13

The next day my dads came and, as always, forced me kicking and screaming into the car and drove to the country. They kept me there for a month - and I spent all the month of July feeling terribly depressed. All those days I stayed inside the dark, dirty hut; got ringworm from the cats - that’s probably all I can tell about July, 1999. Leaving aside the fact that due to my depression and the gloomy atmosphere around me I nearly lost my marbles.

One evening when my dads were going to visit some relatives living nearby I told them to lock me in the hut in case of Irinkas coming to ask me out to the nightclub where I didn’t want to go for the reasons mentioned above. This way they might come and, on seeing the padlock on the frontdoor, think that nobody was home and go away. Thus I was ridding myself of the negative communication with them and avoiding conflicts at the same time.

Being locked in I had to stay put - no approaching the windows, no turning on the light, no going out to the toilet, using a piss-pot if there was no way to hold it in. Of course, this kind of existence aggravated my already severe depression. But it couldn’t be helped anyway.

So, one evening as I was sitting alone locked in the dark hut I suddenly heard some strange voice calling my name from the outside.

I shrank. Had the locals got into the backyard? But the voice, hovewer, sounded male.

“I must’ve imagined it” I thought, but the indistinct voice from the backyard called my name again.

“Dad? Is that you?”

I cautiously unhooked the backdoor and, taking a flashlight, peeped out in the twilight. There was no one there.

“Hm...”

I got overwhelmed by fear. I couldn’t have imagined it twice! And my dads, as ill luck would have it, had got stuck somewhere and weren’t coming…

I recalled Irinkas telling me the history of this hut the year before that. My parents and I had lived in another house before - the house of my mom’s family, her sisters and their husbands and kids. After the death of my grandads, my mom’s elder sister, a bossy rough woman hating my guts, had kicked us out. My submissive mother had succumbed and ended up hitting the road with all her s***s. It was then she and my father had found this abandoned wreck of a house at the very end of the hamlet. They'd moved in it, fixed somehow the leaky roof, whitewashed the fireplace, brought in electricity. But I disliked this hut badly; I just couldn’t stand this horrible crypt. And then Irinkas told me that the house had been cursed that’s why it had stayed abandoned for such a long time.

“Many years ago - during war - a woman lived in this house. One February night a crippled soldier knocked at her door. “Let me stay the night in your house” he said. “I am wounded, have come from far away.” And that woman was nasty and stingy. She must have thought the soldier was gonna ask her for food, too. “Clear off!” she said and slammed the door in the cripple’s face. And then he said: “I curse this house and the people living in it, and the people who will.” Having said so he went out in the field, whistled - and a heavy snowstorm began, and wiped off both the woman and the soldier…”

It was in vain that I besought my parents not to move into this house, telling them that terrible story - they were hopelessly stubborn. “Old wives’ tales!” they would say every time.

Actually, I don’t consider myself superstitious and like any reasonable person I tend to question any hypothesis, but the fact remains. Everything that has happened since we moved in that cursed house is not a fiction or a product of my morbid imagination. The fruits of that curse I’ve been reaping up till now as I am neither happy nor lucky in anything, although I bend over backwards trying to do whatever I can. That curse has hit my parents as well…

In the meantime they, deaf, dumb and stiff-necked, settled in this rotten black-aured hut, not noticing or not willing to notice the putrid, distructive fluids of the cursed house.

Soon after that weird incident with the ghost voice calling my name I had a nightmare.

I dreamed about my grandmother's villa. But it looked rather strange - instead of the neat currant bushes and flower beds Gran Zoya was usually taking such a proper care of - there was faded grass, brown and rotten. Instead of the villa itself there were debris over which crows circled and crowed. And in the middle of the neglected, ruined yard there was a long thin pole, creaking and swaying in the wind, disappearing high in the dark-grey heavy clouds. And at its very peak there was a black flag fluttering in the gloomy sky like a sign of a looming disaster…

And there was the strange voice again - like grandfather’s - whispering my name right into my ear.

“No… No… Noooooooo!!!”

I woke up screaming and tossing my head about the pillow.

“What the hell?!” my father muttered woken up by my scream.

“Take me out of here! I can’t stay here any longer… Please, take me out of here!!!” I besought my parents with tears.

“We will when the vacation is over.” replied my father.

“But I can’t take it anymore! I feel awful!!!”

“Well, that’s your problem”

They were just intractable. Nothing worked with them - neither my tears nor my tantrums. As dumb as stumps on the moor they planted the seeds of alienation inside of me forever. And, moreover, even then I already knew for sure that I didn’t want to continue their cursed line and I was not going to.