A former teenager’s story. Ch. 13-16

CHAPTER 13

The next day my dads came and, as always, forced me kicking and screaming into the car and drove to the country. They kept me there for a month – and I spent all the month of July feeling terribly depressed. All those days I stayed inside the dark, dirty hut; got ringworm from the cats – that’s probably all I can tell about July, 1999. Leaving aside the fact that due to my depression and the gloomy atmosphere around me I nearly lost my marbles.

One evening when my dads were going to visit some relatives living nearby I asked them to lock me in the hut in case of Irinkas coming to ask me out to the nightclub where I didn’t want to go for the reasons mentioned above. This way they might come and, on seeing the padlock on the frontdoor, think that nobody was at home and go away. Thus I was ridding myself of the negative communication with them and avoiding conflicts at the same time.

Being locked in I had to stay put – no approaching the windows, no turning on the light, no going out to the toilet, using a piss-pot if there was no way to hold it in. Of course, this kind of existence aggravated my already severe depression. But it couldn’t be helped anyway.

So, one evening as I was sitting alone locked in the dark hut I suddenly heard some strange voice calling my name from the outside.

I shrank. Had the locals got into the backyard? But the voice, however, sounded male.

“I must’ve imagined it” I thought, but the indistinct voice from the backyard called my name again.

“Dad? Is that you?”

I cautiously unhooked the backdoor and, taking a flashlight, peeped out in the twilight. There was no one there.

“Hm…”

I got overwhelmed by fear. I couldn’t have imagined it twice! And my dads, as ill luck would have it, had got stuck somewhere and weren’t coming…

I recalled Irinkas telling me the history of this hut the year before that. My parents and I had lived in another house before – the house of my mom’s family, her sisters and their husbands and kids. After the death of my grandads, my mom’s elder sister, a bossy rough woman hating my guts, had kicked us out. My submissive mother succumbed and ended up hitting the road with all her shits. It was then she and my father had found this abandoned wreck of a house at the very end of the hamlet. They moved in it, fixed somehow the leaky roof, whitewashed the fireplace, brought in electricity. But I disliked this hut badly; I just couldn’t stand this horrible crypt. And then Irinkas told me that the house had been cursed that’s why it had stayed abandoned for such a long time.

“Many years ago – during war – a woman lived in this house. One February night a crippled soldier knocked at her door. “Let me stay the night in your house” he said. “I am wounded, have come from far away.” And that woman was nasty and stingy. She must have thought the soldier was gonna ask her for food, too. “Clear off!” she said and slammed the door in the cripple’s face. And then he said: “I curse this house and the people living in it, and the people who will.” Having said so he went out in the field, whistled – and a heavy snowstorm began, and wiped off both the woman and the soldier…”

It was in vain that I besought my parents not to move in this house, telling them that terrible story – they were hopelessly stubborn. “Old wives’ tales!” they would say every time.

Actually, I don’t consider myself superstitious and like any reasonable person I tend to question any hypothesis, but the fact remains. Everything that has happened since we moved in that cursed house is not a fiction or a product of my morbid imagination. The fruits of that curse I’ve been reaping up till now as I am neither happy nor lucky in anything, although I bend over backwards trying to do whatever I can. That curse has hit my parents as well…

In the meantime they, deaf, dumb and stiff-necked, settled in this rotten black-aured hut, not noticing or not willing to notice the putrid, destructive fluids of the cursed house.

Soon after that weird incident with the ghost voice calling my name I had a nightmare.

I dreamed about our villa. But it looked rather strange – instead of the neat currant bushes and flower beds Gran Zoya was usually taking such a proper care of – there was faded grass, brown and rotten. Instead of the villa itself there were debris over which crows circled and crowed. And in the middle of the neglected, ruined yard there was a long thin pole, creaking and swaying in the wind, disappearing high in the dark-grey heavy clouds. And at its very peak there was a black flag fluttering in the gloomy sky like a sign of a looming disaster…

And there was the strange voice again – like grandfather’s – whispering my name right into my ear.

“No… No… Noooooooo!!!”

I woke up screaming and tossing my head about the pillow.

“What the hell?!” my father muttered woken up by my scream.

“Take me out of here! I can’t stay here any longer… Please, take me out of here!!!” I besought my parents with tears.

“We will when the vacation is over.” replied my father.

