Part One – There (Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER EIGHT – THREE PRESCHOOL SUMMERS
These were probably the most light-hearted months of my life. Remember, I narrated in the very beginning, how happily time flowed in the old apartment? But I also traveled in the summer time. It was customary to take children to summer cottages or resorts from a hot dusty city. I don’t remember the first four summers at all, although at the photographs, made during the fourth summer in Zheleznovodsk, I can recognize myself.
Vague memories of the fifth summer are already showing through in my memory. At first, my mother and I drove to Kislovodsk along a winding mountain road. I had motion sickness from frequent turns, and for not to vomit, I sucked on barberries candies. We arrived at night, and the landlady graciously gave us… boiling water. She didn’t have anything else.
“Sorry,” she said, “The milk haven’t being milked, the butter haven’t being whipped, and the dough haven’t being kneaded. Learn to live like a human beings, and people will reach out to you.”
I had to suck the remaining barberry candies, washing them down with boiling water. From candies, I reflexively recalled moving car, and fell asleep.
In the morning I got up at the crack of dawn and left the house.
From the outside, house was surrounded by a pretty orchard. A barefoot girl of my age wandered between squat trees with large green apples,
“Who are you?” she asked.
“A summer-resident of it,” I replied and pointed out at the house.
“Of It? Of shit!” determined the girl, “And what is your name?”
“Nick,” I said, with resentment in my voice.
“Ah, Shit-Nick!” she blurted out and, darted into the house, just in case. But seeing that I was arming myself with neither sticks nor stones, she went out into the garden again.
“And my name is Vigi,” she said, “What will you say?”
“That you are… a piggy,” I suggested.
The girl doubled over with laughter.
“I’ll shit up into my panties now!” she said, “A Piggy! Where did you come from? Learn to speak like a human being, and people will reach out to you.”
She was probably right…
People who spend vacation in the resort were engaged in spa therapy, that is, they wandered from one mineral spring to another one and drank water, which had unpleasant taste and odor. For example, they approached the Water Spring number Four. It was a glass pavilion with a round or semi-circular marble counter, like in “Water and Juice” stores. A woman with an immense, like the Motherland, chest, dressed in a white coat or apron and a headdress, twisted a massive tap handle, more appropriate for a steam locomotive then a water pipe, and poured water into faceted glasses for those, who wanted to “take a risk” and drink. It was a ritual.
“Two hot, two cold!” mother usually said and received two glasses of cool and two glasses of warm Narzan mineral water from the spring.
We moved aside, where I quickly poured out a warm liquid and, after sipping a cold one, handed over my glasses back. Taking advantage of the moment, I begged my Mom for ten kopecks, bought from the boys a beautiful slender stalk of cattail, which everyone called reeds, with a brown plush top, and returned back. I don’t remember if my mother liked the mineral drink, and what was its purpose, but even now I strongly suspect that spa therapy is nothing more than a game, and the reeds are the most beautiful part of it.
Then dad joined us in Kislovodsk, and we went to visit relatives in Pyatigorsk. My father’s uncle Boris lived there and worked as the head physician of the sanatorium. He had a wife, Lena, and a small dog, given to him by my dad. Dad liked the toy terrier that fit on the box of cigarettes, and dad bought a puppy. Uncle, apparently, also liked the small economical dog, and he persuaded his nephew to donate him, a childless, this joy of life. Dad took pity on the old man and gave in.
And now the dog recognized my Dad and went crazy with happiness. He licked daddy’s face and hands like a slave saved from death. He whined, howled, barked and sang dog’s songs. He jumped on the sofa and table and pissed around the whole apartment out of joy. Grandpa Boris was terribly jealous,
“Ungrateful creature! I fed and groomed him for years, and he forgot it in a second and rejoices at the person who at ones got rid both of him and the cares about him.”
