“Who are you waiting for?”
One of the boys, the taller one, sneered and pointed at me:
“Little Jew.”
“Who, who?” Gennady asked. He moved close to the boy and exhaled cigarette smoke into his face. The boy shook his head.
“Well, c’mon… Who’s next?”
None of them moved. It was very quiet. Gennady, who wasn’t tall and was skinny, continued to smoke, shifting his eyes from one boy to another.
“Well…” Herald said. He dropped his cigarette, stomped it into the snow and jabbed that same boy who seemed to be the leader of the group in the chest.
“Would you like to be a pigeon?”
Deathly silence was the answer. They must have heard about the fate of Sokura’s pigeon.
Gennady kept silent a while. Then he spat at the boy’s feet.
“Valery, if anyone bothers you, let me know. Let’s go!”
And we left the schoolyard without looking back.
Kolya, Edem and I, naturally, made up shortly after that. I don’t remember how.
Chapter 47. Boolk-Boolk, or the Day of Delicious Food
“Where’s that damned jar? Perhaps on another shelf?”
I stood on a chair near the shelves on the veranda, hunched up against the winter morning cold, looking for a jar without a lid among the home-canned foods. While my eyes were searching, my imagination continued to draw a different picture, devised during the night.
This quiet winter night, when our whole building, like the whole Yubileyny Settlement, like all of Chirchik, was fast asleep, a deafening rumble was heard… It woke me up, but not quite; rather it was woven into my sleepy dreams. “They’re shooting…It’s war… No, shooting is coming from the tank school where a training exercise is underway.” And then I envisioned a cadet, a tank operator. He must have been dozing in his tank, just like me in my bed. Being only half-awake, he confused north and south and, instead of shooting at the bare hills, shot at the residential area. And a projectile hit our yard and exploded with a crash. I would check in the morning how many windowpanes had been broken.
To tell the truth, these dreams didn’t crop up for the first time this night. My friends and I had imagined that many times, but under much more dramatic circumstances. A projectile hit the building, a fire broke out, moans and shouts were heard, sirens wailed – ambulance, police, firetrucks… Water spurted from hoses. And we boys didn’t panic; we hastened to rescue the wounded. We made our way up the stairs through thick smoke; we knocked down apartment doors and, groping our way, looked for helpless suffocating people in the chaos of smoke and flames and carried them outside on our shoulders.
By the way, I think many adult residents of our town had pondered the possibility of such an accident, without dreaming at all about heroic feats.
Even though I was lost in my dreams, my eyes continued their work, and, at last, the true protagonist of the night’s rumble was found: a jar without a lid. It was absolutely not “the damned jar,” as Mama had called it when she sent me to find it. My attitude toward the jar was much more benevolent, and I didn’t blame it for anything. On the contrary, it looked like a normal jar filled with cherry preserves, which were very tasty though a bit sour. I was going to check it now.
It is quite possible to use one’s finger in emergencies. That’s what I did. I absolutely didn’t need a spoon. It was even tastier with a finger. Adults pretend not to understand that, “How can you do that with your finger? It’s outrageous!” Didn’t they do it when they were kids?
Standing on the chair, hugging the cold jar of preserves, continuing my pleasant occupation, I looked through the window. The sweet stuff warmed me up, and I felt very good.
The day was breaking. In the morning light, I saw what one didn’t often get a chance to admire in our parts because a cold snowy winter in Uzbekistan was a rarity. It hadn’t been cold yesterday. Snow fell, was damp and began to melt. But suddenly, intensely cold weather hit, and all the shrubs and trees turned into icy sculptures covered with a hard, transparent crust. Thin trees bent under it. Did it hurt? I didn’t know, but it was so beautiful. As soon as the sun rose, each branch would begin to glisten, to sparkle with little multicolored iridescent lights as if it were studded with gems.
One shouldn’t eat too much of a good thing, there was considerably less left in the jar now. As I was about to get down from the chair, I spied the handle of a small suitcase sticking out on the upper shelf. I remembered that the suitcase had been sitting on the shelf since we moved to Chirchik. I had meant to check what was in it long ago, but then I forgot about it.
Mama wasn’t yet in the kitchen. Father was on a business trip. I put a small stool on the chair, climbed onto it and pulled the suitcase down carefully. I sat down with the suitcase on the floor, which was wooden but still cold. Opening the tight locks and lifting the cover, I felt like a treasure hunter, my heart was in my throat.
And not for nothing. Something multicolored shone under the cover as if the suitcase were filled with precious stones. Wow, they were so big!
But the happy illusion lasted only a second. There were not stones but rather strange glass objects in the suitcase. They were red, yellow, greenish, transparent, some of them straight and short, others intricately bent, and all of them wide at one of the ends. In a word, they were unusual tubes, and I understood a moment later what kind of tubes they were when I saw a small bottle with a rubber thing, something like a child’s enema bag, attached to its side. Ah, those were Father’s tubes for aerosol which he had used long ago when he had asthma attacks. The tubes had to be attached to a bottle of aerosol and put into his mouth. I didn’t remember how to attach the tubes, but I decided to try.
I picked out one of the more interesting tubes and began to insert it into the neck of the bottle. Crack! “Ah, how clumsy I am!” A fragment of glass cut into my finger. The cut was bad, and I had to run to get iodine and a bandage.
When I returned, I began hiding the fragments on the bottom of the suitcase and was about to put it back onto the shelf: it had nothing to do with me. The edge of a bright book jacket flashed at the bottom of the suitcase, and the aficionado of reading turned out to be stronger than the petty coward. It was strange to find the novels “Runaway” and “Rebels of the Gold Fields” by Jack Lindsay instead of books on basketball in Father’s suitcase. Well, I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure of reading them. The suitcase returned to the upper shelf without the books.
“Are you still here? Without a sweater? Immediately…”
That was Mama. She peeked into the veranda from the kitchen as she was tying up her apron. Closing the cupboard and putting the chair back in its place, I could hear “Mama” sounds that were so pleasant and habituaclass="underline" water running from the faucet, the striking of a match, the clanking of dishes.
“What do you want for breakfast?”
“Eggs Boolk-boolk,” I answered right away.
Eggs cooked according to Mama’s method were considered one of the best family delicacies.
“All right. Then wake Emma up quickly.” Oh, well… The most interesting part was about to begin, something I could watch a hundred times, and here “wake up Emma” interfered.
I rushed into the bedroom and shook my sleeping sister, “Eggs Boolk-boolk are for breakfast! Hurry, or I’ll eat them myself!” And I rushed out as quickly as I had rushed in. I knew that was enough for Emma to jump out of bed: she liked Boolk-boolk as much as I did, and she always feared my treachery. As I was running out of the bedroom, I heard Emma yelp and jump out of bed. Meanwhile, Mama got the little old cast iron cauldron with the flat bottom and the handles that stuck out like ears and rinsed it. That cauldron, old and safe, had served us for many years. She dried it, put it on the stove and poured cotton oil generously into it. She struck a match, and bluish tongues of flame began to lick greedily at the cauldron. While it grew red-hot, while the oil was heating, Mama quickly and skillfully sliced an onion and distributed it among three plates. The oil had already become hot enough; Mama knew exactly when it happened. And at that moment, Mama cracked an egg against the edge of the stove and, after separating the halves of its shell, poured the egg very slowly into the oil. Just one egg since each serving of Boolk-boolk had to be cooked separately.