Everything Begins In Childhood

Two years after Grandpa Hanan passed away, it had become more than she could bear. She would spend practically the whole day in bed with her legs bent comfortably at the knees. Nobody had a clue about the consequences of such immobility. Her knees ceased to bend at all after a few months. And Grandma couldn’t walk.

That’s when Uncle Avner became alarmed and rushed to see doctors…

* * *

It turned out that there was nobody but Uncle Avner to take care of Grandma. Her three older daughters had long had their own families and moved away. Marusya lived in Bukhara, Mama in Chirchik, and Rosa had five adopted children. It was only twenty-year-old Rena, the youngest daughter, who still lived with Grandma Abigai. But Rena, the heavenly bird, could hardly take care of her mother for she couldn’t take care of herself. It was hard for Avner, but he didn’t complain. Avner had always helped his parents. And he loved his sisters. Perhaps, their difficult wartime childhood had brought them closer together. It seemed to me that he was particularly attached to my mama. Even his voice changed when he talked to her. Grandpa Hanan loved his daughter very much. How gaily, affectionately and melodiously he would say her name, Ester, every time he visited us. But still, Uncle Avner managed to say her name much more tenderly and gently.

As for Mama, she wasn’t as close to anyone else in her family as she was to her brother. It’s not enough to say that she loved Avner; she admired him. She admired his honesty and kindness, his abilities, energy and achievements.

After serving in the army, Avner graduated from the Institute of National Economy and very soon became an important administrator. By the time Grandma fell ill, Avner was the manager of the meat facility attached to the Military Trade Center. That was a senior position, and, as anyone who lived in the Soviet Union will know, a very advantageous one. In a country where it wasn’t easy to get a piece of good fresh meat, who wouldn’t want to do a favor for the “Meat King.”

I was too young to wonder whether Uncle Avner used those advantages and possibilities. Of course, I heard that there were spiteful people who envied him – anyone in his position would have had such critics. They tried to mar his reputation as much as they could. But Mama always repeated with pride: Uncle Avner was a really hard worker, and not the kind who spent long hours in jacket and tie in his office. He always preferred to wear overalls. He would put them on, go to his army of workers and soldiers and, working along with them, unload goods and arrange them in refrigerators and warehouses.

In a word, he didn’t behave like a boss. He behaved like a real, diligent administrator. And the enterprise worked very well.

But those weren’t Uncle Avner’s only merits. Like his father, Grandpa Hanan, the Meat King had a sunny poetic soul. His father had nurtured his love of music and singing.

The Bucharan Jews have a kind of old folk music – an instrumental-vocal genre called shashmakom. It consists of cycles of songs that incorporate verses by different poets, including famous ones like Alisher Navoiy, Omar Khayyam and Ganjavi Nizami. The cycle is set to folk music. A cycle consists of six parts, which is why it is called shashmakom: shash meaning “six” in Tadjik and makom meaning “part.” Humorous, wedding and, naturally, love songs are included in the cycle. When performed, they’re accompanied by Tadjik percussion and bowed instruments. The songs have a distinctive and complex vocal structure. One must sing higher and higher to reach the highest notes and then descend slowly. A singer needs a very wide vocal range to cope with such an arc.

By the time of the revolution, that wonderful skill had almost been forgotten. Surprisingly, it was the Bukharan Jews who remembered it and began to revive it. My Grandpa Hanan was one of them.

Grandpa Hanan was one of those wonderful people referred to as “queer birds.” Fortunately, there were quite a few of them among the Jews. He was so kind and generous that he would give the shirt off his back to a person he felt sorry for. He often caught hell from Grandma for doing that because it was she who had to figure out how to feed the family. Even into old age, Hanan was capable of working up enthusiasm for the most unexpected things, such as, for example, shashmakom.

In a word, Uncle Avner received a wonderful inheritance from his father, which included, apart from lofty emotional qualities and an understanding of beauty, a love for shashmakom and a collection of old records. It’s no wonder that Uncle Avner’s elder son Boris became a musician.

* * *

But let’s return to Grandma Abigai’s illness. I don’t know what doctors Uncle Avner consulted about Grandma’s illness, but he hoped that her bent, practically petrified knees could somehow be brought back to normal.

