Then the noise little by little abated, the hallway door clicked behind departing auntie Paulyna. From the parents’ bedroom there came the sound of mop taps as at the floor washing, from time to time the splash of water poured down into the bowl was heard from the toilet room.
The door opened. Mom stood there with a wide seaman belt in her hand. “Come here!” she called without giving any name, but the 3 of us knew perfectly well who was summoned.
And then there reigned silence—some complete, suspended, silence… I stood up and went to catch hell… We met in the middle of the room, under the silk shade from the ceiling. “Don’t you ever dare, you, piece of a rascal!” she said and swayed the belt.
I cringed. The slap fell on the shoulder. It was just a slap, not a blow – no pain at all. Mom turned around and left. I was stunned by so light a punishment. It’s nothing compared to what I’d be surely shown by Dad when he comes home from work and sees the bandaged hands of Grandma after applying vegetable oil to the burns…
When the door clicked in the hallway and Dad’s voice said, “What the… er… What happened here?”, Mom hurried over there from the kitchen. All that she said was not heard but I made out these words, “I’ve already punished him, Kolya.”
Dad went into the parents’ bedroom to estimate the damage and very soon entered our room. “Ew, you!” was all he told me.
For a few days, the apartment had a strong smell of smoke. The runner from the parents’ bedroom was cut up into smaller pieces. The remnants of the tulle curtain and burned bed were taken out to the garbage enclosure across the road. A couple of years later I could read already and whenever coming across a matchbox with the warning sticker: “Keep matches away from children!”, I knew that it was about me too…
~ ~ ~
This question puzzles me till now: what at that tender age made me so cocksure that in future they would be writing books about me. The certainty was spiced by a pepper-hot pinch of shame that set my cheeks a-glow at the thought that future writers when touching my childhood years would have to admit frankly that, yes, even being a big boy, a first-grader actually, I sometimes peed in bed at night, though Dad just couldn’t hold back his exasperation because at my age he no longer made puddles in his bed. Never!
Or take that terrible occurrence when on the way from school my tummy got squeezed by unbearable colic which made me run home to the toilet room, but there everything stopped halfway, in spite of all my straining, until Grandma, terrified by my heartrending howls, rushed from the kitchen to the toilet and, snatching a piece of newspaper from the bag on the wall, ripped the stubborn turd out.
Who would ever dare write things like that in a book?!..
(…already in another—my present—life the current wife of mine, Sahtic, went to a fortune teller in the war-destroyed city of Shushi when our son Ahshaut fled the local army because of harassment by his company commander and regular beating up at the guardhouse.
In the year of Ahshaut’s birth, the USSR was ripping apart at all seams, some new life was promising to start, instilling hope that before he grew of age there would be no army drafts but only contract enrollment of volunteers. And why not? “You never know the Devils’ next joke,” quoting a Russian byword. Well, in my dream’s case, the SOB was not in the mood for joking.
The commander of the company, handled Chokha, picked on Ahshaut because of his own dissatisfaction with the unfair arrangement of life—after the Karabakh war his combat bros became generals with hanging stomachs and personal Jeeps equipped with drivers while he, Chokha, was still rotting at the front line.
After Ahshaut was missing for eight days, Sahtic went to Shushi, to the popular fortune-teller who assured her that everything would be alright. And so it happened. Ahshaut came home, we took him back to the place of his service, to higher ranked officers in the chain of command than Captain Chokha, and our boy was transferred to another regiment, in a hotter spot, where he served the remaining year, though already without the sergeant stripes in his shoulder straps…
So then, in the process of seeing the future, the seer shared additional information, kinda a bonus for turning to her, that my Grandma, though in the other world already, was ill at ease on my behalf and lighting up a candle on her behalf in this here world would relieve her over there. My Grandma’s name (so the fortune teller) was almost like that of Maria, only a little different…
I was utterly flabbergasted by the accuracy of the extrasensory guess. Maria and Martha are indeed very similar names of the two sisters from the Gospel. Leo Taxil assures that even Jesus Himself sometimes confused the chicks…
And when my Grandma turned 98, she also began to forget her own name. On such days she sought her daughter’s help, “Lyaksandra, I keep wondering lately—what could my name be?”
Well, yes, Aunt Alexandra was also a good sort, “Oy, Mom! But I can't recollect either! May it be, Anyuta?”
“No … Somehow different it was…”
And three days later she would triumphantly announce to her daughter, “I remembered! Martha, I am. Martha!.”
No wonder the fortune teller couldn’t deliver her exact name…
However, by this flashforward, I jumped ahead way too much because it’s me who had to serve in the army first, but in this here letter to you, I’m still at the kindergarten senior group.
I think I’d better turn off the tap that pours profound hooey on infantile megalomania, and return to the period when kindergarten was completing its share in the formation of my personality…)
Now, back to the pivotal 1961… What is remarkable about it (besides my graduating the senior group at the Object’s kindergarten)?
Well, firstly, whichever way you somersault this figure it'll still remain “1961”.
Additionally, in April the usual flow of programs from the radio on the wall in our room cut off yet didn’t die transmitting static for quite a while before the toll-like voice of Levitan chimed out that in an hour there would be read an important government declaration. Grandma started sighing and stealthily crossing herself… However, at the appointed time when all of the family gathered in the children’s room, Levitan gleefully announced the first manned spaceflight by our countryman Yuri Gagarin who in 108 minutes flew around the globe and opened a new era in the history of mankind.
In Moscow and other big-time cities of the Soviet Union, people walked the streets in an unplanned demonstration, straight from their workplaces, in robes and overalls, some carrying large paper sheets of handmade placards: “We are the first! Hooray!” And at the Object in our children’s room full of bravura marches by orchestras from the radio on the wall, Dad was impatiently driving it home to Mom and Grandma, “Well, and so what’s not clear, eh?! They put him on a rocket and he flew around!”
The special plane with Yuri Gagarin on board was nearing Moscow and, still in the air, he got promoted from Lieutenant straight to Major. Fortunately, the plane had a stock of military outfit and at the airport he descended the airplane stairs with a big star in each of the shoulder straps of his light-gray officer’s greatcoat to march in parade step, fine and proper, along the carpet runner stretched from the plane to the government in raincoats and hats. The laces in his polished shoes somehow untied on the way and whipped by this or that loose end the carpet runner at each stomping step, but he did not lose his demeanor and in the general jubilation no one even noticed them.
(…many years later watching the footage of the familiar newsreel, I suddenly saw them though before that as, probably, all other viewers, I could only stare at his face and the well-trained marching in.