My dream, wonderful and snowy
My dream, wonderful and snowy, lasted for centuries. Winds were ringing, grass was singing, and people buried on the edge of the earth intertwined their roots.
I dreamt of a woman who didn’t stop laughing, tears were rolling down her cheeks. But that woman was not I.
It is in the childhood only that you can touch, just touch, the mysteries of the Universe.
What happened to my soul after I woke up one sunny morning of my childhood? What was the unfathomable misfortune that went away so far away into the remote centuries that benevolent gods made me forget about it?
I want to get back to the lost paradise ahead of time… I want to avoid the sufferings prepared for me by the gods. Who will help me avoid those sufferings?
No one… Just no one.
I went to town…
‘Was it then that my soul lost memory and hid quietly in a salami box…’
I went to town… Got married… I never saw the magic fish in my dreams. Well, I didn’t need that any more…
My husband and I rented a little room in a one-bedroom apartment. Our hosts, the bright red Lyubov Petrovna and Sergey Petrovich, dry like firewood, were heavy drinkers and often threatened to put me and the children at stake in the cards.
Alenka, my daughter, was only six months old, and my son was four years old. I was with the children in the room trembling with fear, my arms around the kids. The hosts were having guests, so the party began. My husband was at work. Nothing was easier than breaking the shabby shaky door in our room. ‘Ha-ha-ha’, they roared behind the wall. ‘It would be great to look at that woman!’ ‘Well’, Lyubov Petrovna muttered thickly, ‘Nothing special, just a school teacher, and a lean one. She always gets a swelled head, the f… intelligentsia!..’
Rain was knocking in the window. Cockroaches were crawling on the wall. The bulb was rocking slowly on its long cord. A sticky smell of sour cabbage, smoked chicken and fermented kvass was coming from under the door…
Late at night, the cheerful company melted and my husband came back from work. He went to the kitchen tiredly and spent a lot of time there, eating. There were no curtains on the kitchen window. Wet leaves were crawling down the glass. If you keep looking at them, you will see them getting blue, then black as if dying. I didn’t like fall.
My husband worked as a fitter at the tractor factory and wanted to become a boss as soon as possible. His parents were bosses, that’s why.
As he was never appointed a boss, he quitted. He didn’t even claim the money he was supposed to receive. I did, instead of him.
We were penniless. When I tried to convince my husband to find a job, he would raise his fat white arms tragically and exclaim, ‘I help you with the kids!’ He used to pronounce that ‘he-e-elp-you-u’ as if he were singing a song, which made me laugh quietly behind his back. When a university student, he used to visit a theater workshop, he even was its president! Since then, I hate the word ‘husband’. In my mind, it associates with a very long, endless, dusty corridor full of all kinds of old needless stuff. In the corners, dusty tattered cobweb hangs down, dead flies stuck to it… A rusty iron with a ragged cord. I want to rush out into fresh air, but, somehow, I can’t. Like in a bad dream.
My husband was fat and that’s why he was always sweaty, feeling hot. So he used to go to the basement and turn off the heating. The hosts didn’t care, but the kids used to catch cold, and I felt desperate.
Once, when he was getting ready to go to work, I begged him not to turn off the heater, the more so that he was going out till the evening. I had Alenka in my arms while my son was holding me by my leg…
My husband first listened to me, than he wrested Alenka from my grasp, put her on the bed… and hit me in the face! He was a strong guy, so if he had punched me harder, I think he would have killed me. But the hit was not too strong, and I just flew into the corner, hit my head against the wall, and blood gushed from my nose. Then I flared up!
Although the most terrible thing for me was staying alone, I wasn’t afraid of anything any longer… I rushed about the room in rage, gathered all his stuff and threw it out; then I turned him away, too. I said ‘Get away, I will live alone.’ Then I sat on the bed and rested my burning cheeks with my fists… Then I burst into tears!
I would have kept crying for a long time, but the kids were scared. Alenka lost her sliders and crawled to me, her plump butt moving funnily. She was crying and smearing snot on her face. Vovka was singing like a grownup man, in a bass, as if doing an important job, holding my tight by the knee. All that was so funny.