In addition to this episode, I remembered an unusual smell. Whether it was inside the apartment or outside of it, and how to describe it – I do not know. In my youth, I was able recalling and reproducing it as an image. I enjoyed its antique style and grace. It seemed to me something of coffee and something of an unfamiliar refined spice. I never visited Pyatigorsk again, never saw Grandpa Boris or his wife. Subsequently, I asked my parents about the strange smell – they did not understand me. Once, in Odessa, during my student years, I smelled this magical aroma on the street. Almost the same thing happened to me as to a small dog, who recognized my father’s scent. But before I could identify the source of my pleasure, it disappeared. With flared nostrils, I ran up and down the street, broke into shops, gateways and inhaled, inhaled. Everything was useless. The signal has vanished. I never met it again in my life. But then I still could call out this “spirit” in my memory. And later that opportunity also disappeared. And I don’t even know if there was a real substrate – a chemical molecule that causes an olfactory reaction, or if it was some kind of irritation in the hippocampus. However, what’s the difference?
For the first time in my life I saw the real sea the following summer. And I didn’t just see it, I fell in love with it. This feeling, apparently, deeply penetrated me, and became the source of many my childhood stories about the brave captain, his fast-moving ship and bloody battles with vicious pirates. I do not rule out that the first source of these intense emotions was a colorful panorama book with three-dimensional caravels of Christopher Columbus: Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria. These names, engraved in childhood memory, repeatedly served me many years later and on another continent as a password that opens the door to the souls of Hispanic Americans.
Our journey began with a night train to Batumi. A military surgeon, Rima’s husband and my father’s friend, grew up in this sea-port city. We stayed at the house of the surgeon’s father – also tall and strong like his son and also a doctor. I appreciated his study with massive bookcases, a desk full of papers, a table lamp with a green shade and a bronze inkstand with sphinxes, and, being a captain of a ship at heart, mentally transferred them to my ship at once.
In the evening we went for a walk to the sea. For the first time I saw liquid gold in the waves crashing onto the rocky city beach, and a giant fire-breathing ball descending over the sea on the horizon.
And in the morning the white motor ship “Admiral Nakhimov”, like a double from the neighbor girl Netta’s postcard, sailed away from the pier and set off across the blue sea, heading for the city of Yalta. That was great! All that I saw first time in my life – cozy passenger cabins and round porthole windows and seagulls, shouting their guttural calls over whitecaps waves. I liked everything: the wind, the little flags, the music on deck; ropes, ladders and lifebuoys; the pool, in which I jumped wishing to swim, and a decisive dad, who throw off his trousers, and in boxers and socks, to the laughter of passengers, saved me; the Argentine mystery “Three Mirrors” in the wardroom, and a cake on a saucer, left by a sweet mother at the bedside of tired from impressions and fell asleep Nick.
We spent a week in Yalta sunbathing on the beach, traveling and sightseeing. I appreciated the elegance of the Livadia Palace, the originality of the Vorontsov Palace in Alupka and… I made friends with its stone lions. I imagined myself as Antosha Chekhov as a child, who would grow up and live in a cozy writer’s house. I hid in the shade of a fringed felt hat, ate in a restaurant Crimean chebureks, full of fire and steam, and enjoyed dessert. Offered ice cream or jelly. I, internally tormented, chose a treat familiar to me, but my Mom shared with me a red jellyfish, trembling on her white plate.
And then there was Odessa. I don’t remember exactly how we got there – I have arguments in favor of each version: on the motor ship Nakhimov, which returned a week later to Yalta, or on a small LI-2 plane, which made everyone sicker worse than a car at the winding road to Kislovodsk.
With Odessa, we immediately became friends. I was familiar with the monument to Pushkin in my native city and the Vorontsov lions in the Crimea. We lived in Londonskaya, and walked along Deribasovskaya with its bustle and captivating fun.
We returned home on a much larger IL-14 aircraft. I went through the hospitably open door into the cockpit of the pilots, who treated the young captain with Cola chocolate balls and let him hold a huge black pistol, having taken out the clip in advance.
“Let’s dive into the air pit?” I asked the friendly pilots, “Here Mom will frightened!”
