_{~ ~ ~} The Childhood

The very first notch to sum up my legendary past and start recording in my memory my life events by means of my personal recollections was scratched by the raw morning sun whose glare made me squint and turn my face sideways atop a small grassy mound upon which Mom had pulled me. There we stood, hand in hand, giving way to a black crowd of men marching across our route to kindergarten.

From their advancing mass, they saluted me with cheerful ‘hellos’. My hand raised up didn’t wave back grasped by Mom’s palm, still I felt big, pleased, and proud that my name's so popular among the adult convict-zeks. I never realized then that the amiable attention of zeks on their march sprung from the presence of so young and good-looking mother…

Those zeks were constructing 2 blocks of two-story buildings upon the Gorka upland and after the first block was accomplished, our large family moved into a two-room flat in the uppermost, second, floor in a house of eight-apartments.

All in all, our Block comprised six two-story houses alongside the perimeter of a vast rectangular courtyard. All of the six houses were entered from the courtyard, four longer cranked buildings bounded its corners and had three entrances each, while each of the 2 shorter houses, inserted in 2 opposite sides, had only one. However, it was the presence of those shorties that made rectangular of a mere square. The road of hard concrete ran around Block and its twin under construction both uniting and separating them like loops in 8 or, maybe, ∞.

Allowed to play out, I often left the empty childless Courtyard and crossed the road to get to the block under construction. Zeks working there never discouraged my visiting the site and at the midday breaks they treated me to their balanda soup. The speedy buildup of a stock of expressive embellishments to my—otherwise babyish—talk soon made my parents aware of who were my current gossip milieu and they posthaste entered me to kindergarten.

The Gorka upland, most elevated part in the Object, shared its name to the two blocks atop of it. On all the four across the loop road around the blocks there grew the forest but no tree could ever make it over the concrete in the roadway… When the second of the Gorka blocks was completed, zeks disappeared altogether and all the subsequent construction works at the Object (people around preferred this name to “Mailbox”) were performed by soldiers with black shoulder straps in their uniform, blackstrappers. Apart from them, there also were redstrapper soldiers at the Object but as for their mission there I am not sure up to now…

~ ~ ~

The trail to kindergarten started right behind our house. There was a long straight dirt road tilt towards the gate in the barber wire fence surrounding the Recruit Depot Barracks. Yet before you reached it, a well-trodden path forked off into the Pine forest on the right. Bypassing the fenced barracks and a large black pond under big trees, the path went down thru the thicket of young Fir-trees. The descent ended at a wide clearing midst the forest enclosed by the openwork timber fence to keep the trees away from the two-story building, the hub to the web of narrow walks to separate playgrounds with sandboxes, small teremok-huts constructed of lining boards, see-saws and even a real bus, short but big-nosed. It had no wheels, to make it easy to step inside directly from the ground, but the steering wheel and the seats were all in place.

Coming to the kindergarten, you had to take off your coat and shoes, leave them in your narrow tall locker marked by the picture of two merry cherries on the door and, after changing into slippers, you might climb the stairs to the second floor with 3 big rooms for separate groups and the common, even bigger, dining room.

My kindergarten life was a patchwork of various feelings and sensations. The victorious pride in the noisy locker-room where parents already started to pop up after their children and where, prompted by Mom, I discovered my ability to tie the shoelaces myself, without anyone’s help… The bitter humiliation of defeat from those same shoelaces on that morning when they were drenched, pulled, and made into tight knots and my Mom had to untangle them, distressed that she would be late for her work…

In kindergarten, you never know what awaits you there before Mom or, sometimes, Dad or a neighbor woman will come to take you home… Because while you are there they can catch you unawares and insert a chrome tube-end of a thin rubber hose deep into your nostril and blow in a powder of nasty scratchy smack, or else make you drink a whole tablespoon of pesky fish oil, “Come on! It’s so good for health!”

The most horrible thing when they announce that it is the injection day today. The children will line up towards the table with a loudly clinking steely box on it from where the nurse takes out replaceable needles for her syringe. The closer to the table the tighter the grip of horror. You envy those lucky ones for whom the procedure is already over and they go away from the table pressing a piece of cotton wool to their forearm and boast happily it didn’t hurt. No, not a tad bit!. The children in the line around whisper how good it is that today’s injection is not done under the shoulder blade. That’s the most fearful one…

Saturdays are the best. Besides the usual dinner of hateful bean soup, they give you almost half-glass of sour cream sprinkled with sugar around a teaspoon stuck in. And they do not send children to bed for the “quiet hour”. Instead, the dining room windows are sealed by dark blankets to show filmstrips on the wall. The caretaker reads the white lines of inscription beneath each frame and asks if everyone has reviewed everything in the picture, and only then she drags the next frame in where Zhelezniak the Seaman will capture the iron-clad train of the Whites or a rusty nail will become a brand new one after his visit to the steel furnace, depending on which of the filmstrips the projector was loaded with.

