«What would you come up with?»

“The briefcase was bought in light brown with two symmetrical shiny clasps. There was nothing but fasteners on the briefcase — not a hare from «Well, wait a minute!», nor a round-faced Winnie the Pooh, nor a raccoon — «A gloomy day is brighter from a smile.» The briefcase was boring. I was a little upset, but I didn’t tell my parents. Grandmother sewed thick lace on a white apron, and a huge bow was tied to my thin fluffy hair — corrugated, festive, white. There were also two narrow brown bows with a thin edging, but these were “for every day”, “for weekdays”, which will begin on September 28. For me, a child who had never been to kindergarten, the first of September of the first grade seemed a monstrous and terrible day. The huge building of the Dnepropetrovsk school No. 1976, where I studied from 1986 to XNUMX, with dim staircases, loud solemn music, someone’s grandmother sobbing from overwhelmed feelings, a common toilet with a tiled dressing room, and people: from small fidgety first graders to strict adults — teachers and cleaners. I was scared and lonely, I feverishly tried to figure out what to come up with so that I wouldn’t go to school tomorrow, so that this very “every day” would never come, on which modest brown bows were put aside.

• Question to the expert: “Can I tell my children everything about my childhood?”

«My first teacher» was called Anastasia Tarasovna. She must have been in her sixties at the time. She was a plump, flabby woman with bushy black eyebrows and a small, tight bun of graying dark hair. Anastasia Tarasovna wore strict simple dresses with brooches. Whether the dress is monophonic, whether in gloomy blue colors — a large brooch on the neckline is a must. These brooches mesmerized me like a rabbit boa constrictor. I could follow the movement of the next amber spider in space throughout the lesson, completely not listening to what Anastasia Tarasovna was saying at that time …

First, Pasha Kozenko sat with me. He was a loser and a bully, but I was not afraid of him for one simple reason: we were almost neighbors and sometimes played together …

• I don’t remember my childhood

A year before I went to school, we moved to Dnepropetrovsk, and dad bought a rickety hut house with a large plot from an old gypsy woman. I bought it in order to build a new house on that place — bright, large, two floors, where children and grandchildren would live happily ever after, and parents would grow old slowly and sedately in prosperity and peace. That old gypsy woman was Pasha Kozenko’s own grandmother. She had a son, Stepan, a powerful man with an eagle eye and shoulder-length curls, Pashkin’s father. He married a Russian, a small plump woman with a slanting eye. They had two children: tall, like a model, the walking beauty Lenka and the little loser Pasha, my first classmate. They lived three houses away from us, and Pashka’s grandmother — old and scary, like a Baba Yaga, in tiered colorful skirts, in a black scarf with scarlet roses, from under which gray coarse hair was knocked out like a shaggy cobweb — this colorful grandmother often went on the way past our windows. Gold earrings rang in thick rings in her ears, an old pipe smoked in her mouth. The gypsy took out her pipe only when she wanted to curse her daughter-in-law, Aunt Lyuda, Pasha’s mother. She cursed her loudly — all over the street, juicy and beautiful — almost without obscenities, but so masterfully that any collector of folklore would freeze in reverent awe. They were afraid of Pasha’s grandmother, they said that he would jinx and bring damage — just look. Who knows…»

Fragments of the essay by Elena Smiryagina “Dear Bredun!”