“But I can’t take it anymore! I feel awful!!!”

“Well, that’s your problem”

They were just intractable. Nothing worked with them – neither my tears nor my tantrums. As dumb as stumps on the moor they planted the seeds of alienation inside of me forever. And, moreover, even then I already knew for sure that I didn’t want to continue their cursed line and I was not going to.

CHAPTER 14

My nightmare about the villa had begun to come true as early as August of that year. When the excruciating July in the country was over and I was dumped like a log at the villa again I figured out that the sick aura exactly like that I had dreamed about was already forming. To get the whole picture the place only lacked the debris and the creaking pole with the black flag, but my gut told me that they wouldn’t be long in coming…

Sue would come over almost every day, begging me for forgiveness and promising from now on to make any sacrifice for the sake of our friendship if only I gave her another chance. And I, kicking myself for being such a softy, made it up with her and we started to hang out as before.

Meanwhile, things at home were getting even more tense. My grandads’ attitude towards me was getting worse and worse; not a day went by without them scolding me or nagging at me for something. I saw the reason was my grandad’s decline in health. Almost every week came an ambulance; the rest of the time he groaned, moaned, got annoyed with everything and at times even cried like a spoilt baby.

One day Gran Zoya remembering the doctors’ advice not to give Grandad too much greasy food denied him another portion of jellied pork. And she did it so brusquely that he sat down on the stair and broke into tears.

“You rascals… You’ll all regret it when I’m dead! Screw you!..”

“There you go again!” exclaimed Gran Zoya clapping her hands, “Honestly, Sasha, you’re being childish!”

I was sick and tired of all those groans and whimperings of my ailing grandad. At such moments I felt like giving him a swift kick and saying something very rude to him.

But we all got the worst of it at night. Then the senile old man would get especially anxious which was a telltale sign of a coming heart attack. He would rise from his bed and, grunting and gasping, wander around the house like a ghost with a flashlight on, not letting anyone sleep. I would frequently get woken up by the flashlight right in my eyes.

“Grandad, are you nuts? Why are you wandering around here in the middle of the night?” I grumbled.

“The car… The car might get stolen!” he snapped out gasping for breath.

“Oh come on – who wants that old jalopy of yours?”

“Shut up, you rascal! How dare you… How dare you open your mouth to your own grandfather, you filth?”

I resented him. It was difficult to say if my grandad was a good man or a bad man, but he was ill, irritable and definitely hard to deal with. I remembered that when he’d been well he’d loved me and cared about me, but I’d never truly appreciated it. I was mad at him, and he would say both lovingly and disdainfully:

“I’d squish you like a bug, just can’t be bothered…”

Sometimes during the day as I sat with the girls on the windowsills of an abandoned house which had been being built on an empty lot once upon a time but never got finished – we could clearly hear the tumult coming from our villa, and so we knew that my grandad was having a heart attack again. All the windows and doors were wide open, and Gran Zoya running up and down and cackling like a disturbed hen. And the terrible, harrowing screams of my grandad, I think, could be heard as far as at the railway station:

“You rascals! Let me die!!!”

And then Gran Zoya’s sister from Lithuania who’d been staying with us at the villa that summer – a dried-up little old woman, “Splinter” as my mother had nicknamed her behind her back – as calm as a zombie, would repeat the same:

“We won’t let you die.”

At times like that I tried to show up at home as rarely as possible. And Splinter, stirring her tea, would say calmly:

“She’s a callous girl, isn’t she…”

Grandad didn’t really need my sympathy, though. Having got his needle he would finally calm down and as he saw me he would only say this:

“I’d squish you like a bug, just can’t be bothered…”

 

CHAPTER 15

One day, in the end of August Gran Zoya and I had a very big argument.

It was one of those rare sunny days of late summer; after the incessant cold rains the pale sun, no longer warm enough, showed up from behind the clouds, laying its farewell rays on the wet grass, chrisanthemums, asters, gladiolas.

“You’ve got such wonderful flowers, Zoya,” complimented Splinter as she and my grandma sat over tea on the patio. I was present there, too, sitting aloof with a Cool Girl magazine. Can’t remember why exactly I didn’t participate in the tea party – for a wrong doing or something else.

