Well? We held our breath. Would it at last pull harder? No, it didn’t. On the contrary, it backed up, and the chain loosened.
“What a silly thing!” We were disappointed. “It could at least try.”
I learned the reason for such strange submissiveness much later. An elephant, when it first arrives at a zoo, is restrained with a thick chain. It can’t break away, but it keeps on trying. It pulls that damned chain, bustles about and trumpets furiously. This desperate struggle for freedom lasts a few months, but then the elephant gradually loses hope. It no longer tries to break away and stops pulling on its chain after half a year, its will broken. At that point, the thick chain is replaced by a lighter one.
I don’t know why that incident is etched so sharply in my memory. I was just a child, and it couldn’t have dawned on me that we humans actually also lived in a zoo and, in a certain sense, we were very much like elephants. We were “trained” in one way or another all the time, inured to subservience. Our will and belief in the possibility of achieving freedom were systematically killed. And when our trainers had succeeded, they allowed us to frolic about on a long leash, for they knew we wouldn’t run away.
Even more amazing is that we did it to each other, to those like us. In other words, some of us are tamers, others – animals. So, what is this thing called humanity all about?
But I digress…
The other animals and birds were not exactly cheerful. Even the peacocks didn’t boast about their splendid tails. They didn’t parade majestically as they often did. It’s not accidental that we sometimes say about a person, ‘proud as a peacock.” We didn’t notice any pride in those peacocks. A bear sat with its mouth open, swaying constantly, back and forth, back and forth. A tiger paced across its cage, from left to right, then from right to left. Only the frivolous monkeys were not distressed in captivity.
We remembered them with pleasure. We were also entertained by a donkey who, for some reason, was in the zoo. It wasn’t in a cage but rather tied to a tree. It was a nice little donkey, with clipped ears and kind eyes. But we made fun of it because, sticking out between its hind legs was… No, it wasn’t its tail, it was another long thing. Something must have agitated the poor donkey. Can you imagine how exciting it was for the boys to see such indecency?
On the way home from the zoo, that was all we talked about, not about how sad the animals were. We also discussed how all the animals were fed. How much fodder was necessary to feed such a huge crowd? We also argued: was it true that the zoo bought donkeys and horses for slaughter from local residents? Somehow, it seemed ridiculous that they would buy animals to feed other animals. It didn’t seem strange to us that we people ate meat and slaughtered animals for that purpose: just a small detail pertaining to the question of how one’s thinking is formed with the aid of one’s habits. We soon went to the zoo again, and this time we learned what the animals were fed. The lion was working over a thick bone, cracking it with its mighty teeth. Was it a goat?
We admired the royal meal – the lion was large with a big mane, the real king of the beasts.
We were about to leave when one of us shouted, “Look!”
We saw the familiar donkey. We recognized it right away: the same kind eyes, the same little ears. Its head was the only thing left of it.
The zoo was coming to Chirchik again. We learned that it would be located close to us, in our neighborhood. We thought that was great luck. The monkeys were a nice entertainment, and we could see the elephant, even though sad, every day. We were impatient to have the zoo back.
Coming home from school, we heard the humming, clinking and roar of engines. There were many trucks in and around the clearing. A crane was unloading them with a rumble… Those were cages. A dozen of them were already in the clearing.
“Why here? Why are they here?” I asked.
I didn’t know whom I was asking, but I thought all the boys understood me. All our puddles, down to the last one, disappeared under the wheels of the trucks and were now under cages. It would make us ecstatic anywhere else, but not here.
There was almost no one but us in the clearing. And we weren’t looking at the animals but rather down, under our feet. What if one puddle with tadpoles had survived? No. There was only earth dug up by wheels, only wet, rumpled, torn up grass.
“Look here,” Vitya Smirnov said. He squatted and looked under a cage. Yes, where there had been our puddle, our breeding farm yesterday, there was now a cage with a bear. The big, brown, shaggy bear hadn’t changed since we last saw it. It was rocking back and forth and nodding its head, its mouth open, exactly as before.
We stepped away from the cage and went home.
We didn’t even listen to the frogs’ concert that night. I heard it later. I was in bed by the open window, and I was falling asleep when I heard the familiar roll call through my drowsiness. It appeared to me in my drowsy state, when I wasn’t quite awake any longer that our tadpoles had survived and that the transformation, which had always amazed us, had already happened, and they had become tiny frogs. How many of them were there? They hopped and hopped from the puddle to the arik, jumping up the grass like little greenish peas. Hey, you, brave little ones! I laughed from joy in my dream. And it seemed to me that those were our grown-up tadpole-frogs singing at the arik. They were singing for me.
“Koo-aa-a! Koo-a-a-a! Hello! Everything’s all right with us!”
Chapter 49. Soldier’s Lake
“You guys are lucky to live close to the hills!”
Vitya Yarosh and Sasha Parkhomenko, the lucky ones, only smiled in response, but their faces were beaming.
The new residential area behind the school where Vitya and Sasha lived was at the very edge of town. There was an abandoned lot beyond it, beyond which hills rose, ridge after ridge. Those ridges, a bit misty, seemed endless when seen from the roof of our building, from which we watched training battles. Many boys envied us too.
However, today the tank school wasn’t holding training. Today we were off to the hills for munitions. On the way there, we picked up Vitya and Sasha, as agreed. They both were sons of officers, so they were considered worldly-wise. They knew where the pillboxes were, where it was better to look for cartridges, and other such things.
We decided to take a hike to the hills yesterday morning on the way to school, maybe because yesterday was a somewhat special May day. It was the kind of day when you longed to go somewhere, to do something unusual.
I was dumbfounded as I stepped out of the building in the morning, perhaps from the smell, most of all. As I stepped off the porch, I was enveloped in a warm, velvet, fragrant wind. It seemed to me that we had never had such a fragrant wind before. I could smell the delicate aroma of cherry trees in bloom, and the sweet scent of roses, along with the pungent acrid smell of herbs coming from the hills.
The spicy, fragrant wind blew from the green hills down through Yubileyny settlement.
It blew on me and rushed farther and farther, up, up, to the spurs of the Tian Shan and beyond them, ignoring borders, throughout the world.
I stood with my face turned toward the wind, breathing, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted nothing but to breathe and look at the trees, from which white petals, like butterflies, fell and flew away, carried by the wind, at the branches on which two black crows sat conversing right above me. They looked kinder than usual, enjoying spring. It seemed to me that their shrill voices sounded milder today, calmer than in winter, that they weren’t arguing but rather talking, that their round hazel eyes, usually malicious, had a kinder look. Here, a flock of noisy sparrows flew off the upper branches. They always argued like bazaar dealers, but today their hum sounded more cheerful, “How warm it is, how nice, how warm is the sun, chiv-chiv-chiv!”