The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
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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, as simple as that! Such a trifle, ain’t it? But then at school, I, with God’s help, would have no problems. The grade of “five” is needed? Just say a prayer and – get it! Some good trade, eh?.
And I wavered. I succumbed to her temptation and, even though never disclosing it, I turned a clandestine believer on my own. As no one enlightened me what a believer had to do, I came to inventing the rituals myself. Going out to play in the Courtyard, I for a second dropped behind the narrow door to the basement and there, in the darkness, pronounced—not even in whisper but silently, in my mind, “Alright, God, you know all yourself. See? I’m crossing me.” And I put a sign of the cross somewhere about my navel…
However, when before school there remained just a couple of days, something made me revolt and I became an apostate. I renounced Him. And I did it out loud. Openly. I went into the grassy grounds by the garbage bins enclosure and shouted at the top of my lungs, “There’s no god!”
And though there was no one around—not a single soul—I still took proper precautions, just in case if somebody would overhear accidentally, say, from behind the fencing around the garbage bins. “Aha!” they would think, “Now that boy shouts there is no god, which makes it clear even for a fool that till lately he has believed there was some.” And that was surely a shame for a boy who in a few days would become a schoolboy. For that reason, instead of articulating the blasphemous renunciation clearly, I took care to howl it with indistinct vowels: “Ou ou ouu!”
Nothing happened.
Turning my face upward, I hollered it once again and then, in a way of putting the final period in my relations with God, I spat in the sky.
Neither thunder nor lightning followed, only I felt the drizzle of spittle landing on my cheeks. So it was not a period but the dots of ellipsis. Not too much of a difference. And I went home liberated…
~ ~ ~
(…the microscopic spittle fallout that sprinkled, in the aftermath of the God-defying spit in the sky, the upturned face of the seven-year-old I, proved up to the hilt my inability to draw conclusions from the personal experience: a handful of sand, when thrown up, invariably came back down. Additionally, it demonstrated my complete ignorance of Sir Isaac Newton’s conclusions in his law on the respective matters.
In short, it was really time for the young atheist to plop into the inescapable tide of compulsory school education…)
The never-ending summer of the pivotal year pitied, at last, the little ignoramus and handed me over to September when, dressed in a bluish suit with shiny pewter buttons, my forelock trimmed in the real hair salon for grown-up men, where Mom took me the day before, clutching in my right hand the stalks in the newspaper-wrapped bunch of Dahlias brought the previous night from the small front garden of Dad’s friend Zatseppin who had a black motorcycle with a sidecar—I went for the first time to the first grade, escorted by Mom. I cannot remember whether she was holding my hand or I succeeded at my claim of being big enough to carry both the flowers and the schoolbag of dark brown leatherette.
We walked down the same road from which since long had disappeared the black columns of zeks though the sun shined as brightly as in their days. On that sunny morning, the road was walked by other than me first-graders with their parents and brand-new leatherette schoolbags, as well as by older, differently aged, schoolchildren, marching both separately and in groups. However, down the tilt, we did not turn to the all too familiar trail towards kindergarten but went straight ahead to the wide-open gate of the Recruit Depot Barracks. We crossed their empty yard and left it thru the side gate, and walked uphill along another, yet unknown, trail between the tall grayish trunks of Aspen.