7

The villa of my grandmother Zoya was probably one of the few places I felt rather good at. I had many friends all over the neighborhood so I was hanging out with them from morning till night. We would have a lot of fun together, riding bicycles, swimming in the lake until we got blue in the face, gathering in the upstairs of Nadya’s house, playing all sort of games: cards, hide-and-seek, blind man’s bluff…

We would also entertain ourselves with random phone calling. Back those days mobile phones weren’t just as widely spread among simple folks; so people in our neighborhood would use the old phone booth in the main street - it was the only spot in the whole village to make calls from.

The calls were free, and from early morning there had always been a crowd lining up to the phone booth. It never dispersed as the day went on, but became even bigger. The calls were unlimited, so the callers were not in a hurry to get off the phone. In our days of mobile technologies people, indeed, have learned to keep it short and to the point in order to save their time and money. But back then people lacked this skill for it was quite useless. So, the ones waiting in the queue were compelled to hear out the incessant prattling of some old Aunt Anna:

“Hey, Nadya! Hello-o-o! I say hello!!! How are ya?… Great! I say, great!.. Yeah… How’s the weather? Been raining a lot? What?.. Oh yeah, yeah, it’s been raining cats and dogs over here, too… What did you say? Come again?… Lovely weather for ducks, yeah…” - etc, etc.

Only forty minutes after, when Aunt Anna had got her fill of talk and finally started saying goodbye, everybody knew that her farewell would at least take another twenty minutes.

Now, looking back from the vantage point of a different time things like a two-hour-long idle conversation and half-an-hour-long goodbye on the phone seem implausible. Now the phone in my terms is something like an emergency button used only in cases of absolute necessity. So, my usual phone conversation now will never go over this limit:

“Hi, where are you? How long will you be? Ok.”

That’s enough! Idle words such as “hello, how are you, ok then, I gotta go now, it was nice talking to you, see you later, bye-bye” are unneeded and expected to fall into disuse soon, because they waste your time which is limited as it is.

But back those days we were young and had all the time in the world. So, late in the afternoon, when the bored villagers had already finished flapping their jaws on the phone and left the phone booth, we rushed into there to have fun. We would dial random numbers and crack jokes depending on who had picked up. If there was a pleasant young male voice at the end of the line - we giggled foolishly, trying to flirt. If the voice was old, female or childish - we had a couple of hackneyed tricks for such cases:

“Hello, is this the home of Hares?

“No.”

“Then why are your ears sticking out the phone?”

Or we would pose as “poll managers” and ask tricky questions:

“How many times a week do you have sex? In what positions? Do you use a condom?”

Sometimes we were told to stop goofing around and go do our homework. One pleasant male voice, as we had tried to flirt with him, said kindly:

“Someone missing a good f**k, huh?”

I bet any of us girls would have rather died of embarrassment if such things had been said to her in private. But, as we were all united together, under the illusion of safety in the crowd - all the insults rolled off us like water off a duck’s back. We just didn’t give a flying f**k, as we used to say.

It is not without reason that even crimes are easier done in the crowd than single-handedly. At no time do people feel the need to flock together so pressing as in their teens, when they are most vulnerable to external influence. A lone reed is easy to break, a bunch is not.

So we held on to one another - not because we were soul mates sharing the same common ground and other kinds of bullshit usually mentioned by grown-ups teaching us how to pick up good friends. Even then any of us vaguely realized that we were different and when the time came our paths would diverge forever. But meanwhile we were huddling together to feel safer and more confident - and we sincerely believed that our friendship would never end.