Translated material
From chestnut to plane tree. Oleg Kashin* - about the roofs of his house
Oleg Kashin
The collection “House Number,” a joint project between Republic and Vidim Books, is a unique testimony to the fifth year of a full-scale war. The authors of the “literary issue” of Republic are Dmitry Glukhovsky*, Polina Barskova*, Polina Aronson, Mikhail Yampolsky, Elena Fanailova, Vladimir Sorokin and many others. The collection can be pre-ordered on the publisher's website. And we are publishing one of the most piercing texts - in it the writer and publicist Oleg Kashin recalls his family homes.
One of the first memories in my life is the calluses on my father’s hands; Later, I would see many times in (mostly Soviet) literature the image of my father’s calluses, but those, the first and only ones, I will remember forever: he returned and showed his bloody palms in surprise - to my mother, to me, and, probably, to myself. It was a cleanup day in our housing construction cooperative, the five-story Martian landscape needed landscaping, and all the men were called to plant trees around the house, dad got a chestnut, and this was the second chestnut that I saw in my life, the first was on a box of Kyiv cake that dad brought back from a session at the Kiev Institute, which he was then graduating in absentia, and I will remember those calluses in a few years, when at school a labor worker - we had to do carpentry - will ask us to bring from home “Mom’s apron or Dad’s robe,” and I will honestly bring my father’s terry robe from the Pakistani company “Tabani”, in which he came out of the bathroom.
The chestnut is still there, it is already higher than the house, above the fifth floor, I recently saw it in Google Street View, this is a quiet emigrant joy - virtual walks through my native places, and just as if I continued to live there, I am pleased to see that the Martian landscape is no longer Martian, the five-story buildings have become part of nature, and they, and my father’s chestnut, and the poplars growing there are equally appropriate in space, remains dear to me, and the windows of the fourth floor are no longer mine, but they are the same, I find them just as easily as forty years ago, returning from the next vacation, when a taxi from the airport turned into an alley not marked on the map (as an adult, I will drunkenly show it to taxi drivers, it’s really hard not to miss it, it’s only for my own people), and I saw the light in the foggy window, and as if I smelled the smell of a bath that had been drawn for me in advance - in advance, because The water pumping station in our new area was just being completed, and water (any kind) was turned on for us hourly, morning and evening. An acquaintance one morning was getting ready to wash something, woke up, but at the appointed hour there was no water, he called the water utility duty officer, yelled, “You’re sleeping on the job, you bastard,” and hung up, they gave him water immediately.
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