— Jacob Gur
I lived with Mum and her boyfriend in the barracks in the woods, on the disreputable outskirts of our town. These apartments were given to their occupants by the government as the last resort. Considering that in the early 90s Russia, everyone received their housing from the government, I could never understand where the disreputability came from. It could be that we got our gas, electricity, and hot water for free. Except that we never had any hot water. Whenever we needed to take a bath, Mom would heat a huge pan. Of course, there was no real “bathing,” just a quick, undignified wash at the kitchen sink. We did have a sixty-year-old bathtub, but it served as a permanent residence to several generations of rats.
Of course, the house wasn’t really a barracks, just a pre war building falling to bits. It was christened the “barracks” by the aficionados of the Brazilian The Slave Isaura series, who used the word to designate any unsavoury dwelling. Plus, there was a psychological significance to the fact that the house marked the boundary between the town and the deep, dense pine wood—the Russian, rather than Latin American folklore, this time. In the townspeople’s mind, the building was an izbuska hut strutting around on its chicken legs, inside which a Baba Yaga, with one of her legs all bone and no skin, lay in wait to gobble you up. Speaking of izbushkas, to its left, there was a row of little huts, picturesque in their dilapidation as if they had been plucked from the middle of some sweet strawberry-farming village. Curiously, the folklore totally ignored these, wrapping itself instead around our house tighter than a cocoon.
I, for one, enjoyed living in the woods most of the time. I always got top marks in Nature Studies for my samples of leaves and oddly shaped pinecones. The poems I wrote about those specimens won every children’s poetry contest in our school and later in our town. But there was no denying it—we were the dregs of the town, the butt of a collective joke, and a poorly wiped butt, at that.
On weekends and school holidays, the place became a wilderness straight out of a hellish nightmare, with nothing but an uninhabited expanse of wood. It wasn’t an actual wilderness, of course. To the left of our house were the lovable huts; the part behind didn’t belong to our town but to the large and prosperous Ramenskoe region. Something unheard of in the Soviet Union was happening there—land was being bought, and houses with a pretension to style were being built by the so-called “New Russians,” the nouveaux riches of local importance. But as far as I was concerned, it might as well have been a desert island. There were no kids at all. Except for Andrei, of course, who lived on the first floor, but he was beyond contempt—he was two years younger than me.
“Play with Andrei,” Mum would say, sick of my whining about having no one to play with. But I always looked right through him whenever we came across his mother and him by the kiosks.
One day, as I was kicking a pinecone around (an activity that tends to lose its appeal after about a minute), I spotted Andrei doing the same. My first thought was to chase him away back to his own yard. Since it was our door that faced the woods, I considered it my private territory. But if I kept him out, all he’d have left would be a tiny yard on his side of the house. He’d have nothing to do, save for squinting over the rickety fence at the nouveaux riches building their mansions far in the distance.
“Hi,” he said.
“You have a one-room apartment, and we’ve got a three-room one,” I replied scornfully, instead of a greeting.
“You’re bullshitting me.” He sounded thrilled that I had finally condescended to him.
Everyone knew that the apartments on the second floor had two rooms and those on the first floor had one room. The very notion of a three-room apartment would have seemed like something out of a science fiction book to a pre-war architect.
“Come on.” I took him up the stairs to our apartment. I was bored, and there was nothing else to do.
I showed him our living room, then my very own private bedroom. Then, after climbing onto the back of the living room sofa, I opened a door on the wall. We took turns climbing into the “third room” and squatting in it.
Andrei’s face suddenly lit up. “We have two rooms, not one.”
I followed him downstairs, around the house, to his apartment, which turned out to be smaller than my bedroom. With an expression of a conjurer about to produce a goldfish bowl out of his big toe, he opened a door and showed me a storage room, where a child our size could enter without squatting, and where two people could sit at the same time.
“What kind of room is it if you have to climb over the back of your sofa to get there?” he scoffed. “This is a proper room, where you can just open a door and walk in. You and I each have a two-room apartment.”
Our equality was thus established.
Since no other kids appeared in the area, Andrei and I soon became inseparable. I quickly forgot his inferior age because he displayed aspirations for a better life—a vision. At that time, foreign bicycles were advertised on television. What made them look magical was that the sides of the wheels were painted in different bright colours. His face a mask of determination, Andrei regularly rubbed the sides of his bike’s wheels with coloured chalk. The colour scheme never lasted more than a day, but he claimed it was even better than the real thing because he could choose a different colour every day.