On one of our visits from Chirchik, Grandma was being treated royally to massages, thermal treatment, medications and, among other things, a terrible procedure resembling medieval torture, which I saw with my own eyes on that day.

As Mama and I entered the house, heat hit our faces. Grandma had always been afraid of catching cold, and she saw to it that there was no draft in the rooms. But now it was unbearably stuffy in the house, particularly in the kitchen. A woman in a white gown stood at the stove and, bending over a pot, dipped a long strip of fabric into it. A strange smell rose from the pot along with heat, as if dozens of paraffin candles were burning. The woman in the white gown, a registered nurse, was preparing paraffin bandages to warm Grandma’s knees.

Grandma, pale and exhausted, sat in her bed. I had not seen her look that way before. Her bare gaunt knees stuck out like two solitary toothpicks. She nodded to us and whispered to Mama:

“Cover my legs, cover them… I’m cold.”

The nurse entered the room, carrying the pot and began to bandage Grandma’s knees with hot, soft paraffin strips. Uncle Avner and I went to the porch. That’s when I learned that he and Mama needed to leave to attend to some urgent business, and I would have to stay with Grandma for an hour, but not just stay. Grandma’s legs would be tied to a board after they were warmed up. I would need to unbandage them in fifty minutes.

That was the torture I was watching now. Yes, yes, I felt like a warden, an executioner. It seemed to me that I had read about similar tortures in historical novels, where people’s feet had been stuffed into “Spanish boots.”

Grandma kept groaning and pleading, “Untie them, untie them.”

And I repeated, “You’ll just have to bear it. It won’t be much longer.” And terrified, I glanced at the clock: there was nothing of “not longer” about it. The minute hand seemed not to move at all.

I tried to distract myself by looking around.

Disorder is particularly noticeable in a sparsely furnished house: a table from which dirty plates hadn’t been removed… a worn, sooty kitchen caldron… a chair pulled away from the table standing askew… trash littering the floor… scattered things… Every trifle emphasized the desolation. That’s how neglected Grandma’s unlived-in room, previously so cozy, seemed to me now. Since she had taken to her bed, there was no one to take care of the house. Grandma’s bed was the only place where order prevailed, the territory accessible to her, so to speak. The pillows were fluffed, the blanket spread out neatly. Small towels and rags were arranged in a neat stack on the chair near the bed. And the cord of the telephone receiver there had been straightened out, even though it was twisted and tangled in almost every house.

Grandma fell silent, her eyes closed. “Has she fallen asleep? That would be good…”

But she looked so worn out. Her dark headscarf was pulled down to her eyebrows, her eyelids had become swollen, and her lips were dry. She kept licking them…

“Something to drink. Valery, give me something to drink…”

I leaped to my feet. Here was the thermos. I poured hot tea into a bowl. Grandma drank everything hot because she was mortally afraid of catching cold. She had a warm dress on with a wool cardigan over it, even warm socks in this hot weather. And her felt boots stood near the bed. Why would she need felt boots now? Perhaps to walk to the bathroom… How could she stand such hot weather? I, in my summer clothes, sat there covered in sweat.

“Oy, Valery, untie it… I can’t stand it… Djoni bivesh. Untie it. What do I need this for? I’d rather die…”

Grandma was looking up at the ceiling, perhaps through the ceiling, at the One she addressed, to whom she poured out her soul. And she kept mumbling something. She spoke, as usual in Bukhori, the Bukharan Jewish dialect. And even though I didn’t speak it, I could understand Grandma. It came across to me in a somewhat incomprehensible way that Grandma was asking God why he had sent those tortures to her, and her appeal, couched in subtle Eastern turns of speech, and with Biblical wisdom and tragedy, was woven into it.

From whom and how had Grandma absorbed the colorful speech of our forefathers? I didn’t know. I wouldn’t be able to translate what she was saying word for word, but I was listening to her with agitation. During those moments, I felt for the first time – perhaps vaguely, but still I felt it – how tragic old age was.

Grandma’s voice broke as she began to groan again, hoarsely and slowly. Tears began to flow from her lowered eyelids and roll down her hollow cheeks.

I bent over her and shouted, “Just bear it a little longer! It won’t be long!”

