It was Yura, of course. He chuckled and told me that he couldn’t sleep but that I had fallen asleep an hour ago and slept and slept. That was laughable. How could anyone sleep on such a night?
I came to my senses gradually and looked around. Deep down, I agreed with Yura, and my rage faded.
It was vacation, summer, in my favorite old yard where Yura and I usually slept under the apricot tree on the trestle bed near the clay duval (fence). What could be better than spending the night that way?
The night was very still. Only the singing of cicadas could be heard. It wasn’t loud, as if they were afraid to disturb the stillness and only rustled softly in the darkness. The light from the dim bulb over the gate didn’t reach us, lost in the crowns of the trees, but stars shone brightly in the dark velvet sky. There were so many of them – millions, billions. They twinkled, as if having a conversation. Perhaps they were also talking to us, not just among themselves? Maybe it was their rustling we heard, not that of cicadas?
“Yura, can you hear?”
“What? You mean cicadas? What about it?”
“No… That’s the stars twinkling. Listen…” I took Yura’s hand, lifted it up and began to move it in time to the twinkling and rustling. “Listen.”
For a few short moments, Yura diligently tried to understand what I wanted of him, but then he laughed and pulled his hand away.
“You can’t be serious.”
Yura is a realist. The sounds that interest him in the night are quite different. I wasn’t quite truthful when I wrote that only the ringing of cicadas was heard in the stillness. I was so accustomed to all the other sounds that I almost didn’t hear them, for example, chpok-chpok.
The trestle bed stood under the apricot tree. I could see the sky studded with stars through the space between its branches and the roofs of the buildings. Even now, just as it seemed when I was little, it seems to me that these branches supported the firmament. The tree itself was not distinguishable in the dark, but I knew it so well that it seemed to me that I could make out the tree, with its protruding twisted strands of bark winding around its powerful trunk.
It was so mighty that it sometimes seemed to me that this tree had never been small. It hadn’t been growing. Once, it worked its way out of the ground and broke through the wall of the house. Twisted, thick branches covered with leaves stretched in all directions. Grandpa Yoskhaim walked onto the porch one morning and saw the tree. It stood there as if it had always been there.
Our apricot tree was not only powerful and beautiful. It also bore fruit with incredible generosity. All its branches were covered with dark yellow, brown-speckled apricots the size of a small plum. In our parts, dried apricots with pits were called uryuk and dried apricots without pits, kamsa, and cut into two parts, kuraga. No matter what you call them, they’re amazingly sweet and fragrant.
Yura and I ate many, many apricots throughout the summer, a kilogram a day. Of course, we didn’t disregard the sweet and sour cherries, but the apricots had an advantage – we didn’t need to climb the tree to get them. Ripe fruits would fall onto the ground by themselves… though ants and gnats usually beat us. You would bend down to pick up an apricot only to see that they had already covered the most appetizing ones. So, we had to let them have those.
The day would come when Grandma Lisa, who made the tastiest jams and preserves, didn’t have the energy to cope with that abundance. Even Yura and I couldn’t eat them any longer. And then, the wide space, above which the apricot branches extended, would be covered with a carpet of apricots. Tender apricots rot very quickly. Flies and gnats would swarm above them like little clouds. We had to sweep the yard twice a day.
“ValeRY! Yura! There are flies everywhere! Go sweep the yard!”
Grandma Lisa was obviously guided by the rule “those who don’t work don’t eat,” which was all the more justifiable for Yura and me since no one else ate as many apricots as we.
Those were the days when we learned that we had many relatives in Tashkent. They arrived carrying pails and baskets and picked up apricots, even overripe ones for preserves, jams and compotes.
And the apricots continued to fall. No, that tree never ceased to amaze me. Chpok! Chpok! could be heard in the yard day and night.
This was one of those nights. The resounding chpok-chpok seemed especially musical. I didn’t pay attention to it right away, but, as I began to listen carefully, I tried to gauge the rhythm of that monotonous tune and guess when the next chpok-chpok would sound.
Then, quite different sounds reached us from the direction of the house.
Chief, or our Uncle Robert, slept right under the windows of Grandma’s bedroom. Like Yura and me, he preferred to sleep in the yard when it was hot rather than in the company of his pregnant wife Mariya, who was about to have a baby. Chief snored in his sleep, though his snoring was gentle. Grandpa’s mighty snoring rushed out through the open windows, so we didn’t just hear two different types of snoring, but a duet of father and son, a family concert. Kir-r-r-kh-kh-e-rr-rr! – solemn, awesome and bellicose. That was Grandpa. Pikh-k, kh-kh-pp, pi-k-kh – soft and soothing. That was Robert. Chpok-chpok – the apricots’ accompaniment was woven into that music.
“Damn it!” Yura cursed in a whisper. A juicy soft apricot, as was clear from the sound it made, had landed on his head.
I heard the smacking of his lips: the apricot was eaten right away. My cousin wiped his sticky face with the duvet cover. After a night like this, the snow-white bedsheets were often colored grey-brown-crimson. Those were Grandma’s sheets, and Yura thought she wouldn’t mind washing an extra sheet.
Khri-i-k-k-kir-r-r! “P-pi-kh-k-k…” Yura giggled, “That’s some snoring. Can you hear? Grandpa’s gets louder, and Chief sleeps like a log. Nothing falls on his head. Redhead, grab an apricot.”
It didn’t take long to find one. Yura, on his knees, raised his arm and threw an apricot with all his might in the direction from which the snoring was coming. A smacking sound was heard. Judging by the sound, the apricot had hit the wall.
“Missed,” Yura bent down and began groping the ground with his hand. “Just you wait… This one is soft.”
A new projectile was launched in Chief’s direction. The snoring stopped but soon resumed.
Yura hastily picked up yet more projectiles. I couldn’t help laughing. At the same time, I was afraid. We knew Chief’s explosive personality all too well.
“Yura, stop it! Are you out of your mind, Donut?”
I called Yura “Donut” that summer because, even though he had grown, he had put on some extra weight. But the extra weight didn’t affect Yura’s liveliness.
“Ah, you sleepyhead. You’ll wake up now,” he mumbled.
Then he stood up and threw a few apricots at the enemy fortress with all his might. And the fortress blew up.
“Scoundrel! I’ll kill you!” Chief’s shout, or rather roar, was heard.
It was amazing: newly awakened, he immediately understood who the culprit was. Of course, it was his damned nephew, that spineless creature. A stream of swearwords fell on Yura’s head. We listened to them with interest after climbing under the blanket and pretending to be asleep. That was silly. Chief’s yelling could wake up the dead.
We pretended all right, but we watched closely to see if Chief would rush to our trestle bed. We would need a few seconds head start to run away. But obviously Chief wasn’t in a hurry to rush anywhere in the dark. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought that his dear nephew was preparing another dirty trick.