Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT – OUR COMPANY. ODESSA STORIES
The plane was carrying me away from Leningrad to the warm southern regions – to Odessa, which raised its heroes – commanders, scientists, writers and poets, and was sung by them – in battles, deeds and songs.
This was my third visit to Odessa, including childhood acquaintance to it and the grandiose “Physicist Day”, which we celebrated here several years ago. We then went to Odessa with a whole “crowd” and befriended with a whole “crowd” of Odessa residents. Then they came to Tbilisi, we corresponded for years, in a word we became close, real friends. And now I was flying to visit one of my Odessa friends, Igor, who once fell in love with our beautiful student Anya Gverdtsiteli and had visited Tbilisi to court her.
In Odessa, I really liked that people love and understand humor. This created warmth in the relationships of even strangers. And many things reminded me of life in Tbilisi. For example, all sorts of good traditions, such as meetings with graduates, etc.
I just arrived at the beginning of the academic year and on the First of September I found myself in the City Garden, where university physicists were gathering. The meeting was not organized, but proceeded freely: from morning until lunch (in our terms, a break, that is, between one or two PM), people came to the beer stall, told something funny and ran off further, about their business. They usually had a glass of beer, and the owner of the stall was delighted with the activity of graduates and students. But that day she was unlucky – the pump supplying beer from the barrel to the tap broke down. Immediately, one of the physicists, Kolyuchkin, Igor’s friend, a jack of all trades, volunteered to fix it, and the happy owner offered several bottles of slow-selling white wine from the stall as an advance payment. Students in Russia and Ukraine generally preferred cheaper beer. In Tbilisi, beer advertisements have been burning on the station square since Stalin’s times, even when the whole country was struggling with alcohol. During “Physicist Day,” the Moscow delegation appeared on the university stage straight from the station with the words,
“We arrived by train due to bad weather, we were afraid to be late for the holiday, but when we saw the neon letters “Drink beer! It’s healthy and nutritious,” we realized that this is the very city, where impossible to come late!”
But now, in Odessa, having received free wine, the people were inspired. True, the wine needed toast, and the toast needed a Georgian toastmaster. I was the maximal approximation to this image there. So, I had to “work” as a toastmaster. But some people were replaced by others, and I kept making and making speeches, barely able to stand, until, fortunately for me, Kolyuchkin repaired the beer pump.
It was time for lunch and we went to the cafe. I hoped that after eating I dilute the alcohol in my blood. However, the first thing my Odessa friends ordered… was beer.
“That’s it!” I thought, “I’m finished!”
But it would be cowardice to retreat, and I emptied my glass of ice-cold beer. To my great surprise (and this is my only experience of this kind) I immediately sobered up. This is probably the reason why I remember such an apparently unremarkable episode from my life.
In the hospitable house of Igor Eliseev, I gradually became kind of family member. His grandmother and I immediately found a common language. We were both teachers by vocation. During smoke breaks between battles, she taught literacy to the fighters on Perekop. What courage and dedication!
His grandmother, like mine, was a strict and straightforward person. She often made comments to her grandchildren. One day, feeling that I already belonged to the family, she attacked me too,
“And you, like my grandchildren, why do you still smoke? All the rednecks have already given up!”
I’ve got confused. In my understanding “redneck” was a greedy person. Maybe they quit smoking out of greed, but we’re not stingy?
But in Odessa, hard workers and big guys were called “rednecks.” Grandma wanted to say that it’s especially time for us, weaklings, to think about our health.
Igor’s mother, Ivetta Alekseevna, held some position in the system of the psychiatric care of Odessa-city, but she raised her two sons alone. She sometimes told interesting stories. For example, how a drunk student at the port threw his black college mates into the sea and shouted, “Home! Sail home!”
He was later given a psychiatric diagnosis to save him from time in prison; his classmates were not ordinary students, but children of African leaders.
Ivetta Alekseevna fell in love with me after I freed Igor from military training in a long-proven way. On the second day after my arrival, Eliseevs received a summons for Igor. His mother was very upset. When Igor served in the army, he received a head injury and lay in the hospital for a long time, and now his mother was terribly worried during military trainings.
“Don’t expect anything good from my Igor. He always brings problems on his own head,” she said about her eldest son.
In sadness, his mother showed me the summons. I knew well what to do with such pieces of paper. Usually there was no need for each specific person. Five hundred summonses were sent out, and the first three hundred who showed up at the military registration and enlistment office were sent to training camp, and the rest were sent back home. Therefore, it was enough just not to show up. This way you could free yourself from visits to the military registration and enlistment office until you were really needed. I received a summons at my home several times, which I tore into pieces until the messenger arrived. The first time I told him that Nick was not there, and I was a guest from Odessa. The second time the messenger came with a photograph, I had to go. It turned out that I had been given next rank, and the head of the reserve officers department wanted to get a bottle of vodka from me.
