Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN – TIME IN SUMMER COTTAGES
Summertime was, in a sense, a special time for many Soviet children. During classes, a rare schoolboy managed to travel, on short holidays – only those who were lucky with prosperity in the family, but during the three summer months, most of them had been somewhere. At least in the pioneer camp. In this sense, I had a typical Soviet childhood. And I remember it well.
The first and second school summers were spent at the dacha (or summer cottage) in Kiketi, in the mountains. As was customary, moving to a dacha was a whole campaign. At first, dad had to go to a village, inspect available for the rent rooms and leave a deposit for the chosen one. Their entire arsenal of rooms differed little from each other, except perhaps in the size of the room; the number of windows in it; a tap on the balcony or in the yard or even a simple washstand, into which water had to be carried from a well or spring; a toilet in the yard or God knows where, behind the garden and orchard. All these details, as well as a bunch of others, more or less significant for summer residents, influenced the rental price. But the one who imagines that this is just renting a room without amenities is either not in the know, or has rather forgotten the past.
The room was rented unfurnished. Absolutely empty! The delivery of beds and furnishings, and taking them back, was the task of the tenant, and had nothing to do with the price of housing, although it significantly increased the cost of summer holidays. But the time of residence was not specified. Simply – warm time – three summer months and, if you like, May and September. After all, the rooms were empty during the off-season, and the owners were indifferent to whether the tenants lived for two or five months for the same pay. It’s like to invite guests in our time, regardless of the frequency of their visits the toilet in the house.
The village closest to the city, Tskneti, was the most expensive. Perhaps that is why we spent two years vacationing in Kiketi, a more remote and cheaper place. When I grew up, I learned another reason why some of my friends preferred more remote villages – it was more difficult for their wives to swoop in from there with an unexpected revision.
There in the country, for a long summer, a lot of things happened, but only a small part lingered in my memory. There I witnessed how a peaceful horse of a thrush bit a neighbor girl in the face, tearing off the skin from her cheek and frightening both children and adults, and the owner of the horse herself. I saw a boy fire a blowgun and hit a pig in a hemorrhoid that dangled like a tight brown pouch on its buttocks. The bag burst from the shot, dark blood flooded the grass, and the pig, squealing like a child, rushed off into the forests. Not expecting such an effect from his accidental hit, the boy burst into tears and, holding the rifle by the barrel, slammed it against the tree like a club. The recoil tore it from his weak hands and dropped it on his brother’s forehead. In a word, I realized that with a weapon you either shoot at a target to hit and do not regret it, or you keep it away and do not play with it. This came in handy later when my dad brought home an air gun, or when I stole an ownerless “Walter”.
I don’t remember my Kiketi friends very well. With the boys, we played around our dachas, and sometimes entered the surrounding forest. Here we were in relative “freedom” without the supervision of our mothers, until shouts from afar had forced one of us to run as a courier to the “mainland” and list everyone who was in the forest company. This precaution was understandable, did not arouse our protest, and often made it possible to delay the return home. In the forest we played Indians and Pathfinders, lit fires, learned to bake potatoes in them, and, most mysteriously, smoked. No, not yet tobacco, but dried straws. I don’t even know what kind of plant it was, whose hollow stems I carefully cut off with a razor, cut into tubes of the same length and dried in the sun until they turned into golden straws. I kept my homemade cigarettes in my father’s empty box of cigarettes “Resort” quite openly. It never occurred to anyone that the diligent home boy was the manufacturer of the “children’s potion.” When the stems dried up, they were suitable for smoking: their spicy, slightly sour smoke pleasantly cooled the mouth and gave the smoker a share of self-confidence and prestige among the surrounding boys.
