The Ugly Duckling

Infidel. When I was a child, I didn't really understand the meaning of this word, but it seemed terribly offensive to me. It was even more offensive to hear a contemptuous "Tatar girl! That's how the children teased me in the yard.

When I was six years old, my parents sent me to a pioneer camp for the first time.

I was the smallest in our group, and the first thing I heard when I got on the bus was:

- "Oh, we don't need no niggers here! - The boys in red ties hostilely kicked my suitcase and blocked the aisle: "Negritos ride standing up!"

After the Pioneer leaders intervened, a seat was found for me, but all the way to camp the boys cursed at me and slapped me on the back.

Other kids silently averted their eyes and pretended it was none of their business.

It was 1984. Black-haired and dark-skinned kids like me were a curiosity back then. There were plenty of redheads and blondes, all kinds. Against their background, I was an ugly duckling, an outcast.

I was excluded from games, chased off the sports fields, shouted at, "Blacks don't belong here!" I'm not talking about the pokes and cuffs. By the end of the shift, I had almost forgotten my name. Everyone called me only "black" or "negro".

Alas, on all requests to take me home, my mother persuaded me to "bear with it", and my father advised me to fight back, considering that his daughter able to stand up for herself.

Unfortunately, I didn't know how to fight, so I had to endure.

One day the guys got some black paint. Dipping their palms in the can and trying to smear me on my face, they laughed: "Ugh, from this negro even hands get dirty!"

It was frustrating to the point of tears. And it is also incomprehensible why the pioneers, singing at the campfire songs about the friendship of nations, in life behave not like comrades, but like pigs.

Perhaps I was just unlucky, - so I consoled myself - in our squad gathered evil guys, and the color of my hair has nothing to do with it.

I wish! The taunts followed me for a long time-at school, on the street, everywhere.

Don't covet another man's pie.

But after that trip to Pioneer Camp, a funny story happened. And I think my camp experience had a lot to do with it. As they say, patience has its limits, and sometimes you have to stomp your foot.

It was graduation year in our kindergarten.

We were preparing a matinee for the anniversary of the October Revolution, where the protagonists were two brotherly peoples - Russians and Ukrainians.

According to the script we learned folk songs, dances and poems. I don't remember what we sang, but the dance I was supposed to participate in was Ukrainian.

The adults had sewn national costumes for the girls, made beautiful kokoshniks in the form of wreaths with ribbons, and appointed boys as partners.

I wanted to dance with Sasha Shklyaev, but I got Vlad Yesunin.

And something went wrong, we could not get in step, lost the rhythm, could not keep up with the couples who were sprinting ahead of us.

But it wasn't just the dancing.

I was more concerned about something else - I claimed to be the leading role of all Russia.

At the end of the performance, together with our teacher Valentina Nikolayevna, who personified the Soviet power, we had to go to the guests with bread and salt - "Russia" on the right and "Ukraine" on the left. For this occasion the cooks even baked a cake with jam and a round loaf of bread.

I got the role of "Russia" easily, because I could memorize big texts, and here was a poem the size of a notebook page.

But at the dress rehearsal, the commission of the Regional Education Center rejected me, saying that although I have a sundress, my face is not Slavic, so they urgently need to look for a substitute. But there is no substitute!

According to the commission's plan, the "Russian" girl should have been a head taller than the "Ukrainian" girl, with a waist-length braid and a European face.

Natasha Tretyakova more or less fit these parameters. But Natasha did not fit into my sundress, and when she saw the text she had to learn overnight, she cried so hard that everyone rushed to console her, saying, okay, instead of a sundress, a regular dress will do, and let Khabibullina read the poems instead of Natasha...

No, I said, no way! Either the role is mine, or I refuse to play at all!

Then the women of the commission carefully asked me if I could learn another - Ukrainian poem until tomorrow morning? I said: Why not? Of course!

In the end, I came out with the bread to the guests - in Ukrainian costume, with a Russian kokoshnik and absolutely non-Slavic appearance.

But in general, being a black sheep was not very pleasant.

One day, my cousin Andrei and I (he is also half-Tatar and also brunette - a raven type) decided to bleach our hair, naively thinking that this way we could be like "everybody".

