Stars on the wallpaper

It was the scariest night of my life.

I'm six years old. I woke up to a noise and some kind of angry mess behind the wall. I pulled back the blanket and listened to the chilling sounds. I think I can guess what it could be, but no, it's not that, it's Dad hitting Mom. Hitting her in a wild fit of jealousy.

I'm scary, I don't want to go to them. But I'm afraid that if I don't intervene, Dad will kill Mom.

There's a bright light on in my parents' bedroom. I ran in and stopped in horror at the threshold.

Mom's nightgown was torn and her breasts were bloody. Mom calls my name, pulls her arms around me, tried to hold me and hug me, but I pull away, afraid of getting blood on me.

Then Mom falls to her knees and wraps her arms around my legs and howls like a wounded animal.

Dad is out of his mind. Eyes white with rage, he pulls Mom away from me and kicks her in the teeth. Mom screams loudly, a grimace of pain and disgust contorting her face.

She shouts some angry, hurtful things at her father.

He lashes out at Mom, grabs her by the throat and begins to choke her.

I scream and beg my mother to shut up, but she doesn't seem to hear me.

So I jump on my father from behind, punch him, try to reason with him, pull him away to protect my mother from his fists, but my father growls and pushes me back into the corner like a kitten.

Mom's throat is bleeding. At the moment of the next blow, it splashes on the wall, leaving a scattering of bright scarlet stars on the wallpaper - as if it were not blood, but fireworks.

- Paper! Daughter, hurry up and give me the paper! - Mother asks, choking on her tears.

I don't know why she needs paper. I fumbled around in the bedroom and hurried to my room. It's a good thing my little sister is asleep, she can't see or hear this nightmare. The paper is nowhere to be found.

I grab a thick Ozhegov's dictionary from the shelf and tear out the title page.

My mother hastily scribbles something on it and slips the note into my hands. The letters danced before my eyes. "I'm leaving my gold earrings to Natasha and my ring to Tanya," I read.

Dad comes back into the bedroom. I hadn't even noticed that he was out.

He smells of vodka and tobacco, but he's calm. I don't think he's going to hit Mom again.

- Go to bed! - he says through his teeth, not looking at me.

- Don't leave Tanya," Mom whispers quickly. - Live well. Give this note to your grandmother.

- Mom, but what about you? - I ask fearfully. - Daddy won't touch you anymore. Tomorrow you'll give it to her yourself.

- Daughter," Mom's voice trembles. - Tomorrow I'll be gone. This blood. I won't live till morning. Go away. When I am buried and your father is arrested, your grandparents will take you to Tagil. You and Tanya will be fine. Believe me!

But I don't believe her, I'm crying. The only one who can help me now is God.

In desperation I turn to Him, begging for help, making vague vows and oaths.

It seems to me that if I don't fall asleep before morning, He will hear me and save my mother.

I only wish I wouldn't fall asleep!

Wrapped in a blanket, I sit on a chair in a half-lazy state. How slowly time passes.

I want the night to end, but I'm afraid of the morning.

I'm afraid to see my mother dead.

In the morning, I tiptoe into her bedroom and sigh with relief: alive!

- What's wrong with you? - Mom guiltily hides her tearful eyes.

She gets up, puts her feet in her slippers, and goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

Dad turns on the TV. They both act as if nothing has happened, as if they were not the ones who rolled around on the carpet last night, grabbing each other's hair and hitting each other.

Or was it just a nightmare?

But what about the crumpled note in my hand?

- Throw it away! - Mom says angrily when she sees it. - Throw it away right now! I'm telling you!

I obediently go to the trash can, but at the last moment I change my mind and hide the note in the dictionary. It's my only witness. No, the spots of dried stars on the wall - they haven't gone anywhere either.

I lock myself in the bathroom and cry, silently, bitterly, inconsolably.

Barbarism

As a child, I loved it when my parents read me poems and fairy tales.

There were many favorite stories, but only two poems - Stevens' ballad "Heather Honey" and Musa Jalil's "Barbarism" - made my heart tremble and filled it with an unspeakable longing.

Like now, I see a simple gray book in my mother's hands.

I made myself comfortable in the chair and prepared to listen.

"They put mothers and children together.

They made them dig a pit and they stood there.

They stood there, a bunch of savages,

and laughed with hoarse voices."

My mother's voice shakes and I get goose bumps all over my back. It's as if I can see everything that happened there, in the forty-third - and "the sad sun, washed with tears," and the angry noise of the autumn forest, and the boy clinging to his mother in fear: "Hide me, Mommy, hide me! I can even hear her last words: "Be patient, son, it won't hurt now..."

My mother cries, she can no longer read. I'm also sniffling my nose.

