Chapter 5. "Grow up, eaglet!"
As it was said before, I went to school a year later than I was supposed to. However, this year was not wasted. I read a lot, expanded my perception of the world — although, of course, I did not think about the fact that I was expanding it. It was just another miracle: you don't know something, you've never been somewhere, — but then you opened a book and found out, and it was as if you saw with your mind's eye absolutely unknown places before. A huge world began to pour into me like in a vessel, began to fill me, began to sound in me. Life began to sparkle with new colours.
About the same time I began to think not only about life, but also about death. It too turned out to be a part of the world that opened up before me. But a part much less understandable. And no one around me could explain to me what death was. Death... Well... It's when you disappear and you're gone. They couldn't tell me anything more intelligible. Remarkably, there was no explanation from a religious point of view — about the afterlife and all that. Certified materialism. You will die — and disappear, completely. Here you go.
I've often tried to imagine disappearing one day. I wouldn't exist. I won't be able to think, see, feel... What would that be like? I tried to imagine and I couldn't. I imagined darkness and silence and emptiness, but I was still there. I couldn't imagine that I wasn't there. I thought about it until I got very scary. Then I tried again... Finally, after many attempts, I realised that nothing would work, and I gave up, marking death in my mind as a riddle to be solved.
I don't know if it was because of these thoughts or not, but it turned out that I was afraid to see a funeral. I was very frightened by the funeral procession, the mourning music and the dead person in the coffin. I had encountered this a couple of times in the village, a couple of times in Manastyrok. I turned away and shut my eyes tightly so as not to see anything. I was simply not taken to the funerals of my relatives, so as not to frighten me. This went on for several years, and then somehow it went away. When we once again met a funeral procession during a walk, I asked my mum to come closer to see it. It turned out not to be so scary.
...And so I went to school. To be more precise, the school came to me in the person of the teacher, full and kind Lidia Viktorovna. She immediately made me feel at ease, and my studies went quickly and well.
I could read perfectly well, I didn't need a primer; I just had to learn how to write. I coped with this quickly — it was only boring to print several lines of the same letters. There was a strange thing: not knowing a single rule, I could write an arbitrary — that is, from my head — text with a volume of a notebook page (which is a lot for a first-grader), and there was not a single error in it. This greatly surprised my first teacher. Later, the ability to write with almost no errors — with rare exceptions — stumped other teachers. Because I always had trouble memorising the rules. I got straight A's on my writing assignments. Sometimes — B's, if I was in a hurry and made mistakes, or spoilt the letters by circling them many times, from which they turned into greasy scribbles and smeared. But when I had to memorise and answer the rules, I would sometimes get C's. I could answer the rules, but then I would immediately forget them. In the end, I just stopped getting asked them, and about my ability to write without mistakes made a verdict: innate literacy. I don't know if such a phenomenon actually exists. I believe not.
Lidia Viktorovna gave me one of my first serious books — "Dersu Uzala" by V. Arsenyev. I could not appreciate the gift at that time, but I read and re-read it with enthusiasm. Then I got my hands on a library's "The Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway, which made a strong impression. After that I began to read quite adult literature, examples of which I gave earlier.
I never met my classmates, except for Lidia Viktorovna's son, who was in the same grade with me and sometimes came with her. And once she brought several girls, in their presence she pinned the Little Octobrists badge to me, and they congratulated me. I saw my class in full only on the photo. However, it is also true that I had no desire to meet my classmates. They seemed to live somewhere else in the Universe, like some semi-abstract creatures, in which I had no interest. Well, they are... So what? They're out there somewhere, and I'm here.
I was not bored, although I had no friends then. Except for the neighbor Ivanovna's granddaughter, Lena, who was three years older than me and came to play with me every day in the summer. When she left, I did not want to let her go, I was very angry and offended, and I always admonished her with the words "Never come again!" She would reply "All right," and the next day she would come again, and it would be the same again. One day she came with her friend Natasha. After sitting for a while, the girls decided to joke on me. Lena slyly asked, "Do you like Natasha?" Both looked at me with sly smiles, waiting for an answer. It hadn't occurred to me at my then seven or eight years of age that I might like someone in the way that grown-up boys and girls like each other. But the teasing was obvious. What to say? Say "No" and they'd be offended, say "Yes" and they'd laugh... So I put on the most important look I could muster and asked, "Are you asking me literally or figuratively?" They looked at each other in surprise and replied, "Literally." Then I triumphantly said, "I don't know what the literal and figurative meanings are, so I can't answer your question." I really didn't know — I just heard these words somewhere. But they didn't ask about such things anymore. And I was very pleased that I got out of it so cleverly.
