My first memory is of my third birthday. Before that… there’s imagery, colours, sounds, feelings, but I don’t trust in them. It could all as well be my imagining myself as an infant from seeing myself in infants as it could be actual memory. I remember being held my Mama. I remember Papa-Petr as a series of entrances. Bursting through the door of our wooden house with cold or dry sun sashaying in a corner of a moment later like a smell. The glad feeling of an infant greeting his father.
But my first real memory is of my third birthday. My memory does not begin with waking up that day. It is not a sequential, fluid thing with a beginning like awakening and a conscious end. It is a flash – this memory – the sulfur flash of a match as it sparks.
This is all:
I am a small boy, exactly three years old. I am not yet aware of being young. My Mama is life and Papa-Petr is a looming god. I do not know that I will grow, or that the days pass because the earth encircles the sun, nor that I am one of billions alive on this planet enslaved by these days.
It is my birthday but I don’t know it. Mama is pregnant again with my sister Manya but I don’t know it. I am sitting under the table in the middle of the room. It is a heavy table. Papa-Petr made it. The underside of this table is unfinished wood. The grain runs wild; breaking out of their dual-dimension pattern with ragged splinters and frayed Swede saw planed boarding.
I am sitting naked on a clean wool blanket on the dirt floor. We have two rooms in our house and the dirt floor extends through the whole thing. This floor is pounded hard and almost clean, but hell rains upon us from the flailing arms of Mama if we spill water on this floor.
Young Petr is only one and a half years older than me. He is standing near Mama who is cooking. She is humming a sweet song too quietly for me to hear what it is. Young Petr looks up at Mama who occasionally asks him to hold a spoon that she is using to stir the broth in the mutton soup she is slow-boiling. When he gets ahold of this whittled wooden spoon in his little knuckle-less fist, he turns his head to me lips pursed, eyes smiling, brow piqued, spoon aloft.
I don’t know that mutton stew is a special supper. I know that Young Petr is an РЕБЕНОК and I want to hit him.
Papa-Petr comes in the door with a blast of dark frigid air. Mama turns to him, wiping her hands on her apron and smiling. Papa’s eyes are set back deep in his face. “What МЕД?” Mama said.
Papa would not say. He would not speak. He sat at the table with his boots on. Reached down and patted me on the head. I moved closer to him, leaned against the table leg nearest him, but did not touch him – his boots and pants cold cold cold.
