When I returned home, the schoolchildren in festive white shirts and red pioneer ties were still walking along Nezhyn Street returning to the Settlement lanes after the demonstration.
And then I committed the first dastardly act in my life. I went out from the wicket of our khutta and wantonly shot with my crook pistol in the guilty of nothing white back of a passer-by boy pioneer. He chased me, but I ran back into the yard up to the kennel of Zhoolka who kept barking and yanking his chain violently, so the boy did not dare come up and only shouted his threats and abuses thru the open wicket…
In summer our parents bought a nanny-goat from Bazaar because when Father received his first payment at the Plant and brought home 74 rubles, Mother, confusedly looking at the money in his hand, asked, “How? Is that all?”
The purchase was meant to make living easier but, in fact, it only complicated life because now I had to walk the white nanny-goat on a rope into Foundry Street or Smithy Street where she grazed the dust-covered grass along the weather-worn fences.
To drink any of the goat milk I refused downright in spite of all Mother's wheedling how hugely beneficial it was for health. After a while, the goat was slaughtered and tenderized into cutlets which I ignored completely…
Sometimes Grandma Katya’s son, Uncle Vadya, came to our khutta in his boiler-oil smeared spetzovka during the midday breaks at the Plant to beg hooch because his colleagues were a-waiting, but his plea seldom succeeded.
Uncle Vadya had a smooth black hair combed back and a toothbrush mustache also black, the skin in his face was of slick olive hue, like that of young Arthur in The Gadfly by Lillian Voynich, and on his right hand he missed the middle finger lost at the beginning of his workingman career.
“I couldn’t get it first. Well, okay, that’s my finger dropped upon the machine tool, but where's the water from that drips on it? A-ha! that’s my tears!” so he recounted the accident. Doctors sewed up the stump very nicely—smooth and no scars at all—so that when he made the fig it came out 2 at once. The double-barreled fig looked very funny and no chance for anyone to ape the trick even remotely.
Uncle Vadya lived in the khutta of his mother-in-law near the Bus Station. There's a special term in Ukrainian for a man living with his in-laws, which is primmuck, aka Adoptee. Bitter is the share of an Adoptee! As reported by Uncle Vadya, a primmuck had to keep quieter than the still water and lower than the grass. His mother-in-law he had to address with “Mommy” and kowtow even to the hens kept by her in the yard, and his duty was washing their legs when they saw it fit to perch for the night…
We all loved Uncle Vadya for he was so funny and kind, and smiling all the time. And he had his special way of greeting, “So, how are you, golden kids?”
At the age of ten, when the German Company Headquarters were just behind the wall—in the Pilluta’s part of the khutta—Vadya Vakimov climbed onto the fence in the backyard and attempted at cutting the cable of the occupants’ telephone connection. The Germans yelled at him but didn’t shoot and kill right on the spot…
When I asked how he dared act in such a heroic way, Uncle Vadya replied that he no longer remembered. However, it’s hardly possible that he wished to become a pioneer partisan posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union, most likely he was allured by the multi-colored wires running inside telephone cables of which you could pleat lots of different ornamental things, even a lush finger-ring…
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On my way to the Nezhyn Store, I was intercepted by a pair of guys riding one bike. First, they overtook me, then the one sitting on the bike rack jumped off to the ground and smacked me in the face. Of course, it was a revolting dishonor, however, though he was half-head shorter than me, I didn’t fight back in fear of his companion who also got off the bike, some brawny tall oaf.
“I told you’ll catch hell!” said the offender and they left. I realized whose back I had shot at with a crook…
The movie shows at Club started at six and eight in the evening. With the tickets bought in the lobby, the film-goer had to climb the straight flight of wide red-painted thick-board steps to the second floor. The tiled landing up there somehow managed to always have kinda murky air despite the two high windows and three doors.
The door to the right opened a small hall with a switched off TV set in front of a dozen short rows of seats, always vacant, and the handrailed flight of steep openwork iron stairs up to the projectionist booth. On both sides of the dead TV, two more big doors led to the huge gym of the Ballet Studio which is not what you need with the cinema tickets in your pocket. So, back again to the tiled landing with two more still unexplored doors.
The first door on the left was always locked because it led to the balcony in the auditorium. And the next, invitingly open door was controlled by everlastingly grim auntie Shura, who stood by in her helmet-like head kerchief, a kinda somber sentry in charge of tearing off the check part in your ticket before letting you in.
The floor inside the vast auditorium had a slight slant towards the wide white screen behind which there was a big stage with two porches and doors by the side walls. For concerts or performances by puppet theater, the cinema screen was drawn to the left wall disclosing the dark-blue plushy velvet of the stage curtains. The open balconies adorned with alabaster swag ran along the sidewalls, yet stopped before reaching the stage. By the rear wall, the balconies sloped steeply from both sides, so as not to block the loopholes of the projectionist booth from where the flicking widening beam streamed to the screen to deliver a movie.
In the lobby on the first floor, next to the windowed door of the ticket office, there hung the list of movies for the current month brush-written in the canvas stretched over a sizable wooden frame. Films changed every day except for Monday when there was no cinema at all. So you could make your choice in advance and know when to ask from Mother twenty kopecks for the show… Summertime annulled the cinema expenses totally because the Plant Park, hidden behind the long dilapidated two-story apartment block that stood above the tilt to the Under-Overpass tunnel, was a great money-saver. In the Park, apart from its three alleys, a locked dance-floor, and the large gazebo of beer pavilion, there also was the open-air cinema behind a pretty tall plank fence with conveniently located gaps and holes in its rear part.
The show began after nine when twilight showed signs of getting denser and, more importantly, if the ticket office on the first floor of the projectionists’ booth managed to sell at least four tickets because the new generation preferred watching films from outside the cinema. However, standing on foot by a hole for an hour and a half, with your nose buried in planks roughed by merciless time and calamitous weather, was not exactly what you’d call a pleasurable recreation. That’s why the film-going guys took advantageous seats in the old apple trees grown by the brick structure of the projectionist booth. If your fork in the tree was too narrow or the bough too bumpy for comfortable sitting, next time you’d be smarter to come earlier and have a better choice from the vacant tree-seats…
The film went on, the warm summer darkness thickened around two or three dim lamps in the Plant Park alleys and the stars peeped from the night sky thru the gaps in the apple tree foliage. On the silver screen, the black-and-white “The Jolly Fellows” with Leonid Utesov kept slapping each other with drums and double basses and at less breathtaking moments you could stretch your hand out and grope among the apple-tree twigs to find, somewhere between the Cassiopeia and Andromeda constellations, a small inedible crab-apple for biting tiny bitter bits off its stone-hard side.