like me and my friends had drowned there. But my fear was receding, it was letting me go, and my joy was becoming stronger. “I wasn't a chicken. I swam, I’m still one of the gang.”
Finally, we approached the settlement of Yubileyny (Jubilee). It was still very spacious, with even more greenery than before – there were more trees. But what had happened to the “Oktyabr” (October) movie theater? Why were the theater windows covered up? And the glass on the entrance door was cracked. And the poster boards were empty. They must have closed the theater… How sad.
And at last… there was our building, number 15. After getting out of the car, I first looked at the third panel from the ground on our building. No, I didn’t imagine it. There were distinct marks – round marks of clay exactly at the spots at which we, the guys, had been throwing balls of clay the last time.
It was quiet all around. I was listening very closely. Something was missing, some habitual sounds… Ah, I knew – I didn’t hear the babbling of water, that quiet tune that had sounded from spring to autumn, day in and day out. But the ariks were silent on that summer day.
The soccer field… its net was gone, the pavilion was lopsided, and its roof full of holes. Steam heating pipes hung at a height of three yards along the entire length of the street. They looked horrible, with their decayed casings hanging from them. And the kitchen garden! It had been abandoned and overgrown by weeds. The natural green fence expanded, the shrubs' branches sticking out in all directions. The poor old tree stood forlornly, its branches broken, dents like wounds along its trunk. Even the bench near the entrance had become an invalid – its back was missing.
"Valera, is that you? You’ve made it here at last!"
I raised my eyes. A gray-haired bent-over woman in glasses was looking out at me from the second-floor balcony. She was laughing. She was glad to see me. And I–I froze and my jaw dropped. I recognized that voice, and there was something familiar about her, but only something… Oh my, I hadn't expected to see how much time had changed her, my teacher Valentina Pavlovna. Teachers don’t grow old in their students’ memory.
I shouted something cheerful, waved my hand, and we entered the building. Each step of the staircase was a page from the book of memory, and, instead of the sounds of our steps, I heard children’s voices, the clinking of broken glass, the humming of Dora’s coffee mill and her incessant blabbering.
A whole bunch of relatives and friends got together at the apartment of Edem, my old friend – his parents Emma and Rifat, his brother Rustem, their wives and children. All were excited, animated, toasts were given. Everyone drank to us, to our meeting again. In other words, everything went according to the accepted ritual. And still I experienced a strange feeling, and it grew with every passing moment. Something was missing in our get-together. Something had changed, but what?
"Here, Esya, we have no future," Edem’s mother Emma explained to my mother. "We’re just living out our lives. That’s it. Life has become quite dreadful."
She was sitting with her arms crossed over her chest. Her once jet-black hair had become gray, and neither cream nor powder could freshen her face. Emma was an energetic woman. Once she had the belyash shop (large meat dumplings) in the market place. She did very well. Her belyashes were great – fat and juicy. When Mama reminisced about it, Emma just waved her hand.
"Oh, Esya, no more bellyaches. We’ve been driven away from the market."
“Why?" I wondered to myself. "Who could be bothered by juicy belyashes? Was that what they called perestroika?"
Edem also complained. He worked at the construction company, just as his father before him. After he had finished a big job, he wouldn't get paid.
"That’s the common practice today," he explained to me. "Now, everything’s on credit. We have to wait."
None of them had good news. Plans for the future were very indefinite. Some of them dreamed about going back to their homeland, to the Crimea. Others wanted to move closer to their children, to Russia. And they all unanimously brushed away our questions – there’s nothing good to tell you about, we’re just living out our lives – and were eager to learn about our life in America. They were surprised by the most common things that we took for granted. And none of them, not a single person could understand why we had dragged ourselves to the edge of the earth to visit a local healer. America must have everything imaginable.
I was sad. I was ashamed, as if it were me and not the local government that were responsible for my friends’ awful life and lack of hope of improvement. Besides, I understood that that was not all that had changed.
Many years ago, I was the son of a simple seamstress and a teacher. We were poor. I often envied other boys who could afford much more than I – a book subscription, a bicycle or a hockey stick. I envied them and I dreamed. Now we had traded roles. But the gap between dreams and reality had become immeasurable.
I approached the window of the veranda. From there, from the third floor, a whole panorama opened up, the whole area where I had walked time and again in my childhood. The vegetable garden… The arik where we formed our balls of clay… The corner of the building with its garbage bins… I peered and peered into that space, trying to picture everyone I knew in the past in those places. I tried to envision the boys kicking a soccer ball here, the adults on the bench near the entrance discussing the day's events, the noisy construction next door… but in vain. The colors had faded, familiar faces were not coming back, their voices couldn’t be heard… Perhaps all that did not surface in my imagination because everyone and everything had changed in this reality that had become different, faded. I experienced a very strange feeling as I was standing at the veranda window. Something was gone for good, had disappeared, had stopped beckoning to me.
At the time, I didn’t yet understand that my nostalgia, my yearning for childhood, for the settlement of Yubileyny were disappearing for good along with that strange feeling.
Chapter 8. “And here there used to live…”
Time flew by. We had been in Tashkent for almost two weeks, but the healer still hadn’t appeared in Namangan. And no one knew when he would be back. Tension was mounting; a sense of alarm was growing. Sometimes I panicked –what if we never got to see him? Our friends did everything possible to make our agonizing wait easier. They invited guests to entertain us; they took us out.
One day we visited Yakov’s countryside cottage. I climbed out of the car and gasped, “Oh, my God, how long I’ve been dreaming about this! Right by the gate there were two sour cherry trees. They were short, young, and dotted with dark-red, shiny cherries. They were not just shiny, but they sparkled with reflections of light like little stars in the night sky. They stuck out on all sides of the branches on their strong little green stems as if on the needles of a hedgehog. I rushed over to those beauties and, like a little boy, stuffed my mouth with juicy fragrant cherries.
“Just imagine… there are no such cherries in America! No, cherries there are absolutely tasteless,” I explained to the laughing Yakov.
I also remember another trip. Yakov Gavrilovich decided to show me the factory where he worked. It manufactured reinforced concrete plates for construction of residential buildings. We wandered through half-empty workshops where big machines, forklifts and elevators could be seen. Most of them were not working. The workshops’ capacity was only partially used. When I asked why, Yakov answered, “You see, we used to be a link in the chain. We received raw materials, made plates and delivered them to construction companies. Now, the chain has fallen apart, as the country has fallen apart. That’s why we don’t work to full capacity."
Obviously, these sad circumstances
