I liked those looking so alike, yet somehow different, birds flocking around you to bang the scattered bread crumbles away from the road on which you’d never see a vehicle except for a slow-go truck carrying, once in a blue moon, the furniture of tenants moving in or out, or a load of firewood for Titan boilers installed in the apartments’ bathrooms.

But even more, I liked feeding pigeons on the tin ledge out the kitchen window. Although it took a long wait before some of the birds would get it where your “gooil-gooil” invitation was coming from and hover with the swish of air-cutting wings in the relentless flapping above the ledge covered by the thick spill of breadcrumbs before landing on it with their raw legs to start the quick tap-tapping at the offer on the hollow-sounding tin.

The pigeons seemed to have an eye on each other or, probably, they had some kind of intercom system because the first bird was very soon followed by others flying in, in twos and threes, and whole flocks, maybe even from the other block. The window ledge submerged into the multi-layer whirlpool of feathered backs and heads ducking to pick the crumbs, pushing each other, fluttering off the edge and squeezing in back again. Then, taking advantage of that pandemonium, you could cautiously put your hand out thru the square leaf up in the kitchen window and touch from above one of their moving backs, but tenderly, so that they wouldn’t dash off with the loud flaps of the wings and flush away all at once…

~ ~ ~

Besides the pigeons, I also liked holidays, especially the New Year. The Christmas tree was set up in the parents’ room in front of the white tulle curtain screening the cold balcony door. The plywood boxes from postal parcels received long ago and presently full of fragile sparkling adoration came from the narrow storeroom: all kinds of fruits, dwarfs, bells, grandfathers frosts, baskets, drill-bit-like purple icicles, balls with inlaid snowflakes on their opposite sides and just balls but also beautiful, stars framed within thin glass tubes, fluffy rain-garlands of golden foil. In addition, we made paper garland-chains as taught by Mom. With different watercolors we painted the paper, it dried overnight and was cut into finger-wide colored strips which we glued with wheatpaste into lots of multicolored links in the growing catenas of our homemade garlands.

Lastly, after decorating the tree with toys and sweetmeat—because a candy with a thread thru its bright wrapper is both nice and eatable decoration which you can cut off and enjoy at Xmas tide—a snowdrift of white cotton wool was put under the tree over the plywood footing of one-foot-tall Grandfather Frost in his red broadcloth coat, one of his mitten-clad hands in firm clasp at his tall staff and the other clutching the mouth of the sack over his shoulder tied with a red ribbon which hid the seam too sturdy to allow actual investigation of the bumps bulging from inside through the sackcloth.

Oh! How could I forget the multicolored twinkling of tiny bulbs from their long thin wires?!. They came into the Christmas tree before anything else, and those wires were connected to the heavy electric transformer also hidden under the wool snowdrifts, Dad made it himself. And the mask of Bear for the matin'ee in kindergarten was also his production. Mom explained him how to do it and Dad brought some special clay from his work and then on a sheet of plywood he modeled the bear’s face with its stuck-up nose. When the clay got stone-hard, Dad and Mom covered it with layers of gauze and water-soaked shreds of newspaper. It took two days for the muzzle to dry and harden, then the clay was thrown away and—wow!—there was a mask made of papier-m^ach'e. The mask was colored with brown watercolor, and Mom sewed the Bear costume of brown satin, it was a one-piece affair so you could get into the trousers only thru the jacket. That’s why at the matin'ee I did not envy the woodcutters with the cardboard axes over their shoulders.

(…and until now the watercolors smell to me of the New Year, or maybe vice verse, it’s hard to decide, I’m not too good at moot points…)

If the big bed in the parents’ room was taken apart and brought to our room, it meant that later in the evening they would haul tables from the neighboring apartments and set them in the freed bedroom for guests to sit around. The neighbors’ children would gather in our room to play.

When it got very late and all the visiting children gone back to their apartments, I would venture to the parents’ room filled with the smarting mist of thinly bluish tobacco smoke and the noise of loud voices each of which trying to speak louder than anyone’s else. Old Morozov would announce that being a young man he once oared no less than 17 kilometers to a date, and the man by his side would eagerly confirm that proves it was worth it and all the people would rejoice at the good news and laugh happily and they would grab each other and start dancing and fill all of the room with their giant figures, up to the ceiling, and circle along with the disc on the gramophone brought by someone of the guests.

Then they again would just speak but not listen who says what, and Mom, sitting at the table, would start singing about the lights on the streets of the Saratov City full of unmarried young men, and her eyelids would drop and shut half of her eyes. Mortified by shame at that view, I would get onto her lap and say, “Mom, don’t sing, please, don’t!” And she would laugh, and push the glass back, and say she did not drink anymore and go on singing all the same. In the end the guests would go to their apartments taking out the tables with them and still talking without listening. I would be sent to our room where Sasha already sleeps on the big sofa but Natasha alertly bobbing from her pillow. In the kitchen, there would sound the tinkle of the dishes being washed by Grandma and Mom, and then the light in our room would be briefly turned on for the parent bed parts to be taken back…

Besides her work, Mom was also taking part in the Artistic Amateur Activities at the House of Officers which was very far to go and I knew it because at times the parents took me to the cinema there and made the twins envy so dearly. All the movies started by loud music and the big round clock on the Kremlin tower opening a newer newsreel “The News of the Day” about black-faced miners in helmets walking from their mines, and lonely weaver-women in white head-clothes pacing along the rows of shaking machine tools, and giant halls full of bareheaded clapping people. But then one of the news frightened me to tears when showed jerky bulldozers in fascist concentration camps whose blades were pushing heaps of naked corpses to fill deep trenches and press them down by their caterpillar tracks. Mom told me to shut my eyes and not watch and, after that, they didn’t take me to the cinema anymore.