In addition to peers, we sometimes made friends among the local population: lovers of horses – a groom, of cows – a shepherd. At that time I was interested in gathering. Forests, in which many wild fruit trees, berries and mushrooms grew, began near the village. I saw how people collected full baskets of forest stuff. I also wanted to learn to understand the forest. This became an occasion to get acquainted with a lonely old woman who lived nearby in a small wreck. She worked as a cleaner or janitor in the sanatorium, wore some kind of robe, belted with a rope and rubber boots. In her free time, she collected mushrooms, dried them and sold them to summer residents. I don’t recollect how we met, I must have asked her about plants. The lonely woman liked a cute polite kid, and she taught me to pick mushrooms. Later I’ll tell you how I used this skill in a pioneer camp in a couple of years. In the meantime, I have a personal acquaintance from the locals. However, she could barely be called local. Aunt Nadya spoke in the purest Russian and used old-fashioned words. For example, she asked me about my education like this, “And you, young man, are in what grade of Lyceum?”
Once, to my surprise, when we were sorting through the collected mushrooms, Aunt Nadya, already knowing my love for adventures and mysterious stories, suggested:
“Do you want to see something ancient, Nick?”
Of course, I agreed without hesitation. Then she literally crawled under a miserable bed and pulled out a shabby suitcase containing her relics. From a pile of rags, she pulled out a massive photo album. Most of its pages were blank, but it began with a group shot. In the center stood Tsar Nicholas II with Tsarina Maria, surrounded by a retinue of pretty girls in white ball gowns, looking like a flock of swans.
“And this is me, Princess Trubetskaya,” said Aunt Nadya, pointing to the young girl, “the maid of honor of Her Imperial Majesty.”
I was smitten. The ragged cleaning lady, girded with a rope, in rubber boots turned out to be … a princess, like Cinderella.
“What happened to the king and queen?” I asked, “Were they imprisoned?”
I already personally knew two victims: Princess Orbeliani and Princess Trubetskaya.
“No, Nick, it’s worse. They were executed. The whole family was shot, along with the children, the servants and the doctor. God rest their souls.”
I felt sad. I had understood, what mean “to turn a fairy tale into reality” or “turn a spiritual plane into a real plain” or maybe … pain?
In Kiketi, I learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. At first, I could not keep my balance, but I wanted to get a ride with the breeze. Then I began to go down the hill, holding my legs apart, like on a donkey, and once I realized that on a flat path you can already put your feet on the pedals and move further. Dad came over the weekend and I decided to show off my new trick. As it happens in such cases, I tumbled off the bike, and the handlebars pressed painfully on my throat. In a word, the show turned out outstanding!
But that was not my biggest injury in Kiketi. Once, we, boys, climbed onto someone’s motorcycle with a sidecar. We were mastering it, climbing from one place to another, in a word, behaved like ants that have stuck around an unexpected big find. And one ant was a bit unlucky. Sliding backwards from the back seat, I finally jumped off. Suddenly, a sharp pain pierced my left knee, and hot blood flooded the ground around. It’s the sharp edge of the motorcycle license plate cut my knee. Snow-white bones were visible from the wound. Kakha, a neighbor’s boy, fainted from this view. But nothing special happened. Mom covered the wound with powder of crushed streptocide and tightly bandaged it. Everything healed quickly, but for many years I had a very long scar on my left leg. Over the time, it shortened to 3 cm. This is all that still reminds me of my first acquaintance with motorcycles.
Once, my father’s relatives from Baku visited us at the dacha in Kiketi. There were a father’s cousin with his wife and their daughter Belka, nicknamed Strelka, in honor of the dogs Belka and Strelka, who successfully flew into space. Belka-Strelka and I constantly joked and laughed, did not want to eat, and my mother, with a large belly, as I thought from mineral water, was angry with us and even threw breakfast away over the railing. We couldn’t help stop laughing!
But the next summer was even more fun. Our dacha room became more populated. Mom and I already spent weekdays not together, but with my sister Mayechka and her nanny, Aunt Pasha Alpert, settled with us. She was an elderly Jewish woman from some Belarusian village, with wide, always bare feet and a good sense of humor. When my sister did not want to sleep, Aunt Pasha tried to scare her with a gray wolf and went howling under the window, quite loudly, in a voice. Once a guest came to the neighbor dacha residents. He was walking past our dacha, when Pasha suddenly started howling.
“Woman, do you feel bad?” he asked sympathetically.
