Pihkal Read online

  There was a trip we had all taken when I was very young, to the Great Lakes area, where we picked up a brand new car in Detroit. We drove across the southern tip of Ontario and re-entered the United States at Niagara Falls, in upstate New York. Apparently the immigration people were alerted by the fact that we were driving a spanking new car, and they stopped us and asked questions.

  "Are you American citizens?" asked the official at the border station.

  "We are," answered my father, who had a clear, distinctly Russian, accent.

  "Oh," said the official, aiming his question directly at my father, "Where were you born?"

  "Chelyabinsk," was the answer, with an unmistakable touch of pride.

  "And where is that?"

  "In Russia." I can imitate the accent when speaking the word, but in writing, it's not easy. It comes out with a lightly tongue-trilled "R," followed by a broad, extended vowel, with the texture of the letter "A" in the word "cart." Something like "Rashia," or, better, "Rrraaaashia."

  My mother spoke up, trying to explain that my father was indeed born in Russia, but that he had come here in the early '20's and he had sought and received American citizenship. That did it. We were invited to come into the shack that was the immigration office, and answer more questions. Apparently, suspicions are aroused when a wife answers the questions posed to her husband.

  "Do you have your naturalization papers with you?"

  "No, there is no reason to carry them everywhere," said my father.

  "What is the number on your citizenship paper?"

  "I have no idea."

  "What evidence do you have that you are a citizen?"

  "I am a member of the California School Teachers Association. You have to be a citizen to teach in the California public schools."

  "How do I know that?"

  "Everyone knows that!"

  The conversation came around to our Canadian entry. The final exchange was a classic.

  "If you are carrying no evidence of U.S. citizenship," asked the aggressive official, "How is it that the Canadian authorities allowed you to enter their country in the first place?"

  My father's response was clear and unanswerable, "Because the Canadian authorities are gentlemen."

  That did it. Apparently the government man simply hung up his jock, realizing that no one but a genuine American citizen would display that particular kind of arrogance. We were very quickly on our way, in our crisp new 1929 Model A Ford.

  Another incident involving my parents painted a somewhat different picture of my father.

  Around the time I was ten or so, there may have been a period when my father was involved with another woman. I did not know the meaning of the word, "involved," in that context, nor the meaning of "another woman," but something was going on which was uncomfortable for my mother. I was enlisted in a strange little plot. We drove to a motel on San Pablo Avenue, down near the border between Berkeley and Oakland, and my mother asked me to go up to a certain car parked there and to let the air out of one of its tires. That done, we drove back home. Much later that evening, my father returned from his school board meeting with the complaint of having been held up by an unexpected flat tire. I was mystified. Were there some exciting goings-on about which I knew nothing? It was all very intriguing, but it involved my father in some unknown way, and that wasn't comfortable for me.

  Again, as with the border incident story, I was seeing my father through my mother's eyes, and now, viewing all these things from the point of view of an older man, it seems to me that they give me as much a measure of her as of my father, some insight, for instance, into her insecurities and her dependence on others.

  My pre-college schooling occupied the expected amount of time minus a couple of years for skipped classes, but most of it is lost in a sort of amnesic cloud. Big hand-waving events can be recalled, probably because of re-telling and thus reinforcement, but the day-to-day detail is totally gone.

  I can remember which schools I went to, but not a single classmate's name, and there were only three teachers whom I now remember. My mother taught my junior high school English class one year, and my mother's brother. Uncle Harry, taught my algebra class in high school.

  I also remember that when he had completed the writing of the rough draft of an algebra text to be published for his students, he asked me to read through it and look for errors, which was quite a compliment. The third teacher, Mr. Frederick Carter, was not a relative, but he taught all the music classes, conducted the school orchestra, and led the ROTC band. Music has always been a valuable part of my life.

  Come to think of it, there is one student's name that pops up out of the fog. Rick Mundy. He was a noisy show-off, who loved doing suggestive things with uncooked hot dogs at the little lunch counter across Grove Street from University High.

  Before high school, I was a little-too-tall, little-too-young, little-too-smart kid who slipped over from the comfortable "me" of pre-adolescence into the terrifying "I" of being a real person who existed apart from everyone else. I didn't see it coming and I wasn't really aware of it when it occurred, but somehow, very gradually, there was a change. Where, earlier, I might get hit by something while playing and I would look down at my leg and think, "Oh, there's blood; the stick did that and my leg hurts," now I began to think in terms of, "I've been hit by that stick; I am bleeding, and I've got a painful leg."

  The terrifying aspect of it was the realization that I had to take responsibility for what happened to me. Before, it had always been my parents who fixed things, solved problems, and took care of me. As the ego-awareness (if that's what it's called) came about, I interacted less passively with other people.

  I was a child prodigy. I never thought of myself in terms of intellect or intelligence, but I knew that my mother considered me quite advanced and more capable than the others in my age group. I could do this and that on the piano and the violin, and I wrote poetry. As I was growing up, the atmosphere around me always carried a certain expectation that I could do more and do it better.

