I was a sickly child. Always sick, I mean. I was born slightly premature and it took a lot of years for me to recover from this bad beginning. When the cold weather began in September I would turn pale, drop weight off my already impossibly spare ribs, and acquire an invalid’s cough. All night, against the walls of our little house, my ‘heh-heh’ child’s cough would converse with the exhaustion-breaths of Papa-Petr asleep on his back and the inaudible but unmistakable ghost of Mama’s dreams.
It would not cease through October or November, perhaps getting a little better once the freeze finalized itself mid-December. Some weeks after my third birthday though, in the middle of a terrific snow storm – with Papa-Petr and Mama stuck with young Petr and I together all day in our little house – my little ‘heh-heh’ sucked deeply back into my stomach, calling up phlegm and bile and I woke myself that morning with a whooping cough.
Mama picked me up out of my infants bed there beside Young Petr – a bed of old blankets made to mattress us stuffed with last summers’ hay. Mama draped me with her heavy dun smock and held me to her breast like hiding me from soldiers seeking for the Christ. She walked me to the corner of the room and rocked from her heels to the balls of her feet – leaning against the wall, then reeling back so I thought she would tumble to the floor dashing both our heads on the cemented soil.
It was early morning. The light that entered our room through cracks here and there and there was nearly green. I did not know that it came through a shell of freshly fallen snow. Papa-Petr broke through this shell and the door fell inwards before him. He carried in his arms an enormous armload of fire wood.
“Don’t know if I’ll be able to get to the wood shed at all if the snow keeps on falling like this,” he said. “Mama, I know you don’t like my bringing so much fire wood inside at once. Can you give me a hand putting this stack down so’s I don’t hit anything… it’s hard to move about.”
He looked up then at Mama and me in the corner. Mama didn’t say anything to him, just coo’d at me and massaged the pocket of my throat with the ball of her index finger.
“Is our little prince sick again?” Papa-Petr asked, the irritation like gravel embedded in the tar of his voice. “Mama, what are we going to do with this boy?”
Mama looked over her shoulder at him standing in the doorway with his load of wood. Her eyes glistened with the help of the light released into the house through the door and magnified off the snow.
“Your prince,” she said, “is becoming another Peter the Great here in this icebox. Can you build a fire now with your precious bundle there?”
Papa-Petr shifted his arms beneath the cord of wood he held against his chin but did not move to put it down. Like the coal nub eyes of a snowman, he glared at me with hatred there protected in Mama’s arms. “Maybe pneumonia is best for him and for all of us,” he said.
Mama said nothing and whispered “shhhh…” in my ear. I let loose with a terrible string of this cough, my face went red and my eyes even rolled back looking for oxygen in my own sloping brow that I inherited from Papa.
“You see?” said Papa as he dropped the wood against the floor. A ridge of soil broke away where the wood struck it by an edge and a wider berth of the floor scaled like the back of a garden snake.
“Damn it Petr, look what you’ve done,” said Mama.
And then she looked back at me in her arms. I was no longer coughing, but pecking the air for a breath in that would not go; like a falling man seeking something to grasp onto.
Outside the snow kept falling.
