… So Mother would come to the hill, sit down on a stone, sob and cry her eyes out, soak herself with bitter tears, and remember her girlfriends, fair maidens, or dream about those de-portmunt stores. And all the streets, she said, were covered with assfelt. That's like a sort of foam, but hard, black, you fall down on it and you don't fall through. If it was summer weather, Mother would sit and cry, and Benedikt would play in the dirt, making mud pies in the clay, or picking off yellers and sticking them in the ground like he was building a fence. Wide-open spaces all around: hills and streams, a warm breeze, he'd wander about-the grass would wave, and the sun rolled across the sky like a great pancake, over the fields, over the forests, to the Blue Mountains.
Our town, our home sweet homeland, is called Fyodor-Kuzmichsk, and before that, Mother says, it was called Ivan-Porfirichsk, and before that Sergei-Sergeichsk, and still before that Southern Warehouses, and way back when- Moscow.
BUKI
When he was small, Benedikt's father taught him all kinds of handiwork. Making a stone ax was a chore. But he could do it. He could build an izba-dovetailed, beveled, any old way you like. He knew how to build a bathhouse and heat the stones. True, his father didn't like to wash. Bears, he'd say, live just fine without any baths. But Benedikt liked it. He'd crawl into the bathhouse, into the warm insides, splash egg kvas on the rocks for the smell, steam up some elfir branches, and give his backside a good thrashing.