My mother's stories
chapter
25
The
informer
(the ending)
When
I think about all those numerous people, who used to scribble
information against their neighbours and colleagues, I usually recall
our own neighbours, who live just across the street: a woman, five or
ten years younger than my mother, and her divorced son, who have
always considered our street as the continuation of their yard. I
could never understand them, as if they were aliens. Still her son
reached the top of his outrageous behaviour at the time of wild 90s,
when he slaughtered two pigs just under my kitchen windows. It was
not a matter of a minute and our panes vibrated with the pig's awful
yells. In vain I tried to close my ears with my fingers: it didn't
muffle the sound. So when it came to the second pig, I lost my head
completely and ran out of our house with firm intention to stop that
horror at any cost. I remember how furious I was when my husband
stopped me at our gates. Nowadays I feel grateful for his
intervention. What an awful scene I could have witnessed if he hadn't
forced me to return to the house!
Actually, that
man has always preferred to do all his dirty and unpleasant work in
the street. I remember him sawing up the tiles with a disk grinder on
concrete floor in front of their gates. The sounds were so piercingly
annoying that I wondered how he could stand them working there for
hours, not even wearing protective earmuffs. Sometimes I thought the
man just loved being exposed, being watched by all his neighbours and
passers-by. And, maybe, the feeling of unfriendly glances at his
back. My son, perhaps, understands our neighbours better, saying it's
not as complicated as that. In his opinion it's their well-known
tendency for neatness – they just don't want to pollute their
precious yard.
Anyway, it was
not all of that that stopped us saying hello to each other in the
end. It was their dogs, whom they have always allowed to run freely
in the street. The thought that those audacious animals weren't pigs
for slaughter after all didn't help much. “Don't be afraid”, our
neighbours usually said to scared passers-by, “They are only
barking. They wouldn't bite”. But I knew it was not true. The small
white dog was really only barking. In fact, he was doing it all day
long and part of the night, often without any visible reason at all.
But his main fault was that he egged his companion on. And that big
black dog did bite sometimes. I witnessed it three times at least. Not
to mention one lucky girl, who got off with only her bag ripped
because the owner of the dogs called them back in the nick of time.
Standing at my open window I saw the girl coming to our neighbour's
fence to show her torn bag. I was unable to catch the words, only the
tone and was struck by our neighbour's rude answer. In confusion I
tried to guess what arguments she could have offered to justify
herself for being so rude in such a situation. What gave her so much
confidence in her own rightness? Did she really like to terrorize
people with her dogs or was it that she just didn't understand what
she was doing?
In any case,
those dogs didn't usually bark at us as we were their neighbours, but
they often used the space in front of our gates as their toilet. I
believe they were marking their territory, showing us where the
border, in their opinion, actually lay. Several generations of our
neighbours' dogs have had this irritating habit, but in reply to my
mother's accusations that woman always said that they were just
animals and that she could do nothing about it. Naturally I got tired
of dirtying my shoes while coming home in the dark, but it was only
when my mother got senile and I understood that it was my turn to
clean after those nasty animals, I decided to teach them their spot.
And it turned into a real war for the territory.
I had to get up
very early to shoo them away. Sometimes even risking my skin and
jumping out of our gates. My task was to persuade those animals that
I was as fierce as a dog myself. And I really was sometimes. Our
neighbour was quick to catch me at it and she asked me with
indignation what was the meaning of that – shouting “shoo” at
her dogs. I started to explain to her that I was going to teach her
dogs to behave if she was not able to, but she didn't give me a
chance to finish my speech. Every time when I opened my mouth to
continue she began to talk too. Such kind of conversation usually
turns into a real battle of lungs, when two furious women are
shouting at the same time, trying to muffle each other's words. Two
women from the market – that's how people usually call them. It's
really funny to watch such a scene, but I had no desire to take part
in it. So I used the only decent option left for me and turned my
contemptuous back on that woman. But I didn't stop my war with her
dogs and did win that miserable space in front of our gates in the
end. The price of my victory was that our neighbour stopped saying
hello not only to me but to all the members of my family.
So every time I
am thinking about our neighbours as I try to understand their
motivation, I imagine them scribbling a denunciation about me being a
spy at the time of Stalin's rule. Just to punish me for my
interference with their dogs' up-bringing. And then I begin to think
about all those people who are shouting now, demanding to bring
Stalin's statues back. Perhaps, they are not as harmless as they
seem. Wouldn't they be the first to write a denunciation against
people, whom they were angry with, if that bloody regime suddenly
came back? They don't understand, it seems, that they would not be
out of reach themselves and could be hit by the same stick that they
are so eager to use against others.
To be continued...
To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
33. The informer (the continuation)