“On the contrary, I feel good!” Pasha joked. “Look, it’s a full moon,” and howled, “A-u-u-u! A-u-u-u!”
The man ran away in horror.
Once I caught a duckling. Both he and I were just walking in the meadow. The duckling was a soft, yellow-downed chick, but already walking alone, like me. I held it in my hands and wondered what I should do with it – my power over this tiny creature was unlimited. The first thought was to look for its family, but there was no one nearby, no people, no ducks and no ducklings. It was useless to carry him home. Now that we had a small child, my mother would not let any living creatures “along with its bacteria” into the house. Leaving it in the yard meant death – children could torture it; pigs, dogs and even people could have eat it.
And then a seditious thought occurred to me: if he had to die anyway, then let him serve in research, like the dog Laika, burned alive in a rocket. No, I didn’t mean to roast the duckling alive. I decided to check what happens to a living creature that has fallen into a village toilet. This question caused great controversy in the boyish company. There were no modern toilets in our dachas, because there was no sewerage as such. Everyone used the village latrines, rickety wooden houses set over a huge cesspool where sewage was collected. Once every two or three years, a cistern of sewers came and pumped out the shit by centners. Often the hole in the floor was so large that the children were worried lest they fall into the fetid mass. These fears caused our disputes about what would happen to such a loser. Pessimists argued that a quick inevitable death awaited him, because it was impossible to swim in a dense environment, and described the agony of the unfortunate swallowing shit. Optimists believed that the mass is not continuous, largely consists of decaying urine, so swimmers will be able to stay on the surface and their torment will be long, because screams from underground are hard to hear.
Apparently disturbed by these conversations, I decided to make an experiment on a duckling: will it be able to swim in shit and will its voice be heard from the pit. With these thoughts and with a duck in my hands, I went to the nearest toilet. A small fluffy lump sat in my arms, stopped fruitless attempts to free itself. But the closer I got to the toilet, the slower I walked. My legs were filling with lead. I imagined the poor duckling swimming in the shit in horror, calling for its mother. And I, having launched my hellish experiment, can no longer help the chik. He gets weaker and weaker until he falls on his side, and fat toilet flies stick around his body. Tears filled my eyes, I breathed heavily and burst into sobs. It was a catharsis. The duckling was saved. With a wet, but brightened face, I happily went to the house of Aunt Nadya Trubetskaya and gave her my furry friend. I told her how I found the duckling and how I wanted to experiment on it, but I couldn’t. I regretted it.
“It was God who showed you the right path!” she said, crossing me, “Blessed is he who heeds his advice.”
I tried to remember who would have advised me something about ducklings in the toilet. There were none, and I realized, that after thinking carefully and imagining the situation, a person can find a way out, which is not immediately obvious.
After the birth of my sister, my parents were worried that I would be jealous because of their increased attention to the child. It always seemed to me funny and strange. What jealousy is there, if I myself showed increased attention to the child? But as it turned out, such fears were justified. Many babies appeared in our village in the second summer. Maybe the reason for this was fresh forest air?
A baby also appeared in the family of our neighbors. They already had a boy Kakha of my age. Once, Kakha was asking for lemonade for a long time, but his parents kept putting off his request, taking care of his baby brother. And then, having finished the business and put the child in the stroller, they poured a full glass for the elder. Suddenly, Kakha rushed like an arrow to the forest and climbed a high elm, and all the neighbors heard the screams of his parents. Then Kakha’s father came running with a belt in his hands. Not catching up with his son, he had whipped the tree with the belt, cursing and threatening his heir with all sorts of horrors. When his father cooled down a bit and returned home, the neighbor boys including myself cautiously approached the tree and asked the whining Kakha what he had done. It turned out that in a fit of resentment at the parents who gave all their attention to the baby, he also gave his brother his glass of lemonade, knocking it over and pressing it to the nose and mouth of the child, swaddled in the stroller. Fortunately, their mother went to check how the baby sleeps, and saved her son. All day long until late at night the boy hid in a tree, and we brought him food there. In the evening, his dad left for the city, and Kakha cautiously returned home…
Another summer passed in a mixed mode: my mother and Mayka lived in the summer cottage, but I already didn’t. I lived nearby, in a pioneer camp. Dad rented a dacha in Manglisi, even further from the city and higher in the mountains, where pine trees grew, and the coniferous air was ravishing. Now dad had a car, it was easier for him to come for a weekend. I was sent to a pioneer camp for the first time in my life.
