the most final
concluding work

Grandma Katya knew the way of tying a usual handkerchief into a fatty mouse with ears and a tail, which she put onto her palm to pet the white head with a finger of her other hand. All of a sudden the mouse would leap in a desperate escape attempt, but Grandma Katya caught it on the fly, put back and went on petting, under our eager laughter. Of course, I realized that it was her who pushed the mouse, but following the trick, as closely as possible, I could never crack how she did that.

Each evening she hauled out the pail of sourly smelling slop with peelings, scraps, and offals to her section in the mutual shed, where pig Masha greeted her by upbeat impatient grunting. There Grandma Katya would stand over slurping Masha accusing her of one or other act of blatant misbehavior.

She showed us which of the vegetable beds and trees in the garden were hers so that we did not play around with the neighbors’ because there was no fencing to split the plots. However, the apples were not ripe yet and I climbed the tree of White Mulberry, though Grandma Katya warned that I was too heavy for such a young tree. And indeed, one day it broke under me in two. I dreaded the pending punishment, but Dad did not beat me. He pressed the halves of the split tree back to each other wrapping tight with a length of some sheer yellowish cable. And Grandma Katya never said a scathing word.

That evening she shared that the pig refused to eat anything at all and knocked the pail over because the animal was too clever and felt that the next day they would slaughter her. In the morning, when the butcher came, Grandma Katya left her khutta, and only after that they pulled frantically screaming Masha out of her enclosure, chased about the yard and slaughtered with a long knife to pierce the pig’s heart and her high-pitched squeal turned into wheezy snorts growing shorter and shorter. Throughout that time, Mom kept us, her children, in the khutta, and she allowed me to go out only when they were scorching the motionless it by the buzzing flame of blowtorch.

At Aunt Lyoudmilla’s wedding, plates with sliced lard and fried cutlets, and dishes of chilled-out pork jelly cluttered the long table in the yard. One of the guests volunteered to teach the bride how to stuff a home-made sausage, but she refused and the merry guests laughed out loud….

In general, I liked Konotop although I felt sorry for Masha and ashamed of splitting the Mulberry tree. For some reason, I even found likable the taste of the cornbread. Everyone was cursing it but still buying because Nikita Khrushchev declared Corn the Queen of the fields and at shops they sold only bread made of cornflower…

Back to the Object we also were coming by train but the road seemed so much longer. I felt sick and dizzy until eventually there was found a window in the car where you could stick your head out into the wind. Clinging to that window, I watched as the green string of cars in our train, keeping a constant bent about its middle, rolled around the green field. It was easy to figure out that our journey became so endless because the train was describing one huge circle in one and the same field with random copses added here and there. At one of the stops, Dad left the car and did not come back at the departure. I was scared that we would remain without our Dad, and started to whine pitifully. But a few minutes later, he appeared along the car aisle, carrying ice-cream because of which he lingered on the platform and jumped into another car of the departing train…

~ ~ ~

That year my younger sister and brother also went to school and at the end of August, Dad, angrily red-faced, was taking Grandma Martha to the station of Bologoye to help her change trains to Ryazan.

When saying “goodbye”, she sobbed a little until Dad snarled: “Again? Started again!.”

Then she kissed all of us, her grandkids, and was gone from my life…

Across the road opposite the corner buildings of our Block, there was a grocery store and, after Grandma Martha had left, Mom was sending me there for small purchases, like, bread, matches, salt or vegetable oil. More important products she bought herself—meat, potatoes, sore cream or chocolate butter. For holiday celebrations, large-beaded red or smaller-beaded black caviar was also bought because the Object was well catered for. And only ice-cream appeared at the store no sooner than once a month and was immediately sold out. As for the tasty cornbread, I never saw it on sale there.

To the right from the store, near the bend in the road around the blocks, the wall of the forest was slightly cleft by a narrow glade, where the car repair ramp constructed of sturdy logs provided another gathering place for children to play.

“To the ramp!” called a familiar boy running by. “They’ve caught a hedgehog there!”

