While my mother was changing me over again, my father took a hammer, stepped out and nailed the dangling plank in place. Then he came back and together with my mother watched: now what?
The kid walked to the usual place and pushed the plank. It didn’t stir. Neither did the planks on both sides from it. The railed in child went along the fence, twice, checking each of the planks then he stood still and burst into tears…. My memory retained neither timber house nor its yard, but at this point in the parents’ narration, I felt the emphatic tears welling up in my eyes. Oboy, poor captive!.
And from another legend, the paw of horror ran up my bristled hair before to pierce the back of my neck by the grasp of its point-sharp talons because my mother grew suddenly anxious that I was nowhere around and for quite a stretch too, so she sent my father to look for me. He went into the yard then in the street—not a sight of me anywhere and no neighbor had seen me at all but it was getting dark already.
Dad walked the street again, from one end to the other, and then he paid attention to the rumbling noise of the river. He hurried to the steep, almost vertical, slope under which the river, swollen after the rains, rolled angrily on. And there, far down, he made out his son. Run, Daddy, run!.
The torrent of muddy water had engulfed the narrow strip of the bank under the cliff-like drop-off. He had to race knee-deep in the water.
The boy in a tight clench to the wall of clay, a tuft of withered grass in his pinch, his feet under the rushing torrent. He does not even cry already and only whimpers, “uhu-uhu..”
Dad wrapped him in his jacket and hardly managed to find a spot he could climb out without helping himself with his both hands…
And how proudly fluttered the wings of my nose at the story that it was me christened my brother and sister!
Since I was named after my father’s brother, the names of my mother’s siblings were readied for the twins that came next. In the maternity hospital, they were addressed just so—Vadik and Lyoudochka. However, when the babies were brought home and the parents asked me what we would call them, my immediate response was, “Sassa-’n’-Tattassa.” And no fast-talk could convince me to change my mind.
That’s how my brother became “Alexander” and my sister was called “Natalia”.
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