The Marked

My mother told me that when she was a child she was kicked by a calf-a hoof kicked her right in the forehead.

The same thing happened to my father when he was a boy, only it was not a calf that kicked him between the eyes, but a colt. So both my parents are marked.

Like my mother, my father was born in the country. His father was a miner, and before my father was born, he traveled a lot around the country looking for work with my grandmother and his first-born son, Grisha.

When Misha was born, the family moved from Kizner to Nizhny Tagil, to the Lebyazhka district, and settled in a communal house on the corner of Vogulskaya and Krasnoarmeyskaya Streets.

The windows of the house overlooked the ice-cream factory, and my then two-year-old father could stand for hours on the windowsill, imagining how he would grow up to be an ice-cream maker and eat his favorite treat to his heart's content.

One day he was daydreaming so much that he lost his footing and fell head first onto the concrete floor.

He hit the back of his head, his eyes rolled back, and his mouth foamed.

The grandparents were not home, and the neighbors who came running to the screams decided that the boy was on his last breath and unlikely to live until the ambulance arrived. They took the dying child in their arms, carried him carefully into the room, and laid him on the bed - to wait for the end. But Daddy didn't die. Someone went to get my grandmother, and she managed to call an ambulance. The doctor determined that the baby had a severe concussion and ordered that the boy be taken to the hospital before he fell into a coma.

Daredevil

Dad broke his head again when he was a schoolboy.

In the yard on Zernovaya Street, where my grandfather and grandmother had moved from a communal apartment, there were big swings with twisted iron bars. My father swung "to the sky", couldn't hold on and, after several somersaults in the air, hit the ground with the back of his head.

Again foaming from the mouth, blood, rolled eyes, the ambulance...

News of Misha's death spread quickly around the school.

The school even sent an obituary to the newspaper.

No wonder that when Misha came to class alive and almost unharmed, with his head bandaged, everyone ran away from him as if he were a ghost.

Anyway, dad was lucky. His classmate, for example, rolled on the school railing, fell from the third floor, hit his head on the stone steps, and went blind.

Another classmate, awkwardly jumping from the foot of a freight train, hit his forehead on a railroad embankment and died two days later of a brain hemorrhage.

But my father never feared danger. He fearlessly jumped into the water from the pond tower, climbed into attics, rode on the roofs of freight cars, he was a daredevil.

Two brothers

Dad's older brother, Grisha, was nothing like him. Misha is small, agile, mischievous, dark-skinned, black-haired like a gypsy. And Grisha - blue-eyed blond and tall, like a pole, very quiet boy. Nevertheless, the neighborhood children often confused the brothers, and when they met them, they would say: Misha-Grisha, what's your name?

Naughty Misha didn't understand how anyone could be as shy as his brother? He was always teasing Grisha, bullying him, trying to take away a plate of borscht at lunch, or stealing a cutlet.

If Grisha resisted, the brothers would fight. My grandmother had to separate them, and Misha got a spoon on his forehead for his mischief.

So Misha usually acted cunningly. Knowing that his brother was terribly squeamish, he would lean over and whisper in his ear: "Remember the dead cat!"

Grisha would jump up from the table, cover his mouth with his hand and hurry to the toilet.

And Misha, with an innocent flutter of his eyelashes, would push Grisha's plate to himself and eat his brother's portion appetizingly. He knew that his brother would not touch the food until the evening.

Still waters run deep

When I was a child, I also thought that Uncle Grisha was a klutz.

He was lanky, and his eyes were always inflamed. He worked at a construction site, and he came to Grandma Dusa's house for lunch in a red Zhiguli car. I secretly watched him.

Uncle Grisha would eat in silence, leaning over his plate and looking at the TV screen. Sometimes he would ask me something - about my studies, or how my father and mother were doing. He would listen intently, humming and nodding. Then he would talk to my grandmother in the kitchen about something, borrow some money from her, and leave.

Lenka, my uncle's youngest daughter, complained that her father, despite his seeming indifference, was always strict about how and with whom his daughters spent their free time.

Once, in the seventh grade, Lenka thought her parents were asleep and decided to sneak out of the house at night to meet friends who were waiting for her at the front door. She was almost ready to leave her room when the floorboards creaked treacherously under her feet.

