Midsummer Games
by Vladimir Soloukhin
There's not a lot to do for fun in our village on a hot day in July, really. You can't go into the woods. "You'd sizzle," as they say around here. For the woods, a nice cool cloudy day is best. Even a fine rain has a unique charm. At times like now the heat by itself is the least of your worries. There are mosquitoes, horseflies; no, in heat like this, the woods are certainly out. It's hot in the fields and the open meadow too, but why go there anyway? True, it's the peak of the wildflower season, and you can pick all the flowers you want. But flowers will be here tomorrow ...
So my little nine-year-old Natasha was bored. Worse than that, she and her small friends had had an argument over something. They were in quite a huff, and not playing together at all. So Natasha was left all alone with the long long hot hot July day.
Of course it wasn't my job to entertain her. I needed to spend more time at my desk. But when you know there's a nine-year-old scamp from the city fidgeting and fretting somewhere nearby, you know it's something that needs attending to. How could I amuse her?
"Just you wait and see what I'm going to make for you," I said.
"What?"
"A fine chvikalka!"
My fine city girl had never heard this word before. It didn't matter. It would be all the more interesting for her to watch and find out.
Children and the time we spend playing with them are the only real chance an adult has to revisit childhood, to take a magic time machine and go back, even for half an hour. Can you imagine three adult, middle-aged, or elderly people getting together and playing hide-and-seek? Or blind man's buff? Or building toy dams along the stream and floating paper ships on the water? But if an adult is with a child and showing him or her how it's done, teaching them various games, he'll run and jump and play like a child himself.
Take me, for instance -- already almost 60 years of age, sitting at my desk thinking about my article that I need to write about the Bolshoi. How odd if suddenly, on my own, without little Natasha, I were to go and make a chvikalka. Or suggest a game of hide-and-seek to my 70-year-old sister.
But with Natasha it's not only permissible, it's normal and expected. If any of our neighbors happens to pass by, let them look -- old Grandpa is only making a chvikalka for little Natasha, who is looking on with eyes big as saucers.
I had been overwhelmed by the storms of my own childhood. I have a fine sharp knife now. In my childhood, I never had a decent knife. If by luck I got hold of anything good, somehow I always lost it. Or maybe some envious boy, one of my pals, would pinch it.
But now I have just the knife. Perfect! How I would have loved one just like it when I was a boy. It has a leather sheath, and is small, but it's a real dagger just the same. You can hang it on your belt. I saw it at the Sunday market in Los Angeles, at the stall of an old Mexican fellow, and I realized at once what a joy it would be to gather mushrooms with a knife like that. The man asked three dollars, and I didn't grudge it. So now I have a nice sharp knife, and that's a good thing, for every job can be a pleasure instead of a burden if you have the right tool in your hands.
Natasha and I set to work, relishing every movement. First we went into the garden, our neglected garden, overgrown with various wild plants, to choose the best specimen we could find. What we needed was a tall, hollow-stemmed angelica.
We used to do the same thing when we were children, here, in the garden or the vegetable patch. But only beside the fence or in the dense thickets of blackthorn, for the rest of the garden and vegetable patch was closely tended. There were neat rows of vegetables in one spot; in another patch there were raspberry canes; in a third corner, the grass was cut for hay.
Now everything grows as it pleases — the nettles and motherwort, the bitter burdock and the angelica that we needed. It grew along the hedge in thick swatches like white clouds, and in the blackthorn bushes (where the need to stretch upward was greater), the tendrils stretched even taller than I. If you lifted your arm, you couldn't reach the top, an umbrella-like cluster of flowers.
Angelica grows in joints. At the foot just above the earth, you find the thickest tube. Then a sort of node. Feathery leaves branch sideways from this node and above is another tubular stem, thinner than the first but usually longer. It, too, ends in a node, more feathery leaves, and another tube of stem. And so on for several joints, higher and higher, and at the top blooms the flower-cluster of umbrellas: the thin stems branch and multiply, and each fine stem supports a lacy umbrella with tiny white flowers — a true marvel of nature.
