LITMIR.BIZ

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grader. We kids respected him very much, and not just because he was older. All the boys respected Ilyas. Hardly anyone could compete with him when he played soccer in the yard. He was skilled, fast, and frisky. He never bragged about his achievements. He never bragged about anything, and he was very fair, for which he was especially admired. He would halt arguments, even fights, and, on top of that, he would reconcile the boys so that they didn’t ruin a friendship just to nurse a grudge.

      Ilyas… How did it happen?

      Sasha had heard that Ilyas and his friend Petya supposedly went for a walk by the canal. Ilyas slipped and fell on the concrete edge. He must have been knocked out, slid from the edge into the water and never resurfaced.

      We moved closer to listen to what the adults were saying.

      The accident had happened the day before, Sunday, in the afternoon. Ilyas’s parents grew anxious when their son didn’t return home by late evening. And his friend – what a pathetic coward he was – was scared and didn’t tell anyone what had happened. Only when Ilyas’s parents called him and began to ask him questions did he break down and tell them the truth. He said he had hoped that Ilyas was playing a joke on him, that he had gotten out of the canal downstream and run home, but he was afraid to find out. Sasha and I were indignant – what a coward he was! What a scoundrel! Ilyas would never have done anything like that!

      We discussed the tragic event for some time.

      There was always something happening that would attract the attention of everyone in the large apartment building. Our entrance, like the whole building, the whole micro-district, like any other community, called a mahalla in Uzbek, lived from one event to another. The number of people drawn into the whirlwind of an event depended on one thing – the scale of what had happened. Heavy drinking and the escapades of drunkards were basically local events. There were so many drunkards, and their behavior, with rare exceptions, was so predictable and boring that they barely aroused any interest. At least one drunk would inevitably catch one’s eye every day – on a bus, at a movie theater, on a bench near a building entrance, under a bench, or in a dry arik that seemed a particularly cozy place to catch up on one’s sleep.

      “Vasilyich drank himself into a fog again,” a woman informed her neighbors. “He thrashed poor Veronica again.”

      “She’s such a foolish thing. She should have called the police long ago. He hasn’t been to the sobering-up station for a long time.”

      In fact, there was nothing more they could add to that conversation for it had all been discussed more than once.

      Scandals and fights – much more exciting events – attracted the attention of the entire building. They happened quite often and invariably evoked interest. The news would spread immediately and be the topic of heated discussion near every entrance.

      “Ester! Shura!” Fat Dora waved her hand urging my mama and her factory friend to join her. “Have you heard about it? You mean you haven’t heard?” and she would inform them, accompanied by the whirring of her coffee grinder. “Vova Oparin broke Vasilyev’s window. It was such an awful fight!… No, between the fathers! They bloodied each other’s faces!”

      It was worth watching Dora when she reported an incident. Her pupils, magnified by the thick lenses of her eyeglasses, would widen to supernatural size. Her eyes seemed about to pop out of their sockets and run to the scene of the fight. She would forget to blink; it almost seemed as if she would forget to breathe. Her big body seemed to inflate like an oxygen pillow. She didn’t want to waste precious time inhaling and exhaling but instead used it to speak non-stop.

      Someone’s death was a much more significant event that brought together the residents of neighboring buildings and the whole mahalla.

      Funerals took place quite often in the Yubileiny settlement. They always ended up with a procession on the street that was sometimes silent, other times resounding with the wails of women mourning the loss of the deceased. No matter how sad it was in itself, for us boys, a funeral was an important diversion – a lot to see and hear. And, in general, where else, apart from parades, could you see such a gathering of people?

      It was strange that the death of Bogeyman, a person who had perhaps less claim to respect than anyone else in the mahalla, was the cause of the deepest sorrow, mixed with remorse, that my friends and I experienced.

      Bogeyman – his nickname was uttered much more often than his name, Anatoly – had been a man of about forty-five who lived in one of the buildings nearby. He was a degenerate drunk whom we hardly ever saw sober. It was true that, unlike other drunks, Bogeyman didn’t run wild and didn’t curse. He used to zigzag unsteadily down our street, and when he had no more energy to walk, he would lie down on one of the benches near our entrance and take a peaceful nap. With his cheek on his hands and his knees bent, he would snore softly as if in a comfortable bed.

      Perhaps, no one would have bothered him, but… he gave off an appalling stench.

      “Hey, Bogeyman, get out of here!” enraged tenants, tired of his odor, would shout from their verandas. “Hey, Bogeyman, get lost!”

      “A cannon ball wouldn’t wake him up!” someone echoed from another veranda.

      “He’s quarreled with his wife again!” Dora would add. She always had the latest news.

      “Anyone would drink living with such a bitch; even a dog wouldn’t want to live with her,” was another neighbor’s brief yet accurate opinion about Bogeyman’s wife Marya, as loud as the whole bazaar. “Leave the poor thing to his nap, we can put up with it.”

      The “hero of the occasion” would smile in his dreams and sniffle peacefully as he lay on the bench. Perhaps, among his sleepy drunken thoughts was the following one: “I have wonderful understanding neighbors who pity me, an unfortunate man.”

      Alas, Uncle Anatoly – that’s how we sometimes called him – would forget that “understanding” neighbors had children who were not at all wonderful or understanding. On the contrary, they were capable of carrying out cruel and unpredictable pranks.

      That was what happened once when Bogeyman was unfortunate enough to fall asleep on the bench near the entrance of the building where the Oparins lived. Around that time, the Oparin brothers walked out of their building as a group of kids, including Rustem and me, were passing by. Naturally, we all surrounded the bench on which Bogeyman was snoring softly. After all, he was something to look at, if we could ignore the stench.

      “He couldn’t find a better place to stink?” Gennady asked angrily. He never missed a chance to demonstrate his valor and other qualities of a future officer. “Just you wait, you’ll be hopping around soon. Guys, let’s make a ‘bicycle’ for him. Who has paper? Run! Get some paper!” he commanded, pulling some matches out of his pocket.

      His younger brother was gentler and more compassionate, either because of his age or his disposition. He tried to prevent the inevitable.

      “Hey, get up! Please, get up!” he pleaded in his thin voice, shaking the unfortunate drunk and pulling at his sleeve.

      “Get out of here, what are you? The Red Cross?” Gennady pushed his little brother away. “You shouldn’t feel sorry for this piece of rotten carrion…” and he quickly got down to business, with all the experience he had.

      After checking whether anyone could see him through the windows or from the street, Gennady took Bogeyman’s shoes off. Naturally, he wasn’t wearing socks. His dirty, swollen toes were exposed. One of the boys tore the newspaper into long strips and twisted them into braids. Gennady inserted the braids between Boogeyman’s stained toes. Now, the soles of his feet looked like two tattered brooms made of twigs. A match was struck, and the brooms turned into candles with little purplish crowns of flame, pale in the daylight.

      I watched what happened next from the entrance hall of our building where we were hiding. I had retired there before anyone else, for I hadn’t the heart to stay through to the end. Poor Bogeyman woke up from the pain and rolled off the bench with a moan… Now he’ll run, we thought, watching him in horror and excitement, through the crack. He would run and, since he was half

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