When I returned home, the schoolchildren in festive white shirts and red pioneer ties were still walking along Nezhyn Street returning to the Settlement lanes after the demonstration.

And then I committed the first dastardly act in my life. I went out from the wicket of our khutta and wantonly shot with my crook pistol in the guilty of nothing white back of a passer-by boy pioneer. He chased me, but I ran back into the yard up to the kennel of Zhoolka who kept barking and yanking his chain violently, so the boy did not dare come up and only shouted his threats and abuses thru the open wicket…

In summer our parents bought a nanny-goat from Bazaar because when Father received his first payment at the Plant and brought home 74 rubles, Mother, confusedly looking at the money in his hand, asked, “How? Is that all?”

The purchase was meant to make living easier but, in fact, it only complicated life because now I had to walk the white nanny-goat on a rope into Foundry Street or Smithy Street where she grazed the dust-covered grass along the weather-worn fences.

To drink any of the goat milk I refused downright in spite of all Mother's wheedling how hugely beneficial it was for health. After a while, the goat was slaughtered and tenderized into cutlets which I ignored completely…

Sometimes Grandma Katya’s son, Uncle Vadya, came to our khutta in his boiler-oil smeared spetzovka during the midday breaks at the Plant to beg hooch because his colleagues were a-waiting, but his plea seldom succeeded.

Uncle Vadya had a smooth black hair combed back and a toothbrush mustache also black, the skin in his face was of slick olive hue, like that of young Arthur in The Gadfly by Lillian Voynich, and on his right hand he missed the middle finger lost at the beginning of his workingman career.

“I couldn’t get it first. Well, okay, that’s my finger dropped upon the machine tool, but where's the water from that drips on it? A-ha! that’s my tears!” so he recounted the accident. Doctors sewed up the stump very nicely—smooth and no scars at all—so that when he made the fig it came out 2 at once. The double-barreled fig looked very funny and no chance for anyone to ape the trick even remotely.

Uncle Vadya lived in the khutta of his mother-in-law near the Bus Station. There's a special term in Ukrainian for a man living with his in-laws, which is primmuck, aka Adoptee. Bitter is the share of an Adoptee! As reported by Uncle Vadya, a primmuck had to keep quieter than the still water and lower than the grass. His mother-in-law he had to address with “Mommy” and kowtow even to the hens kept by her in the yard, and his duty was washing their legs when they saw it fit to perch for the night…

We all loved Uncle Vadya for he was so funny and kind, and smiling all the time. And he had his special way of greeting, “So, how are you, golden kids?”

At the age of ten, when the German Company Headquarters were just behind the wall—in the Pilluta’s part of the khutta—Vadya Vakimov climbed onto the fence in the backyard and attempted at cutting the cable of the occupants’ telephone connection. The Germans yelled at him but didn’t shoot and kill right on the spot…

When I asked how he dared act in such a heroic way, Uncle Vadya replied that he no longer remembered. However, it’s hardly possible that he wished to become a pioneer partisan posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union, most likely he was allured by the multi-colored wires running inside telephone cables of which you could pleat lots of different ornamental things, even a lush finger-ring…