Yet when I was a boy, angelica was not even considered a flower. Daisies were flowers, and bluebells and buttercups were flowers. But what sort of flower was angelica? To tell the truth, we didn't even have a name for this plant and had never heard the word. It was just another weed. And we used to say, "Chvikalkas are growing." "Let's go and cut some chvikalkas."
"There," I said to Natasha, "chvikalkas are growing over there. We'll choose the very best."
"Which one is the best one?"
"It should be long and thick. And it should have strong firm sides."
The stems of the angelica are covered with longitudinal ribs, and this makes them tough. Natasha spotted this at once.
"The one with the most ribs?" she asked.
"Ribs are good, but we want the hollow inside to be as big, big as can be. The walls may be thick, with lots of ribs, but the hole inside can still be small, and that isn't what we want. Look, here -- this one seems as if it'd be right."
With a crosswise jerk of my knife at ground level, I cut a tall branching plant, and turned the cut end to Natasha.
"See what a big hole it has? That's the thing we need. And the sides are strong. We've got a good one here."
When I first grasped the plant with my left hand, I hadn't felt its weight. But now I was quite aware of its heaviness. One minute it was supporting itself and the next its whole weight was in my left hand. Another marvel, really — the way a plant grows; generating so much of its body from air and water and yet transforming it into such a juicy green mass.
"Now we take this joint and cut it like this, so that the other end, with the node on it, is blocked."
The cut on the node was shaped like a figure-eight. Because both the joint of the stem and the base of the leaf both grow out of the node.
"Now we'll take something sharp and pointed, and put a little hole in the blocked end."
"A nail?" Natasha asked at once.
"A nail would do. But when I was a boy we used to use spines from a blackthorn bush."
I broke a dark brown thorn off a plant near at hand, a thorn shorter than a match but as strong as bone.
"See how strong and sharp the thorns are? We don't need a nail. Look...."
The thorn sank with ease into the green pulp of the cut. For a moment the resistance of the skin could be felt, and then the point sank into the emptiness of the hollow stem. We had pierced our hole.
"Now we'll cut a young twig. A straight thin one. A young shoot. But strong enough not to bend. I'll tell you a secret. When I was as small as you are, only much much stupider than you, I ..."
"Why were you stupider?"
"Well, you're a bright girl to start with. And you have books and watch television every day and gather a lot of knowledge and sense from all over. But we never saw anything in those days, except our own little village. Oh, I'm sure if you had been in my place then, you would never have done anything so stupid."
"What did you do?"
"I started to make a chvikalka just like this. And I needed a straight, thin, strong twig just like this. Now two years before, there had been a very severe winter that killed everything in all the gardens in our village. Our garden too. And so spring came, and it was time for the leaves to come out, but the apple trees just stood there black and dead.
Then on one of the apple trees, our very favorite apple tree, a shoot began to grow out. Out of the trunk, not far from the ground, a living twig began to grow. Just imagine! It might have grown into a whole new apple tree just like the original. A new 'Limey'. We used to call those sorts of apple trees 'Limeys' because the apples on it were sweet and fragrant as the white honey you get from lime blossoms."
"Didn't it grow? Why not?"
"See, that's what I'm telling you. I was stupid then. I went and cut that young shoot, to make a chvikalka."
"No, Grandpa!"
"That shoot was really straight. It really was a very straight twig."
"You're right, I wouldn't have done something like that. What happened? Were you punished?"
"I wish I had been, it would have been easier. My father almost cried. He didn't, of course. But he nearly did. I'm still ashamed even now of what I did."
"But you didn't mean any harm. You were stupid!"
