The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
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Turning round the farthermost corner in the second veranda, you reached the last, fourth, door belonging to the khutta of old man Duzenko and his wife. They also had the same-sized sequence of hallway-kitchen-room, yet by 2 windows more than in Grandma Katya’s khutta because of the symmetry in layout—the 2 windows viewing the street called for 2 windows looking into the common yard.
2 mighty American Maples with pointed fingertips in their open-palm leaves grew in the yard right next to each of the Duzenko's additional window. The wide gap between the tree trunks was filled by a squat stack of red bricks, brittle with their age, which old man Duzenko kept all his life for a possible reconstruction of his khutta in some future time.
About six meters away from the breastwork between the Maples and parallel to it, there stretched a long shed of ancient dark gray boards, whose blind wall had blind doors secured by sizable one-eyed padlocks. Their respective owners kept there fuel for the winter, and in an enclosure within Grandma Katya’s fuel section lived a pig named Masha.
Opposite the veranda in the barren Vine coat, one more huge Elm and a timber-fence separated the common yard from the neighbors at Number 21. Next to the Elm, there stood a small shed plastered with the mixture of clay, cow dung, and chopped straw, which also was padlocked to secure the earth-cellar of the Pillutas inside it. The Duzenkos’ earth-cellar shed of bare boards stood farther away from the street and as if continued the long common shed, being separated from it by the passage to the kitchen gardens.
Between those two earth-cellar sheds, there stood a small lean-to structure covering the lid over Grandma Katya’s earth-cellar—a vertical shaft two-plus-meter deep, with a wooden ladder going down, into the dark between the narrow earth walls. At the bottom, the flashlight disclosed 4 niches caved in on all four sides and slightly deeper than the shaft bottom under ladder legs. That’s where they stored potatoes and carrots for the winter, and beets too because the frost couldn’t reach the stored vegetables at such depth.
In the corner formed by the Duzenko’s and Grandma Katya’s earth-cellar sheds, there stood a kennel of the black-and-white dog Zhoolka chained to his house. He tinkled the long chain, whipped and lashed it against the ground, barking furiously at any stranger who entered the yard. But I made friends with him on the very first night when, by Mom’s prompt, I took out and dumped into his iron plate the leftovers after supper….
Grandma Katya’s hair was sooner white than gray and a little wavy. She had it cut to the middle of her neck and held in place with a curved plastic comb beneath the back of her head. The whiteness of the hair contrasted to the swarthy skin in her face with a thin nose and somewhat rounded, as if frightened, eyes. But in the somber room behind the kitchen, on one of the three blind walls, there hung a photographic portrait of a black-haired woman with an aristocratically high hairdo and a necktie (as was the fashion once upon the New Economic Policy times during the late twenties)—Grandma Katya in her young years.
Next to her, there was an equally large photo of a man with a heavy Jack London’s chin, wearing a Russian collar shirt and black jacket, so looked her husband Joseph when in the position of the Regional Trade Auditor before his arrest and exile to the North, and abrupt disappearance strangely coincident with the retreat of German troops from Konotop…
On the whole, I liked the visit to Grandma Katya, although there were neither gorodki nor football playing, and only daily Hide-and-seek with the children from the neighboring khuttas who would never find you if you hid in Zhoolka’s kennel.
Late in the evening, on the log electric-line pillars along the street, there lit up rare yellowish bulbs, unable to disperse the night dark even on the ground beneath them. May beetles flew with a bomber buzz above the soft black dust in the road, yet so low that you could knock them down with your jacket or a leafy branch broken off a Cherry tree hanging over from behind someone’s fence. The captives were incarcerated in empty matchboxes whose walls they scratched from inside with their long awkward legs. The following day, we opened their cells to admire the fan-like mustaches and the chestnut color of their glossy backs. We tried to feed them on freshly shredded blades of grass, but they did not seem hungry and we set them free from our palms the same way as you set a ladybug to fly. The beetle ticklishly crawled to a raised fingertip, tossed up his/her rigid forewings to straighten out their long transparent wings packed under that protective case, and flew off with low buzzing. Okay, fly wherever you want – in the evening we’ll catch more….
One day from the far end of the street, there came a jumble of jarring wails split by rare prolonged booms. The sounds of familiar cacophony made the people of Nezhyn Street went out of their yards and, standing by their gates, inform each other whose funeral it was.
In front of the procession, 3 men were marching slowly, the lips pressed to the brass mouthpieces of trumpets in heartrending sobs. The fourth one carried a drum in front of him like a huge potbelly. After walking for as long as it was proper, he smote its side with a felted stick. The wide belt cinching the drum across the drummer’s back left both his hands free to hold the felted stick in one of them and a wide copper plate in the other, which he from time to time crashed against the second such plate screwed upon the drum rim, to which event the trumpets responded with a new splash of disparate wailing.
After the musicians, they carried a large photo of a sullen man face and several wreaths with white-lettered inscriptions along black ribbons. A medium platform truck followed the wreaths, purring its engine. On the platform with the unfastened sides, there stood an openwork monument of rebar rods coated with silver paint. Two men grabbed onto the rods from both sides to keep their balance over the open coffin at their feet with the deceased laid on display. A hesitant nondescript crowd concluded the slow procession.
I did not dare to go out into the street, although Mom and Aunt Lyoudmilla were there standing at the gate as well as the neighbors with their children by the wickets of their khuttas. However, driven by curiosity, I still climbed the gate from inside to peek over it. The lead-colored nose stuck from the pallid dead face looked so horrible that I flew back to the kennel of black-and-white Zhoolka, who also was ill at ease and whining to back up the trumpets….
Grandma Katya knew the way of tying a usual handkerchief into a fatty mouse with ears and a tail, which she put onto her palm to pet the white head with a finger of her other hand. All of a sudden the mouse would leap in a desperate escape attempt, but Grandma Katya caught it on the fly, put back and went on petting, under our eager laughter. Of course, I realized that it was her who pushed the mouse, but following the trick, as closely as possible, I could never crack how she did that.
Each evening she hauled out the pail of sourly smelling slop with peelings, scraps, and offals to her section in the mutual shed, where pig Masha greeted her by upbeat impatient grunting. There Grandma Katya would stand over slurping Masha accusing her of one or other act of blatant misbehavior.
She showed us which of the vegetable beds and trees in the garden were hers so that we did not play around with the neighbors’ because there was no fencing to split the plots. However, the apples were not ripe yet and I climbed the tree of White Mulberry, though Grandma Katya warned that I was too heavy for such a young tree. And indeed, one day it broke under me in two. I dreaded the pending punishment, but Dad did not beat me. He pressed the halves of the split tree back to each other wrapping tight with a length of some sheer yellowish cable. And Grandma Katya never said a scathing word.