A black-haired soldier grabbed hold of a white-paint-coated rod in the gate’s grate while floating by behind the glass in the bus window.
I realized with absolute clarity that never again would I ever see the familiar gate of the Zona, neither that unknown soldier next to it, however, one thing I didn’t know yet… It was my way of leaving childhood.
~~~~~
~ ~ ~
The Adolescence
(…and, probably, that’s it. Enough is enough. It is time to roll the potatoes out from among the glowing ashes before they turned firebrands too. Yes, they told me that coals are crammed up with kilocalories, still I am not quite sure about the taste of those critters. Besides, it’s getting pretty dark and I’d rather not overeat at so late an hour. “And leave your dinner”, said some sage dietitian, “to your enemy”. Which is a pretty useless piece of wisdom in my case. Where could I possibly get them those enemies at all? I've been raised and carefully formatted for life in a society where each man is a friend, a comrade, and a brother to any other man…
Damn, but it’s so tempting to share the bullshit you once were fed with (and in ladlefuls too!) up to your ears. So, one day I poured a podcast homily to your step-sister, Lenochka, like, being good and kind is the innate feature of mankind at large, regrettably obscured by their ignorance of how immensely good they are deep inside, a sad pity!
She listened silently and same night my perversive stars flogged me Shakespeare’s “Richard III” on TV. What a treat! She stuck in the tube and watched, mesmerized, how all those good and kind people (sadly, uninformed of their hidden goodness) were strangling and shredding each other and cutting throats for a change. And sure enough, the next morning she watched the rerun too because Shakespeare isn’t a knickknack you can give the shake, it’s classic. Since then, my political line regarding the TV is that of armed neutrality.
Well, so much to emphasize the fact that, if I chance to come across an accidental enemy, I’d sooner give them my last shirt but not my dinner, moreover, the potatoes baked in the fire ashes.
The moment you break their charred crust and pour a pinch of salt into the steamy core, you see the light of Truth that no oysters, nor lobsters, nor any other fancy kulebyaki can hold a candle to them. Oh, no! Not a chance.
For their sake, all freaky nourishment leave willingly I to abstruse gourmets ‘cause we, uncouth and simple-minded garlic eaters, have no use for neither calipash nor calipee – nope! Our modest goal is an ample simple grub and plum dough, we’re not after excessive luxuries.
And were I a younger man but not a Negro advanced in my years and pressed by all kinds of problems which the struggle for life brims with, then to them, and them only, would I dedicate an ode of love and gratitude—to potatoes baked midst the fire ashes.
No wonder, that in the most poignant episode in all the pulp fiction series by Julian Semenov, his main protagonist Stirlitz, aka Soviet secret service agent Isayev, turns up the sleeves of his spiffy Fascist uniform and bakes potatoes in the fireplace of his Berlin apartment to celebrate the Soviet Army and Navy Day.
However, with all due admiration at his culinary patriotism, no, sir, dat’s ain’t da thin’. To really enjoy the taste of baked potatoes, you need to sit on the ground, under the open sky, with an evening like this one here around you…)
In Konotop, Grandma Katya kissed us all, in turn, confusedly, in her kitchen, and cried. So
Mother started comforting her and talking out of snivel, before she noticed two kids’ heads that peeked from behind the door to the room and asked if they were her sister’s children.
“Yes, here we have our Irochka and Valerik. So big kids already. The girl is 3 years old and he will soon be 2.”
When their father, Uncle Tolik, came home from his work, I for the first time saw, not in a movie but in real life, a man with a bald patch extending from the forehead to the back of his head, however, I tried not to ogle too obviously. An hour later he and I went out to meet my Aunt Lyouda. The food store she worked at closed at seven and, coming home, she always carried bags of chow from work.
Walking by the side of Uncle Tolik, I marked the way to the Underpass, which Konotopers were calling Overpass… Some vague recollection retained a long wait in front of a railway barrier, lowered to block off the overpass made of smeared wooden sleepers bridging the gaps between the rail-heads, then the barrier went up stirring agitated commotion in a ruck of people, who rushed from both sides to cross the railway, a couple of horse drawn telega-carts and an odd truck in their midst… That time we were going from Konotop to the Object… In my absence, they built a deep concrete tunnel under the multi-track railway, hence the official name—Underpass—but folks still named it the way they used to—Overpass…
On the other side of the Under-Overpass, long red streetcars were running from City to the Station and back. The Konotop’s central part named “City” was never defined officially so that Konotopers could entertain different ideas about the area’s size and borders but the Station, located within the City limits, did not belong to City, which subtleties I still had to learn.
Before Aunt Lyouda arrived by one of the streetcars from City, Uncle Tolik talked me into coming up to her under the rare lamps over the tilt into the tunnel of Under-Overpass, but he would keep out of sight, and I had to grab one of her bags and ask in a husky voice: “Not too heavy for you, eh?” But she recognized me even though Uncle Tolik had pulled the peak of my cap down to hide my eyes.
The 3 of us walked back to Nezhyn Street, and Uncle Tolik carried the bags loaded by Aunt Lyouda at the store to be squared up for at her payday.
On climbing up out of the Underpass, we crossed Bazaar along the wide aisle between the rows of empty at that hour counters under the tall lean-to roofs above them, like, lined-up abandoned gazebos, and after walking for another 10 minutes, we turned into Nezhyn Street; a couple of distant lights on far-off lampposts in its depth made it look different from the rest, unlighted, streets….
In Konotop, we arrived at the start of the last quarter in the academic year and both I and the twins became students at School 13 which very conveniently stood right opposite Nezhyn Street, across field-stone-cobbled Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street. Old folks called it “Cherevko’s school” because under the Czar, a certain rich man from the nearby village of Podlipnoye, Cherevko was his name, built a brick two-story pub-house, but the then authorities didn’t allow him to operate it because the would-be pub’s stood too near to the only factory in the city, threatening to make drunks of the local working class en masse, so Cherevko donated the building to the city for arranging a school of four classrooms in it… In the Soviet era, the morality of workingmen rocketed up so that the present-day pubs moved two-three times closer to that same industrial unit and “Cherevko’s school” got expanded with a long one-story building in the pronounced barrack style, also of bricks. The addition stretched along a quiet side street slanting toward the Swamp named, interchangeably, the Grove, that separated the village of Podlipnoye from Konotop or vice versa.
Going to school for the first time, I couldn’t get the meaning of canvas pouches hanging-dangling alongside the schoolbags or sizable leatherette folders of the students walking in the same direction.
I was surprised to learn that in those pouches they carried their ink-wells. It felt a little out-of-date because the schoolchildren at the Object had long since started using fountain pens with an inside ink-tank whose capacity allowed for refilling it no oftener than once a week if you did not write too much. Ha! Kinda getting from the era of gasoline engines back to the epoch of post stages, yet the very next morning same pouches did not look as something overly striking anymore.