Those Saturday happenings fascinated me—a voice sounding from the darkness, the ladder of thin rays thru the slits in the projector’s tin side, the pictures slowly changing each other on the wall—all brought about a touch of some mysterious secrecy…

I sooner liked kindergarten than otherwise, even though it had certain reefs lying hidden in wait for me to run into. One of such skulkers tripped me up after Dad repaired an alarm clock at home and, handing it back to Mom, announced, “Here you are!. You owe me a bottle now.” Which words, for some reason, delighted me so dearly that I boasted of them in front of children in my kindergarten group which braggadocio was reported by the caretaker to my Mom when she came to take my home in the evening.

On our way home, Mom said I did a shameful thing because a boy should not share outside home everything that goes on among the family. Now, they might think that my Dad was an alcoholic. Was it what I wish? Eh? Was that so very nice? How I hated myself at that moment!.

And in kindergarten it was that, for the first time in my life, I fell in love. However, I did my level best to fight the feeling back. With bitter sadness, I grasped how useless was that love because of the insurmountable—like a bottomless abyss—difference in age between me and the swarthy girl with dark eyes of cherry-berry gleam in them. She was two years younger…

But how unreachable and adult looked the former kindergarten girls who came on a visit there after their first day at school. Clad in festive white aprons, putting on so reserved and mannerly airs, they scarcely deigned to answer the eager questions asked by our group’s caretaker.

The caretakers and other workers at the kindergarten wore white robes, however, not always all of them. Anyway, not the one seated outdoors on a bench next to me allaying my distress. It’s hard to say what exactly it was – a fresh scratch on my knee or a new bump on my forehead, yet as for her name, it was positively Zeena… Her gentle palm was petting my head, and I forgot to cry with my cheek and temple pressed to her left breast. The other cheek and closed eyelids felt the warmth of the sun, I listened to the thuds of her heart beneath the green dress that smelt of summer until there came a shrill call from the building, “Zeena!.”

And at home, we had Grandmother who came from Ryazan because Mom started going to work and there should be someone to look after Sasha and Natasha besides other house-keeping chores. Grandma Martha wore a cotton blouse over a straight skirt nearly reaching the floor and a white blue-dotted kerchief on her head whose large square she folded diagonally to form a big triangle and cover her hair tying the acute angles of the cloth in a loose knot under her round chin…

Mom worked three shifts doing the job of a Watcher at the Pumping Station. And Dad had as many shifts at the Diesel Station. I never learned the location of his workplace but it surely was somewhere in the forest because one day Dad brought a piece of bread wrapped in a newspaper which parcel was given him by a bunny on his way home. “Now, I go home after the shift when – lo! – there's a bunny under a tree, who says, “Here you are, take it to Sehryozha, and Sasha, and Natasha.” The bread from bunny was much more delicious than the bread which Mom sliced for the dinner…

At times the parents’ shifts did not coincide so that one of them was home while the other at work. At one such time, Dad brought me to Mom’s workplace – a squat brick building with a dark green door behind which, just opposite the entrance, there was a small room with a small window high above a big old desk and 2 chairs. But if, bypassing that room, you turned to the left thru a brown door, there would be a huge murky hall full of incessant rumble and with another desk at which Mom sat doing her job.

She didn’t expect us and was so very much surprised. Then she showed me the log under the lamp on her desk because it was her job to enter the time and copy figures from the round manometers’ faces to which there led narrow bridges of iron-sheets all rigged up with handrails because under them everywhere was dark water for the pumps to pump. And it was those pumps to make that terrible noise all the time so that for talking we had to shout loud but even then not all the words were heard, “What!? What!?”

So, we returned to the room by the entrance where Mom took from a drawer in the desk a pencil and some throwaway log with missing pages for me to do some hazy-mazy drawings. I began to draw and was busy but they also stopped talking and only looked at each other though the noise remained back behind the wall. When I finished a big sun, she asked if I wanted to go and play in the yard. I did not want to go out, but then Dad said if I didn’t listen to Mom he never-never would bring me there again anymore, and I went out.

The yard was just the piece of a grass-grown pebble road from the gate to the log shed a bit off the right corner of the Pumping Station. And behind the Station building, there rose a sheer steep overgrown with nettles. I returned to the green door from which a short concrete walk led to the white-washed cube of a small hut without any window and a padlock on the black iron door. Now, what could you play here really indeed?

Two rounded knolls bulged high on either side of the hut, twice taller than it. Grabbing at the long tufts of grass, I climbed the right one. From its height, both roofs, of the hut and Pumping Station, were seen in full but so what? In the opposite direction, beyond the wire fence at the knoll’s foot, there stretched a strip of bush and ran a river sparkling brightly, but I would certainly get punished if I went out of the gate.

For any further playing at all, there remained only the other knoll with a thin tree on its top. I went down to the hut, bypassed it from behind and climbed the second knoll. From up there, everything looked quite the same as from the previous knoll top, only that there you could touch the tree. Hot and sweaty after the climbing, I lay down under it.

