The jug had to be turned almost horizontally. Wine trickled out. The bowl filled slowly.
“Damn, there’s so little of it! Just sediments… Taste it.” Yura gave me the bowl.
A match was lit, and, by its light I saw lots of black specks floating in the wine. I sipped some wine and winced. “It’s kind of sour…”
Yura finished the wine. “Great wine,” he said with the air of an expert.
“You must have drunk almost the whole jug. Do you often drink wine here?” I asked, not without envy.
Yura giggled. “Oh, no… not often… occasionally.”
The match was flickering out… We liked to watch as the flame devoured the stick. First, flame shot up, then the match began to bend, its charred little tip bending lower and lower… Then the tip and its blackened, worn down stick, which was red inside, began to flicker. The heat from the flame would grow paler and disappear, like a spirit abandoning a dying body with only a thin wisp of smoke to mourn it for a second.
However, a flame never disappeared so fast in our hands. As soon as the tip of a match was about to burn out, we would moisten our fingers with saliva, grab the tip, turn the match upside down, and the flame would flare up again. We allowed the whole stick to burn down, almost to the end. At the very last moment, we brought another match to it. P-f-ft! We had little fireworks, and then the whole thing was repeated all over again. That was an exciting game we played with just a box of matches. Could it be that it was more than a game? Perhaps, without being aware of it, we were remembering those far off times when fire was a tribe’s most precious possession. We remembered how our ancestors had preserved smoldering live embers, how they had been happy about fire, how they had worshipped it, what divine power they had envisioned in it. Was that the reason we felt we were the real custodians of fire?
Oh, I had lapsed into daydreaming. Yura was not here. I was alone in the cellar.
I shook my head, and all the scenes that had just been before me became blurred and disappeared like the smoke from a burned-out match… Yes, Yura wasn’t here. If he had been here, he would have thought of something, instead of languishing in this construction all day long.
I took a deep breath, headed for the steps and went up to where the sun was beating down mercilessly, where the menacing shouts of the exploiter had long been heard.
I was sure to catch hell!
The wheels began to squeak as my sandals shuffled and the bricks in the handcart rattled.
The long working day was drawing to a close. My vacation was also coming to a close. There was just one week left before school began.
Chapter 35. The Cousins
“Hey, Akhun! Wake up, Akhun! Tell me what time it is!”
My cousin Yasha, also known as Akhun, yawned and stretched on his cot.
“Six thirty-five,” he answered sleepily, “maybe six forty.”
Yasha had an ability that amazed me – he could tell time without looking at a clock. I was sure that Yasha was a cheater, that he knew some trick. No matter how many times I tried to catch him, how many tests I conducted – Yasha might be wrong, but only by a few minutes – I failed to catch him cheating.
Now, I tested Yasha every day for I was spending the rest of my vacation at Aunt Tamara’s and sleeping in the living room, the same room as Yasha. The conditions for my experiment were very favorable – I slept on the couch, from which I could see the wall clock, with Yasha across from me on a cot, with his back to the clock.
Today, I was the first to wake up, and I woke Yasha up with my question. But again, I didn’t catch him. Maybe he had seen a clock with a big face in his dream? Maybe he determined time by the light outside? Light came into the living room through the two big windows of the adjacent kitchen on the terrace. Besides, sun rays hit the wall mirror, were reflected and lit the room differently at different times of day. “No,” I thought, with a sigh, “he could outfox me on this assumption as well.”
I didn’t know then that some people actually have a secret gift of feeling time precisely, and I became enraged for I didn’t know how to figure out Yasha’s secret.
“How much longer are you going to lounge around?”
That was Raya, Yasha’s sister. She planted her hand firmly against the doorjamb. Even her little upturned nose expressed indignation, not to mention her voice. “It’s seven already.”
Vacation wasn’t over. Did Raya really have a right to demand that we get up early in the morning? After all, Ilya, the elder brother, was snoring in his room, and no one tried to wake him up. Unfortunately, Raya had a right to wake up her younger brother. That spring, he had failed his math exam, so he had to take another exam at the end of vacation to advance from fifth to sixth grade. Raya had taken it upon herself to coach her brother, under one strict condition – they had to do it every morning, even on Sundays.
Raya was sixteen. She attended a piano class at the school of music and planned to become a music teacher. She was a serious, industrious girl. She studied well and was the first to help with things at home.
That’s why Raya decided to be Yasha’s tutor. And after I came to stay with them, she took me on at the same time. I had advanced to the fourth grade without any serious problems, but Raya thought that I shouldn’t loaf while Yasha studied. That’s why, after kicking us out of bed – which was possible with Yasha only through an invitation to breakfast – Raya, while we were eating our favorite three-minute eggs, arranged notebooks and math textbooks on the other end of the table, Yasha’s for the fifth grade and mine for the fourth.
“What kind of vacation is this?” Yasha grumbled, with his mouth full. “This is a prison camp. All the guys laugh at me because of you.”
“They’ll laugh even more when you have to repeat the year at school,” his sister answered sternly.
In later years, I came to understand that Raya really had pedagogical abilities and great patience. First, she explained clearly the material from the textbooks to each of us. Then we solved problems. Yasha always forgot the order of operations right away, and everything had to be repeated all over again.
But everything comes to an end in this world. Our lesson was also coming to an end. The day ahead of us promised to be full of the most fascinating activities. It couldn’t be anything else here on Kafanov Street in Yasha’s company.
The Shaakovs, Aunt Tamara’s family, lived half an hour walk away from Grandpa’s house on one of the lanes running from Kafanov Street. There were a few of these lanes, and they all had the same name as the street, but with added numbers. The Shaakovs lived on Kafanov Lane 5.
By the way, that street was once named Gospitalnaya (Hospital) for it ran to the military hospital. Gospitalnaya Street played an important role in the history of Tashkent. During the uprising that occurred in the time of the Revolution, barricades were built there. From the barricades, participants in the uprising went to storm the military fortress, the one whose ruins stand on the banks of the Anhor.
The street was renamed in honor of the famous Uzbek revolutionary Kafanov during the early years of Soviet power. This street, one of the central streets of the city, was gradually becoming modern. Attractive buildings were erected there after the earthquake – the Pharmacological Institute, the Central Department Store, and many others.
But the lane where the Shaakovs lived preserved its old-fashioned look. It was a very cozy place, with tall trees, their tops reaching toward the sky, and an arik that babbled in the shade of the trees. It was a short lane with just fifteen houses. The Shaakovs rented one of them, a one-story house with four rooms. Naturally, it had a yard attached to it.