All the hedgehogs seen by me up to that moment were only met in the pictures, so I also hurried to the scream-and-shouting group of boys. With the sticks in their hands, they checked the animal’s attempts at fleeing to the forest, and when the hedgehog turned into a defensive ball of gray-brown needles, they rolled it pushing with the same sticks into a small brook. In the water, the hedgehog unfolded, stuck his sharp muzzle with the black blob of the nose out from under the needles, and tried to escape thru the grass on his short crooked legs. Yet, he was spread on the ground and firmly pressed across his belly with a stick to prevent his folding up again.

“Look!” shouted one of the boys. “He’s constipated! Cannot shit!” To prove the statement, the boy poked a stalk of some rank grass into a dark bulge between the animal’s hind legs.

“The turd is too hard. He needs help.”

I recollected how Grandma Martha saved me.

Someone in the company had pliers in his pocket, the patient was crucified on the earth with a couple of additional sticks and the self-proclaimed vet pulled the jammed turd with the pliers. The turd, however, did not end and turned out having a strange bluish-white color.

“Damn fool! You tore his guts out!” cried another boy.

The hedgehog was set free and once again made for the forest dragging behind the pulled out part of the intestine. All followed to see the outcome.

I didn’t want any more of all that and, fortunately, my sister came to the rescue running from the Block to say that Mom was calling me. Without the slightest delay, I left the party of boys and hurried after her to the Courtyard. There I talked to Mom, greeted neighbors, ran some errand and all the time was thinking one and the same thought formulated in an oddly crisp, not childish way, “How to live on now, after what I’ve just seen? How to live on?”

When you are a child, there is no time to look behind at all those series back in your memory. You have to go on—farther and beyond—to new discoveries. If only you’ve got the nerve to keep the course.

Once, slightly veering to the left from the accustomed “school—home” route, I went deeper into the broad-leaf part of the forest to come, on a gently rising hillock, across 4 tall Pine trees that grew a couple of meters apart from each other, in the corners of an almost regular square. The smooth wide columns of their trunks without branches nearer to the ground went upwards and at the height of six to seven meters were bridged by a platform you could reach climbing up the crossbeams cut of thick boughs and nailed to one of the trees, like rungs in a vertical ladder … I never found out the purpose of the contraption, nor who it was made by. All I learned was it’s not a fraidy-cat to climb a platform in the forest even if discovered by himself…

Much easier went on the exploration of the basement world. I was going down there together with Dad to fetch the firewood for Titan the Boiler who heated the water for bathing.

Because all the bulbs in the basement corridors were missing, Dad brought along the flashlight with the spring lever protruding from its belly. When you squeezed the flashlight in your hand, the springy lever resisted yet yielded and went inside, you loosened the grip and it popped out again. A couple of such pumping rounds awoke a small dynamo-machine buzzing inside the handle to produce the current for the lamp as long as you kept pushing-loosing the lever, and the faster you did it, the brighter was your flashlight.

A circle of light hopped along the walls and cemented floor in the left corridor of the basement with our section at the very end of it. The walls in the narrow corridor were made of boards and so were the sections’ doors locked with weighty padlocks.

Behind our door, there was a square room with two concrete walls and the timber partition from the neighboring section.

Dad unlocked the padlock and turned on the inside bulb whose crude light flooded the high stack of evenly sawed logs by the wall opposite the door, and all sorts of household things hanging from the walls or piled on shelves: the sled, the tools, the skies.

After a couple of plump logs were chopped with the ax, I collected the chips for kindling Titan the Boiler and a few thicker splinters, while Dad grabbed a whole armful of firewood.

Sometimes, he was tinkering at something or sawing in our basement section and I, bored with waiting, would go out in the corridor where a narrow grated ditch middle-lined the cemented floor. Thru the open door, the bulb threw a clear rectangle of light on the opposite section wall while the far end of the corridor, from where we had come, was lost in the dark. But I was not afraid of anything because behind my back Dad was working in his old black sailor’s pea jacket with two upright rows of copper buttons in its front each bearing a brave neatly embossed anchor….

~ ~ ~