We bought hydrogen peroxide tablets at the pharmacy, crushed them into powder, added ammonia, shampoo, stirred well and voila - the miracle mixture was ready.

My cousin thought that this procedure would give his hair an ashy color, so he immediately put all of his hair under the stinking paste, but I, out of caution, only anointed the temples, which immediately turned red. My cousin's head looked like an orange. He didn't look like a blond at all.

Later Andrei found a way out of the problem - he enrolled in a judo class. But he lived in the big city of Sverdlovsk, and we didn't have such class in our city yet, we only had school bullying.

We are all a little bit Tatar

I remember the agonizing feeling when we studied the Tatar-Mongol yoke in history class. I was ready to fall into Tartarus, get a sore throat, go to the end of the world, just to avoid the hated lesson.

Only two pupils in our class had Tatar surnames - me and Pasha Kasimov. But in the class book, opposite to the column "Nationality of Pasha's parents" was written: Russian. And my father is a Tatar. Mingaray. But my dad was called by this name only by his co-workers. For everyone else he was just Misha. Mikhail.

The national question never bothered my father. He wasn't ashamed of being a Tatar, although he never didn't know the Tatar language. He did not go to the mosque, did not respect Muslim customs. He liked women, alcohol and pork.

Offensive nicknames didn't stick to him in his childhood. Dad was a hooligan, so if someone tried to hurt him in the yard, he'd get a punch in the nose.

But my dad's older brother Grisha grew up as a quiet boy, not a fighter.

His parents (my grandparents) named their firstborn Galimzyan, and the boys in the yard used to tease Grisha Gal, or worse - girlish name Gala.

The boy got tired of it, and at the age of sixteen he told his father that he didn't want to have a stupid name. In fact, he refused to be a Tatar at all.

There was a terrible scandal at home. My grandfather cursed his apostate son, beat him with a belt and threatened to throw him out of the house.

It did not help. Grisha went his own way, changed not only his name, but also his surname. He took his mother's maiden name.

Oh, how well I understood my uncle! I, too, would have preferred my mother's modest, unremarkable maiden name - Ivanova. Because every time the teacher started talking about the Tatar-Mongol invasion, my classmates turned their heads in my direction, grinned, and nailed me to a shameful pole: "It's all because of your relatives!

Guys, are you serious?

No, with my mind, of course, I understood that during the Tatar-Mongol yoke, in the time of that super-continental chaos, all sorts of things happened. But me, personally, what do I have to do with it?!

At such moments I felt like a second-class citizen. And in order to somehow defend myself from attacks, I vengefully imagined how the great-great-great-grandmother of my particularly wicked classmate Ruslan was being seduced by a thin-mouthed, sweet-eyed Tatar man. And now the blood of Genghis Khan, Batu Khan, Mamay Khan... flows in the veins of Udmurt Ruslan, who for some reason considers himself a true Russian.

It certainly flows in mine.

But over the centuries, it has gotten so mixed up that you never know who has seduced whom.

Uzbeks, Gypsies, Armenians took me for their own. People assured me that I looked like a Turkmen, even a Georgian. "In Kazan he is a Tatar, in Alma-Ata he is a Kazakh" - that is what they say about a half-breed like me.

But here's the problem: when strangers from the East try to talk to me in their native language, I get lost, because, like my father, I don't understand anything they say, well, maybe only two or three words. Although it seems that my appearance and my surname oblige me to do so.

The bullet is a mad thing

One day my Tatar grandmother took my sister and me near Kazan to the remote village of Alaberdino, where there were no Russians at all. Here, Grandma Dusya expected, we would immediately learn the Tatar language. And what happened? My sister and I never learned the language, but the vocabulary of the locals, especially the children, was full of Russian words.

"Oh, those Khabibullinas! - cried the old people. - Damned girls! Satan will take them!"

Yes, by the way, about my family name. My great-great-grandfather's name was Khabibulla, which means "beloved of Allah," which is apparently where the surname came from, because if we believe the family archives, then on my father's side from time immemorial all were Khabiyevs, including my great-great-grandfather.

