8

There was another friend of mine in the village. I mean, she was not just a friend of mine, she was my bestie - my closest friend ever. Her name was Susannah, in Russian it sounded as “Sashka”. Having her in my life made me what I am now. Anyway, she played a very important role in the following story.

I met her as follows. I was riding my old “clunker” as I called my jacked-up bicycle when at the gate of our village I got stopped by a neighbor boy in the company of a tall skinny girl of twelve with curly hair down to her shoulder and thick bangs over her forehead.

“You must pay a fine for violating the traffic regulations!” she said in one breath.

“What the hell traffic regulations?”

“In the name of Victory, the Queen of Great Britain! I am Inspector Susan Starfield.” the girl introduced herself with an important air.

“Oh ok. I’m Margaret Thatcher, then.” I tried to laugh it off.

“But, really, my name is Susan. You can call me Sue, though.” she said.

“Sasha! Have you torn your skirt again?” came the harsh voice of an old woman leaning out of the nearest house’s window - evidently, she was Sue’s grandmother.

Sue rolled up her eyes and sighed.

“Oh, that’s just so you, dear granny!”

Deep down I was amazed at the odd relationship between the grandmother and granddaughter. There she went yelling and scolding Sue, yet the last didn’t look one bit ashamed. Things were different in my own family. I was afraid of my grandads even though I could, too, show them my teeth sometimes. It was not so much fear as some kind of alienation. I didn’t know how I was supposed to address them - formally or familiarly, so I tried not to address them at all. Grandmother would notice it and rebuke me for it.

“Why do you never call us anything? Can’t you move your tongue to say “Granny”, “Grandpa”?

I frowned silently. I couldn’t indeed move my tongue to call them so - I fancied that the word “grandma” or “grandpa” coming out of my mouth would sound strange and out of place.

Not only did I have difficulty in pronunciation the words “granny” and “grandpa”. I couldn’t call by name my aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers. I have no idea where that odd barrier had come from, but even now I avoid addressing people by their names as well as looking them in the eye during a conversation.

I made friends with Sue immediately and forever. It’s truly said that the older you grow the harder it is to gain new friends. Now I can’t even fancy coming up to some nice-looking lady of my age somewhere in the street or a supermarket, starting a conversation and inviting her over to a cup of tea - such things seem incredible in the age of thirty. Back in childhood they were way easier and occurred as a matter of course.

“Let us be best friends, the best of the best of the best!” Sue suggested rapturously and, grasping my hand, skipped down the road as she sang:

“Hey, Captain, smile!..”

“No, that’s childish,” I said with a grimace, “We learned that song at a singing class in primary school. We should make a special new song that nobody else knows!”

“Oh yeah, we should! So it’s very special for us only, and nobody else!” exclaimed my new buddy.

And we started composing stuff. But, as the imagination of silly teenagers we were is very limited and always boils down to the same one thing, the first words that occurred to me were:

“A c**t and a c**k…”

“Pissed on a rock!” Sue carried on.

And just so we skipped down hand in hand and sang at the top of our lungs like two freaks:

“A c**t and a c**k

Pissed on a rock!”

An old lady neighbor cast disapproving glances in our direction from behind her fence.

“The foul-mouthed little oiks!”

But it couldn’t stop us. The “hymn” to our friendship created by us was no limit. We would twist the lyrics of popular songs such as, for instance, “the silken heart, the silken heart can never ache when torn apart”:

“The silken c**k, the silken c**k

Can never raise, looks like a sock…”

No wonder that both our families - mine and Sue’s - weren’t too thrilled with our friendship. Her grandads believed I had a bad influence on their lass, mine thought exactly the opposite.

“Stop messing with that yer Sashka,”grumbled my grandad, “She’s a quirky one.”

I chuckled. “Quirkies” was the brand name of cookies advertised widely on TV back those days. And as I imagined Sue “quirky” with those quirkies all over her face and body, I couldn’t help laughing. And anyway, I wasn’t going to quit messing with her over that reason.