I shouted because she couldn’t hear with her right ear, and she didn’t hear well with the left one. But maybe I shouted because I felt terrible and wanted to do something to help her, something, at least.

Grandma opened her eyes slowly. They were so cloudy and full of suffering. Her lips moved. From the way they moved I understood, “Joni bivesh… untie them.” I looked at the clock… How much longer? Another twenty minutes? Well, that’s enough! That’s it!

I clenched my teeth, threw the blanket aside and began untying Grandma’s legs.

Chapter 57. The Star of David

“All right… So today we’ll repeat what we studied the day before yesterday…”

Georgy Georgeyevich walked, shuffling his feet, between the rows of desks. He raised his clenched left hand to his mouth and coughed intermittently. He didn’t have a cold. It was his habit. He had a pointer in his right hand, which he waved and tapped on the floor. Oh no, not like GooPoo. Georgy Georgeyevich, our auto-repair teacher, was the nicest, most good-natured person. He was a bit funny, short and potbellied. He had light hair with streaks of grey, a bald spot on top of his head, an upturned Slavic nose and puffy blueish bags under his eyes. Georgy Georgeyevich liked to drink. He drank regularly, and he didn’t even try to conceal it from us high school students. According to him, he didn’t drink but “took” it as a preventative measure, in order to prevent the common cold and other ailments. In other words, he didn’t do it for fun; he had to take it to protect his health.

We were informed about these preventative measures by the smell Georgy Georgeyevich gave off. Our teacher began each day in the same fashion, with a hundred grams of vodka. And we had a double auto-repair class in the morning twice a week. That was our type of school, its specialization. We studied auto repair in earnest as we inhaled a thick aroma of alcohol in the upper grades of high school. Some other smells were added to it – perhaps pickled herring or sour salty cucumbers. But on the other hand, our teacher was always vigorous and merry, though he couldn’t quite remember exactly what we had covered in the previous class.

“Who can remember what we studied the day before yesterday?” Georgy Georgeyevich asked, allegedly with a pedagogical purpose.

Well, we couldn’t possibly all say that we didn’t remember. Besides, why should we mock such a kind teacher?

By the way, despite a certain forgetfulness, he knew his trade marvelously. And the auto-repair classroom, his pride and the subject of his ceaseless concern, was wonderful. Engines, appliances, spare parts, instruments, and everything that might be needed for the assembly or repair of a car were laid out in exemplary order on the shelves. Everything had been cleaned and sparkled as if in a display case. Each screw was in its place next to its nut. Georgy Georgeyevich demanded the same tidiness and attention from us, no matter what part of a car we were studying. We did it without drawings and models, probing the “guts” of a car with our own hands. As we did it, the “chief surgeon” was always at the side of the trainees and noticed any small thing, any oversight.

“Who has forgotten a bearing? You? What a dolt you are! No, not here, it should be attached to the crankshaft. Where’s your head? It goes on the rotor!”

And that’s how it went, on and on… But our kind teacher couldn’t become angry, he just couldn’t. We certainly did take advantage of his good nature, but we knew when to stop. Any commotion in class was mostly work related. Inventors, designers, and test drivers argued and made noise. Certainly, auto shop in itself was attractive to boys, so we were lucky to go to our school. But we were even luckier to have Georgy Georgeyevich: he possessed a pedagogical gift and a fertile imagination. He managed to instill in us an understanding that a driver-mechanic wasn’t just someone who had technical knowledge and skills but a person who was engaged in an important, dangerous and even romantic business, a person whose hands, head and soul were constantly working, a person on whom the lives of very many people depended. We had so many tank battles in our classes! We had so many car accidents.

Even inveterate lazybones didn’t miss Georgy Georgeyevich’s classes. Many of us had mopeds and scooters with small engines, and if they needed repair, we could always rely on our teachers’ help. In a word, we considered him our pal. We respected him and poked a little fun at his predilection for “preventive measures.” He most likely realized it but believed that none of the guys would report him. His trust in us was so great that when someone coughed or sneezed in class, Georgy Georgeyevich would say, to enlighten us, “That happens because you don’t take preventive measures. When you grow up, then, by all means…” and he would show the recommended dose in the air with his fingers.