I calmed the kids down. And got sad.
I saw the old, faded wallpaper hanging down in rings in the corner of the apartment that didn’t belong to us. Then I began making melancholic plans: first I wanted to get a job of a janitor, then I thought that it would be better to become a charwoman. It’s all right. The kids will grow up at last. He will see… Yes, he will. I will be beautiful and famous. I will have a lot of money. It’s all right…
Time was passing by. My husband didn’t come back. The money was coming to an end. I started looking for a job. But they didn’t give me a janitor’s or a charwoman’s job because of my university degree. Those were the 80s.
I was kind of lucky at one of the places, they were ready to accept me as a charwoman, but the place was too far from home and I had no one to sit with the kids. I was out of money, I couldn’t even afford milk. I had enough of it for Alenka, she was too young, but Vovka looked so miserable that my heart was about to break.
I went to the school where I had worked as a teacher and asked the union to help me. Olga Mikhaylovna, the head teacher, clicked her tongue several times as though her throat itched, and said, ‘What are you talking about! We can’t even help single mothers, to say nothing of those who have husbands…’ So I trudged home empty-handed.
Alenka fell ill. She was crying awfully, something was nagging in her stomach, and the temperature was high. I called a doctor, and she said ‘It’s aureus, a children’s disease. Antibiotics are not good; she needs better nutrition and vitamins, then the body will handle that.’
My husband lived with Maria Timofeevna, his mother. She came around and brought 2 packs of biscuits and a bar of ‘Strawberry’ soap, and started moaning, ‘Well, we aren’t rich, you know that, you do, we can’t help you. My winter clothes are all shabby, and I need to buy so many things, and the prices are so high today… Mind you, it’s never easy to find a decent guy nowadays. If the man finds someone else, he will easily forget the children. Mind you!..’ And, before leaving, she fired at me with her viperous eyes.
I was scared. I was walking around my room deep in thought and could not fall asleep at night. A lot of melancholic thoughts were swarming in my head like numberless ants. Alone, with two kids, no husband and no money. Lyuba, the stout pink-cheeked landlady, also scared me. ‘You are going to stay all alone’, she told me, ‘then you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. Who needs you, thin like a herring and with two tails?’
But what could I do? Well, really, what kind of woman was I? A dry herring I was, not a woman. I had to get my husband back, the sooner the better. And then we will see.
At that time, I received a monthly allowance for the children. I bought a pair of blue pants for my husband, broad like 2 parachutes. (His pants usually got worn out in a month, so a kind of ‘eight’ always appeared between his legs looking like a sieve.) But he always wanted skin-tight pants, I don’t know why.
I had no way out, so I called my husband almost crying, said I was sorry, and asked him to get back. He did of course. He was looking at me happy and proud, while I was full of desperate fear. Life continued. But, all of a sudden, I felt in an agony of grief, which is now called depression. Nothing was able to cheer me up, not even the kids… The sun looked dull, and I didn’t want to wash the windows and couldn’t even do my hair. It was summer. August. And here is what happened…
I was at the vegetable market together with the kids I held Alenka in my arms, and Vovka was holding on my skirt as usual. I stood in line for melons; all I could afford was a tiny little one. I was the last one in the line, the others were touching and feeling the melons, Alenka was bothering me hanging on my shoulders. The seller looking like a millipede, a hairy Georgian guy, was exclaiming, ‘Don’t ya crumple it up, it’s soft!’ He put three fingers together gently and kissed them several times showing how delicious the melon was.
Suddenly, my eyes blurred: the fragrant dirty yellow balls rolled down fast into the depth of the marketplace, the hairy guy grew up to reach the sky and his voice was roaring from up there echoing around the whole place. I wanted to seize a little melon and swallow it up without even peeling it. I wanted it so much that drool ran down like a stream.
