I was excited and happy all the way home. I was looking forward to future encounters with Ella, with Zoya’s help, of course. Even though Sveta told me as we were leaving, “Come visit us, Valery,” I wasn’t ready to go by myself. I would have done it with Zoya… I hoped that we would visit that cozy little house together before she went away. And then, I might visit them on my own.
But everything turned out differently.
The next day when I returned from school, I found Zoya in the bed in my parents’ bedroom. No one was at home. Mama and Father worked in the morning. Zoya must have started feeling bad while they were away. Her breathing was hard, and she was wheezing. Her chest rose and fell with difficulty, just as Father’s did during his fits. Yes, she was having an asthma attack. And I remembered that Zoya had once talked with Father about that damn asthma. But it turned out that she also had a bad heart. She lay there, pressing her hand to the left side of her chest. Her face was as pale as the pillow.
“Ambulance…” Zoya whispered. I rushed to the phone.
The ambulance (“Quick aid” in Russian) took a very long time to arrive, and Zoya’s breathing was getting harder and harder. She continued rubbing the left side of her chest. I was seized by fear. What if she died?
Perhaps Zoya sensed it, and maybe her kindness was greater than her fear about her condition for she suddenly asked, “Did you… write down… Ella’s phone number? Call… her… by all means… She’s a nice girl…”
Zoya spent a few days at the hospital, and as soon as she felt a little better, she went home to Samarkand.
I ended up not calling Ella. I kept putting it off. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Zoya, on whom I relied, was no longer around, so I got cold feet.
However, don’t we quite often do things that we regret years later? If I strain my memory, I can recall quite a few others besides not calling Ella…
I saw Zoya again a few years later when, right before our departure for America, Mama and I went to Samarkand to visit the graves of Grandpa Hanan and Grandma Abigai to bid them farewell.
And we visited the Koknareyevs, of course.
We went early in the morning, and no one greeted us. The door to the apartment was open.
An old woman sat on the bed in the living room, combing her long grey hair.
“Come on in, come in,” she said, smiling as soon as we approached the door. Yes, she was smiling and looking at us with her very clear eyes though we knew that she was blind, totally blind.
“Opa, it’s me, Ester,” Mama said.
“We were expecting you. Is Valery with you? I heard the steps… Sit down, sit down. Vera, we have visitors. Where are you?” She said everything so merrily, and her voice was so tender.
Vera, Zoya’s sister, tall, good-looking and also merry, ran into the living room. Zoya who had been out shopping returned almost immediately. Hugging and questions followed. Then we had tea and talked for a long time, naturally, most of all about us and our departure. I felt so nice at their place; it was so easy to breathe there. A breeze that blew slightly through the open door from the yard seemed especially gentle and mild. Now, my idea about how the life of Zoya, her sister and their mother was hopeless seemed utterly unreasonable to me. The three of them were actually very happy.
I suddenly understood that, saw it from a different perspective, and my opinion changed. As Mama and I were returning home from the Koknareyevs’, I pondered how one’s perception of another person’s life could be quite wrong. Given an opportunity to have a closer look at it, you could learn something quite different… That’s how I learned about their life that day.
Later, when we were already living in America, we learned that Zoya’s mother had passed away soon after our visit, and Zoya had departed this world soon after her. She was only forty-two.
Chapter 61. Hebrew Lessons
“Alef, bet, vet, gimmel…”
Grandpa and I sat at the table set for breakfast. The choyi kaimoki smelled delicious, and Grandpa, bent over his bowl, munched so appetizingly that my mouth was constantly watering as I pronounced the letters of the difficult Jewish alphabet rather indistinctly. It was Grandpa’s idea to teach me while he was having breakfast. He assumed that I could have breakfast later, but he had to leave for work. If he didn’t have a better time to do it, he shouldn’t have started the whole thing at all. However, it had been my fault.
“Alef, bet, vet, gimmel…”
Grandpa bent his ear with his fingers and inclined toward me, thus demonstrating his attitude about my pronouncing the letters so softly and incorrectly, without due respect for “the sacred language.” That’s how Grandpa always called Hebrew. You say you don’t hear – so take this! “Gimmel!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
So how did it happen? Why did I agree to have lessons in a language I was absolutely not interested in? Not just the language but reading for Grandpa, who himself didn’t know Hebrew. He could read, but he didn’t understand the meaning of what he read. However, I think the fingers on both hands would be sufficient to count the Jews in Tashkent and Central Asia who were actually fluent in Hebrew in those years. And there weren’t even very many people who could just read Hebrew, like Grandpa. It wasn’t surprising that Grandpa was quite satisfied with what he knew. And if he was reproached for not understanding the subject matter of the prayers, he answered with conviction, “One doesn’t need to understand but rather to feel.”
Yura and I made fun of this quite a lot, but the day eventually came when both of us began to learn Hebrew exactly the same way.
Yura was the first. He was twelve, and, to my great surprise, I heard that my cousin was getting ready to be bar mitzvahed. That’s why he studied Hebrew with a teacher.
Of course, I knew what a Bar Mitzvah was. After all, I was growing up among Jewish relatives. I knew that when a Jewish boy turned thirteen, he became an adult and had to observe Jewish law, the commandments. Bar Mitzvah means “Son of Commandments.” However, at that time, we thought that Bar Mitzvah was the name of the ceremony, of the celebration. Even now many people think that way.
When I learned that Yura was getting ready for that solemn ritual, I was terribly amused. Yura was so childish he couldn’t sit still for a second, and he would be called a Bar Mitzvah. That was very funny. Did this fidgety prankster really study with a teacher? Did he really sit face to face with him and study diligently? It couldn’t be true! He was always doing something foolish, even in class at school. And no teacher would tolerate him at home; he would run away and not look back.
When I went to Tashkent during my fall vacation, I rushed to see Yura right away… He would be the first to welcome me in Grandpa’s yard, but, to my great distress, Yura no longer lived there. There had been a fire in their house at dawn one day in early spring. It had begun when everybody was still asleep. Unfortunately, Uncle Misha was out of town at the time. By some miracle Valya and the kids had managed to escape. Firefighters in Tashkent are not known for their speed and skill. As it had taken them time to arrive and connect the water, the house burned down with almost all their belongings inside. Made homeless by the fire, they had had to find a different place to live.
Now, during summer vacation we didn’t spend all our days from morning till night together. As it happened, we wouldn’t see each other for days in a row. Still, we had a nice summer together. Yura, as always, was tireless when it came to concocting activities and daring pranks.