when my Grandma turned 98, she also began to forget her own name. On such days she sought her daughter’s help, “Lyaksandra, I keep wondering lately—what could my name be?”
Well, yes, Aunt Alexandra was also a good sort, “Oy, Mom! But I can't recollect either! May it be, Anyuta?”
“No … Somehow different it was…”
And three days later she would triumphantly announce to her daughter, “I remembered! Martha, I am. Martha!.”
No wonder the fortune teller couldn’t deliver her exact name…
However, by this flashforward, I jumped ahead way too much because it’s me who had to serve in the army first, but in this here letter to you, I’m still at the kindergarten senior group.
I think I’d better turn off the tap that pours profound hooey on infantile megalomania, and return to the period when kindergarten was completing its share in the formation of my personality…)
Now, back to the pivotal 1961… What is remarkable about it (besides my graduating the senior group at the Object’s kindergarten)?
Well, firstly, whichever way you somersault this figure it'll still remain “1961”.
Additionally, in April the usual flow of programs from the radio on the wall in our room cut off yet didn’t die transmitting static for quite a while before the toll-like voice of Levitan chimed out that in an hour there would be read an important government declaration. Grandma started sighing and stealthily crossing herself… However, at the appointed time when all of the family gathered in the children’s room, Levitan gleefully announced the first manned spaceflight by our countryman Yuri Gagarin who in 108 minutes flew around the globe and opened a new era in the history of mankind.
In Moscow and other big-time cities of the Soviet Union, people walked the streets in an unplanned demonstration, straight from their workplaces, in robes and overalls, some carrying large paper sheets of handmade placards: “We are the first! Hooray!” And at the Object in our children’s room full of bravura marches by orchestras from the radio on the wall, Dad was impatiently driving it home to Mom and Grandma, “Well, and so what’s not clear, eh?! They put him on a rocket and he flew around!”
The special plane with Yuri Gagarin on board was nearing Moscow and, still in the air, he got promoted from Lieutenant straight to Major. Fortunately, the plane had a stock of military outfit and at the airport he descended the airplane stairs with a big star in each of the shoulder straps of his light-gray officer’s greatcoat to march in parade step, fine and proper, along the carpet runner stretched from the plane to the government in raincoats and hats. The laces in his polished shoes somehow untied on the way and whipped by this or that loose end the carpet runner at each stomping step, but he did not lose his demeanor and in the general jubilation no one even noticed them.
(…many years later watching the footage of the familiar newsreel, I suddenly saw them though before that as, probably, all other viewers, I could only stare at his face and the well-trained marching in.
Did he notice himself? I don’t know. But all the same, he came up so confidently and, holding his hand to the peak of his forage cap reported that the mission assigned by the Party and Government had been successfully accomplished…)
Standing under the wall radio at the Object, I had a fairly faint idea about bestriding a rocket in its flight, but if Dad said so, then that was the way to open a new era…
A month or two later there came the monetary reform. Instead of being large and long pieces of paper, the rubles shrunk considerably, yet kopecks remained the same. The mentioned as well as less obvious details of the reform became the standing subject in frequent agitated discussions by adults in the kitchen.
In an effort to join the world of grown-ups, at one of such debates, I stood up in the middle of the kitchen and proclaimed that those new one-ruble bills were disgustingly yellow and Lenin in them did not look like Lenin at all but like some petty deuce. Dad threw a brief glance at the couple of neighbors participating in the discourse and crisply told me not to mess around with conversations of elders and better go right away to the children’s room.
Though hurt, I bore the offense silently and left. But why if Grandma might say whatever she wanted, why wasn’t I allowed to?. Especially, that at times I heard Mom’s praises for my intelligence in her chatter to the neighbor women, “He happens to ask questions that even I have no answer to!” From those words, I felt proud tingling up inside the nose as after a hearty gulp of lemonade or fizzy water.
(…what if my megalomania took roots right there?
However, the setback at the exchange on the new money served me a good lesson – no plagiarizing from your grandma, be kind to present the wits of your own, if only there are any…
And, by the way, about the nose. When visiting homes of other people, be it a neighboring apartment or, say, in separate houses, like that of Dad’s friend Zatseppin, there was felt some kind of smell. Not necessarily rancid, yet always there, and it was different from place to place. Only at our home, there was no smack whatsoever…)
In the summer of 1961, the adults of the Gorka blocks took great interest in volleyball. After her work and home chores, Mom put on her sportswear and went out to the volleyball grounds, at a stone’s throw across the road, alongside the Bugorok-Knoll that looked like one of the hills in The Russian Epic Tales. The games were played by the “knock-out system” with the teams replacing one another till the velvety night darkness condensed around the yellowish bulb up on the lonely log lamppost nigh the volleyball grounds. The players chided each other for failures or hotly lambasted the opposite team’s protestations, but no one dared to argue with the umpire because he sat so high and silenced protesters by his whistle blows.
The on-lookers also rotated. They came and went, scream-and-shouted along with the game, manned teams of their own, slapped themselves to kill a biting mosquito or paddled the buzzing scourges away with green broad-leaved branches.
And I was there and also fed the mosquitoes, yet they are just a dim recollection while I remember dearly the rare feel of communion and belonging – all around were us and we were our very own people. Such a pity that some of us have to leave and go, but—see!—there are others coming. Ours. We.
(…so long ago was all that… Before the TV and the WIFI split us up and shoved into separate cells…)
~ ~ ~
With the nearing autumn, Mom started to teach me reading the ABC book, which was full of pictures and strings of letters skewered with dashes to aid at making the words up. Yet even spitted, the letters stayed reluctant to fuse into something sensible. At times, I tried to skulk and, staring at the picture next to the word, read: “Arr-hay-eye-enn. Rain!”
But Mom answered, “Stop cheating! It’s a “c-l-o-u-d”.
I poohed, and eeewed, and started over again converting the syllables into words, and in a few weeks I could already sing thru the texts at the end of the book where the harvester was mowing wheat in the collective farm field…
Grandma Martha’s worldview was not in the least affected by the Yuri Gagarin’s statement for the journalists that, while on his flight, he saw no God up there. On the contrary, she started an anti-atheistic propaganda and covert conversion of her eldest grandkid. She insistently advised me to mark well that God knew everything, could do anything and, most importantly, was able to fulfill your wishes. And in exchange for what? Just for praying regularly,