In truth, there was no need for a single person for the military retraining; in the USSR, the army did not rely on reservists. But it’s not easy not to go to the military registration and enlistment office when the summons is an eyesore. And I, with the words from the movie “The Irony of Fate”,
“Oh, what small pieces!” tore it into a hundred pieces.
“What did you do?” Ivetta Andreevna exclaimed, turning pale, as if I had destroyed her passport or diploma.
“Don’t worry, please,” I explained to the confused woman all the mechanics of the military registration and enlistment office. “I destroyed a piece of our way of life. Not the best part of it.”
For a week Ivetta Andreevna expected the consequences, but everything resolved, I freed Igor from the military training.
The younger Vova stood out for his tall stature, luxuriant hair, and brilliant knowledge of English. He worked in a shipbuilding bureau in the center of Odessa. Despite the secrecy and access system, I once entered there as a Georgian guest and witnessed such a scene.
(The boss of the bureau runs in and shouts in excitement)
“Who designed the ‘October Revolution’?”
(Everyone is silent just in case)
“I’m asking you, whose project was this?!”
(Chorus of voices)
“Lenin? Bolsheviks? Party?”
“No time for jokes! It had sank, cholera! Now (Points at me), what kind of spy is this in the department?”
(Lab’s boss) “This is Vova Eliseev’s friend from Tbilisi. A physicist.”
“I can be a toastmaster,” I put in my five cents.
“Yeah, you’ll come in handy at the wake! This is what awaits us all soon. Okay, escort the guest out and prepare the documentation. Meeting at five PM. Come bringing your own Vaseline!”
Igor’s dad and his friends went to the Dniester to fish. Igor, Kolyuchkin and I were invited. I saw Igor’s dad for the first time. Igor was like him – just as lean and courageous, only dad smoked like the rest of us combined. I didn’t understand a thing about fish or fishing, despite the fact that my dad once ran a fishing rod production shop. Nevertheless, I fished furiously until finally my rod had bent, turning into an arc.
“Hold it!” everyone shouted and rushed to help me.
Together we pulled out a huge fish. Igor’s dad wordlessly showed me his thumb and lit a new cigarette.
“Can you take your fish off the hook yourself?” asked Igor.
“Sure!” I answered, believing that this was a simple procedure.
I reached into the big fish’s mouth with my hand and tried to remove the hook. But that’s why it’s a hook, to sit firmly and not jump off. When careful movements did not help, I decided to act more decisively and pulled harder.
Probably, if the fish made sounds, everyone would have heard its roar, but the fish only widened its eyes and snapped its toothed mouth. At this point everyone heard my roar. Kolyuchkin jumped to the rescue and with one movement of the knife freed my fingers from the trap and the fish from the hook.
“Into the soup it!” said Igor, “It tried to bite my guest.”
Everyone laughed quietly “in their mustaches.” It was a rather rare case of an adult being bitten by a fish. But I firmly remembered my fishing experience and appreciated the high quality of fish soup.
Hooray! Anton has arrived. He now worked at the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics and visiting his grandmother in Odessa was closer to him than from Tbilisi. We walked around the city, visited friends, courted girls. We taught our Odessa friends to play charades, when we had to pantomime the opponents’ phrase to our team, and they taught us Alexander Gorodnitsky’s cheerful song “Crocodiles, palm trees, baobabs.” I met a nice girl, Ida Raspushinskaya, a future poet and human rights activist. Once, she and I had lunch not far from the opera house, in a basement restaurant, where they served roast in clay pots and pomegranate juice in wide glasses, and we composed a comic presentation of a gift for a friend’s birthday. And, wow, the silver bracelet from Ida’s wrist slipped into the glass. I immediately tasted the contents of the glass and determined that it was now juice from a “pomegranate bracelet.” We laughed for a long time. A few years later, Ida was unjustly arrested and convicted of anti-Soviet activities. Then this meant everything that the authorities did not like. I wanted to say hello to her through her relative and said,
“Greetings from the man with whom Ida drank juice from a pomegranate bracelet.”
You should have seen his reaction to my words. He turned white, turned green and cried out,
“Are you crazy?! Do you want us all to go to jail?!”
And he ran away without looking back. He mistook my words for a code, a password, or an encrypted message. Yes, there were people who were frightened by reality…
Thanks to Ida, Anton and I met three of her friends from the Faculty of Foreign Languages. Natasha, or as everyone called her, Natalie, was about to get married. The other two were free. I decided to court Ada, but it seemed to me that modest Anton wanted the same. In order not to cross my friend’s path, I decided to clarify the question:
“Do you want to court Ada?”
“What do you care about this?”
“Well, just, if not, then I want to.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I think we shouldn’t interfere with each other, that’s why I’m interested. Tell me if you like her, I’ll start courting Marina.”
“I will not say. You must understand it yourself.”
I haven’t figured it out, but friendship is more important, and out of harm’s way I started spending time with Marina. We even went with her to Chisinau, as with Olga to Tallinn. Of course, I don’t mean the result, but the deadline – just for the weekend.”
