And in kindergarten it was that, for the first time in my life, I fell in love. However, I did my level best to fight the feeling back. With bitter sadness, I grasped how useless was that love because of the insurmountable—like a bottomless abyss—difference in age between me and the swarthy girl with dark eyes of cherry-berry gleam in them. She was two years younger…

But how unreachable and adult looked the former kindergarten girls who came on a visit there after their first day at school. Clad in festive white aprons, putting on so reserved and mannerly airs, they scarcely deigned to answer the eager questions asked by our group’s caretaker.

The caretakers and other workers at the kindergarten wore white robes, however, not always all of them. Anyway, not the one seated outdoors on a bench next to me allaying my distress. It’s hard to say what exactly it was – a fresh scratch on my knee or a new bump on my forehead, yet as for her name, it was positively Zeena… Her gentle palm was petting my head, and I forgot to cry with my cheek and temple pressed to her left breast. The other cheek and closed eyelids felt the warmth of the sun, I listened to the thuds of her heart beneath the green dress that smelt of summer until there came a shrill call from the building, “Zeena!.”

And at home, we had Grandmother who came from Ryazan because Mom started going to work and there should be someone to look after Sasha and Natasha besides other house-keeping chores. Grandma Martha wore a cotton blouse over a straight skirt nearly reaching the floor and a white blue-dotted kerchief on her head whose large square she folded diagonally to form a big triangle and cover her hair tying the acute angles of the cloth in a loose knot under her round chin…

Mom worked three shifts doing the job of a Watcher at the Pumping Station. And Dad had as many shifts at the Diesel Station. I never learned the location of his workplace but it surely was somewhere in the forest because one day Dad brought a piece of bread wrapped in a newspaper which parcel was given him by a bunny on his way home. “Now, I go home after the shift when – lo! – there's a bunny under a tree, who says, “Here you are, take it to Sehryozha, and Sasha, and Natasha.” The bread from bunny was much more delicious than the bread which Mom sliced for the dinner…

At times the parents’ shifts did not coincide so that one of them was home while the other at work. At one such time, Dad brought me to Mom’s workplace – a squat brick building with a dark green door behind which, just opposite the entrance, there was a small room with a small window high above a big old desk and 2 chairs. But if, bypassing that room, you turned to the left thru a brown door, there would be a huge murky hall full of incessant rumble and with another desk at which Mom sat doing her job.

She didn’t expect us and was so very much surprised. Then she showed me the log under the lamp on her desk because it was her job to enter the time and copy figures from the round manometers’ faces to which there led narrow bridges of iron-sheets all rigged up with handrails because under them everywhere was dark water for the pumps to pump. And it was those pumps to make that terrible noise all the time so that for talking we had to shout loud but even then not all the words were heard, “What!? What!?”

So, we returned to the room by the entrance where Mom took from a drawer in the desk a pencil and some throwaway log with missing pages for me to do some hazy-mazy drawings. I began to draw and was busy but they also stopped talking and only looked at each other though the noise remained back behind the wall. When I finished a big sun, she asked if I wanted to go and play in the yard. I did not want to go out, but then Dad said if I didn’t listen to Mom he never-never would bring me there again anymore, and I went out.