Everything Begins In Childhood

Chapter 13. “Our Neighbor Is a Greek Woman…”

“Kids, get up! It’s time, it’s time!”

I opened my eyes and squinted right away. After our rather dark Tashkent bedroom, I was not accustomed to the bright light that streamed into my eyes. Here, the two big windows faced the vegetable garden in the back of our building and an expanse of open space with towering hills beyond. The sun set behind them in the evening, and in the afternoon, it visited our bedroom, flooding it generously with its rays. Mama had had bars installed on the windows so that we wouldn’t climb through them while we were busy playing.

I stayed in bed for another minute or two, admiring the bedroom. It had delicate blue walls onto which little gold striped diamonds had been rolled. When I looked at the wall for a long time, I would get the feeling I was in outer space, surrounded by stars. One could also admire the floors, which were freshly painted and almost even.

The radio was on. In the morning, Father put the radio on the windowsill in the living room so that Emma and I could do our morning exercises. We did them for fifteen minutes to the sounds of music. We enjoyed doing them and even had time to be naughty and make faces.

“Emma, can you do this?” I asked, winking each of my eyes one after the other. I was cunning. I knew perfectly well what would happen next. She couldn’t wink each eye individually, even though she had tried many times.

“No, not like that! Look!”

I pretended I was trying to help Emma. She was trying to learn how to do it but would end up exhausted from trying. Sometimes, she would run to Mama to complain.

We finished our exercises, so I washed myself quickly with cold water, got dressed and sat down at the table.

“Just a minute,” Mama said as she was slicing lettuce. “I’m about to serve breakfast. Papesh, I need to go to the bazaar today.”

“Go,” Father answered.

“How about some cash? We’ve already spent my salary.”

“I don’t have any,” Father snapped.

It was his usual answer. It had happened many times. Mama would grow quiet and run to neighbors or acquaintances to borrow money until a payday, naturally, hers.

When I remember my father, when I try to imagine what kind of person he was, I envision someone with two personalities. And I wonder – which of them was actually him?

Father, like his brother Misha, was a teacher. One knows that a teacher is a model to imitate, to be held up as an example. That was exactly how the brothers were at work. They enjoyed respect. They did their best to earn it. They attained authority. They needed that for their careers. But at home they were absolutely different, as if they shed their masks. They claimed to be the sole authority and demanded respect. They were despots.

At work, the brothers were building their careers, and they yielded to the rules that facilitated that. At home, such rules were considered superfluous. Wife and children had to obey them, to tolerate everything, to forgive.

Father liked to pose as a well-off man. He didn’t like being thrifty. Why take a bus if you could take a taxi? It was so nice to toss money around, to spend it for his little pleasures, not for boring household needs. It’s true that he sometimes bought clothes, a book, or a toy for Emma and me. When he was in a particularly good mood, he would give Mama some money for shopping at the bazaar, but most of the time he answered as he did that day, “I don’t have any.” But this time Mama didn’t keep silent. I heard her quiet, tense voice:

“So, where does the money disappear to?”

Father raised his brows angrily. He wasn’t used to such questions, but an even less familiar question followed.

“If you don’t give me money for shopping, why do you eat the food I provide?” Mama asked in the same voice.

Father didn’t answer. He jumped up from the table, ran to the stove and knocked the pan with the cutlets in it onto the floor.

The front door banged – Father left. Mama cried, covering her face. I sat in a stupor, but my heart was pounding as if someone were hitting my chest with a hammer.

We went to the kindergarten without having eaten anything. What happened next is difficult for me to describe, for I learned about it from Mama much later. But perhaps what she told me became so strongly intertwined with my childhood impressions, with my intense feeling of pain for Mama, that sometimes it seemed to me that I didn’t spend that day at the kindergarten but instead went with Mama to the factory. There she walked, so thin, pale and unhappy, whispering, “Why me? Why me?” She had hoped that after leaving Korotky Lane and getting rid of Grandma Lisa’s spite, she would live a normal family life. But no, that didn’t happen. Grandma Lisa dogged her, like a shadow. She was nearby even now, in her son.

Here was Mama at the sewing machine. Rocking in time to its rhythm, her head lowered, she whispered something as if she were talking to her breadwinner. The machine understood her and answered sympathetically. “R-r-r!” its motor was terrified. “What for? What for?” the pedal squeaked indignantly. “Prick-prick-prick! Prick-prick-prick!” its needle hurried to the rescue. “I’ll prick him, I won’t allow him to hurt you.” Even the jacket, obedient and soft, gliding under the needle like a skater on ice, tried to ease Mama’s suffering. But her tears continued to fall onto the soft fabric.

“What’s wrong, Ester?” Katya, the seamstress who sat behind Mama, came up to her and hugged her by the shoulders. “What’s happened? Is something wrong at home?”

Mama nodded. Her story was short and muddled. On hearing it, Katya exclaimed, “Let’s go see Sonya, as soon as possible, during the break!”

