Kitabı oku: «Everything Begins In Childhood», sayfa 18

Chapter 38. The Cold Morning

“Now tell me, Uncle, how’d it chance that

Our Moscow could be burnt to ashes…”

* * *

It was quiet in the house. Everyone was still asleep. Grandpa Hanan fell fast asleep peacefully by morning. I had heard his hacking, seething cough throughout the night while I was half asleep. Now, repeating the lines of Lermontov’s poem, I listened to it unwittingly. The last time I was here, Grandpa hadn’t coughed so hard or so much.

“…Our Moscow could be burnt to ashes

And captured by the French?…”

I had come to visit my grandparents for the short winter vacation because Grandpa wanted to see me very much.

The famous poem “Borodino,” in the lines of which the raging battle resounded, was not difficult to memorize.

It was about eight in the morning. The bright crescent moon was high in the pre-dawn blueish sky above the yard seen through the window. The intense blue color grew paler and paler and the silhouettes of the houses in the yard grew clearer. I could see all that because I sat with my book at the window, framed by a thin lace-like design of hoarfrost. The window was cleared of ice in the evening, and the frost didn’t have enough time to spin a web of hoarfrost over it again. Other windows were fully covered by it. They froze because it was cold in the house in the winter, sometimes very cold. I woke up this morning because I was very cold, even though I slept under a padded blanket. I shivered as I got dressed and was chilled to the bone even after I dressed. The stove had to be lit right away.

When I visited Grandma Abigai and Grandpa Hanan in the winter, I was the one responsible for that. It had happened all by itself. Since I was a kid, I had hung around Grandma or my aunts when they lit the stove, pestering them with my nagging, “May I do it?” until they finally got so tired of me that once I heard, “Well, give it a try.” I was proud and happy. Fiddling with fire was my favorite thing. Since that time, I ardently made sure that no one violated my right while I was visiting. In the morning, I was the first to jump out of bed, shaking from the cold.

That stove… every time I looked at it, I would remember the big, floor-to-ceiling stove at Grandpa Yoskhaim’s house, which was hot day and night in winter, and it was always warm in the rooms. The stove here was tiny, like a chubby child, even though it was called a “bourgeois.” Probably, to those who named it that during the civil war, even such a small stove seemed a luxury. It was made of metal, round and just a meter high. It rested on short legs. There was a small bulging door on one of its sides, and a long flue – on the other, its lower part was parallel to the floor, and then it shot up at a right angle and went outside through the fortochka (a small window cut into the upper part of the larger window). There was a removable cover on top of the stove. It was very convenient to put fuel into the stove through it and then replace the cover. A kettle could be set onto it to boil water for tea, and then one could just watch through the little door to see how it was doing and add small pieces of firewood. Grandma sometimes even cooked on the stove, but usually it was heated with coal.

That morning, a pail of coal brought from the storage room the evening before had been placed near the stove. Wooden chips and old newspapers were also there. I put newspapers and chips into the stove, with coal on top of them.

Shaking from cold – faster, faster! – I struck a match. The bright flame blazed up. It attacked the newspaper and began to gobble it up, then switched to the chips. Hold on, flame, we need time for the coal to become red-hot! But the coal was not in a hurry. Fiery flames enveloped it from all sides; they hugged and licked it, but the black pieces of coal looked cold.

At last, white or slightly blue-gray dots began to appear on its surface. They spread and widened, becoming shimmering spots. The flame around them grew smaller; it was dying down, but the coal wasn’t blazing with heat. I felt it getting warmer and warmer; the “bourgeois” emitted a steady heat.

That little stove had its merits, its thin metal walls got hot very quickly. They also got cold quickly, as soon as the coals burned down completely. But now, I was taking pleasure in it. First, my palms, held above the stove, warmed up. Then waves of hot air began to envelop me, getting under my clothes. My elbows, shoulders, knees and the sensitive spot on my back between my shoulder blades were the first to feel it.

What a delight it was!

When I grew too hot near the stove, I put a kettle of water on it – Grandma prepared it in the evening – and made myself comfortable at the window with Lermontov’s poem in my hands.

“…The Frenchmen learned a fair amount that

They didn’t know of Russian combat,

For we fought tooth and nail!

The earth, just like our chests, was quaking;

The horses howled, their manes were shaking;

A thousand shouts and shots were making

One never ending wail …”

At that moment, banging was heard behind my back, as if continuing the scene of the battle. It was not as loud, of course, but I started. That sound came from dishes in the kitchen. I had been so busy with the stove and Lermontov that I hadn’t noticed when Grandma came out of the bedroom.