What’s that?!. Something stung me at the thigh and then at the other, and then over and over again. I turned around and peeked over my shoulder behind my back. A swarm of red ants was busily bustling about my legs below the shorts of yellow corduroy. I smacked them away but the scorching merciless stings kept increasing in numbers…

Mom jumped out from behind the green door to my wailing, and Dad after her too. He ran up to me and carried me down on his hands. The ants were brushed off, but the swollen, reddened thighs still burned unbearably… And that served me a lesson for the rest of my life – there is no better remedy for the bites of those red beasts than being seated into the sling of the cool green silk in the hem of Mom’s dress stretched taut between her knees.

~ ~ ~

Grandma Martha lived in the same room with us, her three grandchildren, her narrow iron bed stood in the corner to the right from the door, opposite the cumbersome structure of a mighty sofa having upright leatherette back in the frame of varnished wood. The tube-like puffy armrests on the sides of the wide leatherette seat were hinged to let them drop off and get leveled with the seat making it long enough for accommodation of a medium-size basketball player, which was not needed because the twins were bedded in the sofa for the night. At the bottom of the top plank in the back’s frame, there ran a narrow shelf alongside the low strip of mirror inserted above it to reflect the small figurines of white elephant parade lined in a file on the shelf, from the tallest leader to the bantam baby. The elephants had long since lost and the varnished shelf remained empty, except for when we were playing Train constructed of legs-up stools brought from the kitchen and chairs tumbled on their backs, and with the nightfall in the train car, I climbed onto the shelf although its narrowness allowed for stretching on only one your side and to change position you had to go down onto the seat and climb back accordingly.

The Train game became more interesting when Lyda and Yura Zimins, the children of our neighbors, crossed the landing to join us in our room. Then Train became even longer and, sitting inside the up-legged stool-cars, we swayed them with all might and main, so that they tap-tapped against the floor, evoking Grandma’s grumpy orders to stop raging like zealots.

When the games and supper were over, my aluminum folding bed was set up in the center of the room. Mom brought and spread the mattress over it, and a blue oilcloth too, under the sheet, in case I peed in sleep, then a huge pillow, and the thick wool-filled blanket to complete my bed. Grandma Martha turned off the radio box hanging on the left wall by the door and clicked the light switcher. However, the darkness in the room was quite relative – the lights from the windows in the neighboring corner building and from the lampposts in the Courtyard penetrated the tulle mesh of window curtains, and from under the door, there sneaked in a sliver of light from the corridor between the kitchen and the parents’ bedroom.

I watched the dark silhouette of Grandma Martha as she stood by her bed and whispered something up to the ceiling corner above her head. That strange behavior didn’t bother me in the least after Mom's' explanation that it was Grandma Martha’s way of praying to God and that the parents could not allow her to hang an icon in that corner because our Dad was a Party member…

The hardest part of the morning was discovering my stockings. Believe it or not, but even boys in those days wore stockings. Over the underpants, there was donned a special suspender belt with 2 two short rubber straps buttoned on its front. Each strap had a clip-fastener on its hanging end, some gizmo of a rubber nipple squeezed thru a tight-fitting wireframe. You raised the frame to pull a pinch of the stocking top over the nipple which then was forced back into the tight loophole of the wireframe – clip!. Ugh!.

All that harness, of course, was put on me by Mom, however, locating the stockings was my responsibility, and they somehow managed to always find a new place for hiding. Mom would keep urging from the kitchen to come for breakfast, “Can you dress quicker, slow duck?!” Because she, after all, had to be in time for her work, while those meanies were nowhere to dig up… At last – peekaboo! – I spotted the nose of one of them sticking from under the hinged armrest of the sofa with the still sleeping twins. Of course, it called for Mom’s help to pull them out and not to waken Sasha up…

Weary of regular morning earfuls, I found an elegant solution to the problem of disappearing stockings and, with the light in the room switched off already but Grandma Martha still gossiping in whisper with her God, I tied them around my ankles, in secret, separately, one for each. My sister-’n’-brother with their pillows on the opposite armrests of the big sofa were, as always, kicking each other under their common blanket and could not follow my subtle manipulations in the dark. And I was in time to cover my legs when Mom entered our room to kiss her children goodnight. Yet, quite unexpectedly she did something never done before. Mom switched on the light, who lived under the ceiling within the bulb surrounded by the orange shade of silk, lush fringes hanging from the rim let him sleep comfortably in daytime. But now he had to spring at once from his bed and show—as she threw the blanket off my legs—the stocking shackles on each of my ankles. “Something had just pulled me to do it”, she told Dad later with a laugh. I had to untie the stockings and leave them atop the bundle of my other clothes on the chair next to my folding bed and never realize so a brilliant solution…

~ ~ ~

In all fairness, the most unpleasant part in my kindergarten life was going to bed after the midday meal for the “quiet hour”. You had to take off your clothes and put them on a small white stool and, no matter how carefully you did it, at getting up after the “quiet hour” the clothes would be in full mess, and the stocking fastener in one or another garter would stubbornly refuse to do its job.