Story 2. The Magical Nightlight

 
Since I've started talking about Grandma's house, I think it's worth telling another memory connected with it. Sometimes my sister and I would stay overnight at Grandma's. I don't remember exactly why these sleepovers happened. Mostly, when Mum was on night duty (her job was like that – she worked twenty-four-hour shifts every three days), either Dad would stay with us, or if Dad was away on a trip, Grandad would. But I distinctly remember that on those occasions when we stayed at Grandma's, Grandad was home too. He would usually doze in his storage room, which he had equipped as a workshop. We could clearly hear him snoring from there. Well, these sleepovers at Grandma's were filled, if you can put it that way, with unusual sensations. Firstly, as I've already written, her house stood right by the railway line. During the day, the trains weren't as audible as at night. During the day, there are too many different noises, and everything merges into a single hum. But at night, it's a completely different matter. Every sound in the night silence rings out louder and seems more three-dimensional than during the day. Besides, freight trains mostly run at night too. Probably so as not to interfere with passenger traffic. A train announces its approach long beforehand with a loud whistle. As it gets closer, you hear the clatter of wheels over the rail joints. When a heavy freight train rushes past the house, in time with the clatter of the wheels, the dishes in the kitchen and the crystal in the sideboard in the room start to tinkle and jump slightly. It's so loud and unusual that you literally wake up at every sound, but then you fall asleep again quite quickly.
 
Secondly, Grandma had completely different routines than we did at home. Usually, just before bed, after we'd showered and changed into our nightclothes, we'd all sit together in the kitchen and drink tea with jam. In the apartment plunged into darkness, the light in the kitchen seemed lemon-coloured. This was due to the daylight lamp combined with the yellow curtains on the window. The light-coloured surface of the table also seemed to radiate a warm yellow light. Completing the picture was a crystal sugar bowl on a tall stem, covered with a transparent, brown-glass saucer holding sliced lemon – a little island of warmth and cosiness, lost in the night. We would drink tea from thin glasses in filigree glass holders, eat Grandma's delicious jam, laugh, and absolutely not want to go to bed. We felt good and peaceful, while outside the windows, darkness lurked, cut through by the sudden cries of trains and the sharp, bluish beam of a searchlight. Finally, having drunk our tea and laughed our fill, we would head to the bedroom – a small, slightly elongated room adjacent to the living room. There, Grandma's feather bed awaited me, while my sister usually slept on the sofa.
 
In the bedroom, there was one mysterious object – a nightlight that Grandma always lit for us, to help us sleep soundly. This nightlight was special. Inside it lived colourful lights and shadows – at least, that's how it seemed to me as a little girl. In reality, it consisted of a rectangular body, the sides of which were made of the thinnest sheets of tin with cut-out silhouettes of the Kremlin, Moscow State University, and the Ostankino Tower – familiar to everyone. In the centre was a glass tube with coloured stripes on its walls, and inside the tube was a light bulb. A little while after being switched on, the tube would start to rotate, the coloured light would penetrate through the openings in the carved tin sheets, and slowly at first, then faster and faster, colourful patterned shadows would begin to creep across the walls and ceiling. That's how we would fall asleep, watching the spinning shadows and listening to the clatter of train wheels.
 
Waking up in the morning, I would be confused for a long time about where I was. Through my drowsiness, I felt I was sleeping at home – the wall was to my right, the window to my left. I would even try to lower my leg from the bed to feel for my slippers, but for some reason, the slippers weren't there. Then I'd have to open my eyes. The image of my room would slowly dissolve in the pre-dawn twilight, turning into Grandma's bedroom. But imagine my surprise when, where the wall should have been, there was nothing, and instead, where my room and the bluish light streaming from the window should have been, there was a real wall with Grandma's rough-textured rug.
 
So where was I looking for my slippers? Where had I dangled my bare foot? A mystery. To this day, it remains an unsolvable puzzle for me – how could I have dangled my foot where it was absolutely impossible to dangle it?
 
Back then, I also thought that if I squeezed my eyes shut really tight and "remembered-recreated" the image of my room, I could actually find myself there. Just wake up at home and go wash my face as if nothing had happened. But I never managed to realise that vague feeling. I would either sink back into sleep, or I would finally wake up completely and go to the kitchen to have breakfast with Grandma and Grandad.