I am a participant of the war which broke out between my neighbor and me. I nearly died in that heroic war. I can"t forget it up to now.
It was spring. A thaw had set in. The dung was belching out steam. Birds were chirping, hens were cackling. Up in the sky white clouds floated tenderly showing their magnificent elastic breasts or some other parts of the body. I stared at them in admiration. My wife was a jealous woman. And that"s why we quarreled. I thought I"d better go out before I strangled her, like Desdemona.
I called my neighbor, I mean, Ramazanov, a boon companion of mine. We sat down on a bench in a shady place with huge tall poplars wavering in the wide waft of the wind. Taking the floor I made an opening speech:
- You know, Ramazanov, in Europe civilization has reached such a high level! Imagine, you use a public toilet, equipped with computers, and - God forbid! - you forget to let the water out, the door will automatically shut before your nose.
Instead of admiring the story, Ramazanov smiled wryly and said:
- You call that a toilet? I don"t think it"s a toilet; it"s a trap for the poor that come to visit the city from villages. It"s humiliation! The best toilets in the world are ours! In the open air, with no roof! There"s no door, but there"s a curtain instead. You can sit and watch the endless sky, if you wish. You can say good bye, with a sigh, to the caravan of cranes flying over the willow grove where silence reigns and leaves fall quietly and sadly. Particularly at night. You sit with the moon shining right over your head. Far away, over the wood, you can see the sky swarming with innumerable stars and hear the croaking of frogs and the monotonous singing of crickets. Besides, this toilet can in no time be turned into an observation post which allows you to see what your neighbors are doing. When you watch people from a crack in the toilet, like from embrasure, nobody can see you. You can quietly gather information about what has been brought and what has been taken away and things like that. You can even overhear conversations, the way ninja, the mediaeval mercenary agents did. Sitting here you can even have a smoke. Should an unpleasant smell waft to your nose, the wind will quickly carry it away. The most important thing is that this toilet is never clogged up! You don"t have to call to the municipal economy in search of a plumber. It means there will be no additional costs! And you keep praising this backward Europe. Pooh! I scorn you and the whole of Europe!
With these words Ramaznov left. After a while I, too, made my way home. I was in a hell of a bad mood.
I was thinking about my neighbor"s argument. His angry words pierced my heart like arrows of Tamerlane"s warriors who were known to smear the arrow heads with the deadly venom of rattlesnakes, leaving no chance for the enemy to survive.
Nervously, I walked to and fro, working out the plan of retaliation.
When my plan was ready, I took out a crow bar and started breaching the wall adjoining my neighbor"s toilet. With a powerful blow I managed to make a breach. Then I stuck a stove pipe into the hole I had made and started waiting for the historic moment.
Suddenly I heard someone enter the toilet. Taking my chance, I took a bucket of cold water and poured it into the pipe. There came a loud shriek. Apparently, my neighbor had rushed out of the toilet, a toilet in the open air, with no roof, where one can sit and smoke admiring the moon that shined softly and sadly with innumerous stars flickering over the black woods and listening to the croaking of frogs and the monotonous crackling of crickets resounding far away near the swamps with canes rustling like Chinese ancient silk. My neighbor, a well ground axe in hand, looking like an Indian armed with a tomahawk getting on a fierce fight with a pale face, hoping to scalp me, jumped, without a pole, over the fence and said angrily:
- Well, come on, come on! Come closer, I will cut off your cupola filled with shit, well, well, come here!
I grasped the pitchfork and stood on the defensive.
- Well, come up to your daddy - I said - come, if you are sick and tired of living.
Terribly scared, my wife seized me by the sleeve and started begging in a trembling voice:
- Please, don"t, dear! He will kill you!
I put her hand aside and said:
- Go away, don"t hold me, woman! We are on the right, and we shall win! I will make shish-kebab out of this fat monster!
My neighbor kept twisting around throwing his axe from hand to hand and waiting for a chance to deal a shuttering blow upon me. His axe, ready to smash me to pieces, was spinning in his hands like an aircraft propeller. We were waltzing round like Roman gladiators. Our house turned into an amphitheatre. A crowd of spectators could now be seen their heads sticking out from behind the fences.
Like Spartacus, raising high my glittering pitchfork, I dashed to my neighbor with a war-cry. But I missed. The shrewd neighbor managed to jump back. My pitchfork pierced the tree. While I was trying to pull it out my neighbor had time to deliver a blow to my leg. Zap! My foot crunched and was broken. The pain was so severe that I felt as if a black curtain had fallen covering all before my eyes.
I regained consciousness in a somber room. It was the hospital morgue. The detectives and the doctors must have thought that I was dead, so they had brought me here.
I was scared at first. But then I pulled myself together and climbed out of the plastic bag. Then, moaning and groaning, leaning against the wall, I slowly made my way to the iron door. As I came up to it I peeped out into the corridor through the keyhole. Oh my! My entire near and dear are there! My wife, stroking our sons Arabboy and Sharabboy, is weeping. The kids, too, cry bitterly sobbing and shedding tears.
I could no longer bear watching the tragic scene, so I started knocking on the iron door of the morgue with shouts:
- Don"t cry, dear! I am alive! Open the door, I am cold! Babat! Arabboy, Sharabboy, sonny! Do you recognize my voice?
Deathly scared, my dear ones stopped crying. First they fixed their eyes on the door of the morgue, and then, suddenly, all of them got up and ran headlong, without a backward glance, down the long corridor.
