washing up, and in the children’s room sitting on her bed not to be in the way of our playing.
In the evenings, she read us The Russian Epic Tales, a book about hero warriors who fought countless hordes of invaders or the Dragon Gorynich, and for the rest and recreation after the battles, they visited Prince Vladimir the Red Sun in the city of Kiev. That’s when the iron bed had to bear the additional weight of the three of us seated around Grandma Martha to listen about the exploits of Alesha Popovich or Dobrinya Nikitich.
When the heroes had their moments of sadness, they remembered their mothers, each one his own, but to their different, absent, mothers they all addressed one and the same reproach: why those mothers weren’t smart enough to wrap the future heroes into a piece of white cloth while they were still just silly babies and drop them into the fast running River-Mommy?
Only Ilya of Murom and Warrior Svyatogor, who grew so mighty that even the Earth Mother could bear him no more and only mountain rocks still somehow withstood his movements, they never raised that mutual lamentation, not even when having the bluest blues…
At times one or another of the hero warriors had a fight with one or another beauty disguised in armor. Those fights ended differently but the defeated would invariably say, “Do not kill me but treat instead to good food and drink and kiss on my mouth as sweet as sugar.” With all of those epic tales heard more than once, I knew by heart when such combats with gastronomic outcome were near at hand and eagerly anticipated them in advance…
Grandma Martha named the bathroom “the bathhouse”, and after her weekly bath, she was returning to our room steam-heated to red glow and half undressed—in just a tank top for menswear and one of her long skirts. Then she sat down on her iron bed to cool off while combing and braiding her gray hair into a pigtail. On her left forearm, there was a large mole in the form of a female nipple, the so-called “bitch’s udder”.
In course of one of her after-bath proceedings when she seemed to notice nothing but the curved plastic comb running thru the damp strands of her hair, I took advantage of my brother-’n’-sister’s distraction by agitated playing on the big sofa and sneaked under the springy mesh in the Grandma’s bed well sagged under her weight. There I cautiously turned over to my back and looked up – under the skirt between her straddled legs wide and firmly planted in the floor. Why? I did not know. Neither was there anything to make out in the dusk within the dark dome of the skirt. And I crawled away, as carefully as I could, feeling belated shame, regret, and a strong suspicion that she was aware of my hushed maneuvers…
Sasha was a reliable younger brother, credulous and taciturn. He was born after the brisk Natasha, and his complexion startled all by purple-blueish tinge because of the umbilical cord had almost strangled him, yet he was born in a shirt, which was taken off him in the maternity hospital and Mom explained later that from newborns’ shirts they produced some special medicine.
And Natasha turned out a really shrewd weasel. She was the first to know all the news: that the following day Grandma was to bake buns, that new tenants were to move into the flat on the first floor, that on Saturday the parents would go to a party at some people’s place, and that you should never-never kill a frog or it would rain cats and dogs.
At the sides of the back of her head, there started two pigtails split by ribbons before reaching her shoulders to fix each braid with a lovely bow-knot at its end. Yet, neither of those bows survived for long before falling apart into a tight knot with a pair of narrow ribbon tails. Probably, because of zealous spinning her head on all the quarters to find out: what-where-when?.
The two-year difference in age gave me a tangible degree of authority in the eyes of the younger. However, when Sasha taciturnly reran my climbing to the attic, then by that feat he, like, overtook me for two years. Of course, neither he, nor I, nor Natasha was capable at that time to put into words such a finicky deduction. We stayed at the level of emotional sensations expressed by interjections like, “Wow, boy!..” or, “Oh-oh, boy!..”
The unexpressed desire to reinforce my faltering authority and self-esteem or, maybe, some other inexpressible, or already forgotten, reasons led me to being nasty. One evening, with the light in the room already turned off, yet my brother-’n’-sister, laid to sleep with their heads on the opposite armrests in the huge leatherette sofa, still a-giggling and kicking each other under their common blanket because Grandma Martha couldn’t upbraid them while standing by her bed and whispering into the upper corner, I suddenly spoke up from my folding bed, “Tell you what, Grandma? God is a jerk!”
After a moment of complete silence, she erupted in threats of hell and its laborer devils and their pending job to make me lick a red-hot frying pan in future, yet I only laughed in response and, spurred by the reverent lull upon the sofa, showed no esteem for the awaiting tortures, “Whatever! Your God’s a jerk all the same!”
The following morning Grandma Martha did not talk to me. On my return from kindergarten, Natasha briefed me that in the morning, as Dad came home after his night shift, Grandma told him everything and wept in the kitchen and the parents were presently gone to a party at someone’s but I’d be let have it, and that’s for sure!
To all of my goody-goody attempts at starting a dialogue, Grandma Martha kept aloof and silent and soon left for the kitchen… A couple of hours sweating it, then the front door slammed, the parents’ voices sounded in the hallway. They moved to the kitchen where the talk became quicker and hotter. The door in our room prevented making out the subject of the heated discussion.
The voices' volume kept growing steadily on until the door flew open by Dad’s hand. “What? Scoffing at elders, eh? I’ll show you ‘a jerk’!” His hands yanked the narrow black belt from the waist of his pants. A black snake with the square chrome-flashing head flushed up above his head. His arm swayed and a never experienced pain scorched me. Once more. And more.
Wailing and wriggling, I rolled under Grandma’s bed to escape the belt. Dad grabbed the back of the bed and by one mighty jerk threw it over to the middle of the room. The mattress and all dropped down alongside the wall. I scrambled after the bed to shelter beneath the shield of its springy mesh. Dad was yanking the bed back and forth whipping on its both sides but I, with inexplicable speed, ran on all fours under the mesh jumping overhead, and mingled my howling and wailing, “Daddy! Dear! My! Don’t beat me! I won’t! Never again!” into his, “Snooty snot!”
Mom and Grandma came running from the kitchen. Mom screamed, “Kolya! Don’t!” and stretched out her arm to catch the hissing impact of the belt. Grandma also kvetched loudly, and they took Dad out of the room.
Crestfallen, with shallow whimpers, I rubbed the welts left by the belt looking away from the younger who huddled, in petrified silence, against the back of the big sofa…
~ ~ ~
In the Courtyard, we played Classlets.
First, you need a chalk to draw a big rectangular in the concrete walk and split it into five pairs of squares, like, a two-column table of 5 rows. Then get the bitka—a can from used shoe polish filled with sand whose enclosed mass conveys your bitka the required gravity, turns it a kinda tiny discus.
Now, standing out the bottom line of the first column, you throw your bitka into one of 10 classlet-squares and then go after it hopping on one leg (up the first column and down the second, 1 leap per square) to pick it up and proceed thru the rest of the table, also in one-legged hops, to leave the table of classlets by the final bound from the bottom classlet in the second column. A parabola-shaped mission trip is over.
(While going thru the table, take care your sandal never lands near any of the chalked lines or else the other players, closely watching your progress,
