Just as my uncle told me along the way, there was no shortage in the house of milk, katyk and potatoes.
A month or a bit more after my arrival, it was harvest time. Father, mother and my two sisters began to go to work in the field.
I didn’t have to go to harvest. I would run around the village with the boys and spend days wallowing in the meadows. If sometimes I felt hungry during our games, I would climb into the house through a side window and eat the potatoes and chunk of bread my mother left for me.
They locked the doors after dinner but they would leave the side window unhinged for me from the inside.
During harvest time all the village people were at work in the fields, and since there was nobody left around except for old women not suitable for work, we attacked the plantings of green onions in the plots, harming them worse than any goats. When the old women, who stayed to watch after the houses, noticed us, we would jump over the fence and run away. The poor old women had no other choice but yell themselves hoarse and then bite the bullet.
The games made us feel hot, so we went down to the small creek behind the threshing floor and splashed in it for hours or tried to catch fish with our pants and shirts. It was a jolly time!
Once, when I got home in the evening after being out playing with the boys, I found everyone very upset. «What’s wrong?» – 1 wondered. Then I saw that Sabira apa was thrashing about like crazy, from the floor to the bunk, with scary, bulging eyes, hurting herself on anything in her way. That is how I found out that she returned sick from the harvest, «stark raving mad.»
Everyone in the house didn’t have a wink of sleep that night. Only I, when I felt awfully sleepy, went out and lay down in the cart.
Next morning, at dawn, I heard: «Your sister Sabira apa died and you’re sleeping, get up, get up!» I opened my eyes and saw my mother in front of me.
This was horrible news for me, too, and although sleep is sweet, I jumped up at once.
Sabira was buried that same day. A few days after the funeral, I heard my mother saying to dad: «When you take someone else’s child, your nose and mouth will be smeared in blood; when you take someone else’s calf, your nose and mouth will be smeared in butter. It’s true, what people say. That’s why it all happened to us!»
I often heard her say such things to him. Since that time, whenever I misbehaved or did something my mother didn’t like, she would repeat these words to me.
As for father and I, we were good friends. He never said a single harsh word to me.
For instance, when the clothes I brought with me from Kazan – my shirts, pants, ichigi and kyavushy boots, and my knee-length coat with pleats – became worn out, my father decided to give me the blue linen shirt and the tunic which used to belong to his son, who died a year before my arrival.
Mother resented this plan of his for a long time: «I can’t give away to a stranger the clothes that belonged to my son, which I keep as a memory!»
Father finally flared up: «Come on, don’t be so spiteful! Do you want the kid to walk around naked because it wasn’t you who gave birth to him?» – With these words, he grabbed the clothes almost by force and told me to put them on.
III
The harvest was over and autumn came. When the wheat was reaped, it was time to dig potatoes.
This time around, when potatoes were being gathered, I didn’t have a chance to run and play as I did during harvest time: I had to put the dug potatoes into sacks. I coped with the work quite well.
Although it was already getting cold in the autumn, I was barefoot. So to keep my feet a little warmer, I stuck them into the ground.
Once, when I was sitting with my feet in the ground and sorting the potatoes, lame Sazhida apa accidentally thrust the iron shovel right in this place.
The wound was deep, so I jumped up and cried a little where no one could see me. Then I sprinkled the wound with earth and went on working, but no matter how frozen my feet were, I didn’t stick them into the ground again.
(They will ask: «Why did you write that?» What for? I did because the wound was very painful and I still have a scar from it on my leg, that’s why I decided to write about it.)
In the meantime, the work in the field came to an end.
One evening my mother and father told me that early the next morning they would take me to the school of the mullah’s wife, abystai.
We got up at dawn, before sunrise, and had some tea. After clearing the table, mother took me by the hand and brought me to the house of the revered Fatkherakhman, which was only five-six steps away from us.
When we entered the house, we found abystai, who was to be my teacher, sitting there with a rod in her hand. Around her were little girls my age, these made the majority, but there were older girls as well. Scattered among them, like a few peas in a bowl of wheat, were little boys like me.
My mother handed the teacher two whole loaves of bread and one or two small coins, after which both of them and all of us, students, prayed for a long time.
When my mother went away, leaving me at the school, I, along with the girls, began to read in a loud voice without a moment’s hesitation: «Elep, pi, ti, si, zhomykyi.»
After a few days of reciting «elep, pi, ti, si», I was given the «Fundamentals of Faith».
The syllables and verses of this book kept me busy the whole winter. That winter, I circled around these short «Fundamentals of Faith» and didn’t progress any further. Right after the «Fundamentals of Faith», I heard these naughty verses from some mischievous girls when abystai was not at home: «Kalimaten tayibaten, our mistress is rich, money she’s got a lot, and her nose is full of sn…»
Since anything you hear or see for the first time already constitutes knowledge, I memorized this ditty at once, naturally, and liked to amuse with it those boys who were less «enlightened» than me.
IV
My first winter in Kyrlai was gone. Spring arrived and the snow began to melt. The fields and meadows around the village looked black once they had freed themselves of the snow.
A little later came the Sabantui festival[10 - Sabantui literally means ««The Plough Festival»», since the time immemorial it is being celebrated in early summer. Sabantui has been included into the UNESCO Immaterial Heritage list.]. On the day of the holiday I was awakened very early and given a small bag, slightly larger than a pouch.
I went around the village, carrying this bag. Village folk always rise early, but today on the occasion of the Sabantui everyone got up particularly early. Kind words were spoken in every home, and there was a smile on every face.
Whatever house I went into, I was given not only sweets and a couple of honey-cakes, like the other boys, but each owner gave me – an orphan and the son of a mullah – several colored eggs.
That’s why my bag quickly filled with colored eggs, and I had to return home. I think the rest of the kids were still out collecting their treats.
My father and mother were surprised and delighted that my bag was filled so quickly.
I don’t remember whether I drank tea that day or not. I gave the bag to my mother and taking with me a few eggs, I ran outside.
When I ran out into the street the sun was already high up in the sky and the entire village was bathed in golden sunlight. The village lads and girls, perhaps pulling on their white stockings more smoothly and wrapping their puttees around their feet more diligently under their bast shoes, were already out on the street.
From the opposite end, the head of the Sabantui with a flag in his hands (a stick with cloth tied to it) went from house to house collecting headscarves, cotton cloth and other similar items. We, barefoot boys, ran after him, not lagging behind.
After the scarves and fabrics were collected, all the local folk – women, girls and kids – gathered on the meadow. A wrestling and racing competition followed. There were dozens of carts with nuts, sunflower seeds and gingerbread, white with red stripes, standing across the meadow.
Of all those things, the favorite gift a girl could get from a lad was, of course, the white gingerbread with red stripes, because there’s even a song about this gingerbread:
An eagle landed on the meadow
He’ll scare away the geese.
A striped white gingerbread from a fellow
For the girl would never go amiss.
There were also horse races and races in sacks. The headscarves were given away and the Sabantui festivities came to an end.
I can’t recall now how many days that holiday lasted. I only described one. Even if it lasted three or four days it seemed like one day to me.
I also have to add that I couldn’t run around and play that summer like I did the one before, because right before the beginning of spring a boy was born in uncle Sagdi’s family, and when mother was at work I always had to babysit the infant.
