LITMIR.BIZ

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Mama had been dreaming about for a long time happened on one of the first days of December,1966. It was a miracle, performed by her will and her hands – we left the old house. We also left Tashkent. We moved to Chirchik.

      That town was only 30 kilometers away from Tashkent. Father had chosen it himself. Firstly, it was not far away, and if something had happened to him, his relatives – at least that’s what he thought – would help Mama. Secondly, Chirchik was a town of new construction projects, so it wouldn’t be difficult to find work. And, sure enough, Father soon began teaching P.E. at Secondary School 19, and Mama was hired as a seamstress at Guncha knitting factory.

      We took up residence in the settlement of Yubilayny – that was the name of a micro-district of Chirchik. We had our own apartment! It was new, in a new building. We had three rooms and a veranda enclosed in glass. We were allotted a garden plot in front of our windows near the entrance to the building, as were all the other ground floor tenants. There was a rose bush, a cherry tree, and a poplar in our small garden.

      However, I wasn’t very interested in the garden. I was filled and overwhelmed with new impressions. There was a Greek family in the same building with us. A Ukrainian family, the Kulikovs, was above us. There were Crimean Tatars, the Zinedinovs, on the third floor, and above them, the Ilyasovs… In a word, our part of the building, just like all the other parts was a bit international. That was something new for me.

      Naturally, the neighbors all made each other’s acquaintance quickly, and soon there were gatherings at the entrance every evening. The exchange of news, and gossip, of course, began. Dora, an elderly Greek woman who lived on our floor, was the principal gossipmonger. In the evening, when the weather was warm, she emerged from the building, without fail.

      Dora, a corpulent woman, used to plop her heavy body onto the bench and begin grinding coffee or black pepper in a small hand-held coffee grinder. She delighted in chatting, over the whir of her grinder, with anybody who showed up. She definitely had the gift of a street orator. Not a single resident of our building passed her by without stopping to listen and being drawn into a conversation. It would become noisy. Curious faces would appear in windows and on verandas. The meeting would become not only well-attended but also multi-storied.

      My mama was the only one who avoided those gatherings. She had never cared for discussing other people’s affairs, and the conversations under the windows always took on a personal nature, thanks to Dora. I soon learned that my father’s personality was discussed on a regular basis. I heard it myself many times while hiding behind the open window of our veranda. Alas, no kind word about him ever reached my ears.

      Soon, I had new friends in Chirchik. They were the Kulikov brothers, seven-year-old Kolya and six-year-old Sasha from the apartment one flight up. The Zinedinov brothers, Rustem who was a first grader, and six-year-old Edem, the same age as Sasha and me, lived above the Kulikovs. Five kids from the same entrance – what could be better? We immediately found common interests and figured out what games we enjoyed the most. One of them was certainly “the war game.” But apart from that old game, familiar to children all over the world – and unfortunately, not only children – I learned a new, no less absorbing game called Cracker.

      In the spring, as soon as water appeared, clay would begin to accumulate at the bottom of the ariks. We would make something like a flatbread out of it, putting a shallow dent in the center of it. That was a “cracker.” Then, you just needed to lift it with the dented side down and throw it on the asphalt with all your might. Pakh-kh! It sounded like a gunshot. And if the five of us threw two crackers each, at the same time… a burst of machine-gun fire was nothing compared to that. The ground where we played was between two buildings under construction, with a distance of about forty meters between them. It formed a kind of echo chamber, and the noise resounded like thunderclaps.

      Our “shooting” could hardly have pleased the adults, but that didn’t bother us. On the contrary, if any of the neighbors dared to reproach us for such pranks, a particularly loud and long cannonade would be heard under their windows.

      We gradually began to familiarize ourselves with the new town. It took a quite a while.

      Unlike Tashkent, Chirchik was a very new town. It had appeared in 1935 with the consolidation of a few workers settlements created for the construction of the Chirchik Hydropower Station and the chemical plant, but construction was not limited to the plant, the first chemical plant in Uzbekistan. They also built a plant to process metals with high melting points and a plant that manufactured electric transformers. Footwear and sewing factories appeared. By the time we arrived, Chirchik was a big industrial center with about 25 industrial enterprises. There was also the din of tanks, the muted thuds of shots fired, reverberating through the wide valley speckled with hills on the outskirts of town when field exercises at the tank school, the largest in Uzbekistan, would take place.

      That was the extraordinary town we had moved to. Our building, just like the whole of Chirchik, was multiethnic because even people from other republics moved there when they heard there was a new town with big construction projects underway, where workers with various skills and professions were in demand.

      The town was dominated by the chemical plant, which was located not far from the entrance to town on the Tashkent side, surrounded by a high brick wall topped with barbed wire. Poisonous yellow smoke spewed out of its chimneys, day and night. On windless days, a column of smoke rose permanently into the sky like a thick twisted rope, or rather like a monstrous brush that painted the entire firmament with its poisonous yellow hue. That yellow hue accumulated to form paunchy, festering clouds.

      When a north wind would begin to blow, and that happened quite often – for the valley studded with hills didn’t protect the town from cold winds – an unpleasant pungent odor spread throughout Chirchik. It would cause a tickling sensation in the throat and make your eyes water. The grass and leaves would turn yellow after a rain. And trees and small gardens in the vicinity of the plant were an absolutely unnatural shade.

      All the citizens knew that the plant’s exhaust was poisonous and that there were no filters on the chimneys for protection. I never heard about any attempts by citizens to do anything to stop the plant from poisoning them. Workers at the plant were happy to receive free milk at work. Any protest was out of the question. The all-powerful plant had strategic significance. If necessary, it could be easily switched over within a day to produce military raw materials.

* * *

      But for the smoke, Chirchik was a rather cozy and attractive town. It was divided into two parts by the Chirchik River, or “the canal,” as it was called there. Its banks had been coated with cement inside the city limits to prevent erosion. The Chirchik was a turbulent mountain river generously replenished by snow that melted on the spurs of the Tian Shan mountains. As soon as high water arrived in the spring, brooks, torrents, and waterfalls gushed down, flooding and carrying along everything in their path. After turning into a river, the stream rushed about like an anxious mother who had lost her children and was prepared to search every nook and cranny and overcome every obstacle. That was why they had to cement the banks of the river within the city limits.

      Leaves rustled on trees, the roses were fragrant, and water babbled merrily in the ariks that ran beside paths and sidewalks. I would notice all of that later, when I grew up. At that time, we were little kids and traveled only as far as our kindergarten or school.

      Emma’s and my kindergarten, which was named Buratino (Pinocchio), was not much different from the one in Tashkent. We had the same kinds of classes and were taken outside to play in similar pavilions. Of course, there were no get-togethers with our favorite mouse anymore. But a golden eagle, a proud bird, lived in a big cage in the yard. It peered at us with disdain, turned away from us haughtily when we tried to talk to it, and paid little attention to our attempts to feed it bread. Those attempts were unsuccessful because the holes in the wire cage were too small.

      Mama worked two shifts at the factory. The first one started at eight in the morning. In order not to be late for work, Mama would take Emma and me to the kindergarten very early, around six o’clock. It was winter so we arrived when it was still dark, and we paced around in the snow for an hour or an hour and a half in front of the locked building. There was a lot of snow that winter. It sparkled beautifully, streaked with

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