Chapter 6. The Last Serene Times

The new house was really new. It turned out to be a newly built nine-story building on the very edge of the city. From our windows there was a view of a vast wasteland, behind which there was a railway and an apple orchard of the nearest collective farm was spread out. Everyone, both children and adults, went there to steal apples. The house was surrounded by smaller wastelands. They were being built up before our eyes.

There was also a forest not far from the city limits. Once a moose came from there, entered the entrance of one of the houses closest to us and lay down there. It is not known what made it seek shelter in a place inhabited by people, but it did not want to leave. He just lay there and wouldn't let anyone get in or out. The police and firemen had to be involved to get him out of there.

As I mentioned, the apartment was two-room. It could have been bigger — my father was entitled to one because of my disability. When our turn came to get an apartment, he was told that he could get a two-room apartment at once, or a three-room apartment later, if he waited a little longer. My parents consulted and decided to take whichever one they got. Firstly, they really wanted to move out of the small-family house as soon as possible. Secondly, my father was afraid that if the flat was bigger, his mother would ask to live with us. He didn't want to give her that opportunity. This became the main argument in favour of the decision.

He was offered to choose a floor — and he and mother asked for the ground one. It meant that it would be easier to take me out to the street, from which we would be separated by only a few steps. In fact, it didn't matter, since having a lift easily solved the problem. But we had forgotten about the existence of lifts, having got used to going up to the fourth floor on our own. When we realised, it was too late. We had to accept some of the inconveniences of living on the ground floor.

For me, the new move was another disappointment. I had got used to my former home, to walks in that neighbourhood, and I had friends there. Vitalik and I were sad to the point of tears.

Besides, I didn't like moving myself. Destruction of habitual life, fuss, disorder in a new place until everything is properly arranged, laid out and hung... For me, it meant great discomfort. Such an atmosphere, in my opinion, was very gloomy. I was looking forward to the day when it would feel like we had settled in and everything would go back to normal.

From the former reality, there was only the teacher who taught me in the fourth grade. I remember that during the lesson she and I watched from the window the work of people planting trees along our house. To be more precise, thin twigs that were yet to become young trees in a few years. She shouted from the window for them to choose better saplings for us.

Then the husband of my aunt Ekaterina, my mother's sister, came — now we lived very close to them, on the other side of the street — and said that he did not like such plantings. A couple of days later he brought three saplings he had stolen from somewhere and planted them right in front of our windows. Maple, birch and linden. He said that maple is for my father, birch is for my mother, and linden is for me. Contrary to our expectations, all three took root, and eventually turned into large, beautiful trees. Once, during a storm, a maple split in two, and it had to be cut down. My father took the death of "his" maple as an omen of his imminent death, and he was still grieving over this, especially when he was drunk. However, days, months, then years passed, and the omen never came true. Eventually he got tired of grieving and forgot about it.

We were one of the first to move into the house. Then, for more than one month, a stormy movement continued, someone was constantly entering, people were carrying furniture, noisily celebrating housewarming. Mum made friends with one of the new neighbors, from the seventh floor. There was almost exactly the same story with Vitalik: when her son Andrei went to school, they brought him to me to help him with his lessons. And we became family friends too. Andrei was more than five years younger than me, but very intelligent and sociable. We quickly made friends. However, the relationship with him turned out to be very difficult. More on that later.

We still walked to Manastyrok — the journey became longer, but not by much. We visited Aunt Ekaterina, and her family visited us even more often, and I socialised with my cousins Oksana and Aliona, who were also a few years younger than me. I had to entertain the girls and play with them. Their father, Uncle Alexander, loved to fish in the quarry, right next to their house. The fish there were bad — crucian carp the size of a child's palm. Nevertheless, he managed to enthuse my father with fishing. Now, in the summer, we often arranged something like picnics on the quarry shore with two families. We would build a fire, eat something, our fathers would fish, our mothers would chat, and my sisters and I would play.

Oksana was businesslike, she liked games about farming and trading. The youngest, Aliona, had a combative, almost boyish character. She was a daddy's daughter, and her father called her Alioshka. He even came up with a whole story about it. He said that God usually sits in a ditch with big scissors, and children who are to be born must jump over this ditch. God watches who jumps and checks with his plan whether he is to be a boy or a girl. If it is a girl, then at the time of the jump, he uses scissors and grabs the future newborn what girls are not supposed to have. And then one day God was very tired and fell asleep. Then he realised, and in his sleep he just clacked his scissors without looking! And there just jumped Alionka, who by the original plan was to become Alioshka, and the character was already laid down accordingly. That was such an unfortunate misunderstanding... Everyone liked this story very much, except its main character.