I regained consciousness when I was pushed hard in my back. I turned around and saw a woman, crooked like a shrimp, as old as old can be. Looking alive and kicking everyone around her, she picked up a bagful of melons. Then she wiped her hooked nose carefully with a dirty handkerchief, mumbled something incomprehensible… and went away without paying…
I looked at the seller, but the hairy guy saw nothing. There he was, waving his knife glittering in the sunshine, cutting melons bleeding with transparent juice, cutting off fragrant pieces and raising them delightfully high like banners. I picked up a melon quietly and put it in my bag. Then more. My heart was pounding as if someone was hitting me on the head. It was like a dream. My arm, heavy like a log holding Alenka, became weightless, my whole body felt light and fresh as if after a bath. I was scared… and ecstatic.
I have no idea how many melons I picked up, but my bag became quite heavy. I pulled up Alenka’s dress for her… and went away. Nobody called me, nobody shot me from behind. I don’t remember how I got back home, but I do remember the melons falling down on the kitchen floor, there were seven (how did I manage to bring that weight home?). The kids screamed with delight. The melons looked so bright and sunny. As if a color had appeared for the first time in my life’s black-and-white picture. That color was yellow. And it was good. Like the first day of creation… I was feeling no pricks of consciousness so far. I gave myself away easily to the new life as I wanted to see the colors of the world. I didn’t have another way of coloring it.
I fed the kids. Their little faces shone with juice. Alenka ate more than the rest of us, although she didn’t really eat the melon as she had no teeth yet; she immersed fully in the melon and, sobbing loudly, sucked it in like a boa constrictor. Her white fluffy hair looking like feather-grass stuck out. On her cheeks, the hair got wet and sticky because of the sweet juice. I feared that she might burst, that the children would have an allergy as they had never tasted a melon before. But it was OK in the long run.
I don’t know what I enjoyed more: the kids being fed or my unprecedented act. Maybe the latter.
My mother would have been terrified …
I felt like a tree washed with showers, lifeblood murmuring inside me again. Those vital juices rushed up to the branches, which stressed blissfully, the buds burst loudly and deliciously, and bright springtime leaves started rustling. At this stage of my life, I found myself in… stealing. It seemed to me that life sent me a kind of rescue and blessed from above my innocent childish adventure…
I felt unexpectedly strong, so I washed the whole room, the mutual kitchen and the corridor. Then I washed all the stuff, bathed the kids and played hide-and-seek with them till late night. The house went crazy, it took us a while to fall asleep after that incredible day.
We had enough melons for the next week. The days looked like eternity. Trembling of the anticipation of a new, joyful life, I could hardly wait for Saturday. I prepared a large tricky bag: it was firmly fastened and was safely covered with a thick cloth.
I never knew that stealing was so easy. The most important thing was not to think of anything and not to look at the person you were robbing lest he or she should feel the tension. Picking up slowly and calmly… and confidently… yes, confidence is a must… then leaving without any hassle… That’s a kind of art. I was never taught that. Though why, that old woman looking like Baba Yaga was my unwitting teacher. I entered the marketplace like a dream where you can take whatever you want without being punished.
I picked up as much fruit as I could carry away. I put them in my bag carefully, choosing the most tender ones, such as hairy kiwis tasting like gooseberries, or big velvety peaches; I put them on top of melons, oranges and apples. I didn’t feel a thief. For me, I was a rich lady who can choose anything. I was bursting with importance, happy with the opportunity to break all the rules of this life…
In those lightsome childhood years, when my friends used to steal strawberries and apples in other people’s gardens, mother kept me in to avoid the harmful influence of the street. ‘Come on, come on’, the stout apple-cheeked Sveta living on my block would insist. ‘Your mother is at work, you have nothing to worry about.’
She had two strong and bold hooligan brothers, a quiet heavily drinking father, and a merry sluttish mother. Sveta was afraid of no one and nothing but her mother.
Once I wasn’t able to resist the temptation and went with her to steal roses. Next to our five-story building, behind a high fence, there were private houses. Near one of them, the ubiquitous Sveta tracked beautiful red roses grown for sale by Zoya, a tall and skinny woman always dressed in black. That’s where we went.
