Everything Begins In Childhood

Late at night, Grandpa would return home transformed. He smelled of cleanliness, the barber shop and something pleasant. His cheeks, scorched by the heat of the bathhouse, would glow. His fluffy snow-white beard framed his face. His shaved head looked as if it had been polished. It emitted radiance and seemed almost transparent, with Grandpa’s mind shining through it.

It was clear that ablution of Grandpa’s head at home couldn’t produce such wonderful results. Besides, Grandpa Yoskhaim would be in a good mood for a long time after a visit to the bathhouse.

But still, the decision to build the hammom was made. Robert insisted on having it his way.

Robert was the only member of the family who undertook improvements in the house and yard. His mind was always brimming with plans, which he was impatient to implement.

Now he had the idea to pave the whole yard, now to replace the roof, which was full of holes, or to build a little bathhouse, as he was trying to do now. All of his projects required financing. That’s where the serious difficulties arose.

Robert was willing to plan a project out from beginning to end. He was ready to put his work into it, but alas, as a practical matter, he couldn’t invest any money. He had begun working only recently. The only person who could give him money was Grandpa Yoskhaim. I’ve already described the agony Grandpa suffered when his purse was encroached upon.

When Grandma Lisa demanded money for shopping at the bazaar, he could understand that for he liked to eat well. They would argue, and he would exclaim “Just look at her!” but he would give her money. However, he sincerely considered these assorted improvements to the house and yard to be total nonsense. It seemed to me that Grandpa would have been quite comfortable in a cave, provided he had an armful of straw, a pair of drawers and an alarm clock. That’s why every time Robert had a new idea, the first stage would be a long battle, to be precise, an attempt to lay siege to the fortress known as “Grandpa Yoskhaim.”

That’s how it usually started. The family would gather practically en masse for dinner. Apart from the grandparents and Robert, there might be other brothers and sisters, and sometimes we children, at the table. At some point, Robert would begin talking to everybody loudly and animatedly so that Grandpa could hear, “I stopped at a friend’s place the other day and happened to see…”

“Happened to see” was the main point of his story. Robert thought that, firstly, he wouldn’t be suspected of coming up with the idea himself, and secondly, he wanted to plant the idea in Grandpa’s mind that others had that wonderful innovation, and we didn’t.

Or course, Grandpa easily discerned his intention. It wasn’t that difficult, since Robert never came up with new methods of laying “siege to the fortress.” Maybe he hoped that Grandpa had a bad memory. Alas, he was mistaken. After hearing “happened to see,” Grandpa could figure out right away that his beloved son was plotting something again, and he usually began his “I can’t hear” defense. He would bend lower over his plate, pretending that he was completely engrossed in his food, that he couldn’t hear and didn’t want to hear anything, though his beard would start to twitch sharply with indignation, too sharply for a person who was enjoying his dinner in peace.

After losing the first round, Robert would switch to a direct attack.

“Papa, have you heard? Isn’t it great? We should do it too, right?”

After that, Grandpa, like it or not, had to answer. And he always deflected it blow by a blow in the same way, “Az pool gap zan!” It meant roughly “just start the conversation talking about money.” But it could also be translated as “Don’t waste time. Say exactly how much it will cost.”

That’s when things would become very difficult for poor Robert. He knew what would follow and tried to delay the unpleasant moment. No matter how much he described in glowing terms the advantages that could be enjoyed by all the members of the family after, for example, the yard was paved or a bathhouse built, Grandpa would repeat over again, “Az pool gap zan!”

In the end, Robert would give in. “It will cost…” and he gave an obviously understated figure. “So, do you see how inexpensive it is?”

However, Grandpa would hear nothing more. He would eat without haste, groaning slightly. Then he would lean back and, stroking his full belly, at last tell his son that he didn’t think there was any need for another innovation.

I would like to repeat that Grandpa wasn’t pretending. For a man who sat in his wooden cobbler’s booth even on the coldest of days, the idea of building a winter bathhouse seemed utterly ridiculous. Why spend so much money? What was wrong with the public bathhouse?

After decisively expressing his opinion, Grandpa would take the prayer book in his hands and begin to thank the Almighty for giving food to him and his family yet another time.

This was the way he demonstrated unequivocally that the meal was over, and the conversation as well.

But Robert still had one more method. It was tried and true – make his mother his ally. She was an experienced and mighty fighter. Grandpa couldn’t resist her attacks.

