Selected Poetry / Избранное (англ.)

And as if that wasn’t enough, the lame one caressed Sadri all the time, repeating deliberately to upset me: «My own brother! My real brother!»

V

Autumn arrived. When I finished my usual work on the potato harvest, I was sent to a madrassah (not the one I attended together with the girls at the abystai’s house). After I learned the lines and verses of the «Haftiak» very fast in school, I turned to the ayats of «Badavam» and «Kisekbash». And since I coped with this assignment quickly as well and I sat around for a long time doing nothing, they began to ask me to tutor boys who had fallen behind.

One of these boys was the son of a rich man from our village, and he invited me to his house sometimes as his tutor for some tea and cake with spelt flour.

On the one hand, I was a good student, on the other hand, I wasn’t so bad with house chores either. In the morning I opened the valve of the stove and I shut it later; I made bundles of straw to get the fire going; I took the cow out to join the herd and went out to meet her in the evening.

My father and I would sometimes go to the bazaar in Etna during the summer. I watched the horses while he made the rounds of the marketplace on his business.

The esteemed Fatkherakhman, our village mullah, was probably my late father’s friend or studied at the madrassah with him, I don’t know the real story, but for some reason he would give me five kopecks every week.

I spent the money buying white bread at the bazaar in Etna and would eat the bread along our return trip home.

As I sat behind him on the wagon, eating the bread, my father would turn to me occasionally and say: «Leave some of your bread for mother!» «All right», – I said. But even though I pinched off and ate it in tiny pieces, I can’t remember it there was anything left to give to my mother.

Since the Kyrlai village was the place where I opened my eyes to the world, I felt I had to dwell on these memories a little longer.

That is why I will write several paragraphs about the changes, which took place there and about some other things preserved in my memory, and I will then leave Kyrlai.

Sazhida apa suffered from tuberculosis for a very long time. She was in such a bad way that father had to carry her on his back to the bathhouse or wherever else she needed to go. In the end she died.