful boggy drowsiness right away, then never would I come to kindergarten that morning, and never ever come to anywhere else because it would be a languor death in sleep.

Of course, so macabre words were beyond my ken then, I didn’t need them though nor other whimsy turns of phrase of that kind because my thoughts were coming mostly in the form of feeling, so I just felt freaked out, got up into the chilly room and started to dress. On Sundays, it was possible to lie as long as you wanted but never again the bed acquired such a pleasing shape…

One Sunday I woke up alone in the room and heard Sasha-’n’-Natasha’s merry screams from somewhere outside. I donned and hurried out into the corridor. They were not there nor in the kitchen, where only Grandma was clinking the pots’ lids. Aha! In the parents’ room! I ran in there at the height of fun – my brother-’n’-sister, and Mom was laughing together at a white shapeless lump standing in the corner on their bare feet. Of course, it’s Dad! He’s thrown over himself the thick blanket from the parents’ bed and now looms there bulkily next to the wardrobe.

And all at once those legs started to jump jointly under the fat fluttering folds. The horrible white bare-legged creature blocked the way towards the corridor herding Mom and all three of us to the balcony door. Oh, how we laughed! And clung to Mom more and more convulsively.

Then one of us began to cry and Mom said, “There-there, this is Dad, silly!” But Sasha did not stop (or, maybe, Natasha but not me though my laughter sounded more and more hysterical) and Mom said, “Well, enough, Kolya!” And the blanket straightened up and fell off revealing laughing face of Dad in his underpants and tank top, and we all together started to comfort Sasha sitting high in Mom’s arms and incredulously trying to laugh thru tears.

And on Monday morning I went to the parents’ room to admit that at night I again peed in bed. They were already dressed, and Dad said, “Gak! Such a big boy!” And Mom ordered me to peel off my underpants and get into their bed. From a shelf in the wardrobe, she fetched dry underpants for me and followed Dad into the kitchen.

I was lying under the blanket still warm with their warmth. Even the sheet was so soft, caressing. Full of pleasure I stretched out as much as I could, both legs and arms. My right hand got under the pillow and pulled out an ungraspable coarsened rag. I could not guess its purpose in their bed but I felt that I had touched something shameful and shouldn’t ask anyone about it…

~ ~ ~

It’s hard to say what was more delicious: Mom’s pastry or Grandma’s buns both baked for holidays in the blue electric oven “Kharkov”.

Grandma Martha spent her days in the kitchen cooking and washing up, and in the children’s room sitting on her bed not to be in the way of our playing.

In the evenings, she read us The Russian Epic Tales, a book about hero warriors who fought countless hordes of invaders or the Dragon Gorynich, and for the rest and recreation after the battles, they visited Prince Vladimir the Red Sun in the city of Kiev. That’s when the iron bed had to bear the additional weight of the three of us seated around Grandma Martha to listen about the exploits of Alesha Popovich or Dobrinya Nikitich.

When the heroes had their moments of sadness, they remembered their mothers, each one his own, but to their different, absent, mothers they all addressed one and the same reproach: why those mothers weren’t smart enough to wrap the future heroes into a piece of white cloth while they were still just silly babies and drop them into the fast running River-Mommy?

Only Ilya of Murom and Warrior Svyatogor, who grew so mighty that even the Earth Mother could bear him no more and only mountain rocks still somehow withstood his movements, they never raised that mutual lamentation, not even when having the bluest blues…

At times one or another of the hero warriors had a fight with one or another beauty disguised in armor. Those fights ended differently but the defeated would invariably say, “Do not kill me but treat instead to good food and drink and kiss on my mouth as sweet as sugar.” With all of those epic tales heard more than once, I knew by heart when such combats with gastronomic outcome were near at hand and eagerly anticipated them in advance…

Grandma Martha named the bathroom “the bathhouse”, and after her weekly bath, she was returning to our room steam-heated to red glow and half undressed—in just a tank top for menswear and one of her long skirts. Then she sat down on her iron bed to cool off while combing and braiding her gray hair into a pigtail. On her left forearm, there was a large mole in the form of a female nipple, the so-called “bitch’s udder”.

In course of one of her after-bath proceedings when she seemed to notice nothing but the curved plastic comb running thru the damp strands of her hair, I took advantage of my brother-’n’-sister’s distraction by agitated playing on the big sofa and sneaked under the springy mesh in the Grandma’s bed well sagged under her weight. There I cautiously turned over to my back and looked up – under the skirt between her straddled legs wide and firmly planted in the floor. Why? I did not know. Neither was there anything to make out in the dusk within the dark dome of the skirt. And I crawled away, as carefully as I could, feeling belated shame, regret, and a strong suspicion that she was aware of my hushed maneuvers…

Sasha was a reliable younger brother, credulous and taciturn. He was born after the brisk Natasha, and his complexion startled all by purple-blueish tinge because of the umbilical cord had almost strangled him, yet he was born in a shirt, which was taken off him in the maternity hospital and Mom explained later that from newborns’ shirts they produced some special medicine.

And Natasha turned out a really shrewd weasel. She was the first to know all the news: that the following day Grandma was to bake buns, that new tenants were to move into the flat on the first floor, that on Saturday the parents would go to a party at some people’s place, and that you should never-never kill a frog or it would rain cats and dogs.

At the sides of the back of her head, there started two pigtails split by ribbons before reaching her shoulders to fix each braid with a lovely bow-knot at its end. Yet, neither of those bows survived for long before falling apart into a tight knot with a pair of narrow ribbon tails. Probably, because of zealous spinning her head on all the quarters to find out: what-where-when?.

The two-year difference in age gave me a tangible degree of authority in the eyes of the younger. However, when Sasha taciturnly reran my climbing to the attic, then by that feat he, like, overtook me for two years. Of course, neither he, nor I, nor Natasha was capable at that time to put into words such a finicky deduction. We stayed at the level of emotional sensations expressed by interjections like, “Wow, boy!..” or, “Oh-oh, boy!..”