Dobryd by Ann Charney Read Free Book Online

was highly intoxicating. The briskest trade, the quickest turnover, occurred here.
    My aunt, who could never bear to disappoint me, would urge me to choose something, even though we both knew the extravagance would annoy my mother. The choice was not easy. There were so many things I liked. The dishes the farmers made were the kind they normally ate themselves—some combination of flour and potatoes flavoured with fried onions or cabbage. There was a dessert that I particularly liked—deep-fried slices of apple—called apples-in-pyjamas. The name was the chief reason I chose it so often.
    The day passed quickly for me. When it grew dark we made our way home. Often my mother and Yuri would already be there waiting for us. If they were not too tired, or too preoccupied with other matters, I would be allowed to tell about my day in the market. I loved those moments. We sat around the table and I held their attention with my words. It would have been hard for me to decide at that time which I enjoyed more—the experience itself or the opportunity it gave me for reworking that experience into a story.
    At this time the marketplace seemed to me all wonder and enchantment. I saw it with the eyes of a five-year-old. But somehow, while I created games and stories around it, my mind also absorbed other kinds of information which at the time I could not understand. Years later I realized that the transactions of the marketplace, the ordinary daily events that had filled my imagination, had had a deep, long-lasting influence. They were my first lessons in the rules of life and I did not forget them. Many of the discoveries I made later in life seemed to have been foreshadowed by the events I watched from my aunt’s booth in the marketplace.

III
    We were settled in Dobryd and our life had acquired its own rhythm. We had our home, my mother worked for the Russians as a translator, and my aunt spent her days in the marketplace, selling and trading. My uncle had returned to his regiment and it was some time before he rejoined us. I had no school to go to, and so for the most part I did as I pleased.
    I was never lonely or bored. My days were filled with the excitement of constant discovery. For one thing, at about this time I became involved with other children for the first time in my life. At first there were no children in our building, but the street was full of them—children who roamed the town in gangs of all ages, ignored by everyone else.
    Where had they come from, I wondered. Who were they? Somehow I had always known that other children existed, even during the days in the loft. But this was different. They were not as I had imagined them. Nothing in my past had prepared me for the experience of actually being with them, sharing their games, becoming a part of their world. I was something of a freak amongst them. I could read and write and recite long poems and keep still for hours, but I had no idea what children did when they played together, nor what it meant to be part of a group. I came to them with the conception of myself as a unique, solitary person, distinct and separate from all others. It never occurred to me that I might find my likeness in another being.
    But these children seemed not to notice anything peculiar or special about me. I was just another kid, in a world where the word “normal” had lost its meaning. When I was with them, running down a street, I felt that for that moment we were all alike. My own private self seemed to fall away, and I felt myself change, blending physically with other arms and legs that mimicked my own, with voices that drowned mine.
    Sometimes it seemed to me that I was two people—one running, laughing, indistinguishable from the rest, the other, hidden, watching, marvelling at their freedom and my own abandonment.
    In the days that followed I acquired two particular friends of my own. A Russian boy, Kolek, and a Polish girl, Eva. They were about