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But Khabibulla had a son, Gaifulla. In 1943, when he was already a solid family man, he was drafted into World War II. He was a little over forty at the time.

Probably, like any warrior, before being sent to the front, he wanted to gain the support of the Almighty, to cheat fate, to protect himself from an enemy bullet. And in the military recruitining office, when he was asked: "Whose are you?", my great-grandfather replied: Khabibullin's.

For a long time the family clung to the myth that my great-grandfather, a gunslinger, had blown himself up on a mine. Probably because the truth seemed unseemly to the chaste Tatar family.

But what is there to be ashamed of? The bullet hit my great-grandfather in the groin, and he died of blood loss in a military hospital on May 10, 1945. But the bullet, as you know, is a mad thing.

At home, my great-grandfather had a wife, or rather a widow, a daughter Saniya, and a son, my grandfather Shaykhulla, who was not yet seventeen.

Formally, my grandfather was also considered a Muslim, but as with my father, I never noticed that he held on to the traditions and customs of his ancestors.

As for my grandmother's roots, it was not without the Russian Tsar. According to the legend, four centuries ago, during the conquest of Kazan, Ivan the Terrible's soldiers caught my unknown ancestors in the crowd and blessed them with the cross. As it were, they put a cross on Islam. Since then, all the Tatars in my grandmother's family have been baptized - kryashen. Although, according to another version, they never practiced Islam, they were always Orthodox and had Russian names - Andrion, Samoil, Marfa, Ivan, Evdokia.

To believe or not to believe

My mother also looks like a Tatar - dark skin, cheekbones, brown eyes. Although, it seems, there were no Tatars in her family. But who knows? Udmurs are forest dwellers, pagans. Unlike the nomads, they sat in the deep, dense forests, brewed kubyshka - Udmurt moonshine, and quietly worked their magic. But it's not all that simple.

Take my Udmurt grandmother Luda. On the one hand, my grandmother worshiped pagan deities and spoke easily with the spirits of the dead; on the other hand, she believed in God, went to church, respected all Orthodox holidays, and gradually taught her granddaughter to do the same.

Can you imagine the contradictions that tore me apart! After all, I was a young pioneer who was not supposed to believe in God or the devil. Only in Lenin! So I believed in a little bit of everything, but just in case, I didn't show it.

I have been attracted to mysterious things since early childhood.

I have no idea where this attraction came from. My sister and I grew up in a very secular, I would even say Soviet, family. Mom and Dad were non-believers, atheists, they had no respect for Tatar or Udmurt traditions, and they spoke only in Russian to each other and to us children. So, deep down, I considered myself (and still consider myself) outside of all nations and religions.

And if it hadn't been for my grandmothers - from my father's and mother's side, between whom there was an unspoken struggle for the identity of the granddaughter's nationality - I wouldn't have bothered with these things at all.

Us - Them

It seems that Grandma Luda had a significant advantage in this confrontation, simply because of geography. We lived in the same town and apartment for the first four years of my life. And even after my grandparents moved to a neighboring district, I spent a lot of time at their house, so Grandma Luda's influence on me was great.

But Grandma Dusya did not give up her position either - she often came to visit us or took her favorite granddaughter to Nizhny Tagil for the summer. My mother told me that at the age of five I was running around in the train carriage, looking into all the compartments and loudly proclaiming that I was a "Tatar". Who could have taught me that? Only Grandma Dusya!

At times, the call of blood - Udmurt, Tatar, and God knows what else - literally tore me apart. It's all mixed up in my head.

Belief in the afterlife and the power of prayer were intertwined with rituals like knocking on wood and spitting over the left shoulder.

The spirits of forest and water coexisted peacefully with the Great Martyr Nicholas the Wonderworker and St. Panteleimon the Healer. I constantly felt the presence of some invisible forces near me. It didn't matter who or what it was - there was enough room for everyone.

Angels are near

My grandparents used to take me to the cemetery.

Once they even lost me in a maze of graves. They were walking home from the wake and didn't realize until they were halfway there that someone seemed to be missing. They hurried back and there was no sign of their granddaughter anywhere.

