Selected Poetry / Избранное (англ.)

Just as uncle Sagdi promised, my new mother came out to meet me and opened the gate. With an expression of welcome on her face she lifted me from the cart and took me inside the house.

After he finished whatever had to be done in the yard and unharnessed the horse, my new father entered the house. Immediately upon entering, he turned to my mother. «Hurry up, wife! Bring the kid some katyk and bread», – he requested.

Mother quickly pullet a jar of katyk from the under-floor cellar and gave me half of a rather large chunk of bread.

I hadn’t eaten practically anything since we began our journey from Kazan, so I instantly and with relish consumed both the bread and sour milk.

Once I was through, I went outside with my mother’s permission. Afraid I might get lost, I walked, looking back all the while, when I was suddenly surrounded by a bunch of boys who appeared out of nowhere.

The local boys stared at me with undisguised amazement. They were used to running every day from one end of the village to the other but they had never seen me before; besides, I was wearing a cotton shirt with a border, the kind worn in Kazan, and an embroidered skullcap on my head, inlaid with colored velvet, which my Kazan mother made for me as a farewell gift.

After gaping at me like that, they ran away. Today, I still couldn’t join them, so I went home.

I went inside and found two grown-up girls there (for some reason I hadn’t noticed them before while I was eating the yogurt).

One of them was plump, rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed, and the other was a lame girl, a thin, pale creature with crutches under her arms.

When my mother said to me: «These are your older sisters: one is Sazhida apa the other Sabira apa, go and say hello to them», – I went over cautiously and shook their hands. It turned out that these were uncle Sagdi’s daughters and the name of the lame one was Sazhida.

Just as my uncle told me along the way, there was no shortage in the house of milk, katyk and potatoes.

A month or a bit more after my arrival, it was harvest time. Father, mother and my two sisters began to go to work in the field.

I didn’t have to go to harvest. I would run around the village with the boys and spend days wallowing in the meadows.