The White Cherry Fight

This is a story about a tree that stood outside of the fence surrounding my grandfather’s house and was bringing fruit that wasn’t even nearly white, but a noble color of old ivory, yet for some reason was called a “white cherry tree in your grandfather’s yard”. This story also has the split bottles of vodka which were called “little scoundrels” and for some inexplicable reason, after 10pm were to be gotten only at the railway station, and only from the taxi drivers. And the truck drivers who drove Soviet versions of eighteen-wheelers along the Soviet versions of highways were called “long range shooters”.
Yet, it is a very normal story. It’s a story about a family.
Where would we be without a family? Family must always stay together. Through trials and triumphs, through highs and lows. Where would you be without your family? Who but your parents will always love and support you, without a word of judgment or criticism? And when you find yourself in a difficult situation, who but your wife will gently whisper words of wisdom and encouragement, based on her thorough knowledge of your personality, in your tired ear? Who but your sister will, gasping with satisfaction, cheerfully explain to you in detail what's wrong with you and why you can't have the life that you want? And who but your brother will be always next to you and won't talk to you for years and years and years?
  My grandfather’s brother lived two doors from him, on the same quiet street named after sailor Koshka. This living arrangement was spiced up by the fact that both had comfortable houses with garages and summer kitchens, fruit trees heavy with apples, plums, apricots and cherries, flowerbeds overflowing with blooms in spring and summer and similar looking wives who didn’t talk to each other. As a result, Monya and Marik didn’t talk to each other either.

When you don’t talk to your brother for years, it really helps to have him just two doors down, this way you can actually not talk to him every day.

It’s normal. Which family worth its disfunctionality doesn’t have a nice healthy feud to it? It’s normal, such is life. And besides, time goes by and changes everything anyway. So, time went by and Monya’s and Marik’s wives started talking to each other again. Right now nobody in a family can remember the reason that prompted them to stop their boycott, leave alone the reason that started it in a first place, which makes me think that both of those reasons were of truly monumental, life-changing importance.

At any rate, Monya’s Polya and Marik’s Asya not only resumed their interactions, but also gracefully allowed their two husbands to start talking to each other as well. And just as things started looking unusually healthy and happy on the Matrosa Koshki Street, my parents bought a house.

I will not dwell here what a deliverance it was for my mother to be rid of my grandmother’s constant presence, that’s a separate story in itself. Let’s just acknowledge that for her it was a very happy event.

Happy or not happy, no house, even if it’s a dog’s one, is bought in Ukraine without being properly “washed off”, the liquid of choice in such cases being vodka, of course. And that’s why, on a balmy summer afternoon, my grandmother was in her backyard, setting up a table for the dear guests. The checkered tablecloth was wiped, the forks, knives and plates were also wiped and set, the goblets with grape design etched into a modestly blushing pink glass, were put gingerly on a table. 

In front of the gate, the white cherry tree stood tall and queenly, its branches heavy with yellow fruit. On top of the garage is a “veranda” which was accessible by such a steep staircase that one couldn’t climb it, one had to brave it, and there, with the tobacco flowers forming the walls and the ceiling of this inaccessible paradise, the branches of the cherry tree penetrated the flimsy wall of the flowers and reached over the dark red floor crackled with summer heat. From the other side of the veranda, the branches of an old apricot tree hang so low, one had to step over them when walking on the roof. The fruit, orange, reddish, golden, translucent and juicy was not like anything you will ever find in American supermarkets. How can one compare the rachitic American apricots to the jewels of my grandfather’s tree?

But, as it often happens in life, nobody had eyes for the old apricot tree, it was always the white cherry tree upfront.

It is interesting, that though my grandmother possessed more than a fair share of what the Polish call “honor” and French dub “hauteur” in her carriage and manners, I don’t ever remember her standing up straight. With all due respect, the weight of her ample derriere seemed to outweight her frontal development in a way that she seemed to be always slightly bent forward, like a loving mother. Or a charging dinosaur, which is sometimes almost the same thing.

So, I know she was in this position when the dear guests arrived, even if I was too small to remember.

Both my grandfathers theoretically were called Mikhails. In practice however, one was called Monya and the other one Shoonik. How such different nicknames derived from such a  common name they shared deserves a story of it’s own, but for now let’s just accept the fact that no ordinary name was sufficient enough for either one’s personality and so Monya and Shoonik they were. Both were of short stature, with big, round, protruding bellies, a testimony of loving care and cooking skills of their wives. Monya’s hair, gray with a tinge of blond of his youth, laid in dare devil waves, while Shunik’s receded, forming a sort of monk’s tonsure on his otherwise perfectly Biblical Jewish head, black and curly, barely streaked with gray. They both went through war – Monya in a tank, Shunik on it.