  I hated fights. I saw nothing wrong in getting away as fast as I could from any situation that was building up to one, because physical violence wasn't part of my world; it didn't belong in it, and if I was called names for leaving the scene of a battle, that was okay. I just didn't get any satisfaction out of hitting or getting hit.

  Somewhere around age five or six I discovered marbles. There was a marble run next to the fence in the school yard. The structure was the classic one: three holes out from home, then back, then out again and one more, then home (and if you're first, you win some marbles from the other kids). I had a good span, so I could get a slight advantage on my second shot. And some days I would win an aggie, a real aggie. You couldn't tell if your marble was a real aggie unless it would break an ordinary marble, and if it was yours that broke, it wasn't an aggie and you were out a marble for trying.

  There were too many older kids there at the school, so I made a marbles course of my own at home in my back yard. After putting a lot of work into it, I had a course superior to the one at school, and I became quite proficient.

  My back yard had a fence that ran between our place and the back yard next door. It was completely covered with honeysuckle so that the fence couldn't be seen. The plant held up the fence more than the other way around. It was an immensely high, immensely thick, immensely long mass of what appeared to be free-standing honeysuckle vine, covered with small leaves that grew in opposite directions from one-another, and millions of tiny flowers everywhere.

  Of course, I knew that there was really a fence under it all, because I had a secret entry to my tunnels inside the honeysuckle mass, tunnels that no one else knew anything about. This was my own private place. I would go inside my tunnel on one side, through a small hole where a few fence boards had disappeared, to a parallel tunnel on the other side. When I was in there, inside my capsule, I would nip off the base of a blossom and taste the droplet of sweet nectar that oozed ou
t. It was absolutely quiet;

  even the street-cars that normally rattled up and down Rose Street couldn't be heard. I did not need to move my eyes to see everywhere about me. I didn't need to breathe. I could see no one, and no one could see me. There was no time here. Little bugs that should have been crawling along the stems or on the old, broken boards simply didn't move. Of course, when I would pay attention to something else, then look back, they were in a different place, but while I was looking at them, they didn't move. The only things moving were fantasies, and memory pictures of my past and future, when I was in the honeysuckle place.

  The taste of the honeysuckle was a magical connection with this world where every leaf and insect was a friend and I was an intimate part of everything. Someone decided, one day, that the fence was just too rotten and that everything, old wood and old plants, had to be replaced with something new and clean and certainly safer. I was devastated. When I cried, no one understood why.

  But there were other places where I could go and be in my private world. I became a specialist in basements. My mother called it hiding, but I thought of it as escape. From what? Well, for instance, from having to practice the piano. Every day, as soon as I had completed an assignment, a practice run-through of an exercise which was supposed to be done twenty times daily, I could move another toothpick from the right hand treble clef ledge to the left hand bass clef ledge. But my mother never seemed to look at the size of the "completed" pile; she only looked at the shrinking "to be done" pile. It wouldn't have been ethical to move a toothpick from one ledge to the other - that would have been cheating - but if a toothpick accidentally slipped down between the keys, my conscience was clear, and that did seem to happen occasionally.

  Other than my uncle David's basement, the first one I truly got to know well was that of our neighbor, the co-owner of the honeysuckle fence. It belonged to an old, old man whose name was Mr. Smythe, pronounced with a long "i" and a soft "th" to rhyme with blithe or scythe.

  He was a book dealer, and the agent through whom my father bought his pulp-paper books.

  But he had received many volumes of Russian literature through Mr. Smythe as well. I remember the complete writings of Tolstoi, some fifty thick volumes of footnotes and memos and laundry-lists, in which just about the only words I could read were the non-Cyrillic imprint of the publisher on the first page which stated that the volumes were the Edition d'Etat and were published in Moscou. My ancient neighbor lived with his daughter, and some of her family as well. I never got to know any of them.

  But I certainly got to know the unbelievably large collection of books in the basement of that house. Thousands of books, all in dusty rows side by side, in neatly stacked wooden orange crates. Every nook and cranny revealed something new. I was always welcome to snoop and explore, and when I would run into Mr. Smythe he would always say: "Shake my hand, young man, and you will be able to say that you have shaken the hand that shook the hand of Mr.

  Lincoln." It seems that when he had been a small child, his father had taken him to Lincoln's inauguration. So I would shake his hand, and smile, and run away to wait for another day to continue my exploration of his magic collection.

  At about this time, I had developed a passion for stamps and stamp-collecting. I routinely visited the big offices of the Bank of Italy (it is now the Bank of America, I believe) and the secretaries would allow me to sift through the wastebaskets and tear off and take the big denomination stamps that never came in the day-to-day mail that my parents received. My mother had many letters and covers saved from her college days at Pullman and from her visit to Egypt, and these had really old stamps, from before I was born, which I carefully floated off and identified in the Scott's catalog. Then I discovered the wastebasket beside the desk of Mr.

  Smythe, and it was filled with the wrappers of books shipped from around the world. Stamps from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and many other unimaginable places.

