I darted behind the garbage bins. I could see Rustem dashing to the left near the arik. Bogeyman turned too. Then Rustem, without stopping, jumped over the arik, but Uncle Anatoly, running at top speed, plopped into the water.
I groaned. The arik was narrow… Heavy Bogeyman must have hurt himself… but he didn’t. Here he was, wet all over, climbing out of the arik.
To continue chasing Rustem was out of the question. We felt it was inappropriate to laugh. We felt as if we had been doused with water too.
What a strange feeling remorse is. With adults it sometimes works in time to prevent some not quite honest action. A kind of momentary analysis takes place when all pros and cons are pondered. It’s quite different with children, as far as I know. Conscience and remorse begin to torment them after something happens.
That was what happened to us.
The soaking wet Bogeyman stood by the arik looking around. Then he trudged along home.
We also went home without saying a word to each other. We all, even Gennady Oparin, were ill at ease.
That very Bogeyman, or rather Uncle Anatoly, passed away suddenly. It happened approximately a year after we played that cruel prank on him. We would certainly come across Bogeyman from time to time after that, but we tried to avoid him. Then I heard that he had passed away… How – I didn’t know. The circumstances of his death were the subject of heated discussion among residents of our building and the neighboring ones.
Uncle Anatoly was Russian, and Russians, as everyone knows, have the most pompous funerals: music, flowers, and all that, not like the Tatars or the Jews, for example, who wrap a body in a cloth and carry it quietly to the cemetery… For us boys, and probably for the adults too, it was much more interesting to participate in a Russian burial ceremony.
We were looking forward to Uncle Anatoly’s funeral with excitement mixed with no small measure of fear. A person who has passed away is alive in your memory, provided you knew the person. At the same time, a frozen face in a coffin and a terrible, nagging sensation somewhere between your chest and stomach remind you – that’s not him lying there, he’s gone… How is it possible to comprehend that terrible enigma?
The funeral wasn’t held in the morning, but rather in the afternoon, after the end of the school day. It was a sunny autumn day. Our whole group, talking very animatedly, set out for the building where Uncle Anatoly had lived. It wasn’t far, just a fifteen-minute walk. We passed the corner of our building where we had harassed Bogeyman. Here was the arik, the garbage bins… We shouldn’t have done it. There had never been a more harmless alcoholic than he… We looked at each other and grew silent, but not for long because the subject of the conversation was very interesting: what had caused Uncle Anatoly’s death?
“Some people say he poisoned himself with vinegar,” Zhenya Andreyev, my classmate and friend, presented one possibility.
“Deliberately…”
“Stop lying, you’ve gone too far!” Oleg was outraged. “Not deliberately, he simply didn’t have any cash to buy vodka.”
“Oh no,” Vitya Smirnov interrupted. “Bogeyman poisoned himself deliberately, in other words, in-ten-tio-nal-ly… because of his wife. You can be sure of that. It was all because of her. Just imagine drinking that filth…” At this point, Vitya stopped speaking and winced as he imagined himself drinking vinegar. “As you drink it, it burns into you, a living creature, but you continue drinking and telling yourself, ‘I’ll prove to her who I am! I will!’”
We grew silent vividly imagining the horrible scene of Bogeyman’s death. We envisioned him in a new heroic light.
Drawn into this heated discussion, we didn’t notice that we had arrived at our destination. Uncle Anatoly’s building was indistinguishable from ours. An open space spread behind it. Hills could be seen in the distance. Local boys had one advantage – there was a shooting gallery nearby. It was not a portable one in a van but a real military shooting gallery, a very big one, the size of half a soccer field, sunk five meters into the ground. Even we could hear the sounds of shots when members of tank crews practiced shooting their handguns, and the boys from that building sometimes managed to see shooting with their own eyes.
A big crowd, bright with women’s head scarfs, had already gathered at the entrance by the time we arrived. They were expected to bring out the coffin at any moment.
Someone was heard weeping near the entrance. A plump woman clad in a dark dress, her hair hanging down and her tear-stained face swollen, sat on the bench. She rocked from side to side and exclaimed now and then, “You’ve abandoned me, my dear, and I’m all alone.”
Obviously, she was that very Marya, Uncle Anatoly’s wife. We boys had no sympathy for her. We decided that she looked like Baba Yaga (the Wicked Witch). If she had lost some weight, she would have looked exactly like Baba Yaga, disheveled and disgusting; all she needed was a broom to fly on.
Women were fussing around Marya, holding her by the shoulders, trying to console her, but her weeping and cries continued, “Oh-oh-oh, how shall I live alone?”
Zhenya Andreyev shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh yes, now she won’t have anyone to yell at.”
“She’s ruined such a man,” we nodded, utterly ennobling Bogeyman in our imagination, though Rustem suddenly remembered Uncle Anatoly’s insignificant shortcoming and whispered frighteningly to us, “Hey, guys, how will they bury him? He… stinks so terribly.”
We looked at each other, imagining that when they carried out the coffin, the familiar smell, the one we all knew, would fill the air.
“Well, they normally bathe the body,” Zhenya remembered. “Perhaps, it’ll turn out all right.”
Meanwhile, a great many people had gathered at the entrance. Boys, particularly those who, like us, had come without their parents, scurried through the crowd. No one paid attention to them for everybody was occupied in their grippingly interesting conversations. The words “vinegar,” “poisoned,” “while drunk” were frequently heard. Spiritual nourishment, to be further savored and digested, was being cooked up in the crowd. The residents of our mahalla would have a good reason to live tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, even a week later. People would ponder this subject on benches, in pavilions, while playing dominos, at bus stops. Uncle Anatoly’s death would be discussed and embroidered with details and fabrications, turning into a legend, almost a myth.
A wide panorama opened beneath the branches of the oak tree my friends and I had prudently managed to climb. We could observe the sea of swaying heads, bright head scarfs, caps, bald heads, skull caps, boys’ forelocks, girls’ braids. The muffled buzzing of voices now and then drowned out Marya’s lamentations by the entrance.
“They’re bringing him out!” Gennady Oparin shouted.
The crowd froze. The coffin cover was carried out of the building, and, almost immediately after, an open coffin with Uncle Anatoly’s body in it floated out on the shoulders of four men. The coffin was placed on stools.
The shouting became louder. Now, it was not just Marya lamenting. For some reason, all the women joined her cries. Marya rushed to the coffin to hug her husband. She was followed by one woman, then another, and a third. They were all weeping right into the dead man’s ears. We exchanged glances. Did they all love Uncle Anatoly so much? And where had they been before, when he had been drunk and lying on benches?
At last, the women stepped away from the coffin. Someone pulled the wailing Marya away. The men lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and carried it from the entrance. The crowd swayed, lined up and followed. Now came the procession. It moved slowly down the middle of the street. As it pulled even with our tree, we bent down and, motionless on the branches, stared at the coffin, not taking our eyes from it. Here it was, right below us… Who would now call him Bogeyman? He looked so smart in his white shirt and black suit. His light hair, no longer disheveled and stuck together, but neatly combed to the side, gleamed in the sunlight. His well-shaven face was frozen into a meek smile… as if he had done everything himself – bathed, shaved, combed his hair, changed his clothes and then looked at himself in the mirror and, satisfied with his new appearance, lay down quietly and died.