Back to the Little Octobrists badge. By that time, I already knew who Lenin was. The revolutionary films and books for Soviet children shown on television did their job. It's not to say that I was ideologised. That was simply the environment in which the younger generation lived and developed. Once I asked my grandmother, "Is it true that Lenin was the tallest man in the world?" I meant the most significant, the most important. She, not understanding, replied, "No, he was of small stature."
Here it should be noted that from my early childhood I firmly learnt a number of principles: always be honest and responsible, do not cheat in anything and never, do not lie, keep your word, do not do mean things, keep secrets. These principles were taught to me by my mother. They were immediately accepted and learnt by me. I think it was not only my mother's unconditional authority, but also the fact that her instructions coincided with the experience I brought from the past and stored in my subconscious. And that's exactly what I heard from my school teacher when I received my star. It turns out that the Little Octobrist should be just like that. It all came together!
Now we can talk about this with some irony, but it is really important for a child that the concepts of life that he or she receives are not contradictory. Then there will be no painful dissonance that splits reality and can have a devastating effect on the psyche. Everything happily coincided with me, and there was a clear and solid moral framework around which life could be built.
However, it also had a downside: it made me uncompromising and stubborn in such matters. One might ask: what's wrong with that? Nothing, really. But it only seems that if it is good, it is good and everything is wonderful. But in fact, there are always moments in life when it turns out to be profitable or necessary to lie, cheat in something, not keep your word, act ugly towards someone. What am I telling you? Who hasn't been in such situations? Everyone knows this. It is also known that it is not easy to be principled, and that it creates a lot of problems in life as the adherent of principles, and people around him. Well, I managed to become like that when I was a child. And since there was real life around, which often threw up its temptations — from which children are not free — or demanded not quite ethical actions, and I did not want to give in, my behaviour in the eyes of others often looked like a form of stubbornness. At that time, I had no idea of such concepts as morality and ethics, and of the problems and difficult choices associated with them. Everything was simple for me: I knew what actions were bad, and I did not want to do bad things.
No one forced me to do bad things, of course. I was just a little idealist, and that put a strain on my relationships with others.
And I, like any child, from time to time was asked by someone, "What will you be when you grow up?" For the position I was in, the question was, to put it bluntly, ambiguous. On the one hand, the questioner is showing the disabled child that he or she is no worse than anyone else, and that must be pleasing to him or her. On the other hand... I didn't dwell on my illness, but I was already quite aware of its realities. What could I say?.. That I'd be an astronaut, a policeman, a builder, a traveler? I knew I couldn't be any of those things. Therefore, when asked what I was going to be, I usually answered, "A Communist." Such an answer was received with a kind of joyful surprise by everyone, and no one even noticed that I was not quite serious in my answer. At times like this, I just wanted to stop being asked silly questions.
Seeing this reaction to my answer, I came up with a kind of joke. I learnt the "International" and the "Anthem of the Soviet Union" by heart, and when my mother and grandmother worked in the vegetable garden, I would sing them at the top of my voice while sitting at home by the open window. I would sing them again, and then again, and again, and again, and could amuse myself in this way for an hour or two, as long as I had enough voice. They worked to the accompaniment of my concert, which was heard by the neighbours who came into our yard, and by someone else. I knew how strange it looked. There was an element of some absurdity in the situation, and that was what amused me.
My attitude towards ideological things was ambivalent. On the one hand, I saw that it was important, I believed in these ideals as far as I understood them at the time, and I was even, in principle, not against becoming a communist someday. Why not, if it's good and right? After all, in the cinema, the Communists are so good! On the other hand, I remembered the jokes about Brezhnev and the Communists, and how they were laughed at. I noticed that my performance of "International" is perceived by everyone not with serious approval, but with humor. And in general, there was no piety for the Party and similar things on the part of others. Therefore, I myself thought of all this as something seemingly good and correct, but for some reason optional.
