Part One – There (Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER ONE –
THE OLD APARTMENT
My earliest memories relate to the old apartment. It consisted of a small room with a window into someone else’s courtyard and a very small glazed kitchenette gallery. Long time ago this housing belonged to my grandmother’s aunt, Asya, the old thin hunched woman with a prominent schnozzle.
There was a family legend about Asya: she adored her husband (after whom I was named), and when he was drafted into the army during the Great War, she followed him as a sister of Mercy.
Brusilov offensive threw them into Galicia, where one evening in a local tavern, Asya looked too defiantly at a French officer – an Entente observer in the Russian troops. Uncle Nick, of course, did not find a better way to return her attention as to snuff out a cigarette about her palm.
I’ve always been amazed by this story. There were no other signs of the ferocious temper of Uncle Nikolai in the family. On the photographs – this is a chubby smiling man, who stared back at us accompanied either by his beloved wife, or, in the absence of his own kids, by the children of relatives and friends.
In my school years, I applied the scientific method to the study of the issue, examining two sides of both Asya’s hands through a magnifying glass. I did not find any scars, from which I concluded that Uncle Nick’s jealousy was greatly exaggerated and inflated to the proportions of a silent movie, where the level of emotion must be expressed by appropriate action. I came to the conclusion that most likely he just shook off the hot ash into her palm.
Asya had no children of her own and was madly in love with her great-nephews: my uncle and my father. She loved my aunt too, but she treated the boys like princes of the blood. As soon as the eldest, my uncle Abel grew up, she gave him away her apartment and moved to my grandparents as a housekeeper. When my uncle divorced his first wife and left for the Great Construction Project of Communism, the apartment passed to my father. I cannot say that I was born there, but quite soon after my birth, I settled there.
They say that I was a funny kiddy with cornflower blue eyes and huge eyelashes. Well, I won’t be surprised. Looking at my mother, a Hollywood beauty, I feel sorry that these are the only traits I got from her. Nowadays however, only long eyelashes left. They still painfully prick my eyes, though of a completely different color.
I have fragmentary memories of my childhood… A huge Christmas tree up to the ceiling… New Year’s gifts on the windowsill – a book Pinocchio with bright pictures and a large bag of popcorn… The Iron Kit-Cat wall clocks on the wall, which fell on the head of my sleeping father, but did not even wake him up with this blow… A sideboard, where crystal glasses reflected a bright red and gold colors of a box of chocolate pennies… and a suitcase of toys under my bed.
I remember one day when I tripped over it, rattle to the floor and hurt my left hand. Dad, tired after a workday, was very dissatisfied that his slob son would not stop crying, and even slapped my fanny. It was very disappointing that he did not believe how much it hurts and did not want to take me to the doctor. But I also had a mother, so the fracture was discovered in the hospital and a saving cast was applied that same evening.
Mom often recalled that in the first years of my life I had my own language. Anyone who wanted to understand me should learn it. For example, I called potatoes – potawa, and strawberries – strobawa. Mom carefully wrote down my mysterious words and funny remarks in a notebook. Alas, potawa with strobawa and only a couple of stories are what remained in my memory.
Once dad told how he gestured to the seller to let him taste the cheese.
“And the salesman thought I was mute and answer me with gestures” Dad said. I really liked this story, and then I often asked Mom to retell how my Dad muted the seller.
We were friends with classic poetry.
Mom started, “Tiger, tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night” –
I continued, “He is hiding on a tree, making fearful symmetry”.
I remember loving the pacifier for a long time. It was like chewing gum for me. I was already good at speaking. People around were amazed that the baby took the pacifier out of his mouth and asked them questions. I treated with pacifier those I liked. And I often liked people in uniform. Once I saw a policeman snacking on fresh Georgian bread and cheese in the park on a bench. I held out my hand and went to greet him. Of course, he did not understand the gesture and put a piece of bread into the outstretched hand of the poor child. Upon which the child took the pacifier out of his mouth and said, “Suck it, uncle policeman!”
Both Dad and Mom spoke German flawlessly. Mom attended a private German kindergarten, so German was practically her mother tongue. Dad studied in a German school, where all subjects were taught in German. He would have finish this school if all the Germans had not been sent to Kazakhstan in case of an impending war.