A few minutes later they came back accompanied by people in white smocks. When they opened the door I came out with open arms. We hugged and cried for joy, the way participants of the KVN fun club contest do when racking their brains over the rivals" question. The men and women in white smocks stared at me in amazement and shouted in chorus: "Terminator!"
My wife and the kids now cried, now laughed through the tears glistening on their cheeks like diamonds.
After that the docs put me in the ward where patients with a fracture are treated. I was laid up for quite a while but, alas, I was not cured. My foot remained crippled. When I walked it would dangle like a plough hitched to a tractor that furrows the fields in spring, with skylarks flapping their wings and flying up and down and swallows following the tractor in the hope of finding some delicious insects. As I walked, I would hear the little children laughing behind my back:
- Tractor! Look, that man is a tractor!
I would throw stones at them but they would follow me all the way to the bus stop shouting and teasing me like a pack of loud monkeys.
When I arrived at Matarak, the village where I at one time came into this mad, mad world, when they had cut my navel string with a rusty knife, I made my way straight to the house where Kimsanbai lives, the man who was the initiator of the united military alliance in the village, the institution where we paid our membership dues every month.
I entered the headquarters and, addressing Kimsanbai, said straight:
- May I ask you, Your Highness, why do we pay the membership dues, if your alliance has been unable to render us military assistance in this crisis?! When the sacred war broke out between my neighbor and me you did not help me, and, as a result, my family suffered heavy losses.
Trying to find an excuse, Kimsanbai said:
- It"s a lie. On that critical day when the war broke out between you and your neighbor, we immediately sent out peace keeping forces to the battle-ground, and namely, infantry units armed with awls, pitchforks, screwdrivers and sharp-cut nails. Then, on tire inner tubes, we ferried across the river a detachment of land forces, or, to be more exact, a platoon of women, also armed to the teeth with pans, pokers and oven forks. It wasn"t easy to do because we had no pumps and had to inflate the tubes orally. But while the peace keeping forces were on their way the war was over, and you were put to hospital. Thank God, we didn"t send out our air-born troops... But, anyway, you will have to pay a big fine.
When I heard this I got dumbfounded and said:
- No-oo, I will no longer be a member of this military alliance which skins the clients alive.
- All right - said Kimsanbai - we will let you go. But you have to pay the fine first, then you
can hand in a discharge application.
I said I was not going to pay any fine and went home. When I came back to my near and dear family I was in good spirits again.
In the evening my younger son Sharabboy came up to me and said:
- Daddy, my teacher gave me this homework, I have to write a composition on the subject of
"My Father"s Dream". Do you have a dream?
- Yes, of course, - I said. It can"t be otherwise. A human being is born with a dream and dies with a dream. I, too, had my dreams. When a child, I wanted to be a tractor driver. In those days an ox-eyed, black-bearded midget with a big head and a big mouth used to come, on a cart, to our village. The small man was smart at selling kerosene. He would shout at the top of his voice:
- Keldi pinor yak, keldi pinor yak! - Lamp oil has come, lamp oil has come!
On hearing the familiar shrilly scream people would come out with flasks and jerry-cans to buy kerosene. There was no electricity in those days. People used oil lamps to illuminate the house. By the lamp light they would talk, eat, drink, read and write.
Like all other people we, too, had a flask which was crumpled and black from dirt. It looked as if the stoker of a boiler-house had hurled it with all his might from hell and it fell down into our yard.
Our father was an honest tractor driver; he never stole diesel oil for his tractor. Like any one else he would buy kerosene. Every day I would open the flask to look at my reflection and, spreading my nostrils wide, inhale the smell of the kerosene. I don"t know why but I like the smell of it. That"s where my love of machinery comes from.
Late in the autumn days, crossing the farm lands, I would carry supper to my father. At cold autumn nights, far in the distance I would see my dad"s rattling tractor cut the darkness with red and yellow lights. I would hear the echo coming from the rattling engine that broke the night silence with its rhythmical trembling sound. Walking against the cold wind I would make my way towards the field where my father was plowing the land. I would come up to the tractor from the illuminated side, with the front lights on, so that my father might see me, and give him a sign that I had brought him his supper. He would stop the tractor and jumping off the seat come up to me. Then, stroking my head, he would ask:
- Have you brought the supper?
I would say "yes", and he would reply:
- Barakalle! - Good boy!!
While father spruced himself up shaking the dust off his clothes I would quickly gather dry cotton branches, known as "guzopaya", and make a little fire by which father would warm himself up and eat. I would throw branches into the fire watching him have his supper. By the fire light our shadows would change shape, now shortening, now elongating. We looked like two genies sitting by the fire. Like the tongue of a dragon, the flame was flickering in the cold wind with the crackling sparkles flying up into the star-spangled sky. I sat thinking that when I grow up I would be a tractor driver, like father. But my dream never came true.
One day father fell asleep while plowing the field at night and fell into a deep ditch, along with the tractor. So those autumn nights took my dad to the undiscovered world from whose bourn no traveler returns.
A year later my mother followed him. I was now alone with my granny. After she passed away the fellow-villagers sent me to a boarding school where orphans were fostered.
Years went by. I finished school, and as if there were no other occupations, I became a store-keeper.
KVN (Russian: КВН, an abbreviation of Russian: Клуб Весёлых и Находчивых, Klub Vesyolykh i Nakhodchivykh", "Club of the Happy and Inventive") is a Russian humor TV show where teams (usually teams of students) compete by giving funny answers to questions, improvisations, prepared sketches. The program has been aired by Channel One since November 8th 1961.