“Let me turn on the light and take off my coat,” Anna Sergeyevna continued, grumbling, still pretending to be annoyed. She was young, not tall, with short hair. Now, she looked like a roll because she was pregnant, and she felt a little self-conscious around boys. As she was taking off her coat, she thought up an urgent task for us, “There are shovels in the corner. Why don’t you clear off the snow at the entrance? Snow piled up during the night, and it will be a good exercise for you.”
As we were scattering the snow diligently, Igor muttered:
“It was there yesterday, on the upper shelf on the right.”
At last, by pulling strings, so to speak, we were in the desired room, like the most avid of readers. That was the reading room. It had the best books, but they could only be read there. We were no strangers here, and Anna Sergeyevna trusted us. We could go to the shelves and take whatever we wanted home.
“Here it is!” Igor said, taking “Quest for Fire” off the shelf.
Going to the library was not the only way to get interesting books. Another way was to include more boys in the exchange. Let’s say Igor took “The Mysterious Island” from someone, held it for a week and gave it to me to read. And I gave him someone else’s “The Diamond Thieves.” We did it casually because we had confidence in each other; we knew that the books wouldn’t get lost or damaged.
The members of our group had a special attitude toward books. We always made dust jackets out of paper and gave them “first aid,” if necessary. And we were always indignant when a book was returned tattered, with a detached spine, turned up pages, or some ridiculous inscription, such as, “To my Little Sweetheart from the Little Tom Cat. Send me a note. I’m waiting impatiently.”
“Who is this Little Tom Cat? I’ll tear his head off,” the always neat Igor grumbled.
In a word, in order to read books, we needed to obtain them. Buying books and putting together a decent home library was an almost unattainable dream.
To buy didn’t mean to go to a bookstore, pay for books and… no, there were rarely any books on bookstore shelves that children and teenagers liked. Very few were published, and they were distributed in a very crafty way. First, one needed to recycle paper and rags for a long time. It took a long time because recycled stuff would be exchanged for books by weight. If not enough stuff was recycled, books weren’t made available. Besides, you didn’t get what you wanted but what was in stock at the time. You had no choices.
In the evening, after it had grown dark, we gathered around the fire again. We talked about the battle, argued, then calmed down.
Plexiglass was certainly not an oak log, but its flame was as beautiful as any flame. We sat without talking, bent over the fire, our heads almost touching. Tongues of flame intertwined intricately. They swayed, their form changed, now they bent down to the earth, now shot up toward the sky. And we stared at them, unable to tear our eyes away.
“You know what?” Vitya Smirnov suddenly said. “Let’s get together here after we graduate from college. How about it, guys?”
“In ten years…” Igor Savchuk shook his head in doubt. “But what if we have all gone in different directions by that time?”
“Ah, you, Uncas,” Vitya chuckled resentfully. “Go off in different directions, get married.”
“Stop, stop!” Rustem stood up and waved his hand imperiously. “Stop, gentlemen! Mr. Smith, Mr. Pencroff… Gentlemen, do you remember the bottle?”
“A note!” I jumped up. “We’ll put a note in it.”
“And we’ll throw it in the canal,” Zhenya Andreyev said sarcastically. “And it will float down the Chirchik River to the sea.”
“We’ll bury it here,” I said slowly. “And in exactly ten years…”
Within a few minutes a bottle and some paper were brought. We had already found an old shovel and began writing a message to ourselves.
“We pals from the neighboring buildings,” Rustem was writing precisely on a sheet of paper as he listed our names, “decided to put this note in a bottle and bury it, and we promise that in exactly ten years…”
The lemonade bottle with our note in it was closed tightly, neatly wrapped in rags and placed in a plastic bag. Our bottle lay in a deep hole dug in a safe place, well covered with soil, stomped with our feet, leaves piled on top of it.
We stood under the clear sky, studded with stars, and felt amazingly good because we had realized the utter importance of our friendship, and we didn’t want to lose it.
Chapter 42. The Order
Of all the jewelry Mama had, I somehow remember her earrings, the ones Grandma Abigai had given her. They were very beautiful antique earrings. Grandma used to wear them and then gave them to her daughter: three big pearls, each the size of a pea, with a little gold pin stuck through each of them, forming a triangle. It was surrounded by a setting of dull gold. “Old gold,” as it was called, had the subdued luster of precious metal. When Mama put the earrings on, she became even more beautiful. She had a proud bearing, a hairstyle with a big bun on the back of her head, thick Eastern eyebrows that looked like two crescents, and a beautiful curve to her tender lips. It seemed that the earrings swinging in Mama’s ears illuminated her face with a mysterious light that emphasized her beauty. But our life took such a turn that before we emigrated the earrings had to be sold, for we needed money. Now, I have neither Mama nor her earrings in my life, but I can still visualize her the way she looked in those distant years. I remember how the earrings shone swaying from her ears, particularly on that unusual day…
“Valery, get up! Valery!”
I opened my eyes.
What a miracle that was! It was my father waking me up instead of Mama. Besides, the broad smile on his face was also a rare thing. And he was shaking something that looked like a medal in front of my face.
“Do you see this? Mama’s been awarded an order!”
“Wow!” I stretched out my hand. “Show it to me.”
“Later, later. Get up quickly. Let’s go buy flowers while she’s asleep. Dress quickly.”
And Father ran out of the room.
I dressed immediately. Of course, I did – Mama had been awarded an order… Father’s happy face emphasized the extraordinary nature of what had happened. He wasn’t happy often, and I had never seen him rejoice on Mama’s account.
It was six in the morning. Mama was fast asleep. She allowed herself an extra hour of sleep after the night shift only on Sundays. Papa closed the door behind us quietly, trying not to make noise.
Chirchik seemed deserted that early autumn Sunday morning. The cool air was fresh and didn’t smell of gas fumes. The sun’s rays already shone slightly on the treetops.
But as soon as we entered the bus, the feeling of morning stillness and absence of people evaporated. There were no people on the streets because they were all riding buses, and the majority of them were on their way to where we were heading – the bazaar. They almost all had some kind of bag in their hands; some even had pails. Their faces wore concentrated expressions as if they were pondering the quantities of merchandise they planned to buy at the bazaar.
Ah, those Eastern bazaars! A sight that presents Asia in miniature with all its most typical features, customs, ways of life – in a word, all its flavors. Eastern bazaars have succumbed to the impact of time much less that all the other forms and signs of city life. The goods they sell have remained the same for centuries. Interactions between buyers and sellers, their jokes, gestures, traditional exchange of remarks – all that has to be seen and heard.
I have already written about the Tashkent bazaar. The Chirchik bazaar was smaller but, perhaps, because I was older, I have more impressions of it, more fuel for my imagination.