I don’t know whether any of his students followed that “preventive measures” theory, but I can attest that our favorite teacher was never ill, and I don’t remember him ever sneezing. In general, he was a sturdy person, and he wore a tattered light coat, which he never buttoned, even when it was awfully cold.

* * *

The days of driving practice were especially long-awaited events. They were long awaited because each class had them only twice in a two-month semester.

The big dusty field where we learned the art of driving was a half-hour drive away from school. We rode there in a training truck, which awaited us near the school before classes. Georgy Georgeyevich drove the truck himself. We noisily disembarked from the truck onto the field, and Georgy Georgeyevich walked around the truck, climbed into the passenger seat, groaning slightly, and slammed the door loudly. While that ritual took place, we, some of us with fear, others with a sweet anticipation in our hearts, waited: who would be the first to be called.

“Lokshev, climb in!” Georgy Georgeyevich put a checkmark in a journal as tattered as his coat.

The truck jerked, moved away and began moving around the field in circles. And we, crowded together, commented on the quality of the driving as we nervously awaited our turn. We got covered with exhaust and the dust raised by the truck in dense clouds during the dry months, but that was immaterial to us. We just shook our heads and, with our eyes on the truck, discussed Lokshev’s every blunder. And he made quite a few of them.

“Look how he zigzags. What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s looking for a pole to run into.”

Everybody laughed, and I laughed along with them, but my laughter was feigned. It anyone was capable of finding a pole in the open field and running into it, it was me.

Our truck, like all domestically produced trucks, had a clutch pedal, and, on top of that, it was double. You had to press that pedal down to begin with if you wanted to change gears. It had to be pressed, as Georgy Georgeyevich taught us, without delay, smoothly and to the floor; otherwise the engine would stall. It was that damned pedal that caused me incredible agony, and not only me, of course, but it simply harassed me. It refused to be pressed without delay and certainly not smoothly. I mostly failed to feel whether it had reached the bottom and at what speed it should be released. It seemed that its only desire was to make the engine stall. And it quite often succeeded in doing that.

“Be careful! Don’t press too…” Georgy Georgeyevich’s face gradually became flushed. He was nervous too, for the hundredth time that day.

The engine roared. Before shifting to a higher gear, I revved the engine to the max. “All right… I’ll slow down by releasing the pedal… Now, the clutch pedal… and shift into neutral …” Oh my, I’d like to meet the person who invented the double clutch. Press… neutral… release… press again… and then one could shift into a higher gear. “I press…Oh!”

Once again, I hadn’t done it in time. The engine stalled. I broke out in a sweat. I started the motor once again, and now I would have to do everything all over again.

“Too fast, too fast,” Georgy Georgeyevich almost moaned. He didn’t look any better than I. “Don’t hurry. Look how you stagger and lurch, zigzagging across the field.”

“Look.” As if I didn’t know myself. As if I couldn’t hear the guys laughing and mocking over the roaring engine. And the torment continued. The truck first stalled, then moved jerkily. But at last I managed to shift into third gear and then fourth without a shameful failure. Gr-rr, gr-rrr, the engine roared less intensely. Holding the steering wheel very tightly, I stepped on the gas, this time with pleasure. Gosh, how it jumps over the bumps! I had a talent for picking them out deliberately. “Don’t speed! We’ll be thrown out!” Georgy Georgeyevich shouted. We both kept bouncing up and down, but he didn’t step on the instructor’s brake pedal. He was an understanding person and knew what guys like us needed.

Yay! Freedom! The long trail of dust, swirling and expanding, clouded most of the field behind the truck. Forward we went, forward, forward! “What Russian is not fond of driving fast?…” Who wrote that? Gogol? Yes, he did, as he described a swift ride through the snow in a sleigh drawn by three horses in the Russian countryside! E-eh-hh!

The engine was buzzing, the sides of the old body, once dark green but now faded, scratched and jagged, were squeaking loudly – I could hear it even in the cab. But we liked our old “horse,” even the noise and shaking. Is it actually a real ride when you drive down a smooth roadway without noise and shaking? You don’t even feel anything, as if you were standing in place. It’s a different story when you ride in a truck, especially inside its body on a bench placed lengthwise – even though you have to hold on to a transom, it feels like rock or Latin dancing. You sway, wriggle, all your muscles twitching in rhythm to the shaking. Your head bobs, and in another minute, it may fall off and roll somewhere…

Whee, how delightful!