The kettle responded to the banging of the pots. It began singing its song, and the water on the “bourgeois” instantly came to a boil. I grabbed the teapot and ran to the kitchen to rinse it.

In the kitchen, my face was greeted with cold air, and a wisp of steam appeared before my nose. The warmth from the “bourgeois” didn’t reach the kitchen, nor was it warmed by the gas stove. Cylinders placed in the metal booth outside conducted gas to the stove. They were delivered to the city irregularly, and there was often not enough gas, so one needed to conserve it. But even such a stove was a luxury in this house. Not so long ago, a very small kerosene stove would have been making noise in the kitchen.

Every time I visited my grandparents, I compared their poor, almost rural, abode with our Chirchik apartment with all modern conveniences – hot water, a bathroom, and gas that no one thought about conserving. Here, the house was small; it had a living room and one bedroom, where the daughters slept. Now that Grandpa Hanan was very ill, Grandma slept with them. There were two summer rooms in a separate house in the yard, but it was too expensive to heat them in winter.

“Valery, Valery,” Grandma smiled at me and nodded her head. “Get the tea dishes.”

Grandma came to the kitchen fully outfitted in a sheepskin vest, felt boots and a headscarf.

Grandma always wore a headscarf, replacing it with a lighter one at night. Grandma, by the way, adhered strictly to all Jewish customs, not just the ones regarding clothing.

But she applied those strict rules only to herself; she didn’t extend them to the whole family. She wasn’t angry if someone mixed the dishes or accidentally turned on the light or gas on Saturday. Grandma Lisa would screech furiously in similar instances. Grandma Abigai almost never raised her voice, well, sometimes at the children, but never at Grandpa Hanan.

Many children watch grown-ups’ relations closely. They compare them, denounce them or approve of them. I had serious reasons to do that. I lived under constant strain while awaiting the rows kicked up now and then by Father at our home. I heard squabbles between Grandma Lisa and my father or between her and Grandpa almost every day at Grandpa Yoskhaim’s house. In a word, I had seen enough family squabbles. I certainly felt that they weren’t good. Grandma Abigai, Grandpa Hanan and their children served as corroboration of this feeling. Theirs was the place where I never heard squabbles or rude and endless mutual nagging. Certainly, Hanan and Abigai had their differences, and she had occasions to be dissatisfied with her husband and children, but differences were cleared up in a normal way, not without stress but without malice and insults. In their house, one could feel that they loved each other, that they shared all the difficulties, and they had many…

When I grew up and learned more about them, I thought with bitter bewilderment – why had such a nice family had so many misfortunes? It wasn’t fair.

Let’s take Grandpa. He was a good, kind, fair person, and a loving husband and father, but fate inflicted blow after blow on him.

* * *

Grandpa grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family that dreamed about the homeland of their ancestors. In 1933, his mother, Bulor, escaped from the Soviet Union with her fourteen-year-old daughter. I don’t know why her son couldn’t have escaped with them, but I knew that he had tried to do it twice before getting married in 1934 and been caught both times. Thank God, the laws in the USSR were not yet that fierce, and his punishment was limited to imprisonment. My Great-Grandmother Bulor, after long ordeals in Afghanistan and Iran, made it to Israel in 1962, and she sent an invitation to her son. But Grandma Abigai didn’t want to go there, so they stayed in Tashkent. He returned home after the war with asthma. Then he contracted tuberculosis. He needed to feed his big family. But how? Hanan had a pension, or whatever it was called, as a discharged war veteran, but it was too little to live on. And he, like many men in those years, got involved in a not-very-honest trade. What they did was subject to criminal charges. Someone from Grandpa’s group would steal leather at a factory; then it would be resold. They had points of sale where they had “their own people.”

Seven people were involved in those operations. One of them was caught, and he reported them all. The whole group was arrested and prosecuted, and all but Grampa cracked during the trial. Grampa behaved with dignity, even though he knew he would be given a longer sentence.

Now, thinking about Grandpa Hanan’s life, I understand that such operations and dealings were not for him. He wasn’t greedy or cunning. He wasn’t adroit in a mundane way. He was definitely a decent person who felt indebted to the people he considered his comrades. That’s why he didn’t testify against them. Could this person who loved music more than anything in the world become a deft swindler? I could more easily imagine Grandpa dancing and singing in our yard, “E-este-er, I’m here!” than carrying rolls of stolen leather to a dealer.

