The Cult in my Grandmother's House - стр. 20

only by full name and patronymic. But I really felt like calling Ekaterina Viktorovna Aunt Katya. She was like family to me. She was calm, kind, clever and beautiful. She cared about me and talked to me like a human. She didn’t treat me like another adult (all the others did, it was considered normal), but like the child I was. This was why I did my homework with her and liked it. She helped me learn a lot of different poems by heart: poems by Alexander Pushkin, Agniya Barto, Irina Tokmakova and many others. To this day I can hear the perky couplets in my head that Aunt Katya and I would recite together:

Buy an onion, a green onion,

A potato and a carrot!

Buy them for our little girl,

Even though she’s a little minx!

Once we went camping by the mountain river Varzob. It was early spring, all around there were almond trees blooming and flocks grazing. I couldn’t help trying a sheep dropping, because it looked like someone had been scattering chocolates about. Aunt Katya taught me not to lean against the trees in spring: it’s very dangerous because scorpions live under the bark and spring is their mating season so they are extra poisonous and prone to stinging.

Aunt Katya often read aloud to me. Once, after that camping trip, in the collective, she got out a big art book, sat me down beside her and, moving her finger over the sculptures in the illustrations, started to tell me about gods and goddesses, retelling the greek myths. She traced the images of nude bodies with her finger, saying all the while, “Look, how beautiful, look at these lines, isn’t that lovely…”

The revered geneticist Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson wrote that a child’s personality forms under the influence of impressions, so that what has a big effect in a person’s childhood can largely define their life. I remember those moments spent with Aunt Katya very well. For my whole life, whenever I’ve come across something from antiquity, I’ve remembered what she smelled like and the light that came off her. And every time in my head I answer her: “Truly beautiful”.

But my happiness did not last long. Aunt Katya threw herself out the window. I didn’t see it; I don’t remember where I was. She simply disappeared somewhere, and then I was taken to visit her in hospital. The fact I was taken to visit her was a surprisingly humane act, because usually problems were hushed up and hidden, and no one would ever find out the truth if it didn’t fit the doctrine.

Aunt Katya survived, but had badly damaged her neck, and there was something wrong with her jaw: you could see the scar. Someone told me later that during her fall she had grabbed the vine on the second floor, which had saved her. I also found out later that she had been pregnant but as a result of the fall had lost the baby.