Uncle Alexander — whom everyone used to call Shurik — worked with my father at Gomselmash. Before that he had changed more than one profession: he served in the merchant navy, was a customs officer and, according to rumours, a prison warden. He loved to talk about his voyages, sharks and exotic places he had been to. He also boasted that nothing could be hidden from him: as a former customs officer, he would find everything in no time. One day, my mother decided to besiege him and offered a bet. She hides a bottle of vodka in the room, and he tries to find it. If he succeeds, what he finds will become his prize. If he failed, she would give him the excellent nylon tennis shirt he had once bought in Singapore and which he had never missed an opportunity to put over. He easily agreed to such a bet — because the bottle is really difficult to hide in a small room. When he came out, my mother removed the back cover from the TV — it was an old tube TV, still black and white — and shoved the bottle into his gut. Our customs officer came in and started searching. He rummaged through the entire room several times, overturned and gutted every drawer and every shelf. Finding nothing, he gave up. And swore a long time when he was shown the improvised hiding place. And the next day he honestly gave up his loss. Then I wore this t-shirt for several years.

Not only we did visit our grandmother in Manastyrok, but she often came to visit us. And for various holidays — including their own birthdays — all relatives gathered at our place. I remember once during a feast on my birthday I had a quarrel with my parents because of something. Crying with resentment and anger for being scolded on such a day, I shouted to the guests, "It's not my birthday! Everybody get out!" Some of them did get up and went home. My parents somehow managed to please them and calm me down.

...In general, I was not bored, and I somehow unnoticeably settled in and got accustomed to the new place. Among other things, I found myself new activities. I learnt to embroider cross stitch, and began to burn on wood. The latter I especially liked, and I tinkered with the burner for many years — as long as I could hold it in my hand. I tried to paint with watercolour and gouache on wood — it was not interesting on paper. However, I was not a very good artist, so I gave it up. I tried to cut the figures out of paraffin and soap, with the same result.

I also made the first attempt to write something. I conceived an adventure story in which the heroes of various famous literary works all went together on a ship to look for a mysterious island. Writing was very exciting. I did not let anyone read my manuscript. On another trip to the village, I took it with me. That's when my grandfather breathed freely. Instead of tormenting him with my endless epics, I sat and silently worked on a literary opus. The opus, however, soon tired me, was postponed, and then somehow got lost.

But the experience was extremely interesting. It has stuck in my memory. Up to that time I had written only in school — language exercises, essays, and other such things, which I disliked very much. Writing letter by letter was terribly tedious and, it felt, completely pointless. And then the scratching of the pen on the paper suddenly brought great pleasure. I did not think about it then, but I noticed it for myself.

It was around that time that an unusual incident happened in the village. One day my mother went to visit my great-grandmother Domna and my great-grandfather Rodion. I stayed. I was sitting at the table and reading something, or I was just writing. My grandfather and his friends played cards in another room, my grandmother Vera was there as well. A heavy downpour came, a thunderstorm began. The table stood in the partition; in front of me on the right and on the left were windows looking at the street, there were clock-strokes hanging on the wall between them. I looked through one window or the other, watching the elements play out. At some moment I noticed a glow on the left side of the window. I raised my head and saw that a ball lightning was hovering behind the window pane. It was not the kind of ball lightning they show in the cinema, not a glowing white ball almost the size of a football. It was the size of a small orange and glowed purple in the centre and orange around the edges. I didn't have time to get scared. The lightning hung there for a second, then exploded with a terrible rumble. I was blinded, and afterwards coloured spots jumped in front of my eyes for a long time. Grandma came running. It turned out that she saw a fireball flying through the yard through the kitchen window and shouted to grandfather, "Kirill, fire in the yard!" So, the lightning flew over the gate and turned around the corner of the house, where it exploded. Later, it was discovered that the outer wall near the window was scorched.

Mum was sitting at great-grandmother's house at the time, waiting out the thunderstorm. They heard an explosion and came to the conclusion that lightning struck one of the houses. When the downpour was over, she came back and asked, "Did you hear that bang? Apparently, lightning struck someone's house." We said, "This is ours." And in the evening came the reaction. I was shaking with delayed fright, my teeth were chattering. Only in the morning it passed.

...The 1st of September came, and I went to the fifth grade. The teacher assigned to me in the new school — a rather young guy who had hardly more than a few years of work under his belt — showed up for the first lesson. We met, talked a little. He decided to give an introductory history lesson as a touchstone. We were starting the history of the Ancient World, and the first thing we should have learnt was what "B.C." and "our era" meant. He explained. I didn't understand. He explained again. I didn't understand again... The poor guy spent an hour explaining these concepts to me, and all in vain. I still didn't get it. And he never came back after that time. I suppose he asked the headmaster to relieve him of the obligation to study with me. I suspect he thought I was an idiot. And, in truth, with a good reason.