“Yoskhaim, Robert’s right. Don’t be stubborn. Give your son the money,” Grandma would declare decisively.

Of course, Grandpa wouldn’t give in right away, but he understood that, sooner or later, Grandma Lisa would manage to convince him or, to be precise, force him, and he would answer glumly, “I’ll think about it.”

That’s how Robert invariably got things done his way.

* * *

V-zh-zh-i-i-ck, v-zh-zh-i-i-ck – the wheels of the handcart squeaked slowly. I was delivering bricks with it. They were stacked near the storage room close to Yura’s house. I didn’t know who had brought them there or when, but one thing was clear – those bricks had already served people, and they had served them for a long time. I would say that those bricks, which were bigger and thicker than most, were dingy. They were covered with gray splotches of dried-out mortar; their natural color had grown pale, and some edges and corners were broken off.

I hauled the bricks to our former abode, to the place where the small storage room once was, where we had stored coal. Now Robert lived there, and the storage room was gone, to be replaced by the winter bathhouse.

We had been working since early in the morning; it was past noon now. Intense heat was blazing. And, as always, the inhabitants of the yard had hidden wherever they could. Only I dragged myself along, pushing the heavy, squeaky handcart. Drops of sweat clouded my vision. It seemed to me that they began to boil on my forehead and cheeks, and my blood was boiling along with them.

“Yura must be swimming in the Issyk-Kul… in cool water… not too shabby… and I’m swimming in my own sweat here.” That was my reasoning on the unfairness of this world, rubbing salt into the wounds of my soul. Meanwhile, the treacherous handcart ran into a pebble, tilted, and the bricks, arranged in four layers, fell onto the asphalt with a crash. The sound of their crashing drowned out my scream – a few bricks had fallen on my foot. I began to hop and whirl, wincing in pain. Now there were tears, and sweat, clouding my view.

“Well? What’s wrong with you? There is simply no task you can’t mess up. You’re such a klutz! I’ve told you a hundred times not to pile too many of them on the cart.”

Robert stood in the middle of the yard, a trowel in his hand. He had a bandana around his head, and his T-shirt and pants were spattered with mortar. The exploiter’s words gradually returned me to reality.

I reloaded the damned handcart and plodded along to the construction site. Yes, it was a real construction, small but very active. Robert was the heart of the construction project: he was its architect, engineer, construction superintendent, mason, and … I had to give the exploiter credit – he was well versed in construction. He did everything himself – from the planning and drawings to the plumbing and electrical work.

I also had more than a few responsibilities. I was the loader, handcart operator and brick carrier all in one. In a word, I was the unskilled laborer. It would have been all right if my work had been rewarded, not with money, of course, but at least with some sweets, praise, or a kind word… But no! Even Grandma Lisa praised me when I did something for her, but I couldn’t expect that from the exploiter. On the contrary, he reproached me a hundred times a day – this was wrong and that was wrong.

The construction abutted Robert’s part of the house, so he only had to erect three walls. The apricot tree leaned against one of the walls. The little bathhouse was turning out to be rather tight, but there was still enough room for a boiler to heat water and a shower, with space left over for a tiny dressing room.

Today, we would finish the brickwork halfway up the walls’ height. Robert, after precisely measuring the dimensions of the doorways and windows, laid bricks around them. A trough full of mortar stood at his feet. Bricks were piled up with precision near the duval.

Took-took-took – the handle of the trowel knocked on the newly laid bricks. T-sh-sh-sh – the trowel slid along the wall brushing off any cement that had squeezed out. Splash, splash – the Chief mixed the mortar, picked up the right amount on his trowel and threw it at the wall.

“What are you staring at? It sets fast. Bring more bricks.”

There weren’t many bricks left. Robert laid them faster than I managed to deliver them. Before he finished laying one brick, he already had another one in his hand. Robert would look at it, bending his head and squinting as if aiming the barrel of a rifle at a target, and his long nose moving from side to side looked like a trigger. But he should be given credit for laying bricks excellently. That was confirmed by the plumb line hanging down the wall.

“Bring them faster!”

And I was bringing them, and bringing them, and bringing them. My whole body ached; my legs grew weak; my head felt hazy. Even the handcart squeaked more loudly and piercingly than usual. If it hadn’t been made of strong metal, it wouldn’t have held that load.