“Stop! We’re done!” Georgy Georgeyevich commanded. I had gotten so worked up that I didn’t notice when he stepped on the brake pedal.

* * *

Auto shop was our favorite subject. It gave us valuable professional skills. But we also had other shop classes. We spent each Thursday in the one-story building in the school yard. And that was a sacred day for our class 9A, with no Party congresses, great writers or intricate algebra. After two great hours spent with Georgy Georgeyevich, we crossed the corridor to the workshop where we learned to work with metal for another two hours. There was a class where our girls learned the noble art of embroidery in the same building. They were prevented from learning how to drive, which seemed quite natural to us at that time. There was also a woodworking shop in the building. We had worked in it the previous year. Passing the door from which emanated the pleasant smell of wood shavings and sawdust, we sighed sadly.

Unlike metalworking, tinkering with wood was interesting and meaningful. I, for example, took pleasure in mastering the milling machine. I can still visualize how a bar gripped on both ends rotated, and turning now one caster, then another, I cut into the wood with a chisel, first on the surface, then deeper, now increasing the speed, now reducing it… The shavings twisted like a ribbon, the bar’s outline changed, acquiring the shape I wanted to give it. Here it turned either into the knob of a walking stick or a small potbellied column for a stairway balustrade… No matter what I made, I enjoyed the creative process enormously. I was happy to realize that I was turning into a craftsman and could learn to make amazing things on that machine.

Alas, nothing like that happened when we began working with metal. To be honest, we never understood what they were teaching us or why. Our teacher Mikhail Petrovich, a thickset, taciturn man whom we called “Piece of Iron” behind his back, would give us an assignment at the beginning of a lesson. His voice was so serious, even solemn, as if we had to carry out a project on which the destiny of mankind depended.

“Saw off this corner at forty-five degrees, and this one at sixty. Then drill three holes with a diameter of one centimeter each here, here and here,” he poked with a piece of chalk at something resembling a drawing he had made on a small portable blackboard.

Either the chalk or the blackboard was bad, but the drawing was barely visible. And when our teacher turned to the blackboard, it seemed to us that he wasn’t so much pointing at it but through it.

“Do you all understand?” Piece of Iron asked. His brows came together, his face taut. We felt as if we were about to begin building an interplanetary rocket. What was there to understand?

After giving us an assignment, Piece of Iron would disappear, after which he would show up at the workshop now and then for just a few minutes. Obviously, he had no desire to observe how we carried out the project. And we were left on our own, so we started sawing, sawing, sawing and chopping off… We worked by hand on pieces of small pipe, blocks, metal plates gripped in vises. Piece of Iron never informed us why we were doing it. There were few machines in the workshop, but we were allowed to get near the drilling machine only under supervision.

Never in my life have I met a person more indifferent to children than that teacher. Once, a heavy block fell on Sergey Belunin’s foot. Mikhail Petrovich came running when he heard him yelling, and he was yelling his head off. While writhing Sergey was pulling off his shoe, Mikhail Petrovich picked up the block and examined it, as if it was the block that had suffered from its contact with Belunin’s foot.

“You haven’t sawed enough off, and the angle is wrong… Haven’t I explained that it should be forty-five degrees?”

* * *

There were two rows of long tables in the workshop, with a dividing net in the middle so that work could be done on both sides of a table. There was a vise at each workplace. On that day, rectangular plates, each three- or four-centimeters thick, were gripped in the vises. We were given the following assignment: shape something like a pyramid on the top and on the bottom, round off the right and left edges and drill two holes in the middle. I still don’t know why we needed to make that strange object, though I shall always remember how it looked. I can close my eyes and see it. Why I remember it so well is the subject of what I am about to relate.

I was working on the upper corner. I rushed with all my might to saw it off. The guys who were stronger, like Belunin, had already finished working on both corners and were about to round off the edges. At that moment, we heard the door slam, and an unexpected guest, the school principal, Boris Alexandrovich, entered the workshop.