The next lesson the teacher came, whose name was Tatiana Petrovna. She started with the same topic. She explained to me about "B.C." and "our era" once — and I immediately understood everything. Either she explained better than her predecessor, or I somehow matured in a couple of days...

Her subjects turned out to be chemistry and biology, not history at all. The programme of the fifth grade was much more serious and varied than that of the fourth grade, and Tatiana had a hard time, because in addition to her own subjects and the same history, for three years she also had to teach me mathematics, geometry, Russian language, literature, geography, physics, and everything else. I was relieved of a few items, but that didn't make it much easier for her. Before our classes — three times a week — she had to first prepare at home according to textbooks, delving into the next topics, and then explain them to me. Her husband helped her with mathematics, since it was his specialty, and everything else was hers. At that time I was stupid, I didn't think much about such things, and I didn't understand what a labour feat she had done. I realised much later, a few years after graduation. I remember her with great warmth, my respect and gratitude for her labour are boundless. Only in high school I had separate teachers in different subjects, Tatiana Petrovna had only her disciplines, and it became easier for her.

And at that time she and I sometimes argued about the spelling of this or that word. I argued that it was right to write it this way, and she argued that it was wrong. Neither of us could justify our point of view. When she'd go home, she'd say, "I'll check." The next time she came, she usually said, "Yes, you were right." She told this to the teacher of the Russian language, and it was then that I first heard about innate literacy.

The language teacher herself did not bother to visit me and verify what she had been told. But the history teacher bothered. When she saw my final grade in history for the fifth grade "excellent", given by Tatiana Petrovna, she doubted it and came to check personally whether I deserved it. After giving me a good ride through the curriculum, she admitted that I deserved it. At the same time, it was noticeable that she was surprised.

When the books were handed over at the end of the school year, I asked not to take the history textbook, and they left it to me. The following year, at my request, they again left me a history book — now it was the Middle Ages. Both books I read to the state even more deplorable than the astronomy textbook.

However, then, in the fifth and sixth grades, my main interest was not history, but biology. More precisely, zoology. I loved animals very much, read books about them, from fiction to scientific works, and read Gerald Durrell. Then, for the first time in my life, I wanted to become someone specific — of course, a zoologist. Seeing such a passion, my teacher did her best and brought me a microscope from school. It was just mind-blowing. I sat in the arms with it, for hours watching infusoria and other microlife, looking at plants, blood, and in general everything that came to hand. At the end of the school year she tried to negotiate with the school authorities to keep the microscope for me, but unfortunately without success.

Later my interest turned to palaeontology. At that time, there was not such an abundance of brightly coloured children's books and encyclopedias about dinosaurs as there is now. I happened to see only two or three popular publications for children and youth. The information had to be collected by crumbs, from different sources, sometimes having only an indirect relationship to the topic that interested me. I drew geochronological tables, wrote out information from different books, copied images of representatives of the ancient fauna. Not just dinosaurs. I was interested in absolutely everything — and the more ancient, the more interesting. I made dinosaurs out of plasticine. And not in the form of funny toys, but trying to achieve maximum compliance with the descriptions and reconstructions. Several dozen of them stood on the shelf behind the glass, and next to them hung a list of names indicating who was predatory and who was herbivorous. My teacher used to take them to school as a visual aid. After a couple of years, the plasticine became unusable, began to spread, the colours blurred, my dinosaurs lost their marketable appearance, and they had to be thrown away.

At that time I was already dreaming of becoming a palaeontologist, realising that it was not going to happen. My love for paleontology passed with me throughout my life. And now I occasionally read something on this topic, watch educational films and lectures.

There was a negative moment associated with the school. It consisted in the fact that I, who never lied to anyone, then often lied to my mother that I was not feeling well, and asked her to call the teacher and cancel classes for that day. I pretended to have a headache, pretending to be almost dying. Mum, however, was almost impossible to fool. She invariably replied that she would not call anywhere and cancel anything. Of the dozens of simulation attempts, only one or two succeeded. As far as I remember, that was the only reason I ever consciously lied.

At that time a joyous event happened for me. Our house, which at first stood almost alone among the wastelands, was gradually surrounded by new buildings. So, a shop appeared on a bare spot right in front of our windows. And when the neighbouring house was finished, Vitalik's family moved into one of its flats. The reunion delighted us. Now we didn't live door-to-door, but still close — literally at the distance of a loud call. He and Tania began to hang out at my place, and life went even more fun.