I leaned the handcart against the wall of the storage room and stacked another load of bricks on it. I was about to leave when the steps leading to the cellar caught my eye. My feet, all by themselves, took me to the cellar door. “What am I doing?” I thought. “What about the exploiter?” It was either I or someone inside me who immediately answered, “He can wait.” That was all I had time to think about. Then I found myself in the cellar… after the ramshackle wooden door that barely clung to its hinges opened easily, and my burning face was fanned with coolness. The switch clicked, a dim bulb lit the cellar with its low ceiling, earthen floor and walls.

I sat down on the old wooden chair. Kr-ry-k – it greeted me amiably… It must have recognized me.

On such a hot summer day, there was no better place in the yard than this dark earthen cellar. Bliss was all I felt as the coolness of the cellar enveloped me. Bliss absorbed me, relaxing me gradually, plunging me into sweet drowsiness. I felt no remorse or worries about the exploiter waiting impatiently for me somewhere up there.

Let him wait. He felt cool in the shade of the apricot tree. The sun didn’t scorch him. He just stood there laying bricks. How about hauling some bricks across the yard?!

That’s what I was thinking, feeling lazy and sleepy as my sunburned body released its heat into the cellar. Sprawled out on the old chair, feeling drops of sweat drying on my forehead, I suddenly remembered the way the metal roofs of the houses and outbuildings would crack as they cooled off in the evening. Ah, how well I understood their language now.

The cellar where I was in this state of bliss was mostly used for storing potatoes and wine. Potatoes were buried in a hole in the corner. They felt cool in there; one couldn’t find a better storage place, and the potatoes continued to feel alive and tried to prove it as best they could. Closer to spring, thick white roots began to grow out of the potatoes. I liked to study them when I was sent to the cellar for potatoes. Some roots were sticking out, some were dangling, others looked like the legs of a spider pretending to be dead when you picked it up. Put a potato back into the hole, cover it with earth, and its legs would begin to grow and grow…

But the clay jugs of wine, fragrant grape wine made in our yard, were much more interesting for us boys.

The wine that was in the cellar now was five years old, maybe more. No one had bothered to make any in the last few years. But I remembered how it had been made in the old days, how clusters of grapes were put into an apparatus resembling a huge meat grinder, how grape juice would flow into jugs, and how we kids had eagerly drunk that juice, spilling it on our shirts, and how its spicy smell had spread throughout the yard.

After sitting for some time in the jugs, the juice turned into wine. The longer the wine was aged, the stronger and tastier it became, but its quality, of course, depended primarily on the grape variety.

As long as I could remember, Grandpa had grown good varieties of grapes, both red and green. The grape clusters were large, and the grapes, generously filled with juice by the sun, were heavy. Oh, how tasty they were… Pick a grape, bite into it, and your mouth was filled with sweet fragrant juice.

We boys loved the green grape variety called “lady’s fingers” most of all. They grew near the gate. The oblong grapes really looked like little fingers. Pushkin put it wonderfully in one of his poems, “Oblong and tender, like young maiden’s fingers…” The seeds prevented me from enjoying these grapes to the full. So much time was wasted separating the seeds from pulp with my tongue and then spitting them out. One could eat a kilogram of grapes during the season when they were ripe. Yura ate whole grapes; seeds didn’t bother him.

As for the wine, Yura and I were allowed to taste it on big holidays, at Passover, for example. Sometimes, wine was one of the ingredients in holiday dishes, like nishala, cabbage and rice with spices and wine. You could put nishala between two matzos, and it made a sweet juicy sandwich. You ate that crunchy sandwich and thought, “Ah, it’s so good but there’s so little wine in it.” Why were the adults so afraid to give us wine?

We would correct their inexcusable mistake when we managed to get into the cellar.

“I tasted this wine recently. It’s really delicious,” Yura would confess. We would squat near a small clay jug pouring wine out of it into a bowl.

We spoke in whispers since Yura’s veranda was right above the cellar. They might hear us… We were also afraid to turn on the light, so we struck match after match. We felt as cozy as primeval people around their fire. The small but bright flame danced on our faces. Intricate shadows appeared on the walls of the cellar, moved, then disappeared…

The jug had to be turned almost horizontally. Wine trickled out. The bowl filled slowly.

“Damn, there’s so little of it! Just sediments… Taste it.” Yura gave me the bowl.