“The love of flowers I inherited from our mamma,” replied Gran Zoya, “You remember how carefully she used to look after the flowers in our little garden… She had all sorts of flowers: roses, peonies, dahlias, lilies…”

“Oh yes, our mamma was a dab hand at many things,” Splinter said with a sigh, “What beautiful cushions she embroidered, what delicious pies she made! She picked ambers for this very necklace, too…”

“And we all helped her” Gran Zoya carried on, “I remember us running around the seashore, searching for those ambers… Family values were the most important thing back those days, weren’t they? And mamma would never, ever raise her voice at any of us, no matter what…”

“Well, perhaps there was no reason to raise her voice at us. We never were rude or irreverent to her…” remarked Splinter glancing at me sideways.

“Oh, Vera, even now I keep dreaming about the Baltic!” grandmother said wistfully, “But it’s alright; as soon as Sasha gets better, as soon as he is back up on his feet – we will take a trip there together…”

“Oh yeah, translated into a normal language it means “we’ll never go there” I snorted from my seat.

The old women put their cups back on the saucers and looked quizzically at me.

“What do you mean by “never”? I said, as soon as Sasha gets better…”

“What makes you believe he’d get better?” I said, “People of his age and with health issues like that don’t get better, but end up dying. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

Gran Zoya’s face turned red with ire.

“What?.. How dare you talk like that, you little shit?! How could you even say that?!”

“What’s wrong? I was just telling the truth…”

“The truth?!” grandmother rose from her chair and punched me hard in the chest, “I’ll show you the truth! I’ll kick the shit out of you!!! Get out of my sight, you fucking asshole! Clear off now!!!”

“Fine”

That very instant I slammed the gate and left.

CHAPTER 16

My route went in one direction, to Sue’s place. As I came by her tacky wooden house with an overgrown garden the first thing I heard was a distinctive ruckus coming from the inside: that was Sue fighting with her old folks.

“Where’s the phone?”

“Sasha! Put on your tights!”

“Where’s the phone?!”

I opened the heavy frontdoor upholstered in filthy oilcloth and instantly smelt the stale air of a poor country house. It smelt like dampness mingled with chimney smoke, dried herbs and dirty old clothes – it was the smell of poverty, so familiar to me. The decor of the house spoke for itself: a pile of cardboard boxes containing all sorts of rubbish, a tattered plastic tablecloth with spilled milk and spat out plum seeds on it, buzzing flies circling over. The picture was completed by an old couch, greasy and lumpy, and a rolled-up on an iron bed dirty old mattress with yellowish stains on it.

Sue’s grandad was crouching in front of a small furnace and putting twigs on the fire. Her grandma in a greasy apron was standing at the cooker and making sugary plum jam. Sue herself was running around with a bare butt kicking the rubbish on the floor and nervously eviscerating the cardboard boxes in search of the telephone.

“What’s up? Going to call someone?” I asked her instead of saying hello.

Sue gave no answer. She grabbed my hand instead and pulled me to her “bedroom” – a little corner behind a thin partition. There were two iron beds in there and a big poster with Eminem on the wall. One of the beds was piled up with rubbish; the other was occupied by Sue. I sat down on her unmade, untidy bed and some sharp item immediately poked me in the ass. I ran my hand through the sheets and fished out an aluminum fork with crooked prongs.

“Why do you need a fork in your bed?” said I, “Oh my God, what else is that… peas or something, ew! What a mess your bed is! How can you even sleep like that?!”

“Well, I eat in bed” Sue shrugged her shoulders. Like there was nothing wrong with it.

“I’ve got kicked out of home,” I said with a sigh. “bitched with grandmother. Can I stay with you for a while?”

Sue squeezed my hand with a solemn air.

“Oh honey, of course you can! My place is your place, you know.”

“Sasha!” her grandad called out as he stood in the doorway.

She winced with annoyance.

“What is it, old man, you are wanting?”

“Come here for a minute”

“Why can’t we talk where we are?” muttered Sue.

She went outside the partition, though. I got this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Is there anything worse than being let know that you are no more than an outsider and there are things definitely not for your ears? However, the “not for my ears” information shared behind the partition was heard pretty clearly.

“Sasha, you have to understand, we cannot let her stay with us. She should make it up with her grandmother…”

I went out and, without saying anything, headed for the front door.

“Wait, I’ll go with you!” Sue grabbed her jacket off the nail.

“Sasha, come back!” her grandma shouted to her.

But Sue just flipped them off and darted outdoors after me.