In about sixth grade I met my classmates. It happened in the following way. One day, my cousin Oksana came to me with her classmate Natasha. She liked to communicate and play with me, and she began to come on her own. Especially since she lived close by — in the same house as Vitalik. She had two sisters — the younger Tania and the older Galia. Soon the three of them came together. Suddenly it turned out that Galia was studying with me in the same class. She brought some of the guys. The number of people in our house has increased. But that wasn't all. The three sisters began to bring their friends who lived in their house. Thus, groups of 10-12 people became a common thing at our house. Sometimes it was possible to come up with a game for everyone — for example, we went on an interplanetary expedition, making space helmets from cardboard and cellophane and distributing among ourselves the specialities of the starship crew. Or having a council on Olympus and each being one of the gods or goddesses. Or we would imagine ourselves in a prison cell, and everyone was a convict, with their own story and nickname. Or we would cover the windows to make it dark and watch diafilms, of which I had a whole box. But more often we broke into groups, and some played games on the floor, throwing a die and moving the chips, others sat at the table and drew, others organised battles of soldiers, and the girls too. Or inventing something else. Or I'd tell a story — how could I not?

We especially liked to have storytelling sessions in the courtyard in the summer. When I went outside, Natasha and the group would call me to their driveway, and other friends, and sometimes guys I didn't know, would come over. Everyone would surround me and I'd start a story. Mostly books. Gogol was a particular success — the same "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka". I was narrating, a crowd of listeners from five to fifteen years old was sitting and standing around me, and the tenants of the house and passers-by were wondering what was going on here.

And then, of course, there was Andrei. For all his positive qualities he had a bad character and a whole set of shortcomings — such as lying, greed, arrogance, boastfulness, etc. Well, I have always been principled in such matters. So the outcome of our friendship was easy to predict. After a while, he got on my nerves. I put up with him, partly out of respect for his mother, and then I sent him away. But I was wrong to think that was the end of it. A few months later, a former friend came to me for some trifling reason; then he came again... So he began to visit me regularly again, and the friendship resumed. I wondered to myself. Usually, if I drove someone away, it was irrevocable, but here... However, this stage of our relationship also did not last long: soon Andrei again annoyed me, and I drove him away for the second time. This time we did not communicate for several years. Then he came again on a trifling matter, and everything repeated according to the already known scenario. And I wondered to myself again. Why do I accept and tolerate him? It was also unclear what had drawn him here. Because if I treated him badly, he paid me back. Truly, it was a strange friendship, strange to both of us.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. At the time of the story, he and I were in contact, then we separated, then we were in contact again, then we separated again. And he was a part of some of our big gatherings back then.

...Thinking back on it today, I think about how strange it must have looked from the outside. In theory, in my position, I should have been sitting alone, bored, envious of others and worried about my miserable fate. And my life was rich and cheerful, I was surrounded not only by the care of my family, but also by numerous friends, for whom I somehow became the center of attraction. Interesting lessons (not all of them though), my favourite teacher, books, various creative hobbies... I had a good time. Even unpleasant for me and useless in its essence raids of medics had almost stopped by that time. My mother got a job as a home seamstress — she sewed working mittens — and also received a small allowance for me. It was a ridiculous amount — but still... So we lived modestly, but we weren't poor. Walks, bonfires at the quarry, all sorts of domestic and not so domestic animals... I'll say it again: I had a good time. Only years later it became clear how good it was. Those were the last serene times of my life.

Concluding the story about them, for the sake of completeness, I will mention two more moments.

When I was about fourteen years old, I tried a banana for the first time. Nowadays there are plenty of tropical fruits, but at that time they were very scarce and expensive. You could only eat a lot of tangerines, and even then for the New Year only. And so they bought me a small banana. It was not ripe at all, but I did not know that, because until that day I had seen this fruit only on TV and in books. After tasting it, I was left at a loss. Why does everyone praise this nasty fruit, which is not appetising, not juicy, and tastes like chalk?

The other point was that around the same time I got over my fears. For as long as I can remember, three things have scared me: spiders, skeletons, and severed heads. When I saw a spider, even a tiny one, I would start screaming and call for help. If I saw a skeleton, a skull or a head in a book or on the TV screen, I closed my eyes in horror, and then I did not take the book in my hands and did not open my eyes during the whole film. Then I began to treat spiders more calmly, even kept them in jars and fed them flies. And to stop being afraid of skeletons and severed heads, I took books, where they were present in the illustrations, and forced myself to look without taking my eyes off. In fact, it didn't take many such sessions of self-coercion to get used to what used to be frightening. The fears went away, and life became even better.