We had just then got a small-family apartment, and we stayed for several days either there or in Manastyrok, where I had to finish the first grade. And I remember one day in a small-family apartment I woke up to mourning music, and I listened to a voice from the radio telling me that the Soviet people had suffered a heavy loss... I lay down and thought with fear, "Brezhnev is dead. How will we be without him now?.." It seemed that something terrible was going to happen, some catastrophes were going to start. But no, everything remained the same. At least for a while.
I don't have much else to say about my first grade. It was easy, I got straight A's. I even got a letter of commendation. Although I couldn't say that I enjoyed studying. I liked the communication with the teacher more. Lidia Viktorovna treated me very warmly, said that she believed in me and that I would achieve a lot in life. I didn't quite understand what she meant — what could I achieve? — but I felt it was a grade above any A's. Together with the book she gave me a card, where she wrote: "Grow up, eaglet, gain strength! You will still go out to the eagles!"
I will mention one more point that indirectly concerned the school. When Aunt Svetlana was in the tenth grade, I looked at her textbooks out of curiosity. They were boring. The astronomy textbook alone turned out to be a window into some incredible world. Photos of space, — small, black and white, poor quality, but space! — planets, stars, galaxies... Especially galaxies. I stared at these unsightly photos, and couldn't stop looking. As I stared, I started to feel dizzy, I felt as if the galaxy was growing, going beyond the page, attracting me, and I started to fall there, into it. It was eerie and wonderful. I'd close my eyes, shake my head, come to my senses, and then look again.
When my aunt graduated from school and had to pass the textbooks, I took possession of "Astronomy" and said that I would not give it away. I do not know how she managed this when handing back the books, but the textbook remained with me. I often leafed through it, looked at the pictures and diagrams, and later read the paragraphs, trying to understand what they said. Thus, among my textbooks for the first grade was formed a textbook for the tenth grade, worn out to such an extent that it soon began to literally fall apart. And then I kept it for another thirty years, like a rarity from the past.
In addition to it, I seized from Svetlana "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" by N. Gogol, which was awarded to her at school for her achievements. My mother read aloud to me at that time, and I really liked Gogol's stories. Then I read and re-read the "Evenings..." myself. I still have that copy.
Here I will throw a thread to another circumstance. I mentioned earlier that at the age of three I liked to talk and tell things. My memory has not preserved it well; it is mostly hearsay. And what could such a small child talk about?.. But in the times we are now talking about, that is, about five years later, I, one might say, reached a new level. Now I was telling the real stories. I would take a character and tell his adventures, which I made up as I went along. Usually the hero of these adventures was a devil. The story would begin something like "Once the devil went into the forest...", and then followed by a detailed account of what happened to him there. Why him? I suppose because my favorite movie back then was... Yes, that's right: "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka", which featured this character, who I liked so much that I called this film "The movie about the devil". Another favourite hero of my stories was the hooligan Karlsson, a book about whom I read then.
Woe betide anyone I managed to catch as a listener. My mother and grandmother knew about the danger and tried to avoid it. But Ivanovna was sometimes unlucky. A part of the fence was removed between our sites, there was a common bench and a table. You could sit at this table from either yards' side, talk, drink tea. I liked to sit there, usually reading or drawing. And if Ivanovna carelessly sat down to me, I hurried to seize the opportunity and immediately began my tale. I couldn't tell short stories; each could go on for a very long time. Ivanovna first honestly tried to listen, then began to peck her nose. When I noticed that the audience had fallen asleep, I woke her up, "Baba Motia! — Huh? What? — Are you listening? — I'm listening, I'm listening!" The story moved on. Baba Motia was strong for a while, then she fell asleep again. I woke her up again. Then again, and again. Then someone would come and rescue her from the narrator's clutches, giving her a chance to retreat.
But it was Grandpa who got the worst of it. When we came to the village, my mother and grandmother Vera often took buckets or baskets and went to the forest to pick berries or mushrooms. I was left to my grandfather. I would sit him down next to me and start the story. Time passed. The listener grunted, squirmed, tried to escape, referring to household chores — but I was inexorable. When in a few hours Mum and grandma, tired but satisfied, came back with full buckets, my story was still going on, and my grandpa, who was completely stupefied and sleeping off his face, was rushing to meet them with the words "Karaul! Rescue me!"
