register. Selling of Father’s coat of natural leather, which he bought when working at the Object, helped out of the pickle. After that Mother worked in retail outlets manned by a single salesperson, herself, without any suspicious colleagues, at one or another stall in the Central Park of Recreation by Peace Square where they sold wine, biscuits, cigarettes and draft beer….
End summer there again was a squabble in our khutta, though this time not a sisterly quarrel but a scrap between a husband and his wife. The source for discontent became the newspaper-wrapped mushrooms which Uncle Tolik brought from a ride to the forest. Not a remarkably big harvest, they still would do for a pot of soup.
The insidious newspaper package was accurately cinched and put by unsuspecting Uncle Tolik into the mesh-bag which he hung on his motorbike steer not to scatter the mushrooms on the way. However, at home instead of grateful praise, he got a shrill tongue-lashing from Aunt Lyouda, who discovered that the string used for cinching was a brassiere shoulder strap. In vain Uncle Tolik repeatedly declared that he had just picked up “the damn scrap of a string” in the forest, Aunt Lyouda responded with louder and louder assertions that she was not born the day before and let them show her a forest where bras grew in bushes, and there's no use of trying to make a fool of her… Grandma Katya no longer tried to appease the quarrelers and only looked around with saddened eyes.
(And that became a lesson for 2 at once – Uncle Tolik learned to never bring home any mushrooms and I grasped the meaning of “bra strap”.)
But Aunt Lyouda, on the spur of the moment, let herself a try at forbidding even the Uncle Tolik’s fishing rides, at which point it was he who raise his voice until they reached a compromise: he was allowed to go fishing under the condition of my going along. So, the following 2 or 3 years from spring to autumn every weekend with a pair of fishing rods and a spinner hitched to the trunk rack of his “Jawa” we set off to fishing.
Mostly we rode to the river of Seim. At times we fished in the Desna river, but then we had to start off at dark because it was a seventy-kilometer ride there… Shooting ahead before the roar of its own engine, charged “Jawa” thru the city submerged in its night repose, the streets empty and free of anything including the State Traffic Control militia… Then, after the thirty-kilometer-long ride along Baturin highway, we got to the even asphalt of Moscow freeway where Uncle Tolik sometimes squeezed out of his made in Czech-Slovakia motorbike a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour…
When we turned off onto the field roads, the dawn was gradually catching up “Jawa”. I sat behind, grabbing Uncle Tolik by sides with my hands stuck in the pockets of his motorcyclist jacket of artificial leather so that they wouldn’t freeze away in the chilly headwind. The night around little by little transformed into twilight with the darker stretches of windbreak belts showing up about the fields, the sky grew lighter, showed ragged shreds of clouds in their transition from white to pink glad to feel the touches of sky-long sun rays sent beforehand from beyond the horizon…The breathtaking views stirred thrill intense no less than by wild-flight riding…
Our usual bait was worms dug in the kitchen garden but one time the fishermen-gurus advised Uncle Tolik to try dragonfly larvae. Those critters live underwater in clumps of clay by the higher river bank, and the fish just go crazy about them, like, snapping the larva-rigged hook from each other…
We drove up to the riverbank amid murky twilight. “Java” coughed out its last breath and stopped. The river lapped sleepily, wrapped in thin wisps of fog rising from the water. Uncle Tolik explained that it was me who had to fetch those lumps of clay onto the bank. A mere thought of entering that dark water in the dusk of still lingering night threw a shiver up the spine, but a good ride deserved a good dive. I undressed and, on the advice of the elder, took a headlong dive into the river.
Wow! As it turned out, the water was much warmer than the damp morning chill on the bank! I dragged slippery lumps out of the river and Uncle Tolik broke them ashore to pick the larvae out from the tunnels drilled by them for living in clay. When he said it was enough I even didn’t want to leave the engulfing warmth of the stream…
Still and all, it was an instance of unmasked exploitation of adolescent labor and that same day I got square with him for the molesting misuse…
Uncle Tolik preferred a spinner to a fishing rod and, with a sharp whipping thrust, he could send the lure to a splashdown almost halfway to the opposite bank of the wide river and then started to spin the reel on the tackle handle zig-zag pulling the flip-flap flash of the lure back. Predatory fish, like pine or bass, chased it and swallowed the triple hook in the tail of the lure, if the fisherman luck would have it.
So, by noon we moved to another place with a wooden bridge across the river and Uncle Tolik walked over to the opposite, steep, bank to go along and throw the lure here and there. I remained alone and watched the floats of the two fishing rods stuck in the sand by the current and then stretched out in the nearby grass…
When Uncle Tolik walked the opposite bank coming back to the bridge, I didn’t raise my head above the grass about me and watched him struggling thru the jungle of knotgrass and other weeds I lay in. In the movie-making business they call this trick “forced perspective” by use of which he acted a Lilliputian for me. Up to the very bridge…
Once Aunt Lyouda asked if I had ever seen her husband entering some khutta during our fishing trips. It gave me no qualms to give an absolutely honest direct answer that, no, I hadn’t. As for that one time in the Popovka village, when he suddenly remembered that we had set off without any bait and dumped me in an empty village street to wait while he would quickly ride to someplace—not too far off—to dig up worms and be straight back, all what I saw around was the soft deep sand in the road between the towering walls of nettles and the blackened straw in the roof of the barn by whose side I was dropped off but no entering, nor any khuttas whatsoever. That’s why I safely could say “no” to my inquisitive Aunt…
There happened falls, yet just a couple of times. The first one while riding over the field along the path on top of a meter high embankment with the tall grass flying by on both sides from the bike. I guessed it was an embankment because the tall grass was lower than our wheels, but what purpose could it serve for among the fields? The question remained unanswered because the embankment broke off suddenly among the tall grass concealing the pit into which “Jawa” nosedived after a long jump thru the air, and the hard landing threw us both far ahead over the bike.
The other time we had hardly started along Nezhyn Street when the motorbike got tripped by a piece of iron pipe piled nearby someone’s khutta's foundation so that vehicles would not go too close by and splash at it the dirt and water from the puddles developed in the road…
However, both times we got no injuries except for bumps because on our heads there were white plastic helmets. It’s only that after the fall in Nezhyn Street, the ride had to be canceled because “Jawa's” absorber started to leak oil and needed an urgent repair…
~ ~ ~
Square of the Konotop Divisions, was called so to commemorate the Soviet Army units that liberated the city in the Great Patriotic War, aka WWII, and were honored for that deed by the city’s name in their respective denominations.
For me, it, at first, seemed the end of world because it took eight streetcar stops to get there from the Station. Square of the Konotop Divisions was as wide as three roads put side by side, and it had a slight south-west slant along all of its considerable length.
At the Square’s upper right corner, there stood a metal openwork tower like the famous one in Paris, yet more useful because the Konotop tower held a huge water tank on its top adorned with “I love you, Olya!” in jerky splotches of paint brush strokes over its rust-smeared side overlooking Square of the Konotop Divisions. Beneath the tower,
