In the urban-type settlement Sorochinsk, in the Orenburg region, my parents moved in 1956 from the polluted Orsk in order to improve the health of my father-front-line soldier with clean air and rural food. But this was, if not a mistake, then definitely a great stupidity!
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Father was immediately called up for military field training in the N-military camps as a reserve sergeant. And that area, as it soon became clear, from the point of view of ecology, was completely unsuitable for front-line soldiers with bullet holes. Here in the 1960s, the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested!
Parents almost immediately started building their own home.
As a cheap improvised material for construction, they began to use clay, which was mined with shovels right there, in the courtyard of the dugout, in which we made a temporary dwelling. For this purpose, special adobe bricks were molded from clay. These are such large homemade blocks of clay, straw and water. They were made by hand using a wooden mold and baked in the sun.
Since a lot of mortar was required to produce such blocks, my father rented a couple of horses somewhere. The horses had to walk along a dug-up circle of clay, where they poured water and threw straw (to bind the clay mass). But then the oddities began!
First, the water, as soon as we had time to fill it, quickly disappeared somewhere. And secondly, there were suddenly problems with the horses. The horsemen simply did not want to go into a circle with clay. They rushed away, snored, foam appeared on their faces, tore the reins and whinnied loudly, desperately. The animals' eyes were just bloodshot! Father tried to drive them both with a whip and with the help of "gingerbread", but it was all in vain!
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Then one old man from the local came up: “Don't torture the cattle, master! And do not suffer yourself and do not engage in nonsense! This is not a good sign! Horses must be feeling unkind!"
His parents did not believe him, but they gave the horses back, and the subsequent kneading was done by my mother, although my brother sometimes helped her. Father and I only brought water from the well and also threw in straw. Once, having chosen the next batch of clay, the parents left with us to another village to visit. And when we returned in the late afternoon, we were simply horrified …
Local teenagers, having dug out the bottom of a pit from under an earthen solution, took out and put human skulls on sticks. The old man was right. It turned out that under our future house there was an old Tatar cemetery.
HOLIDAY BISHKUNAK
With a sin in half, the house was nevertheless built by us. But there was no water nearby and electricity was not yet supplied. And then, under the roof of the new house, various problems began to arise. The Muslim holiday Bishkunak (meaning a cold snap) was approaching, but my father nevertheless tonsured our three goats, which were toiling from the heat, at the end of May, and sent them to the herd.
According to legend, in ancient times, five Muslim brothers from the Bashkirs returned from guests lightly dressed. The road ran across the steppe. Suddenly a strong snowstorm began, and the travelers, having lost their way, remained in the steppe, freezing from the cold! After that incident, the nomads went to spend the night not earlier than a holiday, when the danger of cold weather was no longer foreseen.
But my parent did not attach any importance to this superstition. As a result, our completely “undressed” cattle, caught by an unexpected gale with rain and snow in the steppe, died from the cold. The family, where there was only one father working, was left completely without milk and meat.
"NICKY" SHIRT
Trouble in the newly built house continued to happen with frightening regularity.
Once, immediately after a strong May thunderstorm, my mother went out into the yard to take off her father's forgotten shirt that was hanging on the rack for drying clothes. She, of course, got pretty wet after the last shower. It had to be wrung out and then dried.
Soon I heard screams in the yard. It turned out that as soon as the mother grabbed her shirt, she was … electrocuted!
Together with my father, we examined the scene and found the cause of the trouble. It turned out that instead of the usual clothesline, my father, like many local residents, used thick aluminum wire, in which static electricity was formed after the thunderstorm. It's good that my mother did not suffer much.
DISPUTE BY DISPUTE
There was no way to get a higher education in the village, so our family decided to sell this house and return back to the city of Orsk, where numerous relatives lived.
For some time we kept in touch with our former neighbors. About a year later, we learned that our former house in Sorochinsk had unexpectedly burnt down from a fire. Presumably the fault was a short circuit, or maybe an accidental lightning strike!
Alas, not only the fate of this house, but also our own life was unenviable. As a child, while swimming in a nearby pool, my brother carried some kind of infection, as a result he lost his sight. Then he married early and unsuccessfully and soon divorced. And having contacted a bad company, he stole chickens from a poultry farm and earned a term.
By this time, my mother's brother, and my uncle, unexpectedly left his first family and married another woman, a Tatar by nationality. By a mystical coincidence, my brother, returning from the colony, also married a Tatar girl. Relatives, I remember, then all were surprised at this circumstance and a little teased! Mom, from the stress associated with my younger brother, began to suffer from a leg disease - she got it when she kneaded clay in icy water during the construction of the ill-fated village house. Soon my mother died. And my father lived to be almost 85 years old.
After my father's death, purely by chance, I learned about the secret that my parents were hiding from me. It turned out that my mother and father were not relatives to me, but only adopted. We left for the village of Sorochinsk not for the sake of changing the climate or for some other reason, but to be away from prying eyes and unnecessary inquiries from relatives and friends!
Wishing to find traces of my biological mother as soon as possible, I began to actively question my relatives on the maternal side. This was my fatal mistake! My relatives quickly remembered that I was not their own. And soon I received bad news. No sooner had I arrived from the Southern Urals to my place in Kaliningrad, where I settled, when my brother and uncle, with whom I was sitting together yesterday at the festive table, suddenly sued me with the aim of depriving me of my share of the inheritance.
So our house, built on other people's bones, continued to annoy and ruin our lives. I didn’t start to conflict with my former relatives….
I thought about everything that happened for a long time. In the end, I realized that the desecration, albeit not intentional, of Muslim graves gave rise to a chain of those mystical phenomena and troubles that I described. It is quite possible that this could have been avoided if the parents had then listened to the voice of the elder and had not built a house on other people's bones!
Yuri KUKHLIVSKY, Kaliningrad