I had been in the woods too. The wheelchair, which I was given at that time, had large front wheels, and due to this it had good cross-country ability, almost like an all-terrain vehicle. My mother and I managed to travel not only on the city asphalt, but also on country roads, bumpy meadows, sandy river bank, and even in the forest. This vehicle has been to so many places and undergone so many tests...
It was a slightly smaller version, for children. But for years of sitting in it I got so used to its dimensions that later, when I received new strollers, already for adults, and other models, I was uncomfortable in them and generally bad. Then the old stroller began to literally fall apart. It was losing parts, then the wheel fell off. To move outside the house, we began to use a new stroller, while at home I continued to sit in the old one. It was repaired, it broke down again, and it was repaired again. Moreover, as time went on, I became weaker and weaker, the things that hurt, hurt more and more, and it became more and more difficult and painful to sit in another wheelchair, which was difficult for my body to adapt to. Unfortunately, it was not possible to get a new wheelchair of the previous modification. They kind of stopped making them. That's why I still sit in the very first one — fixed, repaired, rusted in some places, in some places fastened with wires and ropes. Thanks to it I can still sit at the computer and work.
But let's go back in time. I finished first grade and we finally moved into a small-familly flat. Now we only visited Manastyrok as guests. My mother and I usually got there without transport, on our own, through the city, and each one-way trip took about an hour. We would spent the night in my grandmother's house (she rented our annex to my godmother with her husband and daughter), and then set off on the return journey. Sometimes in the summer we lived there for a week or more.
Our new house was partly four-storey and partly five-storey, old, even without an elevator. We lived on the fourth floor, and they had to carry me and the stroller up and down the stairs on their hands. As already mentioned, I was getting fat by then, and it was hard. Right across the street was the territory of Gomselmash, where my father worked, and in front of our windows there were factory pipes crowned with signal lights burning at night.
I was not happy about moving into an apartment block. After a private house with a vegetable garden, where you were used to being close to the land and where there was a river nearby, it was very unpleasant to find myself in four walls. Our floor was a long corridor, on both sides of which were doors to several dozen one-room flats, and at the ends of it two corridors with four more flats each. In one of these nooks was our apartment. Instead of the street, we had to walk along the gloomy corridor, where, however, there was a lot of traffic, because children ran along it all day long, and we had to breathe fresh air on the balcony. I was not taken out of the house every day. I was upset about this life, sad, and kept asking to go "home", to Manastyrok. It took time to realise that home was no longer there.
Among other unpleasant things, the small house was inhabited by ants. Red, tiny, barely visible to the eye, they were everywhere and it was impossible to get them out. They moved in streams along the walls, up and down. If a piece of bread was left on the table, it was no longer possible to eat it later, because it quickly turned red from ants. They were in clothes and bed, stuffed into sleeping people's ears and noses; especially infants suffered from this. Ants have been our nightmare since getting the apartment. But some of the old-timers said that this species lives in one place for no more than three years, and then leaves. Two years have already passed, and we had to be patient for a year. We didn't believe it. But after about a year, the ants had indeed disappeared. There were still cockroaches, but at least they were manageable.
Gradually I got used to the new life. I liked to spend time on the balcony, reading and from the height of the fourth floor watching gossiping women sitting on the bench at the entrance, children playing in the yard and other phenomena of local life. Often I amused myself by throwing down neatly cut papers, admiring their flight in the wind and rotation in the air. The janitor then wondered who was littering it, and why. He didn't understand my aesthetic exercises.
Then it was discovered that I really liked heights. I regretted that it was only the fourth floor. But my mother, as it turned out, was afraid of heights. When she was a builder, she had seen a girl from her team die when she ran out onto the balcony of a house under construction and fell down. In our city park there is a high observation tower. One day my parents and I climbed to the top. My father and I enjoyed looking at the scenery; my mother stood with her back against the wall and her eyes closed. I also liked looking down from one of the high railway bridges. My mother could not appreciate this pleasure, which made me very sad.
