Perhaps, the most ancient musical instruments were exactly like that.
Somehow or other my “instruments” gradually began to play quite nicely, actually so well, the boys assured me, that it was me the frogs sometimes answered.
Kolya, Edem and Rustem also wanted to learn how to do it. At first, it sounded somewhat like loud farting, but then it began to work. I thought that the boys didn’t attain my level of skill, but still, we could now perform as “the frog choir conducted by Valery the Croakmeister.” The name was devised by Kolya.
Sometimes, we got so carried away that a sleepy angry voice would be heard from one of the verandas, “Damned croakers! Right under our windows! Why should they come hopping around here?”
And we, shaking with laughter, would run home.
Sometimes, we had a roll call with the frogs right near the arik. In summer, we hung around the arik all the time. I cannot adequately explain the place ariks occupied in our life, the charm they lent to Eastern towns. One had to see and feel it in person. I’ll just tell you a bit about the Chirchik ariks.
The network of ariks extended throughout the whole town. It was a very tangled network. Chirchik wasn’t designed and built in a straightforward way. Besides, it was located in the hills. On top of that, there was a vegetable garden near every house, just as in any town in Central Asia, and it was necessary to bring water as close as possible to each of them, or otherwise everything would dry up. In a word, ariks could be found everywhere in Chirchik for dozens of reasons, and one could also hear them. The splashing and quiet babbling of water accompanied you on any street or lane and in every garden. They were such habitual sounds that you ceased noticing them over time. But when you went to a town where there were no ariks, you felt uneasy: something was missing. What a strange town that was.
They were less than a meter wide. Their waters either flowed along the sides of the streets or wound around houses and playgrounds. As an arik approached a wide road, it was sucked with a rumble into a large metal culvert and splashed out of it on the other side of the highway. White foam roiled furiously at the end of the culvert as if the water were boiling. Spray flew out in all directions, rising toward the sky. It seemed that the water had turned into foam and would not flow back into the arik. But no, the foam turned back into water, just as objects that disappeared a moment ago reappear in the hands of a magician.
“The water of the ariks flows so lively,
Gleaming, and bubbling, and ringing at night…”
When I was a boy, this song was already old, and I heard it somewhere by chance. I was very glad I had heard it because the water of the ariks also seemed lively to me. I envisioned ariks as infinitely long snakes, mysterious winding anacondas, arising somewhere out there and slithering to some unknown destination.
In reality, the ariks flowed from the town canal or, to be precise, from the Chirchik, a mountain river that was fed by water from springs and glaciers. First, it was crystal clear, but it became murky in the canal. And it became even murkier in the ariks, even though their banks were made of cement. Water in ariks was not for drinking. It had been used for irrigation since ancient times. Besides, garbage pails were rinsed there, and different household items were washed there, as well as cars and motorcycles. But nobody would turn the ariks into a dump; nobody would throw garbage into them. Ariks were special.
One could say that life in Central Asia without ariks would be impossible. And children there would not be the same without the ariks. Without them, Central Asia would lose its special flavor, something very important.
And what didn’t we do at the ariks? When it was hot, we dipped our feet into them, sprayed water at each other from little bottles, sprinklers. We got water from the ariks when we made khlopushkas [crackers]. We built little dams with locks near them, and through the locks… It’s time to remember one of our favorite water games. It was called “racing little ships.”
First, there was the preparation phase, just as important and interesting as the water game itself. We turned into shipbuilders for a long time, sometimes for the whole summer. Our fleet would diminish disastrously on our turbulent “rivers,” and we had to replenish it over and over.
There was nothing better than pine bark for building ships. It was light, soft, not too brittle and quite thick. We valued this bark because there were few pines in Chirchik, and they grew only in the parks. One of us would strip off as much bark as possible in a park, and our whole team, after arguing and yelling as it was distributed among us, would get down to business.
An outsider would hardly understand what we were busy doing. Squatting or standing on our knees at the entrance to our building, we would rub pieces of bark – which would eventually turn into ships – against the asphalt. Asphalt was a perfect scraper, no worse than a file or sandpaper. It was even better: there were different surfaces in different spots, some rougher, some smoother, and you could choose the one you needed at the moment.
We started by trimming the outer layers of bark, which were uneven and covered with grey growth, by rubbing it on a rough area of the asphalt. We did this until its brown body, delicate, dense, porous and covered with streaks, revealed itself. The longer you rubbed, the stronger the aroma of pine resin it gave off. Then you switched to the next “tool,” the smoothest area of the asphalt. The ship was already taking on its basic features: it would be either a destroyer or a torpedo boat. What didn’t we have in our fleet? Then we moved on to the finishing touches where everything depended on the precision of movement, good memory, and imagination.
“Ea-a-sy! Be careful, don’t press hard. Don’t tear it away, don’t tear it away. All right, one more time. Don’t fuss.”
That was Kolya teaching his brother Sasha shipbuilding. They had a perfect piece of bark, long and quite thick. They had joined efforts to build a destroyer.
I also had a nice piece. It was a bit too wide for a ship, but it would be a pity to cut so much off the bark. I decided to build an airplane, a sort of a sharp-nosed fighter. The fact that my plane would take part in water competition didn’t bother me: it would float no worse than the other vessels. What an original idea! I had to be careful not to break its wings as I ground them smooth.
And I set to work with enthusiasm. The piece of bark, as soon as something resembling wings began to appear on its sides, was turning into a real airplane. It was quite a marvelous plane.
I experienced true creative ecstasy, which may only be experienced by children, and great craftsmen.
Many years later, I made a sad discovery: our ships had been far from the acme of perfection. Boys like us couldn’t possibly realize what true craftsmen were capable of.
At last, I saw and understood that ships of amazing beauty could be cut with the help of a knife or scalpel, or even a razor blade, from pine bark, and, in their final form, they could become works of art… I won’t even mention the ones made of wood.
I was a little sad: why hadn’t we had such skilled craftsmen among us? But, of course, we hadn’t known that we were doing it a primitive way, I thought. When I had been honing my future plane against the asphalt, my joy had been genuine. And that was the most important thing.