Monya, who emerged from the war with an attitude of what the Russians call “sea is up to his knees”, meaning he was indomitable and unbeatable, never actually left his tank. He drove his Zhiguli as one, he spoke with the attitude and volume that only comes when speaking from the tank’s turret, he charged market stalls with his belly as he charged the enemy and crashed the queues with his red war veteran card as he crashed the doors of the Berlin jewelry shops with his cannon.

Shoonik went through the childhood of dodging Stalin’s repressions, war and Siberia full of wonder and curiosity of a child who refuses to grow up. Where Monya was boisterous, quick tempered and feisty, Shunik was slow, determined and methodical. If Monya moved like a light tank, maneuvering and firing around, Shunik moved like a mighty Soviet icebreaker - slow, heavy and unstoppable. Except when he drank. Then he was unmovable.

To the utter exasperation of my grandmother. Babulya was what we called her, because the regular “babushka” was not tender and loving enough, and there was so much of love and tenderness radiating from her, that she required a completely different language to describe or talk to her.  She carried herself tall and proud, all 5 feet of her. Her walk,light and seductive, when she was a young woman, was a legend. She could tell a raunchy joke that would make her prudish Shoonik blush and recite Esenin for hours. A lady to the very tips of her always well-tended nails, she was too proud to admit to the daily suffering that her lifelong poverty caused her. She knew all too well what poverty was about – a daily humiliation, made more so by her highly sensitive and proud soul. A queen in exhile, she made the impossible look effortless on daily basis – tiny, impeccably clean apartment, delicious dinner always ready by only God knows which means. Effortless though it might look, it wasn’t easy at all and Shoonik was a usual receptacle for her fuming frustrations and indignant exclamations. She could put more meaning in her single: “Ah!” than I could ever put in anything I will ever write.

And as I scribble these words, I realize that I would gladly give five years of my life, so that I could only sit there with her on that sweet summer afternoon in my grandfather’s yard and hold her hand. But I cannot. And she would be the first one to tell me that I shouldn’t, that my life belongs to my family, that I should think of my husband and children, because this is exactly what she always did her all life.

So there they were, properly and merrily “washing off” my parents’ new house: my father and mother, their fathers and mothers and a now former owner of the house in question with his wife.

This former owner was a “long range shooter”, which meant he drove Soviet version of eighteen wheelers along what the Soviets insisted on calling highways. It also meant that he had a professional capacity to outdrink anybody under the table. My father, a professional wrestler, was not drinking at that time, so the burden of upholding a family honor fell on both Michails. Two seasoned warriors, they closed the ranks and charged the enemy.

The afternoon was on a wane. In the mauve gaze of settling dusk, a warning tinga-ling-aling of a tramway came from the horizon, where skies meet earth, that is to say, from the Nagorny market. Soon the tramway itself materialized, as always incongruously bright red and cheerful, picked up some women with perhaps-bags and men with newspapers who waited for it at the stop and took them to the other horizon,  all mauve gaze as well, but this one with chestnut trees, towards the Shevchenko park.

The sour cherry trees that lined the street of Academic Bach, the one that led from the tramway stop to the Matrosa Koshki street, like eternally young mothers, stood slender and fruitful, oblivious to the mercy of the twilight as they were oblivious to the scorching heat of the day, absorbed with the magic of their own fertility.

My mother put me and my sister to bed and tucked us in.

The tobacco flowers on top of the garage closed and hang their purple and pink heads and my aunt Margo already climbed the unclimbable to the veranda and settled there with her cot and a garden hose.

My aunt Margo.  With a size and a shape of an average baby whale, if one of course, contrives to imagine a fun loving whale with a penchant for over dyed and over permed hair, she was a soul of any party, a loving mother to any cat and a source of constant lament to her parents and endless entertainment to the rest of the family. You would loath her for her obnoxiousness, it if it wouldn’t be for her self-deprecating humor and obvious good-nature.

With Margo settled on the roof with her garden hose, the Ukrainian evening settled on the town as well and soon became night. Down, in the yard, the three soldiers were briskly approaching the state of a tramway – bright red and cheerful, when suddenly they ran out of ammunition. I mean, electricity.

That is to say, vodka.