In a second, her vigilant father was standing under her door, demanding to be let in immediately to make sure his daughter was alone in the room and not with some young rascal.

He was not such a simpleton, my uncle Grisha!

The family used to tell a story about my uncle: at school he was good at exact sciences, but he was very bad at Russian, writing with grammatical mistakes.

And everything would be fine, but at the entrance exam to the construction technical college it was necessary to write an essay with at least a C - for my uncle with his monstrous spelling, a task almost impossible.

So Grisha went to preparatory courses of the Russian language. For a month he did not miss a single lesson, crammed the rules, scribbled over dictionaries. However, without much success. Essay uncle wrote an "F". But the teachers remembered the diligent young man, and he got the technical college.

And how can I forget the hard confrontation my uncle had with my grandfather when "quiet boy" Grisha changed his Tatar name and surname in his passport against his parents' will.

No, it is not for nothing that they say about people like my uncle: "Still waters run deep".

Flash of anger

I remember an incident that struck me as a child.

My uncle's family lived in the Red Stone neighborhood. My cousins Lenka and Olga and I were home alone, playing and listening to records. Olga was twice as old as me and Lenka, and for some reason she decided to tease me, took a toy from me and threw it on the cupboard.

I ran out of the room crying.

At that moment I heard the lock click, it was my uncle Grisha who had come home from work.

- What's wrong? - He asked sternly, undressing in the hall.

- Olga is teasing me! - I continued to cry, wiping the tears from my cheeks with my fist.

A shadow came over Uncle Grisha's calm face. He pushed me aside, rushed into the children's room, took a belt from his trousers and beat Olga with it.

She screamed like a wounded pig. Squirming and covering herself with her hands, she begged her father to stop, but that only made him angrier. Uncle Grisha whipped his ten-year-old daughter long and mercilessly, saying through his teeth: Here! Here! Take that!

I had never seen my uncle like that in my life, and I was not at all glad that I had told him about Olga.

A child, a girl, my cousin, was being brutally beaten in front of me.

Maybe she deserved to be punished, but not like that.

After a moment, when her father had exhausted himself and lowered the belt, Olga rushed into the bathroom, tearful, disheveled, with horrible purple marks on her arms and legs.

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- Happy? - she hissed, suddenly pushing me towards the door with all her strength.

I flew back and hit my head on the doorjamb.

There was no sign of pity for my cousin. I was instantly enraged:

- Yes, I'm happy! You got what you deserved! - I shouted vindictively.

Fury girl

Uncle's anger scared me that day, but I wasn't surprised. Sometimes I also wanted to snap at someone, to hit him in the ear, to slap him, to shout at him. But I was a child "on my own mind", withdrawn, secretive - I didn't want anyone to know what was going on in my soul.

I tried to maintain a disguise, to obey my elders, to appear nice and docile, but inside this "quiet girl" there were African passions boiling, a raging tropical hurricane.

I was particularly sensitive to injustice. Let's say I wasn't guilty, but I was punished - someone was rude to me, deceived me, played a trick on me, promised me something and broke his word without explanation.

At such moments, the "obedient girl" would turn to fury.

Rage washed over me in a hot wave and I couldn't handle the avalanche of destructive thoughts. I wanted to tear, throw, and trample the person who had hurt me.

But I could rarely afford to do that for fear of looking like a "bad girl. Sometimes emotions would break out in tears, which people around me took as weakness.

They didn't realize that while I was crying, I was thinking of the most horrible ways to get revenge.

I would mentally execute my culprit, and only after the "execution" would I find peace of mind.

Just Dusya

In the passport of my grandmother Dusya there was a dash in the column "patronymic".

The father of my grandmother was Ivan, he drowned in the river when his daughter was two years old. In the July heat he was cutting hay in the meadow, got hot and decided to refresh himself in the river.

The villagers discouraged him: "You'll drown! He waved them off: "There is water up to the knees of a hen. The whole village would laugh at me if I drowned. He dived into the icy water and didn't come up - a heart attack.

Marfa, my grandmother's mother, was pregnant at the time, but fortunately, despite the death of her unborn child's father, she soon married a good, kind man to whom God had not given children.

Her stepfather was Egor, a quiet, kind man who never hurt his stepdaughter. So when it came time for Dusya to get a passport, she could not decide whose patronymic to choose.