However, despite the excellent opportunity to teach me a foreign language, my parents preferred to keep it for themselves as a means of secret communication. And so, once they are lying in the dark in bed and chatting in German, and the indignant son is saying to them: “Well, how much you can keep talking! Don’t you have anything else to do?”
But I loved to talk. My father took me with him to the hairdresser, where I started telling stories that I was a captain, I had a ship, and we were capturing pirates. The stories were so action-packed that all conversations fell silent, the visitors listened only to me, who folded his hands behind his back and measured the barbershop from corner to corner with the staggering gait of a sea wolf. They told my father at the barbershop, “A hair trim is free, if you bring your son-captain.”
Many children “inhabited” the yard and balconies of our house. I don’t remember the neighbor’s boy. He was about five or six years old, big, fat with well-groomed white thighs. And I, a three-four-year-old scumbag (grandfather, my father’s father, called me a finch), who really liked this flesh. The concepts of sex did not exist for me at that time, therefore, when I saw the coveted thighs on the balcony, I stretched my arms forward, bent my fingers in the form of clawed paws and went on a psychic attack. And the boy, who could easily sweep me away with one click, ran in a panic and screaming…
Kurdish children in our yard found out about my exploits and decided to defeat me with cunning. They spoke:
“You won’t be able to pick up a chair and throw it at us!”
“Yes, I would!” I assured.
“Either you won’t rise it up, or you won’t get it into us!”
“I will raise it, and I get you!”
“You are lying!”
“No, I’m not!” I shouted furiously, grabbing my little highchair and throwing it at them from the balcony.
But they, nimble and mobile, with laughter scattered in all directions. There was no case that I hit anyone.
My unsuccessful attacks were appreciated by a neighbor boy from a wealthy family from the opposite end of the yard. He had his own accounts with these “lumpens” from the basements. He said:
“Throwing a chair is inconvenient, you have to throw stones.”
“What stones?” I asked.
“Cobblestones. They can be dug up,” he answered and pointed to the paved courtyard.
Fumbling, the boy loosened and took out one of them. While he was picking out the second one, I lifted the first one on my shoulder. But the cobblestone is not a chair: it is heavy and slippery. It is not easy to keep it in children’s hands, and I dropped the stone right on the head of my volunteer mentor. Half the yard was covered in blood. Since then, Kurdish children have not molested me.
Another character lived in the same yard was a “princess”. It was a pretty girl named Netta. She was eight or ten years older than me. One day she gave me a beautiful postcard with a blue sea and a white boat on it. I don’t know why I remember this unremarkable event. Later, Netta lived in the same apartment, sinking lower and lower: alcoholism, prostitution, drug addiction. Sometimes I think maybe the card was her only hope and it shouldn’t been taken?
The last thing I remember about the old apartment is a visit of my mother’s parents. How they fit into this tiny apartment with us, where they slept, remains a mystery to me. Apparently, they put cots for the night. At that times, leaving together in the same room was treated easier…
One day, my parents, taking the opportunity, left me under the care of my grandparents and went to the cinema. Grandfather was drinking tea at the table – I see it as it happens now – he was sitting with his back to the door. Grandmother guarded me so I would not run away from the pot and tried hard. Suddenly, Grandpa groaned from the pain in his heart and leaned back in his chair. He sat with his arms outstretched and trembled slightly.
“Gilara!” Grandma wailed.
I had not have a clue what’s going on, except that help was needed, and with a bare booty I jumped out onto a dark balcony. The neighbor’s boy with thick thighs was blown away as by the wind. At the other end of the balcony, the silhouettes of a man and a woman in mackintosh, in the fashion of that time, appeared.
“Dad! Mom! Grandpa is sick! I yelled as hard as I could.
It turned out to be neighbors who called an ambulance. But in those years, home phones were a rarity, you had to run to a pay phone…
I don’t know the details. I haven’t even been to the cemetery. I was taken away to live with relatives, whom I entertained with stories about the blue sea and my ship, fearlessly sailing through it into the future…
Nick Neim's Stories 