My dear father, who in himself is an aberration on many levels, on that particular evening aberrated on mainly two: a young Jewish man of athletic build and a young Soviet man who didn’t drink. So, it was for him to go to a railway station and try to procure something for continuation of a banquet.

Off he went under a heavy gaze of Margo on the roof with her water hose atilt.  And back he was with a couple of “little scoundrels”, that is to say, split bottles of vodka. And as he rounded the corner of Matrosa Koshki, he saw a rather familiar sight in front of my grandfather’s house: three young students lingering under the white cherry tree. Two of them were already helping themselves to the delectable fruit dangling from the branches, while the third one was clearly aiming to climb the trunk.

I must add that it was an age-long custom of life on Matrosa Koshki street: the strangers tried to steal my grandfather’s white cherry fruit and my grandfather tried to stop them. Both sides were equally determined and this warfare was going on from the day the first fruits glistened among the leaves until the very last one was picked from the fragrant top. My aunt on the top of the garage was my family’s version of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” of sorts.
 
Margo’s halo of indescribable hair was nowhere to be seen and my father called out quite amicably to the three young men:

“Come on, boys, stay away from this cherry tree! Go away to where you came from!”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a man of athletic build advises you to go somewhere, you should at least consider this option. Another truth universally acknowledged is that university doesn’t give you wisdom and there was no brighter proof of that truism than those three students in front of my grandfather’s house.

Instead of following my father’s benevolent advice, they wantonly suggested he goes there himself. Word for word, the tempers flared, the voices rose… The nascent brawl spread like a fire, before it even began. The drunk men at the table heard it and eagerly sprang, hm, at least attempted to spring from the table, sensing a good fight coming. Because there’s nothing like a good fight after good drinking.

What transpired next, became a story told and retold so many times, that eventually it ceased to be a story, but instead became a symbol of that hilarious, unbearable and precious disfunctionality that is the essence of being  one of the Yakubsfelds.

The gate on the street was separated from the yard by the path, thin as a line between comedy and tragedy. And it was towards this gate that Monya and Shoonik charged, once again keen on defending a family’s honor. Shoonik, who was closer to the path, reached it first, made two excruciatingly slow steps and struck, struck as a ship hitting an underwater rock. His short, surprisingly muscular legs set wide, his arms akimbo, his whole magnificent bulk blocking the meagre path entirely, he was unmovable and inevitable as a hand of destiny. Monya, fidgeting behind him, jumping and fuming from frustration and impatience, tried to push him forward or shove him aside, but to no avail. One might have as well attempted to move a Kremlin wall.

Up on the garage roof Margo’s chevelure finally showed up amidst sleepy blooms and water gurgled softly in a garden hose, when a thundering crash ripped through the evening air.

As my father would later put it, he “kinda took one of the guys aside”. In fact, he pushed one of his opponents away, propelling a hapless lad across the street, where he smashed into the neighbor’s iron gate, which responded with an explosive noise that reverberated across the neighborhood.

Which was to Monya like a sound of a war trumpet to a battle horse. God knows how, he finally broke through Shoonik's barrier and shot through the gate onto a street like a cannonball, just at the moment as a long figure of Marik, also attracted by the noise, loomed at his own gate.

Monya and Marik charged at once. It was only two of them, but they charged like an army.  An army of two brothers, of father and uncle, of two more than middle-aged men, armed only with shortness of breath, diabetes and arthritis, they ran towards my father, a young wrestling champion, to help and protect him. One of the cherry thieves was right in front of them. Marik swayed his long arm of an artist for a mighty punch and just as he was bearing it down on his enemy, Monya, taking advantage of his small height, shot from under his brother’s arm and with a speed of a lightning delivered a blow. In the same second, Marik’s arm crashed against the back of Monya’s skull and a downpour of cold water doused the whole scene, when Margo and her hose finally came into action.

THE CURTAIN FALLS.


It is almost forty years since that night. On a sweet summer evening it is I who put my children to sleep. Monya, Shoonik and Marik are gone. There is no more Babulya and there never will be. These forty years went by as one night. But that night dragged like forty years for my mother.

The “long shooter” and his wife finally left, drunk, happy and elated. They walked the street lined with sour cherry tree towards a new life opening to them – a new life without their old house.

Then, my mother walked her mother down the same street to the tramway which took Babulya to the horizon of the chestnut trees and Shevchenko park. There was no question of Shoonik getting home that night. As a matter of fact, it was a big question if he could be moved at all from that place where he stood.

Eventually, they did succeed in moving him to the veranda that was separating my parents’ tiny house from that of Monya and Polya and putting him on a narrow folding cot.

Now, the word “snore” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Whatever it was, it would usually begin as a quite benign murmur which would quickly and unrelentlessly escalate to crescendo of deafening proportions. Then, after several of minutes of merciless cacophony it would stop for a minute of unbelievable silence – not a sound, not even a breath – which would then be broken by a profound sigh and a sorrowful mumbling: “Oy, lordie, lordie”. And then everything would start again, the murmur, the cacaphonie of Wagnerian proportions, the silence and the lament. Let’s just say that in his wife’s opinion, Shoonik’s appetite, snoring and salary made her life with him absolutely unbearable.

Yet, never in his life did Shoonik snore like he did on that particular night. Nobody could sleep – neither Margo on the roof, nor Polya in her bedroom with a music box that played Ogynski’s polonez, nor my parents, who didn’t know then how happy they were, young and beautiful, surrounded by their parents and children, on their dozen times broken and mended red sofa.

Nobody slept. Except Monya. He himself snored through the thunderous cannonade of Shoonik’s nighttime breathing and the usual daytime turmoil of his household – his wife banging pots and pans and chastising him in her high pitched voice, his grandchildren running and squealing in his yard, Margo descending down the impossible staircase and arguing with her brother.

Eventually, Shoonik woke up and went home, the morning was gone as well and a lovely Ukrainian midday lingered endlessly amid the buzzing bees and fragrant gardens. The apricots drank in the sun, spreading it under their transluscent skin, the cherries were getting heavier and juicier with every passing minute of that summer, and still Monya slept.

The day was on the wane when he finally woke up. His face red, his eyes bloodshot, but otherwise in a pretty good shape, considering the amount that was drunk yesterday, he marched across his yard, squinting at the painfully bright sunlight, wincing at the woefully loud grandchildren.  Never the one to be dressed up when around the house – it’s his house, after all, isn’t it? He can do what he wants, he can wear what he wants! – he was particularly after his comfort that day and was donning his usual old stomped in shoes, worn to the point where they more resembled two old leaky boats than anything a human being can put on his feet and a pair of insanely bright boxers with its quite unreasonable pattern of bunnies, cherries and flowers.  Thus attired, he planted himself in front of his gate and surveyed the street.

The street was empty. A light breeze was playing with the white cherry tree branches and, seeing Monya’s belly, blew on it lightly as well – how could one restrain itself from playing with something so big and round?  A neighbor passed by and called out a greeting – Monya with his round belly, bright underwear and gray waves of hair was a familiar and a beloved sight.

My grandfather puffed and started rolling his “goat’s leg” – a vile smelling home-made cigarette, when Marik’s gate opened as well and just like his brother, Marik stood by his own gate, his right arm in plaster.  Monya pulled on to his “goat’s leg” and gave a long look to his brother. Then, remembering never to lose a sense of humor in a face of somebody else’s calamity, he cheerfully remarked:

“Ha, Marik, what did you do to yourself?”

For one unbelievable minute Marik stared at him, speechless from indignation:

“What? You don’t remember?”
Having slept through his hangover, it was hard to find a person more cheerful and happy than my grandfather at that moment:

“No! What is it that I should remember, ah?”

“And your head doesn’t hurt?” asked exasperated Marik.

“No,” Monya smiled at his brother’s plaster.

“You don’t remember anything?!”

“No,” Monya smiled even wider, finally tearing his eyes off the plaster and looking at his brother.

There was a long pause during which Marik obviously considered if it was worth his while to stop talking to Monya again, or, maybe, if it was worth his while to tell Monya how yesterday he broke his brother's arm with the back of his head. At the end, Marik decided that it was not and heaved a deep sigh, looking at that impossibly, unbelievably blue Ukrainian sky, the slender cherry tries and a reigning queen of the street, the white cherry tree, he looked at the blooming and fragrant flowerbeds and he looked beyond them, beyond the chestnut trees of the faraway park and a blue and wide might of Dnepr river, sparkling under the sun. He looked beyond that to where the willow trees dipped their slended branches into the dark green waters of a small river, where the buzzing of the bees over the flowers filled the air with promise, where as the sun was rising, one could scatter the crumbs of bread over that dark green mirror and get his fishing rods ready and wait for the fish to come.

“Are you thinking of going fishing on Saturday?”

“Yes, I think,” Monya pulled deeply at his cigarette and looked where his brother was looking, beyond, beyond, beyond.