  Mr. Smythe caught me one time with my nose down in his wastebasket. I was petrified that he would think me a spy or a misbehaver of some sort, but to my great relief he was amused that anyone would find value in the mailing covers of books rather than in the books themselves.

  He said that he would be happy to tear off the stamps from his mailings and save them for me in a little box that he put on a shelf alongside his desk. I would always look in that box when I wanted to further the stamp exploring adventure, and it was always filled with marvels of strange faces and strange country names. I don't think I said "Thank-you," but I certainly added many new, unknown countries to my collection.

  I have for the last few years kept a small cardboard box in the closet of my office, and whenever I receive an interesting cover or package through the mail, I take my scissors and clip off the stamps that are on it and slip the clipping into this box. Someday, somebody visiting me here just might have a six or eight year old along with him who has discovered the miracle of stamps. He will get the whole thing as a present from an old man to a little kid. He may remember me only as that funny old gray-haired person who had a lot of books in his office and got a lot of mail from around the world.

  And maybe, I just might shake his hand as well, and tell him that he will now be able to say that he had shaken the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of Mr. Lincoln.

  We had a basement in our own house as well. In this well-explored space, the front part was a concrete room where I set up my first chemistry lab. I think it was called Gilbert Chemistry Set and it contained real chemicals such as bicarbonate of soda and dilute acetic acid, and unfathomable mysteries such as logwood. I haven't, to this day, figured out what logwood is or what one is supposed to do with it. But I kept adding everything I could find to this collection.

  Stuff from the grocery store down the block, powders and liquids I found in garages and hardware stores. Things would fizz, and smell, and burn, and turn colors. I knew that if I could gather together enough different chemicals, every combination would be new, and would produce wonderful new results.

  The back of our basement, the area under the front of the house, was a somewhat mysterious place, and pretty much out of bounds. A friend of my father, a Mr. Peremov, was in some kind of furniture making business, and in our basement he kept large gunny sacks full of hardwood scraps, in many different shapes and sizes. That part of the basement had a bare dirt floor which sloped downward, and the big sacks promised magnificent things - stacking and building and all sorts of great possibilities - but when I tried to put their contents to use, my father found me and I was told the sacks were not to be touched, although I was never given a reason why. I developed a theory that basements were places where treasures could be found, be they pipe organs, stamps, or wooden blocks, especially in the back corners.

  Just four houses up the block was another basement, and it was so dark and scary that I persuaded a friend named Jack to go with me and we managed to find and light a small kerosene lantern and we explored the place to the very back wall. No treasures were to be found that time, but we were very lucky anyway, because when my mother found us later, we were both soaked to the skin with kerosene and it was a miracle we hadn't ignited ourselves.

  The axe came down pretty heavily about basements in general, for a while.

  Some years later, I was offered the chance for a private tour of a basement across the street from my uncle's house. The invitation was extended by a girl who was a couple of years older than I, and I was scared in an entirely new way, but intrigued and ready to explore the new kinds of mysterious things that might turn up. But my mother again appeared on the scene and the program was aborted.

  A psychologist with nothing better to do might have fun explaining why I decided to put three basements in the house I helped my parents build, just before World War II, here in Almond.

  My violin teacher was a Russian gentleman, a compatriot of my father, and connected with the Orthodox Church. I had to play in recitals in strange living-roo
ms, and turn pages for the accompanists to the first-generation Russian-American daughters who sang. My Russian language tutor was one of my father's co-emigres, and it was not until my fourth (and final) lesson that I provoked him to such fury that he tried to kick me (I had retreated under his dining room table) and I succeeding in biting him on the shin. What had triggered all this violence had been his insistence on my learning the structure of the female gander, and it was only much later that I unraveled the whole thing and realized that what he meant was, of course, gender.

  I had another favorite escape which was also a self-challenge, and that was to try to get from Spruce Street clear down to Walnut Street, through Live Oak Park, going from branch to branch in the tops of the trees, without letting my feet touch the ground at all, except for when I had to cross under the street to get to the other side. Once, I grabbed a branch that wouldn't hold my weight and fell with it to the ground and scratched up my knee, but I didn't mention it to anyone.

  One day, I went into the men's room in the park. There were remarkable pictures drawn on the walls, and I felt an uneasy guilt at having seen them. I never told anyone about that, either.

  I think my parents were in absolute terror that I might possibly learn any little something about whatever went on in the area of sex. Each felt that this aspect of my education was the responsibility of the other. I tried to piece it all together from the obvious mechanisms of masturbation, but there was nothing I could find in my parents' library that brought the female half of it into any logical focus. It was a time of prudery and total modesty and there were no clues, or, if there were, I didn't recognize them.

  I slept in a wide bed on the sun-deck on the west side of the top floor, in our house at Rose and Spruce. It was half open to the elements, and the other half was covered and protected.

  My father slept on a narrower bed across from me, and my mother had her double bed in the big bedroom just inside. They never slept together, to my knowledge.