Nobody knows where I was or what I was doing. Luckily, I was found soon and we all went home together.

Maybe because everything in the cemetery was familiar to me, it never scared me. During the day, of course. At night, I wouldn't dare go there for anything in the world.

My grandmother taught me that it was a sin not to take care of graves. She couldn't walk by an abandoned grave. She would stop and tidy up the monument, leave bread for the birds, or candy. She called it "giving alms to the dead.

While my grandmother cleaned the grave, I used to walk around the cemetery, looking at the photos of the dead and mentally counting how old they were.

And imagining exactly how they'd died. I thought it was terribly unfair that it wasn't written about anywhere. It's interesting to know who died of what!

I was especially drawn to the children's gravestones. Not far from my grandfather's grave was an iron pyramid with a glass circle. Inside the circle was a blurry black and white photo of a boy. A nameplate. Sasha Volkov. Blond fringe, a happy look.

What happened to him? Hit by a car? Drowned? How could the angels who were supposed to protect mere mortals have missed a five-year-old boy?

I had no doubt that everyone had a guardian angel.

I had one, too. If it hadn't been for him, I probably wouldn't be here, because my parents should have had a completely different child.

Misha the First and Misha the Second

My mother had a fiancé. His name was Misha.

Mom was finishing the tenth grade at school, and her beloved was about to return from the army.

But it so happened that at a dance my mother met and fell in love with a handsome brunet with shoulder-length curls.

Ironically, the curly-haired guy's name was also Misha.

He worked as a driller in the neighboring village of oil workers, and on weekends would come to town with friends to dance. He liked black-eyed Angelina, too.

After the dance, Misha would accompany her home and feed her "Bear in the North" candy, and soon the legitimate fiancé was completely out of the beautiful mother's mind.

Mom remembered about him only once, when she came home from school, saw on the rack in the hallway soldier's cap. Her heart twitched: how could she explain to her fiancé that she had fallen in love with someone else? But she didn't have to explain anything; the cap belonged to curly-haired Misha, who had already served in the Soviet army.

My mother later admitted that if she had met that first Misha in the hallway, she might have made a different choice. But here she decided it was fate!

Their romance developed rapidly, and soon Angelina realized that she was pregnant.

She rushed to tell her lover the happy news, but he frowned:

- Why did this happen?

- Why?! - Angelina asked in bewilderment. - Have you no idea?

The days passed. The curly-haired driller acted as if nothing special had happened. He joked, "Don't panic before the time. Maybe it'll all go away somehow".

Not a word about marriage and the birth of his child.

And then the crying mother ran to her sister, Nina, a medical graduate.

- Nina, what am I going to do? This bastard doesn't want a child!

A bitter pill

Angelina was eighteen - she had just finished school and had no time to look for a job. She didn't even know if the wedding was going to happen or not.

And then there was this child...

Nina silently took out the pills and handed them to her sister:

- Here! Take one, it will all go away. Next time you'll think with your head.

Mama swallowed the bitter pill, and in the morning there was no trace of the baby to be born.

But soon Angelina was surprised to find herself in an interesting position again.

This time she pressed her lover resolutely against the wall:

- Will you marry me, or shall I poison him again?

- What do you mean? - Misha was afraid.

- What! - grinned Angelina. - Did you think that last time the baby really disappeared on its own?

- Come on, - my future father mumbled conciliatorily. - I don't mind. Let's get married if you want. I just want the first born to be a boy.

For some reason, my father was sure that a son would be born.

But instead I was born.

The Wedding

As it turned out, my father had other plans for his life.

Getting married and having a child were not part of them.

Dad's dream was to travel the world. Army, service in Germany, trips to the Caucasus, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan - he had time to visit many places, saw a lot and did not want to stop.

But when on that life-changing evening Misha called his relatives in Tagil to find out how to be and what to do, the family council unanimously decided: you must get married!

Especially my grandmother insisted on the wedding.

Knowing the character and tendencies of her youngest son, she was afraid that sooner or later he would end up in prison (he had all the prerequisites - a knife scar on his back - a trace of a drunken brawl, bad company, wine, girls of easy behavior).