Hanan spent two years in prison. Then Avner got him released. But Hanan’s tuberculosis had gotten much worse in the stuffy prison cell. It was very difficult for him to work after his release. My childhood memories of Grandpa the Grinder were just a vivid picture impressed on a child’s memory. It was too hard for Hanan to make the rounds of the city with a very heavy grinding machine on his back, so he soon gave up that work. I don’t know how he earned a living. I only remember that he was always up and going, trying to “do deals” until the end of his days. Only he didn’t have any luck in this harsh world. He had neither education nor a real profession. He couldn’t even manage to build a more spacious, warmer house.

That winter morning, as I sat at the window mumbling the lines of Lermontov’s poem and listening to Grandpa’s breathing, I already knew that he had tuberculosis and that it was in its final stage. Neither I nor the adults understood that the terrible disease was dangerous for those around him. Even if they had understood, they couldn’t have done much. He had his separate dishes, but it was impossible to quarantine him.

Haggard, with hollow cheeks and sharp shoulders, he lay in his bed in the living room – he could no longer get up. He had a hacking cough, was wheezing, moaning, and coughing up phlegm into a small jar in which clots of blood floated in greenish-yellow phlegm.

As I entered the living room from the kitchen, Rosa, Mama’s sister, was picking up the jar from the floor.

She had just emerged from the bedroom, bright as the flower she had been named after, a bright scarf around her head, wearing a colorful baize bathrobe and multicolored slippers. Seeing me with the teapot near the stove blazing with heat, Rosa smiled and said melodiously, snapping her fingers, “Tha-at’s my bo-oy, tha-at’s my bo-oy.”

A kind word and a joyful smile – that was our Rosa. She walked, dancing slightly as if to the rhythm of one of her favorite Uzbek tunes.

It seemed to me that Rosa was uncapable of getting angry. When she wanted to reprimand me or Emma, she knitted her brows and waved her hands, but almost immediately, her lips formed a nice grimace, as if she were not going to reprimand us but, on the contrary, to apologize. Her gold tooth – it was considered a must in Central Asia for every person to have some gold in their mouth – glistened like a ray of sunlight, and we understood that we had been forgiven.

Rosa didn’t know how to get angry. We felt and were well aware of how much she loved us. When she talked to Emma, the expression on her face changed; it looked kinder, and she knew how to find special words. “Emma, are you up or are you down?” she would ask when she worried that Emma was tired or upset. That was the agreed-upon signal – “Are you in a bad way? Tell me, and I’ll help you… I’m here for you.”

Yes, my aunt was kind and merry, a smile quite often spread across her face. It was clear that she took every opportunity to enjoy herself with all her being, as if all life did was pamper her and put her in a happy frame of mind.

But that was not the case.

Rosa had had epilepsy since she was a child. I never saw her during seizures, but I heard about them. In those days, epileptic seizures were considered something terrible, appalling, shameful – unconsciousness, cramps, foam on the lips – at least among the Bucharan Jews. So, I thought that if they concealed it, it meant that they had to. But I was not in the least afraid of Rosa. I pitied her, and I loved her.

My relatives didn’t have any understanding of medicine. They thought that Rosa had grown ill because she had experienced a violent fright. When she was a little girl, she got lost on the way home from a store, and she wandered around in the dark for a long time. She wasn’t found until it was very late.

Her fright, naturally, had nothing to do with it. Epilepsy sometimes begins with a serious injury to the head but is more often congenital. They haven’t yet learned to cure it, but seizures can be prevented with good medication.

I don’t know where and how Rosa underwent treatment, what medications she took, or how often she had seizures. It was never discussed in this family. But they did grieve about it very much.

I saw how Grandma Abigai stole glances at Rosa, how she cried and talked to my mama in whispers when they had an opportunity to get together. Grandma thought that Rosa hadn’t gotten married because of her disease, and she was about thirty. It meant that she would not have children. That was a great misfortune in a Jewish family.

But it wasn’t just Rosa who upset her old parents.

They had five children – four daughters and a son. It was hard to imagine how Grandma raised them all by herself during the war years.

The children grew up, but there were still many worries. Out of their five children, only the two older ones, Marusya and Avner, lived more or less all right. They had their own families, and they didn’t live in poverty. I don’t mention my mama among those who lived all right for I knew how hard her life was.

