Part One – There (Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER TEN – THE OTHER NEWS
Our new apartment was full of totally new for me furniture. In addition to an old bookcase with a lot of miscellaneous books, which I was very fond of reading, there appeared in the large room a huge wall-to-ceiling built-in wall cabinet, which was gradually filled with subscription editions. In the middle of it, in a niche, there was a radiola (radio set with a vinyl records player) ‘World’, next to which a tape recorder settled later. There was other new furniture as well: a three-door wardrobe, a sofa, and a folding armchair. Some furniture moved from the old apartment: a hefty folding table and chairs, my parents’ wooden bed with the night table, a secretary and a sideboard, from which chocolate pennies in a red and gold box winked at me. Our tiled stove also moved and was connected with a tin pipe to a chimney in the wall. But the apartment and furniture were not the only news in my life.
Before starting school, I was taken to an ear-nose-throat specialist, Dr. Gonia. In those years, he was a very popular otolaryngologist surgeon in the city. It was he who cut off tonsils and adenoids to everyone I knew. His hand did not bypass me either.
Dad introduced me to a handsome man with an open face and stern gray eyes.
“Open your mouth wide,” he said. “I’ll just look down your throat.”
I opened trustingly my mouth as wide as I could. To my surprise, he stuck his hand in there, pushed his index finger somewhere in the direction of the nose and pressed painfully. I didn’t even had enough time to be scared.
“Well done,” the doctor praised me. “You didn’t cry. Yes!” he nodded to my father.
“Yes,” my father nodded to him.
“I’ll take a last look. I promise, there will be no more fingers, breathe deeply,” he warned me and did not lie.
This time, I found not a finger in my throat, but a sharp hook, with which the doctor painfully, very painfully picked out some piece of my throat.
I tried to close my mouth, but there it was – the cork between my teeth did not allow me to do so. What remained for me? Only to breathe with all my strength, splashing in the face of my tormentor warm blood, flowing from somewhere upstairs into my throat and mouth.
“Well done, well done,” the doctor supported me, “You are breathing right! And here is the end. The rare patient! He did not even cry!”
And then tears flowed from my eyes into two streams. I cried and cried while they took off my apron and oilcloth, wiped me from the blood, gave me cold milk, promised ice cream.
“Why did you cry?” dad asked, “Was it very painful?”
“No,” I said honestly, “Breaking an arm hurts more.”
“Then why?”
“Did you count how many times both you and he had deceived me? You both might better told me honestly.”
Dad didn’t argue with me. He remained unconvinced, but bought me an ice cream. And I learned to breathe deeply when they climb into your throat and nose. It came in handy in the future…
School became the most unusual event in my short life that autumn. In one day I discovered the most interesting entertainment in life – cognizing together with good friends and sensitive teachers; in a word, a world that I hadn’t had before. When I joked many years later that I was living by Ilyich’s (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s) “curse” of “study, study and study”, then, in fact, I still enjoyed it and, interestingly, always new knowledge was accompanied by the acquisition of new friends. I have already told how it happened for the first time, and I will tell about my other friends later…
Simultaneously with school, I was sent to a music school to learn how to play the piano. There, at the solfeggio lessons, we were taught musical score and conducting – with the hand (for others) and with the head (for ourselves). I still have memories of how I was admitted to the music school. I had to find which keys on the keyboard pressed a plump woman behind me. I poked a few times and began to guess from the first hit. This impressed the teacher, and she made the test more difficult by switching to chords. But I easily coped with them, successfully passed the test and was accepted. And then a new object appeared in our new apartment – a medium sized black instrument – a piano. Subsequently, for many years everyone and sundry bludgeoned its keys, but only I somehow played. Dad got only the first years of my studies from them, so I don’t think he ever really enjoyed the purchase. And to be honest, I liked reading more than practicing technique by playing the same etude.
My teacher’s daughter, a girl of my age was behind in development, and her mother always set me as an example to her, as if she did not want or was lazy. I always came early and read aloud to the girl before the lesson. She always really liked it, and her mother always began to cry for some reason…
Another feature of that period was the acquaintance with my home tutor, or “bonne”, as my grandmother Olga, my father’s mother, used to say, disapprovingly pursing her lips. Actually, the teacher’s job was to meet me after school, walk with me in the park for a couple of hours and bring me home. But as always in life, even the simplest things can be phenomenal. Such were my walks with Valentina Matveevna Shliomovich, whom I remember as a close person.