"As soon as he gets married, he'll be under the care of his wife. And the child, I hope, will bring him to his senses," Grandma Dusya reasoned. And although other relatives did not really believe that the hooligan Misha would settle down, no one objected to his marriage.

So in July 1977 my parents became husband and wife.

A man of passion, Dad decided that since he was not destined to travel the world, he would devote himself to raising his children. He read in a book that babies hear and understand everything in their mother's womb, and began to sit in front of my pregnant mother in the evenings and read fairy tales to me, not yet born.

My mother thought he was crazy, my father was offended, but he didn't stop reading me fairy tales.

Children of the Dungeon

I had a nightmare in ninth grade.

It was night. Our yard. I'm sitting by a crooked maple tree where my friends and I used to build "shelters" out of plywood and boards as kids. In front of me are two graves. Judging by the plaques, they are the graves of sisters. The date on one of the plaques was 1976, the other 1979.

While I was looking at the numbers, habitually calculating the age, small stones from the grave fell to the ground. I shuddered: who is here? A child's voice answered, "Me.

- What's your name?

- Olya.

- Are you the big sister or the little sister?

- Big.

The girl climbed out of the grave and sat down next to me. She said:

- It's good that you wanted to know my name. If you hadn't said anything, I would have asked how old you were, and you would have died too.

We were quiet for a while.

- Would you like to come to our place? - Olya suggested. - Come on, be brave, don't be afraid!

I looked down. From the grave, smiling, looked at me the dirty face of another girl in a short T-shirt. The second girl's name was Alla.

We went down into the dungeon, where there were many dark halls, corridors and labyrinthine passages. Besides the two sisters, Olya and Alla, there were several other children in the dungeon, aged between ten and fourteen. All of them, as it turned out, were also dead.

Don't do it

Suddenly we were in Gorky Park. We were walking through the sunlit alleys, laughing, riding the merry-go-round. A light breeze blew, the leaves rushed, and music played.

It was so good that at some point I wanted to throw myself headlong from the "Ferris Wheel", never to be separated from my new friends again.

Olya touched my sleeve sternly:

- Don't do that. You can come to us whenever you want.

And sadly added:

- You're alive and I envy you. As for us, we'll never get out of here.

I felt sorry for her and said:

- It's sad when children die.

Olya nodded.

- Another boy will come to us today...

We met him in the evening. The little boy was sitting in the corner, rubbing his tears with his fist, looking up and asking to go home.

- They all cry like that when they come," Olya sighed. - But then they get used to it.

We approached the newcomer and began to comfort him. The baby calmed down and soon was playing with everyone. It was time for me to leave. The children came out to see me off, waving at me: "Come back!" I promised that I would.

When I woke up in the morning, I had a strong feeling that I had dreamed about my never-born brothers and sisters. And I knew for sure that it was Olya who should have been born to my mother, not me.

In the dream, before the meeting at the old maple tree, she had every reason to hate me, to want me dead. After all, I was the one who had taken her place.

Born under a lucky star

My mother almost lost her baby during childbirth.

The midwives pulled me out, barely alive - born two weeks premature and a horrible blue color because the umbilical cord had wrapped around my neck twice.

The puny, half-suffocated infant did not cry or show any signs of life. The doctors did everything possible and impossible to save me, and afterwards they did not hide their surprise:

- The girl had been born under a lucky star.

In fact, I was born with a veil - a thin transparent film, like cellophane.

Before taking my mother to the ward, the midwife managed to whisper to her that only very happy people were born with such a "veil" and advised her to keep it.

But my mother did not believe in such "nonsense", or maybe she just did not care.

So my lucky veil stayed in the maternity hospital.

In those years we lived in a wooden house on the "airfild" - that's what people call the southern settlement bordering the city. My grandfather and grandmother moved here from the village of Ivanovo. My grandmother worked as a superintendent in the Society for the Blind, my grandfather got a job in a military factory where, soon after my birth, as a war veteran, he got a two-room apartment in the city's new building. The six of us moved there after bringing my very ill great-grandmother Matrena from the village.

To be continued

My earliest childhood memories are with my great-grandmother Matrena.