The last summer before school has passed in New Athos. My parents, in the company of several friends, rented neighboring apartments and dined in the garden of our house. The owner of the house was a cook and, returning from his work, rested by the stove, cooking for everyone who agreed to pay for his cooking. There was no shortage of customers: a cheerful company of summer residents feasted every evening at a long table, under an ivy-covered canopy. I remember Lazar Tilman, a perky man with kind, narrowed eyes, and his cheerful grandchildren, twins from Moscow, Osya and Mika, with whom we went to the sea to catch jellyfish. I remember Lazar’s personal cardiologist, Dr. Omari Mgeladze, with his constant companions – a portable cardiograph, his wife Nunu, and their little thin daughter Nana, who saved me from the neighbor’s wolfhound.
Once, my dad ran out of cigarettes, and he sent me to Omari to see if he could find a cigarette. In those days, even cardiologists smoked. I was going up the path to their house, standing on a hill and separated from our house by adjacent vegetable gardens, when suddenly a huge black beast came out from behind the bushes and, growling menacingly and demonstrating powerful white fangs, began to approach little Nick. In fear, I clung to the trunk of a gnarled pear, trying not to breathe. And at that moment sounded a piercing cry on a high pitch, similar to a whistle. It was Nana who noticed the dog ready to jump on me and squealed in horror. The dog tucked its tail in fear and flew off into its kennel, Nana burst into tears, and I, like an experienced sailor, turned in a voice hoarse with fear to Uncle Omari, who ran out of the house to the squeal of his daughter,
“Can’t you find a smoke, Sir?”
I remember trying to swim. Dad didn’t have the patience to teach me, and I scurried through the water in a small life buoy that I could hardly squeeze into, or hung next to Uncle Omari, stuffed into a car camera. Dad swam well and demonstrated all sorts of circus tricks, for example, he dived with a burning cigarette in his mouth, spent a long time under water, and then returned to the surface, and the cigarette, as if nothing had happened, was smoking in his teeth.
One day he decided to do some trick on me. I don’t know what was supposed to happen, but I suddenly felt a blow to my life buoy, pulled tight over my stomach, and found myself upside down in the company of my father’s hairy legs and Uncle Omari’s hams in tight satin shorts. This company would not have embarrassed me if not for one circumstance: I hung upside down like a float and began to slowly swallow the nasty bitter water. It was dangerous; I was frightened and deprived of speech. So, I simply clung to my father’s leg and dug my teeth into it.
Papa’s scream turned the blue water beneath Uncle Omari into sharply yellow one. I was instantly taken out of the water and beaten on the bottom right on the black slippery camera. My father’s growl was added to by my sorrowful sobs and panicked cries of the cardiologist: from each father’s blow, the camera slipped from Dr. Mgeladze’s belly along with his satin shorts.
I do not know how this episode affected the doctor, in any case, he did not return the money borrowed for the car from Lazar Tilman. I never became a decent swimmer, although I repeatedly learned to swim and even myself, in front of witnesses, successfully taught others to swim.
The last week of August has come, and the number of children around me have sharply decreased. Osya and Mika departed to Moscow. The Tilmans, having sent their grandchildren saddened, and returned home. Cardiologist Mgeladze with his family and beloved cardiographer followed them. And we still didn’t leave, as if I didn’t have to go to first class. When I asked about the departure, my mother reassured me that I would not be late, and my father mysteriously declared,
“Be patient, there is a surprise waiting for you at home!”
I spent the last days of the preschool summer in friendship with the girl Masha, who came with her parents for only one week and did not waste a single minute of time on anything but the sea. They didn’t even visit the New Athos Monastery, although not functioning, but still a local landmark, but they sunbathed and swam as if it was their last meeting with the sea, or even with the planet Earth.
Following the example of Masha and her dad, I climbed on my dad’s clasped hands and, without any lifebuoy on my stomach, flew like a little soldier into the sea. I had already begun to swim, as the signal followed, “We are returning!”
And we took the night train home, where a surprise was awaiting for me.
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