A match was lit, and, by its light I saw lots of black specks floating in the wine. I sipped some wine and winced. “It’s kind of sour…”

Yura finished the wine. “Great wine,” he said with the air of an expert.

“You must have drunk almost the whole jug. Do you often drink wine here?” I asked, not without envy.

Yura giggled. “Oh, no… not often… occasionally.”

The match was flickering out… We liked to watch as the flame devoured the stick. First, flame shot up, then the match began to bend, its charred little tip bending lower and lower… Then the tip and its blackened, worn down stick, which was red inside, began to flicker. The heat from the flame would grow paler and disappear, like a spirit abandoning a dying body with only a thin wisp of smoke to mourn it for a second.

However, a flame never disappeared so fast in our hands. As soon as the tip of a match was about to burn out, we would moisten our fingers with saliva, grab the tip, turn the match upside down, and the flame would flare up again. We allowed the whole stick to burn down, almost to the end. At the very last moment, we brought another match to it. P-f-ft! We had little fireworks, and then the whole thing was repeated all over again. That was an exciting game we played with just a box of matches. Could it be that it was more than a game? Perhaps, without being aware of it, we were remembering those far off times when fire was a tribe’s most precious possession. We remembered how our ancestors had preserved smoldering live embers, how they had been happy about fire, how they had worshipped it, what divine power they had envisioned in it. Was that the reason we felt we were the real custodians of fire?

* * *

Oh, I had lapsed into daydreaming. Yura was not here. I was alone in the cellar.

I shook my head, and all the scenes that had just been before me became blurred and disappeared like the smoke from a burned-out match… Yes, Yura wasn’t here. If he had been here, he would have thought of something, instead of languishing in this construction all day long.

I took a deep breath, headed for the steps and went up to where the sun was beating down mercilessly, where the menacing shouts of the exploiter had long been heard.

I was sure to catch hell!

The wheels began to squeak as my sandals shuffled and the bricks in the handcart rattled.

The long working day was drawing to a close. My vacation was also coming to a close. There was just one week left before school began.

Chapter 35. The Cousins

“Hey, Akhun! Wake up, Akhun! Tell me what time it is!”

My cousin Yasha, also known as Akhun, yawned and stretched on his cot.

“Six thirty-five,” he answered sleepily, “maybe six forty.”

Yasha had an ability that amazed me – he could tell time without looking at a clock. I was sure that Yasha was a cheater, that he knew some trick. No matter how many times I tried to catch him, how many tests I conducted – Yasha might be wrong, but only by a few minutes – I failed to catch him cheating.

Now, I tested Yasha every day for I was spending the rest of my vacation at Aunt Tamara’s and sleeping in the living room, the same room as Yasha. The conditions for my experiment were very favorable – I slept on the couch, from which I could see the wall clock, with Yasha across from me on a cot, with his back to the clock.

Today, I was the first to wake up, and I woke Yasha up with my question. But again, I didn’t catch him. Maybe he had seen a clock with a big face in his dream? Maybe he determined time by the light outside? Light came into the living room through the two big windows of the adjacent kitchen on the terrace. Besides, sun rays hit the wall mirror, were reflected and lit the room differently at different times of day. “No,” I thought, with a sigh, “he could outfox me on this assumption as well.”

I didn’t know then that some people actually have a secret gift of feeling time precisely, and I became enraged for I didn’t know how to figure out Yasha’s secret.

“How much longer are you going to lounge around?”

That was Raya, Yasha’s sister. She planted her hand firmly against the doorjamb. Even her little upturned nose expressed indignation, not to mention her voice. “It’s seven already.”

Vacation wasn’t over. Did Raya really have a right to demand that we get up early in the morning? After all, Ilya, the elder brother, was snoring in his room, and no one tried to wake him up. Unfortunately, Raya had a right to wake up her younger brother. That spring, he had failed his math exam, so he had to take another exam at the end of vacation to advance from fifth to sixth grade. Raya had taken it upon herself to coach her brother, under one strict condition – they had to do it every morning, even on Sundays.

Raya was sixteen. She attended a piano class at the school of music and planned to become a music teacher. She was a serious, industrious girl. She studied well and was the first to help with things at home.

That’s why Raya decided to be Yasha’s tutor. And after I came to stay with them, she took me on at the same time. I had advanced to the fourth grade without any serious problems, but Raya thought that I shouldn’t loaf while Yasha studied. That’s why, after kicking us out of bed – which was possible with Yasha only through an invitation to breakfast – Raya, while we were eating our favorite three-minute eggs, arranged notebooks and math textbooks on the other end of the table, Yasha’s for the fifth grade and mine for the fourth.