"See, that's what I mean, you're our bright girl, you understand things. Just the same, I regret that apple tree to this day. One snick — and that's the end of a whole big beautiful tree with pink and white blossoms and sweet fragrant apples. So do you see now what it means to go slashing around with a knife? This blackthorn here -- what a lot of it there is, eh? Nature won't be any worse off if we cut one twig from all this. It needs cutting back. Look how it's spreading and taking over the ground. It'll be all over the whole garden soon. I'll have to sharpen a good ax to deal with it then.... "
"So first it's wrong to cut one twig; but other twigs don't matter?"
"Yes. That's what people have brains for, to know what to cut down and what to leave alone."
While we had been discussing these lofty subjects, I had been peeling. I'd peeled the twig, and now we needed some fibers. It would have been simpler to use cotton wool, but I wanted to do it the way we used to do it when we were children. And we used fibers then. We would go to the bathhouse, which was there in the garden, as neglected as badly as the garden itself, and in the spaces between the logs we could find and pull out some old dried-up fibers.
The task was to wind the fibers evenly around the end of the twig. If the fibers had been long and fresh, it would be easy. You take a long strand and start from the very end of the twig, from the cut edge, and wind the fibers around part of it until your strand runs out. You give the last few hairs a lick to keep them down, and they stick to the twig. Then they get properly soaked in water.
But the fibers we had gotten from the bathhouse were weak and rotten and prickly, barely fibrous at all. When I had wound it round the end of the twig as tightly as possible, I realized it wouldn't hold on its own, and I would secure it with a bit of thread.
When we were boys, we would always make the same mistake. When the fibers are dry, they move freely in the slit in the chvikalka, so you try to put on more. But then it gets wet and swells and at last the green tube of the chvikalka cracks open on one side of the middle, and instead of drawing water firmly in and then pushing its jet out, it dribbles feebly.
I twisted on about the right amount of fiber now, keeping those boyhood blunders in mind.
"Let's try it. Off you go, bring a scoop of water."
Natasha had not understood till the last minute what we were making and what it was for. I put the twig with the fibers wound around its end into the green tube and pushed it down as far as it would go. I put the end of the tube into the scoop and tugged the twig toward me. It moved easily, still idling as it were, for the fibers were still not yet wet. I repeated this movement several times without taking the tube out, until finally I felt my chvikalka drawing in water and pushing it out.
Finally I drew in as much water as possible, turned the end of the tube up, and pointed it into the distance, and a slim transparent jet of water spurted out. It had a range of about 10 steps and then the fun started. Natasha aimed at a hen, at the cat and at a sparrow on a branch of the lime tree. They bounded off screeching. Delighted, she looked round to see what else she could spray and scare.
"Did you fight duels with these chvikalkas?" she asked.
"There were a lot of us boys. Each of us would get a chvikalka. Then we'd have a war. Three against three or five against five. By the pond or the river, where there was lots of water. Or else we'd splash the girls. We would go to where they were playing, with our chvikalkas hidden behind our backs...."
Soon it was time for dinner and an afternoon snooze. I left the chvikalka with Natasha, and when I woke up, I heard she and her little girl friends squealing and laughing happily on the street outside the window. It wasn't difficult to guess from the sound of it that they were spraying each other.
"So Natasha has taught them, and they've made themselves chvikalkas from bits of angelica too," I thought. "Well, after all, there isn't all that much to it."
But when I went out into the street, I saw the chvikalka I had made. It was lying beside the porch, abandoned and unnecessary. Natasha was chasing the girls and holding an old plastic shampoo bottle with soft sides. She had made a hole in the screw cap and filled the bottle with water, so that now when she pressed the sides of the bottle, a jet of water spurted from it. The jet didn't go any further than the one from my chvikalka, but then you didn't need to refill it every time either — this was an automatic rifle, a machine gun, a quick-firing multishell cannon instead of a muzzle-loader.
Natasha saw me and ran up to me and showed me her invention with delight. What could I say? People grow up differently generation after generation, and we go on looking at them as though they were the same as ourselves. Different times, different children, different games.