While she pondered, the passport officer simply wrote: Evdokia (Dusya's full name), sparing my grandmother the agonizing choice. By the way, Marfa and Egor named the newborn boy Ivan.

Alaberdino

When I was a child, my grandmother Dusya often told me about her family. I remembered that her grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, was called Samoil and was ten years younger than his wife.

They lived in the village of Malye Erykly in Tatarstan, raised pigs and were considered wealthy people. But I could not understand how a 19-year-old young man could marry a 29-year-old "old woman"? Was it for money? Or was it love?

I have already written about my grandfather's father, Gaifulla, who died in the war.

I know very little about his family, although I once visited my grandfather's village of Alaberdino.

I remember being amazed to learn that there was only one television for the whole village. I also remember a decrepit old woman - my great-grandfather's wife, her name was Askhab.

She lived apart from the family, in a closet, and spent all day counting rosary beads and some old rags.

Maybe because of the heat, maybe because my great-grandmother was sick, or just because she was old, her body emitted a strange sweet and foul odor that I found disgusting as a child. When I was asked to hug the old woman, or when she herself tried to sit me on her lap and caress me, I would defiantly hold my nose and pull away.

The old woman would chuckle good-naturedly, shake her head, and mumble something in Tatar.

Despite her age, my great-grandmother had almost all her teeth.

My grandfather's sister assured me that her mother always grew new teeth to replace the ones she lost. Such an inexplicable anomaly.

A ram

In Alaberdino, for the first time in my life, I saw a ram being slaughtered. The doomed animal was seized, tied up, cut across the throat with a knife, and crucified on wooden poles.

The ram was still alive, but dumb, spinning wildly with crazed eyes.

The sight shocked me so much that by nightfall my fever had risen to forty degrees.

Everyone thought I had drunk ice-cold water from the well and had a sore throat, but in my delirium I saw the image of a slaughtered ram bleeding before my eyes. The smell of raw hide and cooked meat made me vomit, and I couldn't take a bite.

Are there savages in this godforsaken village who could slaughter me like an innocent sheep? I did not understand their guttural language, and that made me even more afraid.

When a doctor came to our house, I refused to let her come near me.

A doctor should wear a white coat and cap, and this one was wearing a plain dress. She's probably planning to kill me and has a knife hidden in her suitcase.

- Don't touch me! - I shouted. - I don't want you to treat me! Go away! I hate you!

To defend myself, I even splashed the doctor with water from a glass. I wanted her to know that I would not be taken barehanded.

No happiness since youth

Like my great-grandfather Gaifulla, my grandfather Shaykhulla could have died young, but not in war, but in peacetime. He was pulled under a conveyor belt in a coal mine.

The mechanism severely damaged his right arm, tearing tendons and shattering bones.

The doctor, fearing gangrene, wanted to amputate the mangled hand, but my grandfather resisted and would not allow it. As a result, amputation was somehow avoided. The hand healed itself.

Discharged from the hospital, my grandfather made a tattoo on the back of the palm - a semicircle of the sun with rays and the inscription: "No happiness since youth". But why? The hand was saved. It might be scarred and a little crooked, but it had not lost its basic functions.

Secret

In the late nineties, a store opened next to our house that sold chewing gum, soda, ice cream, and alcohol. My father often went there to buy a beer.

There was a young saleswoman behind the counter, and Dad liked to talk to her and sometimes stay in the store for a long time. Mom even began to be jealous of him because of her.

- Why are you telling me this? - I didn't understand.

He looked at me searchingly, as if wondering if I could be trusted, and then he told me his secret. When he was young, he had an affair with a girl named Vera, and apparently she could have a child with him. Dad did the math, and it all seemed to add up.

- What does that mean? - I still couldn't figure out what my father was trying to tell me.

- The last name of the girl in the store is the same as Vera's! - he exclaimed. - I think she's my daughter.

The girl said she had never seen her father, and this literally drove my father crazy.

He was determined to find out the truth.

Unfortunately, the store closed soon after and the girl disappeared without a trace.

The whole story left me with a kind of ambivalent feeling.

On the one hand, I was happy to have a half-sister, but on the other hand, I was terribly jealous of my father and suffered from doubts: What if she is an impostor? There are many namesakes in the world.