Sonya, the head of the factory’s Trade Union Committee, was a sharp woman, the kind of woman whom the saying “Be on your guard when she’s around” suited well. She was compassionate. She acted decisively, using all the energy built up inside her, when she could sometimes help workers without antagonizing the management. And Mama’s misfortune afforded her just such an opportunity.

“You’re so silly, Ester. Why have you concealed it for such a long time? We’ll show him… If he doesn’t want to behave, we’ll exchange your apartment for two… It’s impermissible for a teacher to behave like that. I would understand if he were an alcoholic… All right! We’ll go to your place after work!”

Sonya had made a decision. Everything was clear to her. And Mama stood in front of her with her tear-stained face, thinking, was she really ready to flee again? What would she have done if her co-worker and friend hadn’t taken her to Sonya?

Certainly, it’s very important to know that one is not alone. Perhaps, that was the most important thing. But still… Now I think that it was a different Ester in Sonya’s office that day, not the one who humbly tolerated her husband’s cursing and beating and the insults of his relatives. Something had been building up in her and it broke through on the day she took an axe and smashed the walls of the hated house. Her first victory, moving to Chirchik, gave her strength. Was it possible that the respect she enjoyed at the factory and the fact that she was earning more had boosted her self-confidence? It must have been so…

Mama looked at Sonya.

“Yes. Let’s go after work!”

Then we were at home. We, because Mama picked us up from kindergarten on the way home. We were in our room because children should not be around when adults have serious conversations. But our door was cracked. I could see and hear everything. Mama and an unfamiliar woman were in the living room. And where was Father? He was in the bedroom, dressing hurriedly. I was quite worried, for I did understand something, after all. What would Father do? I saw him go to the front door, for some reason, with an axe in his hands, and head for the vegetable garden. He began chopping branches, as if to say, “See? I have work to do here.” But Sonya wasn’t the kind of person one could play such games with. She came out onto the veranda and began her attack.

“Comrade Yuabov, you have visitors in your house, and you’ve walked away. That’s not polite. Come on! We need to talk!”

The adults sat around the table. I could see Father’s face. I had never seen him look like that. His face was pale. That I had seen often. His lips were clenched and distorted. That I had also seen – his lips were always like that when he was angry and quarreled with Grandma or Mama. His big nose, curved like an eagle’s, was close to his lips. I had seen that too. But his eyes… yes, it was precisely his eyes that changed his face, made it unfamiliar. Father stared at the visitor, and his glance betrayed his confusion and fear.

Sonya had already introduced herself. She was calm and focused. This situation was not unusual for her. She had taken part in such encounters many times. She was the one to give orders and make decisions: she and she alone. But for Father… Everything was upside down for him. Perhaps, this meeting at the table reminded him of the schoolteachers’ meetings he had attended so many times, but not in this capacity. There, he was an eagle attacking lackadaisical students. Here, Sonya was the eagle. She looked at Father, her glance icy, and asked sternly, “How can you explain what has happened?”

Father was silent, beating the table with his fingers.

“If you don’t want to live together, no one is forcing you,” Sonya continued ruthlessly. “The apartment can be split. You’ll be given a room.”

Silence.

“You’re a teacher, aren’t you?”

Father nodded as he continued beating the table with his fingers, the same grimace on his face and his legs crossed.

“So, this teacher thinks that he can humiliate, beat and harass a defenseless woman. And the school principal probably thinks he has an angel working for him… I’ll visit your principal. I’ll talk to him…”

“One…” Father began to say. He must have decided to answer. “One of our neighbors is a Greek woman…”

Sonya just looked at him in bewilderment, then she turned to Mama. What did this have to do with the neighbor? Sonya didn’t know Father’s trick. When he was cornered, he would blurt out some nonsense to confuse the person who was talking to him, pretending to be a simpleton, to shift the conversation in a different direction.

But it was impossible to confuse Sonya. Without waiting for him to continue his story about the Greek neighbor, she reminded him calmly, “I’m asking you for an answer. Do you want a divorce, or are you willing to live normally?”

“Everything’s normal with us here,” Father mumbled.

“Beating your wife, throwing food on the floor? What’s normal about that?”

Father mumbled something unintelligible again. But the visitor inflicted blow after blow, calmly and persistently breaking the P.S. 19 teacher into even smaller pieces.

Father sat there, drumming the table with his fingers. No, he wasn’t sitting at the table, he had been knocked down, defeated. Sonya was an experienced fighter. She knew that people like my father, self-confident, merciless with the weak, had to be taken by surprise and pinned down.

After casting a last stern, contemptuous glance at Father, Sonya stood up.

“All right, this conversation is over. It’s up to you to decide what will happen next.”

In the morning, my parents talked to each other. Father was calm, polite and nice. We all felt good. Mama even smiled. All was well… for a few days.