We went out to the road with the streaks of melting black tar over the joints of concrete slabs in the road surface. I knew that road which went down from the Gorka blocks towards the House of Officers. We did not follow it though and only crossed into the thicket of supple bushes cut with a narrow trail which brought us to a house of gray logs with a sign hanging above its door for those who could read.
The boys did not go any farther. They started dawdling aimlessly between the bushes and the weathered-gray logs in the house walls until an adult unclie came out of the door and crossly ordered us away. Our leader answered his parents sent him to pick up the newspapers and mail, but the unclie grew even more angry, and I went home well taught what they mean by mentioning the Where-Where Mountains…
Yet, I still believed that adventures and travels would certainly come my way and getting ready for them was the must. That’s why, spotting a maverick box of matches upon the kitchen table, I grabbed it without a moment’s hesitation or delay—you have to train yourself to get the knack at vital arts, right?
A couple of initial attempts proved that lighting a match against its box side was something easy indeed. And there at once popped up the urge to proudly demonstrate to someone my newly acquired skills. Who to? To Sasha and Natasha, sure thing, they would be much more impressed than Grandma. Besides, my authority by them called for repair and restoration after all the recent flops.
(…however, this list of motives is made by me in hindsight, from the immeasurably distant future—my current present over this here fire loaded with potatoes to bake.
But then, in that immeasurably distant past, without any philosophizing and logical justifications, I perfectly knew that…)
I should call the younger ones to some hide-out and show them my apt control of the fire. The most suitable place was, of course, under the parents’ bed in their room, where we crawled in the Indian file. At the sight of matches in my hands Natasha oh-ohed in a warning whisper. Sasha kept silent and watched the process closely.
The first match caught fire but went out too soon. The second developed a good flame, yet all of a sudden it swayed too close to the mesh of tulle bed cover hanging down by the wall. The narrow tip of the fire bent forward, the upturned icicle of yellow flame burst thru the tulle forming a black, ever-widening, gap. For some time I watched the scene before I guessed its meaning and shouted to my sister-’n’-brother, “Fire! Run away! Fire!” But those little fools stayed where they were and only boohooed in duet.
I got out from under the bed and ran across the landing to the Zimins’ where my Mom and Grandma were sitting in the kitchen of Paulyna Zimin over the tea she treated them to. On my skimble-skamble announcement of fire alarm, the three women dashed across the landing. I was the last to reach our apartment.
Under the ceiling of the hallway, leisurely revolved fat curls of yellowish smoke. The bedroom door stood open to the show of half-meter-tall flames of fire dancing merrily upon the parents’ bed. The room was filled with a white-blue mist and somewhere within it, the twins were still howling.
Grandma pulled the mattress and all from the bed down to the floor and joined the number with the brisk step by her slippers over the fire accompanying the lively kicks by loud calls to her God. Mom yelled to Sasha and Natasha to get out from under the bed mesh. The fire jumped over onto the tulle curtain of the balcony door and Grandma pulled it down with her bare hands. In the kitchen, Paulyna Zimin rattled the saucepans against the sink filling them with water from the tap. Mom took the twins to the children’s room, came running back, and told me to go over there too.
We sat on the big sofa silent, heeding the to-and-fro racing in the corridor, uninterrupted swish of water from the tap in the kitchen, the stray exclamations of the women. What now?
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…