In my mind I see images from war newsreels: a bunch of ragged, dirty children at the edge of the moat, a bravura German march, and the Nazis, laughing at the camera, handing out chocolates to the children. The children stretch out their hands, unwrap the foil.

And just then, a volley of rifle fire. Crying and screaming children fly into the pit.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

How despicable, how monstrously despicable! I'm so sorry that they were betrayed, that they were deceived, that they didn't get to taste at least a fraction of the unprecedented pleasure of chocolate before they died...

The book is put aside. My mother and I cry our eyes out. How lucky that we're both alive! But the boy in the poem, did he really die? It can't be! I want to believe that the bullet did not hit him, that he managed to escape, to save himself from the damned evil Krauts.

I quietly tug at my mother's sleeve, begging her to read on, vaguely hoping for a miracle.

Show me Moscow

- Would you like me to show you Moscow? - my father asks me with a mischievous smile.

- I want to! I really want to! - I rushed to the window, expecting to see, as if by magic, the capital of our country, where I had never been in my life.

My father came up behind me, pressed his palms to my ears as if he were checking the ripeness of a watermelon, and lifted me up - higher, higher, to the ceiling.

- Can you see Moscow?

I stare into the distance with a sinking heart, and soon it seems to me that the Kremlin is flashing over the roofs of the houses opposite, and ruby stars are shining on the Spasskaya Tower.

- I see! - I exclaim with joy.

- That's great! - Father laughs. - Who else wants to see Moscow?

- I do! - Tanya whirls under my feet with her ears ready. - I want to go to Moscow!

Kapitoshka

Once my dad's cousin Uncle Gena gave me a plastic crocodile.

This crocodile is just like a live crocodile, its mouth opens and its paws move back and forth.

- It is really alive! - Daddy winks at me and, after rolling up a small ball of paper, sticks it in the crocodile's toothy mouth, says a loud "am!" and pulls the ball out from somewhere under its tail.

I clap my hands in glee: well done, crocodile!

But when I try to feed the toy myself, the crocodile refuses to swallow the paper.

For some reason, it doesn't listen to anyone but my father.

But the celluloid frog that bathes with me in the bathtub does not swallow paper, but it can drink water and pour it through the hole between its webbed feet.

Once someone left a toy on a hot radiator, and in the morning it was just a sticky green puddle. To console me, Dad said that the frog had turned into Kapitoshka - a living drop from my favorite cartoon. And as if to prove Dad's words, something immediately gurgled and sang and rattled in the water pipe.

- Do you hear that? - said my father. - Kapitoshka greets you!

I believed it at once. And every time the pipes hummed, I ran to the bathroom to greet Kapitoshka.

Seryozha

Grandmother's neighbor Rosa's son, an electrician, died in Tagil from an electric shock.

Rosa's six-year-old grandson, Seryozha, was left an orphan. At a family meeting, the relatives decided not to tell him about his father's death so as not to traumatize the child's psyche.

The boy was told that his father had gone on a business trip and would not return home for a long time.

When we heard this, the guys and I were terribly indignant: how dare adults tell him this lie!

And all would be well if Seryozha's father had really gone on a business trip, but his son was waiting for him, and as far as I know, no one had ever returned from the other world.

Seryozha's father was buried in secret.

Mother and grandmother were sure that they had managed to hide their grief from the children's eyes, but Seryozha somehow guessed that something had happened in the family, otherwise why did everyone have such a crying face, and the smell of valerian did not leave the house? And the mirror in the hall, covered with a black cloth...

He tried to get an answer from his relatives, but they averted their eyes.

The silence weighed on him, so Serozha went out into the yard, and there the hard truth fell upon him.

I remember him covering his ears with his hands and screaming:

- I don't believe you! No! My father is alive! He is on a business trip!

Then Anyuta, the oldest of us, came over and hugged him:

- Of course your father is alive. He went on a business trip to heaven and will not come back here, but one day you will go there and meet him, believe me.

Seryozha sobbed and looked at Anyuta with tears and gratitude in his eyes. He had been waiting for these words, it was very important for him to hear them, and I think Anyuta helped him.

Under the Slide

Anyuta is twelve years old, she's a girl with "oddities", a weirdo. That's what everyone says about her.

She talks to herself, scares us with the imminent end of the world, sings with a trembling voice about little Mary who poisoned herself because of an unhappy love - sha-lu-la-lu-la-la-la-la.

She likes it when we call her loudly when we want to go for a walk with her: "Anyuta!"

- I'm here! - she answers willingly. She runs out into the yard and entertains us with horror stories. Anyuta has a million of them. The scariest one is about a murdered woman buried under a wooden slide in the neighbor's yard.

