~ ~ ~

The Childhood

The very first notch to sum up my legendary past and start recording in my memory my life events by means of my personal recollections was scratched by the raw morning sun whose glare made me squint and turn my face sideways atop a small grassy mound upon which Mom had pulled me. There we stood, hand in hand, giving way to a black crowd of men marching across our route to kindergarten.

From their advancing mass, they saluted me with cheerful ‘hellos’. My hand raised up didn’t wave back grasped by Mom’s palm, still I felt big, pleased, and proud that my name's so popular among the adult convict-zeks. I never realized then that the amiable attention of zeks on their march sprung from the presence of so young and good-looking mother…

Those zeks were constructing 2 blocks of two-story buildings upon the Gorka upland and after the first block was accomplished, our large family moved into a two-room flat in the uppermost, second, floor in a house of eight-apartments.

All in all, our Block comprised six two-story houses alongside the perimeter of a vast rectangular courtyard. All of the six houses were entered from the courtyard, four longer cranked buildings bounded its corners and had three entrances each, while each of the 2 shorter houses, inserted in 2 opposite sides, had only one. However, it was the presence of those shorties that made rectangular of a mere square. The road of hard concrete ran around Block and its twin under construction both uniting and separating them like loops in 8 or, maybe, .

Allowed to play out, I often left the empty childless Courtyard and crossed the road to get to the block under construction. Zeks working there never discouraged my visiting the site and at the midday breaks they treated me to their balanda soup. The speedy buildup of a stock of expressive embellishments to my—otherwise babyish—talk soon made my parents aware of who were my current gossip milieu and they posthaste entered me to kindergarten.

The Gorka upland, most elevated part in the Object, shared its name to the two blocks atop of it. On all the four across the loop road around the blocks there grew the forest but no tree could ever make it over the concrete in the roadway… When the second of the Gorka blocks was completed, zeks disappeared altogether and all the subsequent construction works at the Object (people around preferred this name to “Mailbox”) were performed by soldiers with black shoulder straps in their uniform, blackstrappers. Apart from them, there also were redstrapper soldiers at the Object but as for their mission there I am not sure up to now…

~ ~ ~

The trail to kindergarten started right behind our house. There was a long straight dirt road tilt towards the gate in the barber wire fence surrounding the Recruit Depot Barracks. Yet before you reached it, a well-trodden path forked off into the Pine forest on the right. Bypassing the fenced barracks and a large black pond under big trees, the path went down thru the thicket of young Fir-trees. The descent ended at a wide clearing midst the forest enclosed by the openwork timber fence to keep the trees away from the two-story building, the hub to the web of narrow walks to separate playgrounds with sandboxes, small teremok-huts constructed of lining boards, see-saws and even a real bus, short but big-nosed. It had no wheels, to make it easy to step inside directly from the ground, but the steering wheel and the seats were all in place.

Coming to the kindergarten, you had to take off your coat and shoes, leave them in your narrow tall locker marked by the picture of two merry cherries on the door and, after changing into slippers, you might climb the stairs to the second floor with 3 big rooms for separate groups and the common, even bigger, dining room.

My kindergarten life was a patchwork of various feelings and sensations. The victorious pride in the noisy locker-room where parents already started to pop up after their children and where, prompted by Mom, I discovered my ability to tie the shoelaces myself, without anyone’s help… The bitter humiliation of defeat from those same shoelaces on that morning when they were drenched, pulled, and made into tight knots and my Mom had to untangle them, distressed that she would be late for her work…

In kindergarten, you never know what awaits you there before Mom or, sometimes, Dad or a neighbor woman will come to take you home… Because while you are there they can catch you unawares and insert a chrome tube-end of a thin rubber hose deep into your nostril and blow in a powder of nasty scratchy smack, or else make you drink a whole tablespoon of pesky fish oil, “Come on! It’s so good for health!”

The most horrible thing when they announce that it is the injection day today. The children will line up towards the table with a loudly clinking steely box on it from where the nurse takes out replaceable needles for her syringe. The closer to the table the tighter the grip of horror. You envy those lucky ones for whom the procedure is already over and they go away from the table pressing a piece of cotton wool to their forearm and boast happily it didn’t hurt. No, not a tad bit!. The children in the line around whisper how good it is that today’s injection is not done under the shoulder blade. That’s the most fearful one…

Saturdays are the best. Besides the usual dinner of hateful bean soup, they give you almost half-glass of sour cream sprinkled with sugar around a teaspoon stuck in. And they do not send children to bed for the “quiet hour”. Instead, the dining room windows are sealed by dark blankets to show filmstrips on the wall. The caretaker reads the white lines of inscription beneath each frame and asks if everyone has reviewed everything in the picture, and only then she drags the next frame in where Zhelezniak the Seaman will capture the iron-clad train of the Whites or a rusty nail will become a brand new one after his visit to the steel furnace, depending on which of the filmstrips the projector was loaded with.

Those Saturday happenings fascinated me—a voice sounding from the darkness, the ladder of thin rays thru the slits in the projector’s tin side, the pictures slowly changing each other on the wall—all brought about a touch of some mysterious secrecy…

I sooner liked kindergarten than otherwise, even though it had certain reefs lying hidden in wait for me to run into. One of such skulkers tripped me up after Dad repaired an alarm clock at home and, handing it back to Mom, announced, “Here you are!. You owe me a bottle now.” Which words, for some reason, delighted me so dearly that I boasted of them in front of children in my kindergarten group which braggadocio was reported by the caretaker to my Mom when she came to take my home in the evening.