What wise words they were! A pity I understood that too late, after many years had passed.
When we left, I asked Mel why he’d kept away from us. He looked at me with the expression of a torture victim, full of suffering, and said, almost in tears:
‘First you tell me not to speak to him, then I speak to him and you scold me, then I don’t speak to him and you scold me anyway! I give up; for all I care this Borishka might not even exist!’
I laughed, but Borishka was right – it was no laughing matter. And that was something we should have known by then.
When we were about ten years old, we went to the cinema to see a film called The Shield and the Sword. The main character, a Soviet secret agent, appeared in various action scenes, shooting his capitalist enemies with his silenced gun and doing a lot of acrobatics. The guy risked his life as if he were doing something perfectly normal and routine, to combat injustice in the NATO countries. It was a kind of Russian response to the many American and British films about the cold war, where the Soviets were usually portrayed as stupid, incompetent monkeys who played about with the atomic bomb and wanted to destroy the world. We, despite the rule imposed by our elders, had gone to see it in the only cinema in town (they hadn’t yet built the second cinema, which was to have a very short life, because it was destroyed in the 1992 war: the Romanian soldiers took up their positions there, and our fathers, in order to kill them, one night blew the whole complex up, including the restaurant and the ice-cream parlour). Well, at one point in the film the main character jumped off the roof of a very tall building, using a big umbrella as a parachute, and landed comfortably without getting hurt. You could say he did a Mary Poppins.
The next day, without saying anything to anyone, Mel, equipped with a big beach umbrella, jumped off the roof of the central library, a three-storey building, below which there was a pleasant green area full of chestnuts and birches. Crashing down onto a tree, a birch, he managed to break a hand and a leg, knock himself out and impale his stomach on the pole of the umbrella. The result was a sea of blood, his mother in despair, and him having to shuttle from one hospital to another for almost six months.
Taking the piss out of him seemed a good way of getting him to understand where his naivety might lead him. Another time, when we were already fourteen or fifteen, Mel was at my house, and we were making some tea to drink in the sauna. All at once he started blathering about tropical countries, saying that it wouldn’t be bad to live there; he thought it might suit us, because the weather was never cold.
‘There’s too much humidity,’ I told him. ‘It never stops raining. It’s a lousy place. What would we do there?’
‘If it rained we could shelter in a hut. And think about it – on an island you don’t need a car, you can go around on a bike and there’s always a boat available. And the Indians…’
They were all Indians to him. American Indians. He thought the indigenous people of every country always went around on horseback with coloured feathers on their heads and painted faces.
‘…the Indians,’ he went on, ‘are clever people. It would be great to become like them.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I provoked him. ‘They wear their hair long, like homosexuals.’
‘What are you talking about? They’re not homosexuals. It’s just that they don’t have any scissors to cut their hair with. Look,’ he said to me, taking out of his pocket a little plastic figure with faded colours that he always carried about with him – an Indian warrior in a fighting pose, with a knife in his hand. ‘You see? If he’s got a knife he can’t be a homosexual, or they’d never had given him permission to insult a weapon!’
It was funny to see how he applied our Siberian rules to the Indians. He was right, in our culture a ‘cockerel’ – that is, a homosexual – is an outcast: if he isn’t killed he is prevented from having contact with others and forbidden to touch cult objects such as the cross, the knife and the icons.
I had no wish to dismantle his fantasies about the fabulous heterosexual life of Indians. I just wanted a bit of fun. So I tried another angle of attack, teasing him about a subject that he regarded as sacred: food.
‘They don’t make red soup,’ I said in one breath.
Mel became very attentive. He craned his neck:
‘What do you mean, they don’t make soup… What do they eat, then?’
‘Well, actually they don’t have much food; it’s hot there, they don’t need fat to help them resist the cold, they just eat the fruit that grows on the trees, and a few fish…’
‘Fried fish isn’t bad,’ he attempted to defend tropical cuisine.
‘Forget fried fish: they don’t cook anything there, they eat everything raw…’
‘What kind of fruit do they have?’
‘Coconuts.’
‘What are they like?’
‘They’re good.’
‘How do you know?’
‘My uncle’s got a friend in Odessa who’s a sailor. Last week he brought me a coconut with milk inside it.’
‘Milk?’
‘Milk, yes – only it doesn’t come from a cow but from a tree. It’s inside the fruit.’
‘Really? Show me!’ In five seconds he had taken my bait. All I had to do was reel him in.
‘I’m afraid we’ve already eaten the fruit, but if you want to try it I’ve still got a bit of the milk.’
‘Yes, let me try it!’ He was jumping up and down on his chair, so eager was he for this milk.
‘All right, then, I’ll give you some. I put it in the cellar to keep it cool. Wait a couple of seconds and I’ll bring it to you!’
Laughing like a bastard, I went out of the house and over to the toolshed where my grandfather kept all things useful and useless for the house and garden. I picked up an iron cup and put a bit of white filler and some plaster into it. To give the liquid the right density I added a bit of water and some glue for sticking on wall-tiles. I stirred the mixture with the wooden stick that my grandfather used for clearing the pigeons’ nests of their droppings. Then I lovingly carried the magic potion to Mel.
‘Here you are, but don’t drink it all, leave some for the others.’
I should have saved my breath: as soon as he took the cup in his hands, Mel drained it in four gulps. Then he grimaced, and a timid shadow of doubt appeared in his good eye.
‘Maybe it’s gone off a bit in the cellar, I don’t know; it was delicious when we first tried it,’ I said, trying to save the situation.
‘Yes, it must have gone off…’
From that day on I started calling him ‘Chunga-Changa’, and he never understood why.
Chunga-Changa was a cartoon film which was much loved by children in the Soviet Union. It was rather badly drawn, in the style of a communist propaganda poster: all bright colours, figures filled in without any gradations of tone and very stylized, proportions deliberately not respected so as to create an effect like that of a puppet show.
The cartoon promoted friendship among the children of the world through the story of a little Soviet boy who went to visit a little coloured boy on an island called Chunga-Changa. The Soviet boy had a very determined look in his eye (as did all communists and their relatives), a steamship and a very small dog , and he dressed like a sailor. The coloured boy was as black as a moonless night and wore only a kind of skirt made of leaves, and his friends were a monkey and a parrot; other creatures also appeared – a crocodile, a hippopotamus, a zebra, a giraffe and a lion, who all danced together paw in paw, round and round.
The cartoon lasted a quarter of an hour in all, and more than ten minutes of that were taken up by three songs, with a few very short dialogues in between. The song that became famous, and was loved by all the children of the USSR, was the last one. In it, to a cheerful, moving little tune, a female voice sang of the happy, carefree life on the island of Chunga-Changa: