Sketches with a pen

         A Walk-Through Courtyard

  Our courtyard was the only walk-through one in the entire block. From Privoznaya Street there stood heavy, dark-orange gates with a small wicket; from Chizhikova Street there was an entranceway, and that was where our apartment was. When a suitcase or a bag was “taken” at the market, it was emptied right there — on the coal bin standing in our entrance hall. Everything of value was slipped into pockets, and out onto Chizhikova Street the accomplice would emerge looking like a perfectly respectable person.

  Almost every day I found someone’s discarded belongings behind the bin. About once a week a gloomy local policeman would drop by and collect the documents that had been found. The rest of the items did not interest him.

  My mother never bought handbags.


         Breakfast at the Privoz

  From the earliest days — back in tsarist times — the market had two magnificent halls: the dairy hall and the meat hall. We boys never went into the meat hall: the butchers there were rude. Not that they would actually offend us — no one in their right mind would dare to offend a “Privoz boy,” if only because he might have an equally Privoz-born mother, quite capable of making life very cramped for the offender. Still, their coarse remarks bruised our sense of dignity.

  In the dairy hall, by contrast, the counters were run by the "rogi" — peasants from the nearby villages — and their opinions somehow didn’t bother us at all.

  On the edge of the counter, on a piece of gauze, they laid out samples of their goods to taste: bits of brynza and cottage cheese.

  By the end of the row I would take a couple of bites of a roll and move on to the second row.

  I never once managed to finish the second row.


         The Proper Way to Eat Watermelon

  First, you had to get a watermelon — preferably two. Along Privoznaya Street there were trucks loaded with striped Kherson watermelons. The boys would jump onto the truck’s steps from both sides and, sticking their heads into the cab — thus completely blocking the driver’s view — would bombard him with idiotic questions. Within a minute the rog would lose all sense. A couple of the bigger lads would climb onto the wheel, help themselves to watermelons, and the whole gang would vanish together.

  We had a big piece of tarpaulin. Stripping to the waist, we would sit around, hiding under the canvas, and place our trophies in the middle. Then you had to hit them with your fist. A ripe watermelon was supposed to burst apart.

  If a watermelon didn’t break from the blow, it was thrown away.

  Everyone took a piece and ate, soaking themselves in juice up to the waist.

  After that, we washed ourselves under the courtyard tap.

  Anyone who hasn’t done this has never really eaten watermelon.


          Our Workshop

  Part of the ground floor of our building on Chizhikova Street was taken up by the plastics workshop of the Zarya factory, where they made all sorts of nonsense—clip-on earrings, brooches, hairpins—and where Jewish women without any formal education worked. My childhood friend Sasha Kapner and I spent a lot of time there, picking up various bits of defective plastic — or maybe not defective at all. Who would pay attention to well-behaved Jewish boys?

  At Sasha’s place everything was neatly sorted, and on a good day we could assemble up to ten pairs of clip-on earrings, complete with little bags and price tags. And in our courtyard, you could sell absolutely anything.

  Where is Sasha now?


         The Disabled

  After the war there were many disabled people on the streets. We children didn’t like them. First, they looked bad, and second, they were angry. Many of them drank. They sold all sorts of useless junk.

  I remember one disabled man who sold black toy spiders on rubber strings with springy legs near Shevchenko Park. In a booze-roughened voice he would shout: “Colorado beetle, Colorado beetle — jumps on a string and wiggles its legs!” And also: “A ruble for one, three rubles for a bunch—and in a bunch, three pieces!”

  One fine day they all disappeared. Many years later it became known that they had all been rounded up and sent far away, so they wouldn’t be an eyesore.

  Soviet power could be very efficient.


         Broth

  On Mondays my mother bought two chickens — Mondays they were the cheapest — and left them for the whole week in the communal corridor, tied by the legs. I fed them.

  There used to be a shoykhet at the Privoz, but I never caught him; by Friday my mother would twist the chickens’ heads off herself — just like that, spinning and yanking.

  I remember once my mother cooked a magnificent broth and left it in the corridor to cool. The broth smelled strongly, and after about fifteen minutes it was gone. An hour later, in the same spot, an empty pot appeared.

  My mother was upset, but she said, “To your health!”


         The Outhouse

  There were four wings in our courtyard: one three-story building faced Chizhikova Street, the others were two stories high.

  The well-off people lived in the three-story building. It had a sewer riser, and the apartments there had proper toilets. Everyone else in the courtyard, summer and winter alike, used the courtyard outhouse. Half of the Privoz went there too—our yard was the only walk-through courtyard in the entire block.

  In winter, the experience was unforgettable.

  That outhouse is something I will never forgive the Soviet authorities for.


        Karolino-Bugaz

  Karolino-Bugaz is a many-kilometer sandspit not far from Odessa. On the south side it is washed by the sea; on the north, by the lagoon.

  Crayfish are caught in the lagoon.

  A train runs along the length of the spit. You get off — and there are dunes and the sea, and no shade at all. In the distance, a little village where wine sells for a ruble a liter.

  The train ride takes less than an hour, but we would come with tents, for two or three days.

  We spent the entire day in the sun — you couldn’t even crawl into the tent, it was an oven in there. The only place to hide from the sun was the water.
The water was warm, very warm.

  Toward the end of summer the sea began to phosphoresce. You swim, and a white trail follows behind you.

  At night the girls liked to swim naked. We were still so harmless that we were trusted to hold their swimsuits.

  In the evenings we built fires and baked potatoes.
  Tried to sing.

  A breeze blew in from the sea.
  Bodies burned by the day’s sun cooled gladly.

  The best time of my life.


          The Peach

  My friend Gena had a gift for slipping easily and effortlessly into decidedly non-platonic relationships with women, provoking envy with his endless victories. One day I uncovered the secret of his success.

  The theater where we worked at the time had gone off somewhere up north on tour, and a theater from there came to our stage instead. Every theater inevitably has a prima donna—a beautiful, fairly young woman with an iron will. This one was no exception.

  The visiting actress was immediately showered with flowers and chocolates—but to no avail. Everyone struck out, as a chorus.

  Gena showed up on the third day. He was already expected. He watched her rehearsal from the wings for about five minutes and then disappeared. An hour later he returned with a peach in his hand.

  An enormous one.

  I had never seen such a beauty.

  They were inseparable until the end of the tour, and when I later asked him how he had managed it, he said that up there in the north they had chocolates in abundance — but no peaches.

  I’ve loved talented people since childhood.


          Brooches

  My good acquaintance Alik always had plenty of business ideas—very interesting ones — but for some reason they all ended in a puff of smoke. We couldn’t understand why, though to be fair, we were all impoverished Soviet engineers, and as authorities on making money we were absolutely worthless.

  Then one day Alik came up with a fresh, brilliant idea: what if you attached a leaf — an ordinary leaf from a tree — to an electrode in an electroplating bath?

  Sure enough, copper deposited itself onto the leaf, and by fastening a safety pin to the back you got a beautiful brooch. “And a unique one, too,” Alik enthused. “After all, no two leaves are alike!”

  Inspired, he went to the Zarya haberdashery factory and laid out a dozen brooches of different sizes before the management. They liked them, but explained to Alik that they themselves did not introduce new products; for that, there were so-called “developers.”

  In this case, the “developer” turned out to be an old Jewish man.

  “My boy, you’re wonderful! You’ve got a bright head! We’ll put this into production! So here’s how it goes: we order molds, set up presses, and churn them out as sets.”
  “Wait a minute,” Alik flared up. “What presses? What molds? What does plastic have to do with it? The whole point is the electroplating, the metal!
  "My boy" the “developer” asked gently, “what did you come here to make — brooches or money?”
  In the new times, Alik became a successful businessman.


          The Bald Spot

At twenty-eight I discovered that I was going bald. I decided to tidy up my neck with an electric razor: sat down in the hallway in front of the vanity, picked up my wife’s little mirror, took a look—and froze. The entire mirror was filled with a bald spot.

“Wife!” I howled in an unseemly voice.
“What is it?”
“I have a bald spot!”
“So?”
“How long has this been going on?!”

We had been married just under a year.

“As long as I’ve known you.”

I ran to my mother.

“Mom, I have a bald spot!”
“Yes, son.”
“How long?”
“Since you were about seventeen.”

And all this time I never missed a chance to mock balding men, always wondering why they looked at me so strangely! For ten years not a single person had ever pointed out my own bald spot.

The world is not without kind people.


  Class Instinct

  The grandmother of my first wife took a dislike to me at first sight — and for a long time I couldn’t understand why. She had money, and whenever my wife felt like taking a trip to clear her head, the old woman would silently pull a bearer savings book from a tall stack in the cupboard — for five hundred or a thousand. At the same time I was endlessly away on business trips, working off my diploma which, as it later turned out, was absolutely useless to anyone.

  One day the grandmother finally snapped.

  “Tell me,” she said, “does the name Abram Shtraykher from Stepovaya mean anything to you?”

  “It does,” I said. “That’s my grandfather.”

  From that moment on, her dislike turned into open hatred.

  I cornered my father.

  “There’s something you didn’t quite tell me about your father. I know he ran a dance hall on Moldavanka, helped the revolutionaries, was friends with Mishka Yaponchik—but he wasn’t a bandit himself, was he?”

  “He wasn’t,” my father said. “But he did a little pointing.”

  “A spotter?!”

  “The best on Moldavanka.”

  Fifty years have passed. Soviet power long ago wiped out the bandits, the revolutionaries, the rich, and a whole lot of other people along with them. And yet a healthy sense of class instinct stubbornly remains.


           The Odessa Windowsill

  In the old houses of Odessa, the windowsills were astonishingly wide. This was not a matter of style but of geology. For a long time, Odessa’s builders took their construction materials quite literally from beneath their own feet. Before building a house, they would dig a deep pit right on the purchased plot, cutting into the soft limestone on which the entire city stood, and quarry the stone from there.

  What emerged was a vast, chaotic system of tunnels that eventually merged into the famous Odessa catacombs.

  The softness of the stone demanded thick walls — walls that held warmth in winter and coolness in summer with admirable stubbornness. If the rooms became smaller as a result, no one complained. No one even noticed. As a child, I certainly didn’t mind. I could spend entire days sitting on the windowsill, where my mother would place me immediately after breakfast, as if assigning me a post.

  We lived on the ground floor, and the street was never still. Something was always happening. I counted cars passing one way and then the other. Men and women. Boys and girls. Time moved slowly enough to be counted.

  Sometimes my mother left me there for the whole day.

  I still don’t understand how I never fell.

  Never hit my head.


         Goyki

  I have always liked athletic girls. I myself was far from anything resembling sport, but being near such a marvel, I would invariably feel as though health itself were pouring into me.

   I remember dating a rhythmic gymnast once: broad shoulders, narrow hips, gray, thoughtful eyes.

  A blush.

  A goyka.

  That was how she lost me.

  It turned out, we see different things when we look at the same tree. As if there could be something in a tree besides just a piece of wood. At the time, this struck me as strange.

  Some of them are incurably romantic.


         Revelation on a Bulgarian Beach

  In ’75 I ended up in Bulgaria. Whoever said Bulgaria wasn’t abroad? Back then, even the Baltic states counted as foreign countries to us.

  Some collective farmers turned down their free travel vouchers, so the tour group was urgently filled out with city dwellers eager to breathe a little foreign air. Not for free, of course.

  At Sunny Beach (Slanchev Bryag), there were 120 hotels lined up along the sea, and at first glance you could tell exactly who each was meant for. The high-rise towers were for Americans, the isolated urbanist cubes—for the French, and the five-story barracks—for us.

  How could I have known then that a future American president would be named Barack…

  That summer everyone was buying handsome, cheap locally made swim trunks. Every man strutted around in them. Naturally, lying on our beach — and it was made very clear to us that sunbathing on our beach was far healthier than on any other—so, lying on our beach, we began to play a game: “Guess who’s coming toward us?”

  And then a revelation descended upon us: we never once misidentified a Soviet person.

  At first it struck us as hilariously funny. Then it gave rise to sheer panic. It didn’t occur to us right away that the stamp of sovok was imprinted on each of us as well.

  We stopped the game.

  We didn’t exchange opinions.

  There was nothing to talk about. It was time to get out.


         A Winter Scene

  During the winter school holidays, we—a group of top students, along with a couple of Komsomol activists—were rewarded with a trip to Leningrad. We were put up in some kind of sports hotel in the middle of a park, somewhere in the city center.

  One night we were returning — young and high - spirited—from a performance, naturally escorted by our teachers, walking through the snowy park after dark, when we witnessed the following scene: a small wooden bridge, and on it two people in gray quilted jackets, steadily driving in enormous iron spikes.

  And how beautifully they did it.

  A no-longer-young man, with a precise blow of a hammer, set an iron spike upright into the next beam. Then a woman of indeterminate age, still attractive, with one sweeping, hearty strike of a sledgehammer, drove the spike all the way down to the head.

  One after another. Without pause.

  We stood frozen, as if under a spell.

  The smartest girl in our group squeezed my hand desperately; her eyes were filled with tears.

  “Don’t be afraid, Natasha (I adore that name!),” I laughed. “Nothing like that will ever happen to you.”

  How terribly wrong I was.


          The First Depression

  After separating from my first wife and discovering that she was pregnant by my friend and colleague, I sank into a kind of depression. My friend Yura set about pulling me out of it — using his preferred method: restaurant hopping.

  We went every day for two months. That turned out to be enough to develop a lifelong fondness for them.

  In one of the restaurant orchestras played two of my old schoolmates from our eight-year school days: Izya on piano and Borya on drums. I drifted over to them and stayed for about two years.

  The depression passed.

  In every restaurant, the orchestra had its own table, where various friends and acquaintances would dock and linger — some for an hour, some for two, some the entire evening: wives and mistresses alike. Grateful patrons sent bottles of champagne to that table; waitresses brought snacks whose origins we never bothered to inquire about.

  Izya played jazz beautifully — at least, I thought so. I had no musical ear to speak of. None at all. Izya’s mother taught singing at our school, which guaranteed me a solid “A,” on the sole condition that I never sing.

  After work, grabbing a bottle of champagne from the table — and sometimes a girl who had attached herself there — Izya would take a taxi and play jazz until midnight, smiling and puffing on a joint.

  How wonderful that was.

  Where are you now, Izya Kessel?

  Borya, meanwhile, pounded the drums. He had no formal musical education —j ust common sense, but plenty of it. And something else besides… Women loved Borya. Beautiful women.

  I never understood why.

  Usually two or three of his girlfriends sat at our table, patiently waiting to see which one he would leave with that night.

  And there were never any complaints.

  I remember once Borya was playing when a slightly drunk patron approached the orchestra:
  “Hey, how much for a song from Three Tankmen?”
  “A ruble per tankman,” Borya replied instantly, without missing a beat.

  At the time, you should know, the going rate was either three or five rubles.

  After pondering this for a moment, the fellow asked:
  “And how much for Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves?”
  “A dime per thief, a ruble for Ali Baba,” replied the clever drummer, to the roar of laughter from our table.

  One day a local “working girl” plopped herself down at our table — sullen, somewhat swollen — and after listening to our intellectual chatter, suddenly announced:
  “I wrote a poem. A good one. From the heart.”

  For the fun of it, we decided to listen.

  I remember that poem to this day.

  Here it is:

"Everyone’s laughing, everyone’s fine,
Everyone’s living their life, not mine.
Me? I’m done. No big debate.
I could just hang. Why wait?

I’d hang there—pretty, blue,
Lived enough. What’s left to do?
You’d walk in and say, “Hey, sweetheart… what?”
“What the hell happened?”—your voice in a knot.

And I’d say, “Nothing. Don’t get mad.
Loved you hard. Loved you bad.
Didn’t ask. Didn’t beg.
Just you. That’s it. End of the leg.

I didn’t want a thing from you.
Still don’t want a damn thing now.
I tied the rope. I kicked the chair.
And here I am. Hanging. There.”


          Coffee People

  In Odessa, my wife and I were considered coffee fanatics. I, for example, spent long hours in the so-called “zoo” — a fenced-off sidewalk caf; on Deribasovskaya Street. They served Turkish coffee there and "kartoshka" pastries. While suffering through my refusal job as a stagehand at the Russian Theatre, I was required, before each performance, to bring the furniture out onto the stage and wipe it down, and then, after the curtain fell, carry it all back again. The rest of the time, sipping coffee and eating pastries, I “received visitors” in the zoo.

  We had no idea that all the coffee beans imported into the country went straight through a centrifuge right there in the Odessa port —a nd that no real coffee could possibly be made from them afterward.

  On our second day as immigrants in Vienna, my wife and I stepped out of the hotel and caught the smell of coffee. In a caf; we were asked: espresso or cappuccino? These words meant nothing to us, but common sense suggested taking one of each. My wife was given a large white cup topped with foam and a chocolate pattern; I received a tiny cup, half-filled with something black.

  Two dollars were real money for us back then. So, they cheat you here too, I thought — and took a gulp of the scalding liquid. My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, my heart began to hammer, and it became clear that I had never actually drunk coffee before.

  From that moment on, I became a true coffee addict — and remained one for six full years, right up until my heart attack.


          My Father

  In 1948 my family — still without me — managed to break out of evacuation and return to Odessa.
  There was no apartment. They slept on the floor in the crumbling place of my mother’s sister on Staroreznichnaya Street. My father found work as the production manager at the big factory.

  In 1950 the MTS were created — machine-tractor stations — and my father, as an engineer and a Party member of the Stalinist call-up, was sent for a year to head one of them somewhere out in the region.

  A year later my father appeared at the district Party committee to arrange his return. By then the family — now including me — was still living on someone else’s floor.

  He was told that there was no one to replace him, and that as a true Communist he could not refuse to go back for another year.

  Another year passed. When my father came to the committee again, he was irritably asked why he had shown up at all — when we need you, we’ll call you.
  My father placed his Party card on the desk and walked out.

  Later I asked him how he could do such a thing — lose everything: his job, his career?

  “I was already in Odessa, son,” my father replied.

  For a long time I didn’t understand what he meant.

  Later I learned that my grandfather had been friends with Mishka Yaponchik, who even held his wedding in my grandfather’s dance hall. In my own time, my father was friends with Mishka’s brother, the engineer Vinnitsky. My father knew half of Odessa, and half of Odessa knew him — including the women.

  As for work, he was soon made chief engineer of a furniture cooperative named after the 20th Party Congress, later renamed the Remmebel factory, where he remained chief engineer until retirement. There were never any other engineers there.

  In the 1990s, when store shelves stood empty, my long-retired father suddenly became the most valuable person in the family — because for him, everything was always available, everywhere.

  It’s a pity that Odessa no longer exists.