Avner inherited his emotional qualities from his father, though he was more resolute and businesslike. He managed to get an education. I will write in more detail about my favorite uncle later. Aunt Marusya got married and, a few years later, along with her husband Kolya and two children, moved to Bukhara, her husband’s hometown. They had two more children there, so she was busy up to her eyeballs, and I saw my aunt only when she visited her relatives.

I loved those visits. Even though Marusya lived far away, she was a person very close to my heart. Every time she visited, and it happened twice a year, it seemed to me that we had seen each other just a few days before. Aunt Marusya was kind and merry, just like her sisters. She had a habit, or rather emotional need, to greet Emma and me with a song. It started when we were very little, and it continued that way. As she sang, Marusya danced, accompanying herself with her fingers. She didn’t clap her hands as others usually did. She pressed her left fist into the palm of her right hand and tapped on the spots between the joints with the tips of her fingers. I was surprised at how loud it sounded. I tried many times to do it but could never make a sound.

And the smile she greeted us with, and not just us, radiated such kindness that one could only call it boundless, but Rosa’s face also lit up with a smile when she saw us. She also danced and sang. And now, as I write about it, I don’t see much difference between them. Actually, the way they looked, their manners and movements were full of distinctive qualities.

Aunt Marusya seemed to me to be the embodiment of tenderness. Every time she stood beside me, with her feet slightly apart, as if she wanted to be steadier, with her round face and jet-black hair, tall and solidly built, I felt calm, warm and protected, almost like when I was near Mama.

Rena was the youngest in the family. During those winter days when I visited my grandparents, she still lived with them, and she caused them much distress.

When they talked about Rena in the family, they said she was somewhat strange. Rena was carefree beyond belief, as a child. When she grew up, she still behaved like a child. She couldn’t be relied on for anything. When she went to a store for a minute, she could disappear for the whole day. Where was she? What did she do? Nothing. She just loitered around stores and the bazaar.

Rena didn’t go to college. She didn’t have any profession. Every time she began working somewhere, she very soon gave it up. When she earned some money, she spent it to buy something trivial, as if she didn’t understand the difficulties the family was experiencing.

Obviously, she didn’t understand. Even Emma and I noticed it, and we made fun of the way Rena answered Grandma when the latter asked her for help.

“Rena,” Grandma would begin, “why don’t you wash some dishes.”

Before Rena could open her mouth, Emma and I would yell together in her place.

“Holle! Byad!” which meant “It can wait! It’s not urgent!”

Despite all her peculiarities, which kept Grandma angry and grieving, Rena inherited the family kindness. She and I were fond of each other.

I remember a scene from my early childhood, maybe even my infancy. I lay in a wicker basket lined with blankets. I was laughing loudly and stroking my bare legs with my hands. And Rena, squatting by the basket, was tickling me, pinching my cheeks lightly, and crying out joyfully, “Oy! Oy!”

I was very amused and happy.

* * *

Years would pass, and Rosa and Rena would get married. They would experience joys and troubles. They would have their own children. Rosa would also adopt children. Grandma Abigai needn’t have worried. But that would be later.

During the days I am writing about, both sisters lived at home. Rosa was the only person my grandparents could rely on. When she returned home from the factory, no matter how tired she was, she would begin doing chores right away – cooking, cleaning, attending to her father.

And now, after washing that terrible jar, which I was even afraid to look at, she fussed around Grandpa Hanan, speaking to him softly. She adjusted his bed and called to me, “Pour some hot tea for us.”

I had already poured tea into Grandpa’s bowl and carried it, trying not to spill. For those who have asthma, tea is better than any medication. Of course, I knew that because my father had asthma.

Rosa bent over Grandpa – he sat on the bed pressing his palms against the bowl – and raised it carefully to his lips. Grandpa looked at me, smiling tenderly. His smile was very meek, hardly noticeable. He patted his bed with a hand, inviting me to sit down. His eyes came alive; they even began to shine as before. And they were telling me, “I’m so glad to see you. I love you. Joni bobo.”

I loved Grandpa Yoskhaim no less than Grandpa Hanan. I’d grown up in his house, but still, my feeling for Grandpa Hanan was different: it was special. I never called him Grandfather, only Grandpa. I would never pull him by the beard. I would never play any tricks on him like the ones Yura and I devised in the old yard.

One could say that I felt more respect for him. But for some reason I don’t want to use that word – it seems somewhat cold.

Did I, perhaps, feel more pity, more pain for him?