The first one was me, even though I didn’t want to at all. I was sitting in the middle between Kolya and Edem, and they, unexpectedly and treacherously, pushed me off the chair. I thought they were my friends. I had no choice but to go and sit in the barber chair. And while the barber was wrapping a white sheet around my shoulders, I imagined in dismay how the blood would run down it. A scared yet quite likeable little boy with a tidy hairdo, not at all shaggy, looked out at me from the mirror. His eyes were pleading: “Please, don’t do it! It’s a mistake. You have the wrong boy.”
“Which hairstyle do you prefer, young man?” the barber asked with condescending politeness. “I think you’ll go for the one with a forelock.”
I nodded without saying a word. The choice was limited to With a Forelock, Skin Fade and Youth. I wasn’t old enough for the youth style. I didn’t like the skin fade because I would look like a prematurely bald child with a fur cap on my head. With a forelock was the only option left.
The scissors began to snip, the clippers began to buzz, and I became tenser and tenser, cringing as I felt the barber’s fat belly rubbing against my arms. I wanted him to finish quickly. It was too much. I could see the famous forelock on my forehead. It looked like we were done. The barber glanced at the mirror and turned my head from side to side. Now he would set me free, but no, he grabbed the clippers again and began to expose the back of my head. V-v-zh-zh, v-vzh-zh, the clippers rumbled like a car going uphill. It seemed to me that I was about to go deaf, yet the Professor of Barber Affairs continued torturing me. He pushed the clippers hard into the back of my head as if trying to drill into it. Perhaps he had already done so, and now he was scraping it the way you scrape asphalt with a shovel.
I was covered in sweat. My cheeks and ears were on fire. I could see my friends behind me in the mirror. They were shaking with soundless laughter, grabbing the cushions of their chairs with their hands.
Suddenly, everything was quiet. I took a deep breath. I was relieved. That was it. And right away, I lurched forward, as I got a shock, an unbearable burning sensation – the master generously wiped the bare scratched-up back of my head with eau-de-cologne.
I stood up, dumbfounded, and shook my head. I saw a billiard ball rocking first to the right and then to the left in the mirror. The forelock and a small wisp of hair that looked like a little island in the ocean were glued to the top of my head. But my ears were intact, all the more noticeable since they were still on fire.
“Do you like it?” the potbellied master asked with a kind smile. I nodded. If I’d said I didn’t, he might have dragged me back into the chair. I wanted it to stop so I could sit in peace and enjoy the show. It was my friends’ turn now.
After some slight jostling, and without any exchange of words, – Kolya nudged Edem, Edem nudged Kolya – it was Kolya who landed in the master’s chair. Edem rushed to the chair of the novice, which had just become available.
“Skin fade, please,” Kolya requested. He wasn’t amused any longer. He remembered my suffering.
“A skin fade wouldn’t be right for you,” the master answered. “You had a forelock before.”
Kolya was at a loss and, as always in such cases, he twisted his lips to the side and began to mumble something incomprehensible.
“What? A forelock?” Mr. Potbelly responded eagerly. “That’s good!” The scissors immediately began to click. Kolya didn’t even have time to shout “Ow!”
Now it was my turn to have fun. Now I was the one bursting with laughter as the destructive clipper grabbed hold of the back of Kolya’s head. It munched on his light hair like a hungry dog opening a wide path for itself. Aha! Now it was scraping like a shovel. I gazed with malicious pleasure at the back of Kolya’s head and at the mirror in which his tomato-red face was reflected. Now and then, I would cast a glance at Edem, for whom matters were no better – a forelock was already looming on his forehead.
Then three boys were walking home. As they walked, they scratched the shaven backs of their heads. They walked without talking, thinking about the same thing – how tomorrow in the yard and at school, boys would delight in thinking up nicknames for them, repeating the word “forelock” all the time and giving them flicks to their foreheads, which were known as “initiation.” Who knew what else awaited them?
One thing they knew for sure – they would never again go to the new barbershop.
Chapter 19. The Residents of Our Building Gossip, Laugh and Cry
The bench near our entrance was the setting for a kind of court that was continuously in session, where any gossip might turn into a long-running hearing.
But today, as I approached the entrance, I noticed something unusual – there were more than the customary number of adults there. None of them were sitting on the bench. Instead, they were all standing and whispering, and they all looked sad. Sasha Kulikov came out of the building.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said, seeing that I was observing the gathering with surprise. “Haven’t you heard… that Ilyas drowned?”
“Ilyas… today… no, not today. I didn’t see him at school today… I didn’t see him in the yard either.”
Ilyas lived on the fourth floor of our wing of the building. He was a fifth grader. We kids respected him very much, and not just because he was older. All the boys respected Ilyas. Hardly anyone could compete with him when he played soccer in the yard. He was skilled, fast, and frisky. He never bragged about his achievements. He never bragged about anything, and he was very fair, for which he was especially admired. He would halt arguments, even fights, and, on top of that, he would reconcile the boys so that they didn’t ruin a friendship just to nurse a grudge.
Ilyas… How did it happen?
Sasha had heard that Ilyas and his friend Petya supposedly went for a walk by the canal. Ilyas slipped and fell on the concrete edge. He must have been knocked out, slid from the edge into the water and never resurfaced.
We moved closer to listen to what the adults were saying.
The accident had happened the day before, Sunday, in the afternoon. Ilyas’s parents grew anxious when their son didn’t return home by late evening. And his friend – what a pathetic coward he was – was scared and didn’t tell anyone what had happened. Only when Ilyas’s parents called him and began to ask him questions did he break down and tell them the truth. He said he had hoped that Ilyas was playing a joke on him, that he had gotten out of the canal downstream and run home, but he was afraid to find out. Sasha and I were indignant – what a coward he was! What a scoundrel! Ilyas would never have done anything like that!
We discussed the tragic event for some time.
There was always something happening that would attract the attention of everyone in the large apartment building. Our entrance, like the whole building, the whole micro-district, like any other community, called a mahalla in Uzbek, lived from one event to another. The number of people drawn into the whirlwind of an event depended on one thing – the scale of what had happened. Heavy drinking and the escapades of drunkards were basically local events. There were so many drunkards, and their behavior, with rare exceptions, was so predictable and boring that they barely aroused any interest. At least one drunk would inevitably catch one’s eye every day – on a bus, at a movie theater, on a bench near a building entrance, under a bench, or in a dry arik that seemed a particularly cozy place to catch up on one’s sleep.