Once, we rode (well, he rode, and I ran beside him because I had no bike) past the bench where his mum sat gossiping with her pensioner friends. She wasn’t thirty yet, but in her babushka kerchief, she looked over sixty. She must have never noticed his bike wheels before, but now she squinted at them. “Ty chto, sovsem oborzel?” The question, of course, meant something along the lines of “Are you completely off your rocker?” or “Have you gone nuts?” But the root of the word she used for “going nuts” was the same as in “borzoi dog,” so the question I heard was “Have you transformed yourself into a borzoi dog?” The borzois were the most refined looking dogs I knew. I looked at Andrei in awe. He was refined. He was original.
Then the summer vacation came, and, like any kid in the early 90s brought up on the Soviet children’s book, I began to daydream about a summer camp. Horror stories whispered by the fire, pillow fights, lifelong friendships. The book characters lived in their camps, invariably located in a scenic countryside, throughout the summer. The day dumping ground for kids, where one is herded around by bored counselors all day and goes home at night, turned out to be an actual horror. Our little industrial town offered no entertainment for kids, not even a zoo. We traipsed all day, in the dust and the heat, from one nondescript place to another. The worst of it all was that I was being completely and utterly ignored by every single kid.
When we drove up to our house at the end of the first day of camp, Andrei was waiting for me in the clearing. “You have to pee in the bottle, or I won’t be your friend,” he announced.
“What bottle?”
“I have an empty two-litre Coca-Cola bottle. I’ll pee in it, then you, then we’ll bury it. Then we’ll dig it up, I’ll pee in it again, then you again, then we’ll bury it again.”
“What’s the point?”
There was none. I told him he needed a shrink (this was my only pleasant memory of that day) and went home.
I survived two more days of the summer camp out of sheer stubbornness. In Russian, the same word is used for a kids’ summer camp and jail—“lager.” I was sure that had I come back after a day of hard labour at the second meaning of this word, I’d have felt less shattered. I thirsted for human company. But Andrei was true to his word. He didn’t wait for me in the clearing that evening. Nor did a pebble hit my window in the morning. At breakfast, I sat tense and alert, listening for the sound of his front door opening downstairs and twitching hopefully at the slightest noise.
“You think you hear Andrei going out, but it’s just him farting as he turns in his bed,” said Mum’s boyfriend, who thought he was being funny.
Finally, I went out and hung around in the clearing all day, and when Andrei appeared, I put my pride aside. You could say I poured my pride into a two-litre bottle.
One day, when a boy who lived in one of the nouveaux riches houses in Ramenskoe, a good half hour’s walk away, joined us for a game of hide-and-seek (lured, no doubt, by the rumors about our izbuskha jumping around on its chicken legs in the depths of a deep, dark forest), Andrei gave him his two-litre bottle ultimatum. The boy, Nikita, made a circular motion with his finger around his temple to indicate what he thought about the extent of Andrei’s mental development. I was secretly thrilled—for one thing, I disliked Nikita at first sight, and then, it was refreshing to see someone not crumble down under the pressure of Andrei’s bulldozer-like personality.
Andrei was mortally wounded at the core of his being. He persuaded me to walk with him to Ramenskoe to Nikita’s house. We stared at the impressive private houses with open mouths and almost turned back several times. Once outside Nikita’s red-brick fence, we shouted at the top of our lungs, “Nikita is a pea-brained moron.” Nikita leaned over the fence and yelled that he had a Rottweiler, and that if we didn’t clear off this instant, he, Nikita, would open the gate and let him, the Rottweiler, out.
Still, Andrei’s missionary zeal was by no means diminished. He was constantly on the lookout for fresh pee-ers until the Ramenskoe kids unanimously began to avoid our wood like a plague.
Two months later, a new family with a kid bought a plot of land right opposite our house and—it seemed to us, almost overnight—built a two-story mansion. That’s what Andrei and I called it, because anything that wasn’t either our house or the row of huts to the left of it looked like a mansion to us. By then, we had filled so many two-litre bottles that if our urine had been a beverage, we would have become nouveaux riches just by selling it.
The family had narrow eyes and perfectly round faces, and we concluded that they dealt in diamonds. We eagerly discussed their rooms, where we imagined that the walls and ceiling were covered with diamonds, even though we had no idea whether they actually were from Yakutia, the diamond land.
There is an expression in Russian that compares someone gawping at something unexpected to a ram gazing dumbly at a new gate. Almost every day, Andrei and I would sit down on the ground opposite the new house and drill the new family’s gate with our eyes like a pair of determined rams. Until one day, like a genie finally plucked from the bottle by a despairing Aladdin, the kid opened the gate and beckoned us in. Yuna was only six years old, but by then, I had gotten over my snobbishness about the age of my new friends. There were no diamonds, of course, but she had her own huge TV and a pink Ferrari. The latter was only a toy. But Andrei and I couldn’t have been more awestruck if it had been life-size.