I made friends at the new place of residence. Door to door with us lived a family with two children — a boy Vitalik, three years younger than me, and a girl Tania, even younger. A neighbor once brought them to look at my parrots. Besides parrots, I also had hamsters, many toys and books, and Vitalik and his little sister started to stay with us all day long. We were family friends — our mothers socialised, our fathers sometimes drank together. A new friend introduced me to his friends, and they also came to see me from time to time. But they were just mates; Vitalik and I became literally inseparable. We played together, watched TV together, sat together on the balcony, ate together. Later, when he went to school, I helped him a little with his homework.
I moved to the second grade, a teacher from the new school began to come to me. She taught me in the second and third, and then in the fourth grade, already in our new place of residence. My memory has not preserved anything remarkable about her. I can't even remember the name. I studied just as well, and for these three classes I also received commendations.
Apart from making a friend, the most significant event of those years was my admission to the Pioneers, in the third grade. The procedure was about the same as at the reception in the Little Octobrists: they came from school accompanied by several classmates, tied a red tie, congratulated and gave me a farewell. However, it was much brighter and more important, because by that time I knew much more about Lenin, the Party, the Pioneers, and took everything seriously. Now I really intended to become a Communist one day, and I was very proud of my tie, even though I only wore it a couple of times.
From then on, my classmates came to visit me all the time, and I made even more friends in this way. Sometimes our only room was full of children, and my parents had to stay in the kitchen or go to a neighbour's house.
The parents of my friends used to wonder why their children didn't run outside to play, but came to my place. They said, "Is it smeared with honey in there?" But we were interested. Even sitting almost motionless in one place, I managed to be the ringleader: I invented games, distributed roles. I told a lot of stories — retold the books I had read, invented my own stories. Besides, I wasn't greedy. If any of my friends asked me to give them one of my toys or something else, I would give it to them. My parents even reproached me for this, "We buy it for you, and you give it away." And it was incomprehensible to me, how can you not give a person what he asks for. He needs it. If he doesn't get it, he'll be upset. Sounds naive to the point of stupidity. But that's exactly how it was for me. I hated to upset other people. I felt very sorry for them, and then I was very worried. It was easier to give something away.
On the other hand, if I thought someone was wrong, and if they argued with me, I would instantly boil over. A friend who was behaving ugly (in my terms), I could scold in every possible way, and at the end of the invective I could throw him out. Which I did repeatedly. And if I threw someone out, I usually never hosted him again.
For the sake of objectivity, I have to note the fact that among the children who came to me there were thieves, so my toys and various trifles at some moments were stolen almost more actively than they were given away.
Several years flew by unnoticed. Although there were not so many bright events. Relatives from Kazakhstan came to visit. They spent the night at our place or at Grandma Anna's in Manastyrok, and spent the whole day running around the city, dividing their time between the shops and the city park — which, by the way, is really nice, with the forest park, the swan pond, the tomb of the Princes Paskevich, the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, the river station, the Winter Garden, the ferris tower and amusement rides. The guests cried, told us how they longed for their historical homeland, i.e. Belarus, and left laden with bags and bags of black bread, which was considered a great delicacy in Karaganda at that time and which they treated everyone with there. Once even my great-grandmother Domna and great-grandfather Rodion came to visit us from the village for a few days. That was a really impressive event. We ourselves continued to go to the village during the summer months, and now it was an even bigger holiday for me than before.
Everything else — as usual: studies, sometimes walks in the neighbourhood or rushes to Manastyrok, games with friends, a lot of reading, medical treatment, periodic nosebleeds... We were often visited by my grandmother, who had a splitting headache from my noisy company. On holidays, a general drunken party with songs and dances would burst out of the flats and spill out onto the corridor. Then the entire floor turned into a single buzzing and stomping area. Every now and then one of the tenants would make moonshine — a couple of times it was my parents — and the corridor would become inhalable from the stench of the liquor. In those days it was especially dangerous, so the moonshine apparatus was passed to each other under great secrecy, despite the fact that the smell of a nest of moonshiners could be easily detected from the neighbouring street. It was quite amusing to observe this self-disclosing conspiracy.
Everything went on like that until my father got a real, two-room flat, which was also small. That's the apartment we still live in today. With the new move, a new stage of my life began. And all its main events were to take place here.
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