And when we returned, it turned out that Natalie was registering her marriage, and then celebrating in a very close circle. And I, as Marina’s friend, was also invited. I have never been to such modest events at home. It was always the Wedding Palace, Mendelssohn’s march, a crowd of guests, outfits, flowers, champagne. Expecting nothing else, I showed up in a suit and tie, with champagne and a bouquet of white carnations. It was somehow awkward for me to carry the roses – to cross the groom’s path.
I arrived before everyone else.
“Do you have a registration?” the secretary of the regional registry office, which replaces the Wedding Palace I was expecting, asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Are you a witness?”
“No, just a guest.”
The secretary did not argue with me, but she treated my words with distrust. I went outside to wait. In front of the doors of the registry office, an old Jew with a dachshund on a leash walked back and forth and mumbled, not addressing anyone,
“I’ll be a witness for three rubles. I’ll be a witness for three rubles.”
Natalie and her friends Marina and Dasha arrived in a taxi. Dasha, the witness, was with her husband. Then the groom came up. In vain I was afraid of roses. I could bring any flowers I wanted. Instead of a bouquet, he had a liter bottle of vodka. The witness indeed was being late, but they whispered to me,
“Do you mind… just in case? It’s not a good idea to hire a grandfather with a dachshund!”
I, of course, didn’t mind, although I had nothing against this grandfather either. And I already knew who would be the toastmaster here.
The next summer I again ended up in Odessa. Eli and I were heading to Tallinn and stopped to see friends along the way. Eli was friends with Tom. Actually, his name was not Tom, but Tolya, Anatoly, but everyone called him Tom. Tall Tom. Unlike another Tom – Short Tom. The Short one was the son of a professor, a theoretical physicist and my friend, with whom I once became closest to anyone on the basis of humor. But he liked Murochka Voronenkova, with whom we had a spark of sympathy. Nothing more than that, but it was enough for him to lose interest in both her and me.
Tall Tom was also a theorist. He was married. Either his parents, or his parents-in-law had a substantial dacha on the seaside, where he lived in the summer, or Eli loudly advertised his “enlightened monarchy”:
“You’ll see, they’re looking forward to seeing us there.”
Us? I didn’t have that confidence. Maybe they were preparing to receive Eli, but probably not me. However, this did not bother me at all. My friend Igor was waiting for me. He was definitely waiting for me. I could stay with them both at home and at the small dacha that Ivetta Alekseevna was given for the summer time, in the coastal complex of the city health department in Arcadia.
Eli, however, insisted that we go to Tom’s first.
“Nick, I don’t understand, you’re always such an optimist. What are you shy about?”
“I? What are you! I am still optimistic, but only in relation to people and qualities known to me.”
I wanted to compare the stories about Tom’s sybaritism and the luxury and bliss awaiting us with the stories about Eli’s mysterious and rich bride from Switzerland. But there was no point in doing this out loud – Eli was sensitive to the distrust of his words. The only thing I managed to insist on was not to drag our suitcases to Arcadia, but to leave them temporarily in a storage cells in the city.
We rode the tram for a long time, enjoying looking at the flowering trees behind the high fences. Finally, we got off, wandered around and got to the desired dacha. It was surrounded by a forged fence with patterns. Eli called. The intercom responded with a female voice, and Eli began to explain who we were and where we were from. There was no reaction. Then Eli asked to call Tom.
“You can’t see him, he is probably at sea. Call again in the evening,” said the voice.
“How so?” Eli became worried, “He’s waiting for us.”
“Oh, he’s waiting! This is where you had to start. Wait, they’ll look for him.”
We waited quite a long time. It was hot.
“I wonder, will they give us something to drink or will they advise us to come in the evening?” I said sarcastically, but immediately regretted it – Eli looked like a beaten dog.
And then Tom appeared. Tall, handsome, wearing a silk robe over his swimming trunks, he imposingly walked towards the gate.
“Eli, Nick! Out of the blue! And here I fell asleep in the garden. We argue all night long about lofty matters – there’s a house full of relatives! You know, right? – “Without windows, without doors, the ass is full of cucumbers”? I hope you have somewhere to stay? Come into the garden, do you mind if I receive you there?”
We sat in the shade of the trees, drank cold soda and, citing business in the city, said goodbye. Eli was going to look for some relatives who lived in Odessa on Chizhikov Street before the war, and I needed to quickly contact the Eliseevs. The working day was ending.
Igor was at work.
“Have you arrived, Nika? Welcome! Arrived late? I was waiting for your call earlier. In the center? Come visit us right away! Not alone? With Eli? Great! Then don’t come alone, but come together. Grandma will feed you and give you something to drink. Take a shower from the road. This you can do yourselves, without grandma’s help. Well, you know everything about us!”
“Wait, Igor. We won’t scare grandma, we’ll go get Vova and we’ll all come together.”
“Even Perekop didn’t scare my grandma! But together with Vova it’s good. Mom loves it when we all have dinner together.”
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