After the tour of the house, which I remember to this day as an honest-to-goodness mansion, she took us to the garden to play the game of her own invention—a knight rescuing a princess from a dragon. Only, she insisted on being the knight. One of us had to be the princess. Andrei and I offered passionate resistance, inviting her to take a closer look at our snouts and then decide if any knight would be tempted to rescue a princess who looked like that. We insisted that any knight worthy of the name would pay a dragon to crunch up such a princess on the spot. She was adamant. There was no way we could settle the matter by fighting because I was bigger than Andrei. Andrei then had the bright idea to go out and ask the first passerby which of us was uglier, and my heart sank. Despite all this, I was privately even more elated than I had been over the fallout with Nikita. It was plain that in Yuna, with her tank-like will power, Andrei finally met his match. This promised to be a battle of titans.
But Andrei was a true strategist. He didn’t mention the fateful bottle for weeks, until Yuna became a permanent fixture hanging over her expensive green fence in wait for us. When he eventually dropped his bombshell, followed by the threat that he’d stop being friends with her if she refused, she became unexpectedly coy. The next day, I went to Yuna’s house alone.
I hardly saw Andrei in the following days. Mum’s boyfriend began to joke that I should move to Yuna’s house, since I was practically living there. It was true. I even told her grandmother (her parents were rarely home) that our TV was pre-war too, just like our house, so I could watch all the children’s shows at Yuna’s. Nothing in this world could compare to sitting on the floor of her huge bedroom in front of her giant TV, stuffing my mouth with handfuls of cherries from her garden and gorging myself on ice cream until I was sick. But even if it weren’t for the TV, the cherries, and the ice cream, who in their right mind would want to spend a minute outside the mansion when they could be inside? I was beginning to agree with Nikita’s conclusion about Andrei’s mental abilities.
Whether it was because Andrei made a more enticing princess than I did or because there was something about him that people simply couldn’t resist, Yuna seemed to capitulate first. I knew this when I met Andrei at her gate, which he pushed open with the air of someone who owned the place.
Back when we had first met Yuna, I had bet one of my Kinder Surprise schoolkid crocodiles that he wouldn’t be able to get her to pee in the bottle. These crocodiles were the very first Kinder Surprise collectible toys to appear in Russia. Andrei had the entire collection except for that one, and I knew he wouldn’t rest until it joined the ranks.
“Bring me the crocodile now,” he said with a wink as we walked out of Yuna’s gate that evening.
“How do I know it’s Yuna’s pee? It could be yours or anyone else’s.”
The moment we were out of earshot of Yuna’s house, he opened his denim jacket (it was late August, and the evenings were getting chilly) and pulled out… the pink Ferrari. “She gave me this to get out of peeing in the bottle.”
“That doesn’t count.”
The next morning, I was awakened at around six by a quiet but steady rain of pebbles against my window. Has he gone completely bananas? Would I have to call an ambulance to take him to a nut house? I wondered as I wriggled out of pajamas and into jeans and jacket. The mornings were even colder than the evenings. I tiptoed across the living room, which doubled as a bedroom for Mum and her boyfriend, then scurried down the stairs to the clearing.
When I saw his execution victim shivering in her nightgown, I mentally lamented the impending separation from my crocodile. Solemnly, Andrei unearthed the bottle. We looked away delicately as Yuna performed the deed.
By the evening, the whole filthy secret spread through the neighbourhood like a wildfire. Yuna didn’t mean to tell on us. But a minute or so of bare buttocks in the dewy wood air did its job. She spent that day in a feverish delirium.
Andrei’s next excavation of the stores of the precious liquid took place under the stern gazes of his mother and aunt. Unfortunately, unlike the characters of literary fiction, he didn’t have a father (preferably someone the size and disposition of Mum’s boyfriend) to beat him black and blue. His mother and his aunt walloped him ineffectually; the former, with his late father’s belt and the latter with her ex-husband’s.
At that time, a movie called “Stariki Razboiniki,” about two old men who steal a painting from a museum, was very popular. I told Mum that Andrei and I were soplyaki razvratniki, the snotty perverts. I thought it was very funny because “soplyaki razvratniki” had the same initial letters as “stariki razboiniki” and the same number of syllables. Th e same ring to it, in short. Unimpressed, Mum pointed out that “old hooligans” was something out of the ordinary, while “snotty perverts” fitted in perfectly with the spirit of our times.
I went on to share my linguistic inspiration with Andrei’s family. His mother had tried to forbid him to play with me, feebly claiming that I had been the one to come up with the whole bottle thing, but knowing her son’s genius, she couldn’t go on pretending this even to herself. His aunt, who studied Linguistics, said that “snotty perverts” was an oxymoron. Now I know that she was wrong. An oxymoron is a conjunction of two mutually exclusive things like “fiery water.” But at the time, I was thrilled—Andrei and I were an oxymoron, which sounded like an exotic and deadly insect, crawling on the perestroika’s sensitive skin.
The End.
Headlight Anthology 