In the corner formed by the Duzenko’s and Grandma Katya’s earth-cellar sheds, there stood a kennel of the black-and-white dog Zhoolka chained to his house. He tinkled the long chain, whipped and lashed it against the ground, barking furiously at any stranger who entered the yard. But I made friends with him on the very first night when, by Mom’s prompt, I took out and dumped into his iron plate the leftovers after supper….

Grandma Katya’s hair was sooner white than gray and a little wavy. She had it cut to the middle of her neck and held in place with a curved plastic comb beneath the back of her head. The whiteness of the hair contrasted to the swarthy skin in her face with a thin nose and somewhat rounded, as if frightened, eyes. But in the somber room behind the kitchen, on one of the three blind walls, there hung a photographic portrait of a black-haired woman with an aristocratically high hairdo and a necktie (as was the fashion once upon the New Economic Policy times during the late twenties)—Grandma Katya in her young years.

Next to her, there was an equally large photo of a man with a heavy Jack London’s chin, wearing a Russian collar shirt and black jacket, so looked her husband Joseph when in the position of the Regional Trade Auditor before his arrest and exile to the North, and abrupt disappearance strangely coincident with the retreat of German troops from Konotop…

On the whole, I liked the visit to Grandma Katya, although there were neither gorodki nor football playing, and only daily Hide-and-seek with the children from the neighboring khuttas who would never find you if you hid in Zhoolka’s kennel.

Late in the evening, on the log electric-line pillars along the street, there lit up rare yellowish bulbs, unable to disperse the night dark even on the ground beneath them. May beetles flew with a bomber buzz above the soft black dust in the road, yet so low that you could knock them down with your jacket or a leafy branch broken off a Cherry tree hanging over from behind someone’s fence. The captives were incarcerated in empty matchboxes whose walls they scratched from inside with their long awkward legs. The following day, we opened their cells to admire the fan-like mustaches and the chestnut color of their glossy backs. We tried to feed them on freshly shredded blades of grass, but they did not seem hungry and we set them free from our palms the same way as you set a ladybug to fly. The beetle ticklishly crawled to a raised fingertip, tossed up his/her rigid forewings to straighten out their long transparent wings packed under that protective case, and flew off with low buzzing. Okay, fly wherever you want – in the evening we’ll catch more….

One day from the far end of the street, there came a jumble of jarring wails split by rare prolonged booms. The sounds of familiar cacophony made the people of Nezhyn Street went out of their yards and, standing by their gates, inform each other whose funeral it was.

In front of the procession, 3 men were marching slowly, the lips pressed to the brass mouthpieces of trumpets in heartrending sobs. The fourth one carried a drum in front of him like a huge potbelly. After walking for as long as it was proper, he smote its side with a felted stick. The wide belt cinching the drum across the drummer’s back left both his hands free to hold the felted stick in one of them and a wide copper plate in the other, which he from time to time crashed against the second such plate screwed upon the drum rim, to which event the trumpets responded with a new splash of disparate wailing.