My sister-in-law Clavka believed her son to be a mentally retarded child and sent him to live with us in the village.
– Well, it’s a good thing that my grandson is dumb, – my mother used to say to our neighbours. – At least, he isn’t going to be conscripted. Thus, he will stay alive longer.
Zinc coffins were arriving in Pskov Oblast by the dozen from Afghanistan. Moreover, not all mothers had the possibility to see their beloved sons for the last time and lay them to the eternal rest in the native land. Our neighbour aunt Tonya, having received two “killed in battle” notices, lived for the rest of her life with a split feeling of despair and hope. She never saw the bodies of her two sons. And she was not the only one living in suspense.
We lived to see Vanjka, Vasjka’s father, alive. He returned a captain, with a black face and grey head. And he was still on the right side of thirty. As was the custom, a table was set for all comers. A huge knockdown table, the one that had been knocked together by our granddad and which was kept in parts, to be used on special occasions. We drank in memory of the fallen, then to the health of the living. Silence reigned for a few moments; just buzzing of flies. All of a sudden – a resounding bang coming from under the bottom of the table sent the dishes jumping on and glasses flying off the table. The next moment the dead silence was shattered by a bass, masculine voice not familiar to anyone:
– Fuck! It really hurts.
Women, scared to death, began to cross themselves. Men, as if on command, poked their heads under the table. And there they saw – guess who? – our Vasjka, smiling.
– Fucking hell! – he cursed again, rubbing the bump on the top of his head.
My brother, before he had time to rejoice in the fact that his son finally began to speak, suddenly grew pale and yelled:
– Stay put! Don’t move! – and he crawled towards Vasjka. – Hey, someone, give me the pliers, fuck you…
Sticking out within a hair’s breadth of Vasjka’s head was a long rusty nail. Who knows where it came from and how it got there, and what angel saved Vasjka from certain death.
– That’s one guardian angel the boy’s got! – the farm manager Egor Kuzmich remarked, deep in thought. And he added respectfully, – He (the angel) certainly knows his job.
From that day on, the boy began to speak pretty fluent Russian interspersed with foul language. Everyone in our village spoke that way. The strong language they used was not considered to be bad words or curses. The limited vocabulary typical of ordinary, undereducated people was, where strong emotions needed to be expressed, supplemented with a strong, meaningful word, and, on special occasions, – with a pretty flowery expression.
After a while, we got a letter from my brother describing another incident again involving, for sure, the guardian angel. On arriving at the next place of assignment (military men got a new assignment pretty often), Ivan’s family got temporary accommodation in a small dilapidated house that had not been lived in since the demise of the old lady-owner. Just for a couple of days, before they moved into the apartment vacated by that time by previous occupants. Early in the morning, Ivan went to report for service. Clavka went to apply for a job. Vasjka was instructed to behave himself and never leave the house. “The boy is fairly grown-up, will go to school in a month’, she reassured herself. But she locked the door, to be on the safe side.
…A couple of hours later, the roof burst into flames: old electric wiring caught fire. Firefighters arrived promptly, immediately got fire pumps ready and nozzles trained on the roof. The roof collapsed under the weight of water. Vasjka was nowhere to be seen. Clavka was already wailing and sobbing when Vasjka’s muffled voice reached her ears from beneath the earth. Mystic-minded officers’ wives and some of the recruits involved in clearing the site of fire passed out. And when they came to, they saw Vasjka, safe and sound, with an apple leftover bit in his hand. It turned out that seeing round the new dwelling, the boy discovered a cellar under the floor right in the middle of a small room the entrance to which was tightly covered with a piece of sheet iron. The cellar was well stocked with various preserves and other eatables. And it was there that Vasjka was staying, tucking away jam and apples, until he sniffed something burning and heard some noises above. He couldn’t get out of the cellar unassisted: the metal cover slammed down, became terribly hot and heavy; that’s why he was calling out to mum and dad.
We used to receive new evidence of the presence of a guardian angel in Vasjka’s life about once a month. One day, our blockhead made a bet with his friend that he would jump off the roof-top of the four-storey barracks, of the “Stalin architecture”, by the way. Has made up his mind to become an airman and to start preparing himself for the future profession accordingly, young rascal. To this end, he decided to use Clavka’s umbrella as a parachute. He made all the necessary mathematical calculations – he was about fourteen at the time – and jumped off the top of the roof. But the umbrella, which was unfamiliar with Vasjka’s laws of aerodynamics and had been produced at a Soviet plant, apparently at the end of a quarter (when the quarterly report was to be submitted and there was a drive for product quantity rather than product quality), folded in the opposite direction at the very first moment of the flight. He would have never come out if alive had it not been for the truck full of hay that appeared at the very spot where Vasjka’s helpless body was to hit the cobble-stone pavement. It was not until evening that the winner of the bet appeared in front of his friend, prepared to receive a hundred flicks on the forehead as a bet loser, and admiring crowd. Because Vasjka had to take a ride on the hay truck as far as the local state farm and then go back to the cantonment on foot. But to make up for it, he returned home safe and sound.
In the early 1990s, my brother was promoted to the rank of colonel and given an assignment to Transbaikalia as a military unit commander. Clavka, in an effort to live up to her husband’s senior position, strutted about in Chinese imitations of Versace clothes. But she failed to win the admiration of or arouse envy in anyone. Over there, like in our Pskov Oblast, valued highly were plump women. And our Clavka, although a good person, was, as my mother dubbed her on seeing her for the first time, “not much to look at, with a fist-size bum”. And Vasjka took after her: puny and anything but tall – reaching a bit above his father’s shoulder. My mother used to say about people with stature like that: “a good sneeze could knock them down”. But girls cared for him – a curly-headed and blue-eyed guy.
Vasjka never graduated from the university, he dropped out of it, having been inveigled by jolly crowds. He took to the bottle, drinking heavily and going on a drunken binge for days on end. For him – a jokester and the life and soul of the party, – there was no way he could avoid this fate. He would have become a drunkard and perished, like many of his peers, had it not been for Alevtina who suddenly appeared from nowhere – like a bolt from the blue. I believe it was the guardian angel who had a hand in it again. He either called her to his assistance, being tired of saving his ward, or appointed her as his deputy. Alevtina went to distant Irkutsk from these parts to see her boyfriend, the private Stepan – a muscular, handsome young man, – and came back with our “a good sneeze could knock him down” Vasjka. Who would have thought it possible?! Their love was all-consuming and it passed all understanding. They made love non-stop for a whole month. Vasjka even forgot about vodka. But soon, having found new friends, he took to drink again. Alevtina didn’t like it at all. She decided to employ a carrot-and-stick approach. Intended to be used as a “carrot” was her rich, sweet body which Vasjka proved to be craving for to the point of trembling; and as a “stick” – a real whip which she had inherited, along with her considerable physical strength and a comfortable house, from her granddad who had been an owner of a stud farm. Within a few months, Vasjka stopped even thinking about vodka. At this point, we could finish our story with the words “and they lived