If my father knew for sure about his daughter...

But you could expect anything from him. And he wasn't the only one. According to rumors, my father's older brother Grisha also had an illegitimate daughter...

And I have every reason to believe that this is not the first such case in their family.

Out of wedlock

One day we received a long-distance phone call at our home.

Mom answered the phone.

The old man at the other end introduced himself as Alexander. He said that he had read my article about my relatives in Tagil and decided that it was time to reveal the cards, that there was no point in keeping quiet any longer.

- What do you mean by that? - Mother was suspicious.

- I am your husband's brother! - The stranger stunned her with his confession.

And told such a story. In the late 40's, early 50's of the last century, my grandfather Shaykhulla (Sasha, as he was called in the family) was sent to study at the factory school in the city of Kiselevsk in Siberia, where he was mining coal. He met a woman. She got pregnant by him.

But since my grandfather was already married to my grandmother (who was also expecting a child from him), marriage was out of the question.

Maybe my grandfather didn't know or didn't want to know about the interesting condition of his beloved. Anyway, they separated and soon my grandfather and grandmother left the mining town.

The woman gave birth to a son without a husband and named him Alexander in honor of his father.

Mom was so discouraged by this news that she forgot or did not think to ask the caller for his address or at least his phone number. And Dad's "brother" himself didn't insist on anything. He didn't even say how he got our home phone number.

- I don't need anything from you," he said. - I just called to let you know.

And hung up.

To be honest, at first I thought the call was a figment of my mother's unbridled imagination. But there was an unknown long-distance number stored in the phone's automatic caller ID memory that the phone, for some reason, did not recognize.

I hoped the stranger would call us back, but he disappeared.

I tried to look for him on the Internet, but to no avail. I thought about asking my grandmother Dusya if she knew about the other woman and that my grandfather had another son.

And each time I stopped myself with the thought: What if she knew nothing? And even if she did know, how would she react now to the events of long ago? She is not young anymore.

And where is the guarantee that this call isn't someone's evil prank?

So I never dared to call my grandmother for an open conversation. Although I would be interested to know the fate of the mysterious Uncle Alexander (if he really exists).

Night Blindness

On my mother's side, my great-grandfather Grigory, father of my grandfather Slava, disappeared in 1943 during the Second World War, and we never heard from him again.

I saw his wife Augusta only on a photo - a small, thin old woman with bright eyes, wearing a shawl, a mother of many children, whose life was marked by much suffering.

Grandmother Luda also grew up in a large family. After the tragic death of her father, hard times came for her and her mother and two younger brothers. There was no food in the house.

To help their mother, the boys plowed and harrowed the field on horseback. Luda wanted to quit school and work as a babysitter or somewhere else to earn money, but her mother forbade it, saying: "You should study!" Due to constant malnutrition, the girl developed night blindness.

She walked home from school through the woods and fields to the village of Zamyatievo with a bag of schoolbooks. It was a long way, and often she would not reach the village before dark - she would lose her sight. Then she would crawl home on all fours, crying and asking the rare passersby for directions. She was afraid the wolves would catch up with her and tear her blind and defenseless body apart.

A witch's curse

When my grandmother's younger brother Vasya was a soldier, he was hit by a train in Kustanai while running away from a Chechen bandit who was chasing him with a knife. What kind of bandit he was and why Vasya ran away from him, my grandmother did not tell me. Another of her brothers, Vitaly, worked as a trackman on the railroad and lived with his wife, Shura, in the village of Balezino.

My grandmother and I often visited them. In the house on Chapaev Street there was a room that we children were strictly forbidden to enter. Through a cloudy window, which connected the outer entrance hall with the room, you could see an empty bed with "lumps", covered with a patchwork quilt. Rumor had it that the bed was cursed.

It is said that in her old age my great-grandmother Matrena asked to "live out her life" in the house of her son and daughter-in-law, but they took Matrena unkindly, so my grandmother took her in.

When my offended great-grandmother left Balezino, she put a curse on her bed.

Years later, Vitaly fell seriously ill and, unable to bear the hellish pain, hanged himself. After his death, Shura became drunk and died soon after.

The house still stands, and what happened to the cursed bed is unknown.

To be continued