Then I read, went to the rink, played hockey in felt boots and came back again to the books on the big sofa… I was watching the concert of Maya Kristalinskaya on the TV in the usual wide kerchief around her neck—to hide the traces of her personal life drama—when Mom came from work. I ran from the parents’ room to the hallway, and Dad was already there from the kitchen.

He stood in front of my Mom, who had not yet had time to take her coat off. Then, while they stood, oddly still and silent, facing each other, something ungraspable happened to Dad’s hand, which, as if the only moving part in their frozen confrontation, broke the stillness by an awkward short slap against each of Mom’s cheeks.

Mom said, “Kolya! What’s that?” and she burst into tears which I had never seen.

Dad started yelling and demonstrating a saucer with cigarette butts which he found behind the blind on the windowsill in the kitchen. Mom tried to say something about her woman-friend neighbor, but Dad rebuffed in a loud voice that Belomor-Canal cigarettes were not a women’s smoke. He flung his sheepskin overcoat on and, before getting out, yelled, “But you swore to never ever even shit within a mile off him!”

The door slammed furiously, Mom went to the kitchen and then across the landing to her new woman-friend in the former Zimins’ rooms. I put on my coat and felt boots, and went to the rink again. On my way I met my sister-’n’-brother coming back home, I did not say anything to them about what happened there.

At the rink, I was hanging around until full dark. I had no wish to play, neither wanted to go back home, so I just milled about aimlessly or sat by the stove in the shed.

Then Natasha came up to me on the ice empty of anyone already, she said that Mom and my brother were waiting for me on the road and that at home Dad dumped the Christmas Tree on the floor and kicked Sasha, and now we were going to sleepover at some acquaintances’.

Under the desolate light of lamps above the empty road, the 4 of us walked to the five-story building, where Mom knocked on the door to an apartment on the first door. There lived the family of some officer with two children, I knew the boy from the school, but not his sister, who was from a too senior grade.

Mom shared some sandwiches she brought along, but I did not feel like eating. She went to sleep together with my sister-’n’-brother on the folding coach, and I was bedded on the carpet next to the bookcase. Thru its glass doors, I saw The Captain Dare-Devil by Louis Bussenard and asked for permission to read it, while the light from the kitchen was reaching the carpet…

In the morning, we left and crossed the Courtyard to one of the corner buildings, I knew that it was the hostel for officers though I never had entered it. In the long corridor on the second floor, Mom told us to wait because she needed to talk with the man whose name she mentioned but I've forgotten it entirely.

For some time, the 3 of us waited silently on the landing, then Mom showed up in the corridor and led us home. She opened the door with her key. From the hallway, thru the open door to the parents’ room, the Christmas tree was seen dropped on its side by the balcony door, splinters of smashed decorations scattered the carpet around it.

The wardrobe stood with its doors ajar, and in front of it there was a soft mound of Mom’s clothes, each one ripped from top to bottom…

Dad was away from home for a whole week, but then Natasha said that he was coming back and so it happened the following day. And we started to live on further again…