She and her husband like many Jews, moved to the warm Caucasus, away from hungry and angry people. The Shliomovichs were pharmacists and easily found work in a hospitable southern city. Their son, Ricky, graduated from high school. And then the war broke. Both father and son went to the front as volunteers, and both died. Valentina Matveevna said that one morning she woke up from a terrible buzz in her head. In a night shirt, screaming and howling, “Ricky was killed!” she ran out into the yard, where she lost consciousness. And two days later she received her son’s death notification with the date of that early morning. She was not superstitious, and she herself explained that. Apparently, she was worried day and night, listening to reports from the fronts, but… she could not explain the coincidence of dates and events. I’m still grieving, remembering how Valentina Matveevna and I carried flowers to the Jewish cemetery, to the grave of Ricky, with a photo of a young boy in a side cap. Now I understand that he was my father’s age, one of those twelve students from their graduation year, who died at the war, and my father wanted to help his mother financially.
Helping a lonely old woman turned out to be invaluable lessons for me. Conversations with Valentina Matveevna were unlike anything: she told me about medicines, about metals, about animals, about the ancient and new world, about peoples and their history. I think that I first learned about the fate of the Jews from her. After talking and discussing unclear questions, Valentina Matveevna admitted:
“I’ve become old. I’m getting tired… Will you read me fairy tales, Nick?”
And I gladly switched from the hardships and sorrows of real life to the kindness and love of the magical world.
And once we took with us my friend Iya for a walk. We played in the park until we wanted to pee. In those parks, this issue was resolved very simply. I went behind the tree and started watering it. And then Iya ran away from the stories of Valentina Matveevna about Queen Cleopatra and came to me.
“I saw everything!” she exulted.
“Now you will pee, and I will see everything,” I said.
“And I will ask Valentina Matveevna and she won’t let you to. Right, Valentina Matveevna?”
“We’d better ask Nick together, and he won’t look,” suggested Valentina Matveevna.
“Is it fair?” I asked, “Iya saw everything, so now it’s my turn,” I insisted on Solomon’s fairness.
“But it is noble! Even having the right to something, a noble person can refuse it.”
I thought. From a close distance it is nice to look at something that is not always available even at a large distance. However, I wanted to be noble, like my favorite heroes. So, it turns out that to be noble means to refuse what you want.
“Don’t be upset, Nick!” Valentina Matveevna supported me, “After all, you really know very well what a wee looks like in girls.”
“Certainly. Like an apricot. But I love looking at those apricots!” I literally groaned in a last attempt to defend my legal rights to inspect the Iya’s Fruit, but I already knew that nobility would prevail, and I, like Ricky, would be a volunteer.
“Okay, Iya. I won’t watch how you pee even though I want to.”
“Is it true? You won’t break out and run when I already can’t stop peeing and put on my panties back, will you?”
“No. Go ahead and pee calmly,” I reveled in my nobility.
“You probably don’t want to see my wee,” Iya didn’t believe me.
“I want it very much!”
“So why did you give it up so easily?”
“Not easy at all! I wanted to be noble like a prince so that you would not be afraid.”
I talked with Valentina Matveevna, hearing Iya splatter loudly behind a tree, and regretted that noble people have a hard time in the world.
When we returned home, Iya said, “I never played so well! Tomorrow is my turn to be a princess. Come after school, my grandmother will go to the doctor, and I will show you my nobility!”
But the most amazing news of the first school years was a new sister! Her introduction into our world was exceptionally sweet. At that age I did not understand the origin of children at all and often reproached my mother:
“Look at your belly! You can’t drink so much mineral water!”
And suddenly, one warm September day, my mother went to cut out the tonsils. That day she did not return, and I was worried that Dr. Gonia had deceived her, cut something wrong, and my mother was left in the hospital. During this time, dad brought home a baby crib and carriage, filled them with chocolates and forbade me to eat them until my mother returned.
“Mom will not return alone,” said dad, “but with a little sister.”
“Wow! So small, but so voracious,” I thought, looking at the heaps of sweets prepared as a symbol of the future sweet life.
But I liked the little beautiful living doll. She grabbed my little finger tightly and didn’t want to let go. So we became friends. And now I was allowed to eat sweets from the baby carriage without restrictions. Perhaps it was a bribe to the eldest child in order to avoid his jealousy.
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