The camp in Manglisi belonged to the Transcaucasian Military District Staff, and my aunt Lea, who taught accordion at the Officer House, got a voucher there. The dacha was taken across the ravine from the southern fence of the camp. It was planned in case I would bored and wanted to sneak home. However I really liked the camp, and the order was not a burden. I learned to walk in formation, make my bed without a wrinkle, do gymnastics every morning, and wash my feet with cold water every evening. But most importantly, I made friends with many guys for life. I always recall this camp with a kind words and remember interesting stories from the summer months in different years.
But this year was like a transition from country life to camps. It was also the last year that we took a vacation with dad. Well, not just we vacationed – we lived with him! But then no one suspected this and even could not imagine.
In the camp I ended up in the fourth detachment. The detachments were by class, and I had just graduated the third grade. Then for the first time I saw how adult pioneers live in large canvas tents. Oh, when I grow up, I’ll get into those too!
It was like the painting club we dreamed about or the communism, which will come when we get older. But none of this came true: no club, no tents, and no communism.
And behind the camp fence lived my family. I sometimes visited them and ate the vitamins in fruits that my mother tried to feed me. Mayechka, my sister, often had a stomach infection, then a doctor from the camp did her stomach lavage through a probe inserted into her nose. Maya hated this procedure, perhaps it even influenced her attitude towards the doctor, a very sensitive and sweet woman.
Once I got sick in Manglisi camp. I caught a cold, my tonsils were swollen, a high temperature rose. I‘ve got into the medical (sanitary) unit. It was a separate house with a medical office and two or three wards for patients. A doctor and a nurse worked there. Both were my parents’ acquaintances, who raised their daughters without husbands and got a job in a pioneer camp for the summer to take their children to the mountains for free. Aunt Julia Feigen was a doctor and I liked her terribly. In the city, she was our neighbor, and sometimes she treated me and my sister. I remember that I always felt better as soon as I saw her. But that summer, in the medical unit, where I spent a couple of days, the most memorable was the boy who asked:
“Do you know bad words?”
“Sure!” I confirmed.
“Then listen.”
And he rattled out two poems to me: about animals, and about Tanya, the Komsomol member.
If you think that this is something like Mayakovski’s poems about children or animals, then you are deeply mistaken.
“Beasts’ morning early started,
They stretched and then they farted.
And decided: stop your sleeping,
Each will take a shit! No skipping!”
These are the least obscene lines in both poems.
How did prison swear lyrics find their way to children? It’s hard to say. Apparently the transmission link from the prisoners to the pioneers were the soldiers guarding both of them. In a word, in a half an hour I had learned all the words of Russian obscene jargon and subsequently in my whole life I met only one word that somehow escaped the attention of the prison bard.
I don’t want to simply enumerate camp activities: we were on duty throughout the camp (we guarded the gates and patrol the fence, we served messengers for the director and the senior pioneer leader, helped set tables in the dining room and cook dinner in the kitchen, washed the floor in the wards). Although the camp fed us heartily, sometimes we were drawn to eat something unusual. We made our way to the boiler room behind the dining room and baked in the furnace the potatoes that we begged in the kitchen. We fried the frogs. Caught them, killed, cut off the hind legs, skinned them and roasted on fire. It was undistinguishable from a young chicken.
We played war games, organized sports competitions, hikes and carnivals. We had a percussion band and I conducted it. They made for me a top hat and a bow tie. The singer in our orchestra was the camp director’s daughter, but despite this, she sang great and fairly received an award.
In the workshop of the camp, craftsmen built wooden models of ships. And I learned how to make boats from soft pine bark. I wonder if they were related to the white steamer of my happy childhood. I think there were… Time flowed, and the ever-expanding fleet of the growing captain was coming closer to the distant new century.
Nick Neim's Stories 