“What kind of vacation is this?” Yasha grumbled, with his mouth full. “This is a prison camp. All the guys laugh at me because of you.”

“They’ll laugh even more when you have to repeat the year at school,” his sister answered sternly.

In later years, I came to understand that Raya really had pedagogical abilities and great patience. First, she explained clearly the material from the textbooks to each of us. Then we solved problems. Yasha always forgot the order of operations right away, and everything had to be repeated all over again.

But everything comes to an end in this world. Our lesson was also coming to an end. The day ahead of us promised to be full of the most fascinating activities. It couldn’t be anything else here on Kafanov Street in Yasha’s company.

The Shaakovs, Aunt Tamara’s family, lived half an hour walk away from Grandpa’s house on one of the lanes running from Kafanov Street. There were a few of these lanes, and they all had the same name as the street, but with added numbers. The Shaakovs lived on Kafanov Lane 5.

By the way, that street was once named Gospitalnaya (Hospital) for it ran to the military hospital. Gospitalnaya Street played an important role in the history of Tashkent. During the uprising that occurred in the time of the Revolution, barricades were built there. From the barricades, participants in the uprising went to storm the military fortress, the one whose ruins stand on the banks of the Anhor.

The street was renamed in honor of the famous Uzbek revolutionary Kafanov during the early years of Soviet power. This street, one of the central streets of the city, was gradually becoming modern. Attractive buildings were erected there after the earthquake – the Pharmacological Institute, the Central Department Store, and many others.

But the lane where the Shaakovs lived preserved its old-fashioned look. It was a very cozy place, with tall trees, their tops reaching toward the sky, and an arik that babbled in the shade of the trees. It was a short lane with just fifteen houses. The Shaakovs rented one of them, a one-story house with four rooms. Naturally, it had a yard attached to it.

I visited that house and yard quite often. Yasha was my friend, but out of all the members of that family, I liked Uncle Mikhail, his father, the most. Even the way he looked was appealing. He was strong with wide shoulders, and his handshake was like Grandpa Yoskhaim’s. He had a kind, calm, smiling face. He liked to joke and laugh. Mikhail’s dark hair turned gray prematurely, but it was becoming with his round, dark-complexioned face.

I didn’t know why Uncle Mikhail went away now and then. He sometimes didn’t live at home. It seemed to me – maybe because I liked him so much – that Aunt Tamara’s personality was the reason. The summer I remember was when Mikhail was away, and I was sorry about it. The house without him was somewhat empty. I remembered how he and I would have tea together, particularly that one time not so long ago.

I had come over to play with Yasha, but there was no one at home but Mikhail. He was having tea in the kitchen. As soon as I opened the door, he waved his hand, inviting me to join him. I sat down. Mikhail poured tea into a bowl for me, and motioned his hand toward a bag of rusks, the kind that were sold at Tashkent bakeries by weight. He didn’t have to motion twice. I loved those crispy, brown, well-toasted rusks. I could eat them nonstop. So, we sat across from each other, enjoying our tea with rusks. Perhaps we were also enjoying being together in peace and quiet, not in the noisy company of Yasha and Ilya, and loudmouthed Aunt Tamara. We were silent, and the sounds that filled the kitchen didn’t interfere with the stillness. Here, the paper bag rustled – Uncle Mikhail took out a rusk. Tap-tap-tap – he banged the rusk on the table to remove crumbs. Uncle Mikhail was very neat, he would never put a rusk in his mouth without removing the crumbs. On top of that, the salesgirls at the bakery, who knew him, would never put broken rusks into his bag. Tap-tap-tap… That was me tapping my rusk on the table like Uncle Mikhail. Khrr-oop! Uncle took a bite of a rusk. I didn’t lag far behind him. Oop-ss – bending over the bowl, Uncle Mikhail gulped down some of the tea. I did the same. We looked at each other with pleasure. Rusks tapped, the crispy rusks’ khr-r-oop, and oop-ss alternated. Merged together, they sounded like music. A short pause followed as Uncle Mikhail dipped a rusk into his tea. I, of course, did the same because that was what is called eating with relish – dipping a rusk into tea, then sucking sweetish syrup out of it.