However, the setback at the exchange on the new money served me a good lesson – no plagiarizing from your grandma, be kind to present the wits of your own, if only there are any…
And, by the way, about the nose. When visiting homes of other people, be it a neighboring apartment or, say, in separate houses, like that of Dad’s friend Zatseppin, there was felt some kind of smell. Not necessarily rancid, yet always there, and it was different from place to place. Only at our home, there was no smack whatsoever…)
In the summer of 1961, the adults of the Gorka blocks took great interest in volleyball. After her work and home chores, Mom put on her sportswear and went out to the volleyball grounds, at a stone’s throw across the road, alongside the Bugorok-Knoll that looked like one of the hills in The Russian Epic Tales. The games were played by the “knock-out system” with the teams replacing one another till the velvety night darkness condensed around the yellowish bulb up on the lonely log lamppost nigh the volleyball grounds. The players chided each other for failures or hotly lambasted the opposite team’s protestations, but no one dared to argue with the umpire because he sat so high and silenced protesters by his whistle blows.
The on-lookers also rotated. They came and went, scream-and-shouted along with the game, manned teams of their own, slapped themselves to kill a biting mosquito or paddled the buzzing scourges away with green broad-leaved branches.
And I was there and also fed the mosquitoes, yet they are just a dim recollection while I remember dearly the rare feel of communion and belonging – all around were us and we were our very own people. Such a pity that some of us have to leave and go, but—see!—there are others coming. Ours. We.
(…so long ago was all that… Before the TV and the WIFI split us up and shoved into separate cells…)
~ ~ ~
With the nearing autumn, Mom started to teach me reading the ABC book, which was full of pictures and strings of letters skewered with dashes to aid at making the words up. Yet even spitted, the letters stayed reluctant to fuse into something sensible. At times, I tried to skulk and, staring at the picture next to the word, read: “Arr-hay-eye-enn. Rain!”
But Mom answered, “Stop cheating! It’s a “c-l-o-u-d”.
I poohed, and eeewed, and started over again converting the syllables into words, and in a few weeks I could already sing thru the texts at the end of the book where the harvester was mowing wheat in the collective farm field…