The slide is large and hollow inside. If you push aside a sheet of plywood, you find yourself in a "shelter". During the day, it is gloomy and smells of rotten boards and urine. Glass crunches underfoot and empty bottles roll around. In the evenings, the local youth, or just riff-raff, as my grandmother Dusya calls them, gather in the "shelter" - they swear, drink port wine, play cards for money. It's a vile place.

Anyuta says that bandits once raped and stabbed a woman here. They buried her right here, under the slide, so no one would know.

- You're lying! - I can't stand it.

- I'm not lying, I swear! - whispers Anyuta and quickly crosses herself.

- We should call the police, - I suggest.

- Are you crazy?! - Anyuta is frightened. - They are bandits! If they find out, they'll kill us.

A doubt gnaws at me. Maybe I should call the boys, get some shovels and dig her out?

It's no good lying in a latrine like a dog. We should tell the adults so they can bury her ashes.

But the boys don't want to help me - they're afraid of the bandits' massacre.

Then I run to Grandma Dusya and tell her everything.

- Anyuta is crazy, - my grandmother laughs. - She makes up stories and you believe her.

So Anyuta is lying and there really is no dead woman? I breathe a sigh of relief.

But as night falls, the gnawing doubt begins to nibble at my heart again. Maybe I should go under the slide alone? But what if the ghost of the murdered woman wanders there and green lights shine? No, I don't have the courage. Anyuta didn't have to tell me that!

Anyway, I didn't go anywhere, but I didn't forget that story either.

How we beat up Hitler

It happened in the early eighties.

The director of the cultural center "October" invited us, children of the kindergarten "Solnyshko", to participate in a theatrical performance about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.

Girls had to perform the dance of snowflakes on the stage, and boys - rabbits.

None of us, children, of course, doubted that Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was the real one from the books about the war, the one our teachers told us about.

- She was not killed! She is here! Alive! - we whispered behind the stage, swooning with happiness.

And suddenly, just a few feet from us, we saw... Hitler.

He stood there in a black swastika cap, high chrome boots, Nazi uniform, stroking his black bristly mustache. We were stunned.

Finally, the bravest of us, Seryozha Dzyuin, came to his senses and hissed with hatred:

- Damn it! He survived too... Well, nothing, now we'll show him. Beat him, guys!

And we all rushed at the enemy.

At first, "Hitler" laughingly dodged our kicks and spits, but when he realized that he could not get rid of us so easily, he ran down the corridor. We whistled and hooted after him. Dzyuin even threw a sneaker at the fugitive.

In the evening we proudly told our parents how we had beaten the Führer himself. But for some reason, instead of praising us, they began to laugh:

- Poor guy, poor guy!

By the way, the story of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became a tragedy in Tagil in the same years.

In the kindergarten children played a war game. As usual, they were divided into Germans and partisans.

The "Germans" captured a girl - "Zoya" and began to torture her. Not for fun. Seriously. And then they found a rope somewhere and hanged her. Also for real.

In the Yuri Gagarin sanatorium, my friends and I, playing the military game "Zarnitsa", were so into the role that we did not treat our "enemies" with ceremony, but tied them to a tree and tortured them. A girl from the "German" group didn't like the smell of flint, so when we captured her, in order to find out the enemy's secret plans, we deliberately started to cut a spark from a stone and gave it to her to sniff.

And the boys in our class almost set fire to a boy in the neighboring fourth grade.

The first-grade son of Aunt Nina's friends in Shevchenko shot his one-year-old sister at close range. He loaded a toy gun not with suction cups but with sharp pencils, put the baby against the wall and, imagining her to be a German invader, executed her. To death.

My poor Arkady

When I was a kid, I didn't understand why people act in war movies. They get killed in them! Is it worth five years of studying at a film institute to be blown up by a grenade or run over by a tank? - I thought naively, sitting in front of the TV.

No, definitely, only crazy people want to be actors!

Nobody could convince me that everything on the screen was not real.

My five-year-old brain just refused to believe it. Why make a movie if it wasn't real? Who would be interested? Who would watch it?

I remember crying all night after a movie about the Uzbek poet Hamza who was stoned to death by the Basmaches - I felt so sorry for the innocent actor.

Then I fell in love with a Red Army soldier from a Soviet film whose title I can't remember.

Arkady was strong and brave, and when the Nazis took him to the gallows, my heart was ready to break. Tears flowed like a river.

I couldn't watch the enemies massacre the hero, so I ran out of the room.

I thought that if I do not see the execution with my own eyes, the actor will remain alive, and just in case, I spent the whole evening writing a letter to the filmmakers, diligently scribbling on paper. I begged them not to kill poor Arkady.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers did not heed my pleas. The next morning, as I sat down to watch the replay with a sense of accomplishment, the Nazis hanged Arkady again.

"I will never go to the actors! - I swore. - I don't care about fame, life is more valuable!"

To be continued