With the money which the conductor had given me I reached the Beshagach district and rent a flat. Then I found a job through the Labor Registry Office.
I started working at the old people's home. I liked working there. My health had improved. It was warm in my booth which was both my home and my office. I would get up early in the morning, wash myself and pray. Then I"d weep the campus. At night I would keep watch over the house and sit at the table writing.
The director of the Retirement Home Abdulkasym Kakharovich was a tall broad-shouldered man with a Japanese face, curly caracole-like hair, serious and sociable.
Humanitarian aid came from all kinds of relief funds the world over. The house received clothes, medicines, disposable syringes, food and all. They were kept in the store-house managed by a man of about thirty five by the name of Pukhtiyerkhan. By appearance, he was the spitting image of an orangutan, and by disposition and temper he was very much like the zoo technician Yiguit Nagybulla.
Pukhtiyerkhan had his clients. They would come at night and take away medication and other things delivered from world charity institutions, for free. He sold those things for double price, making money. Besides, he took home meat, rice and other food from the kitchen. If you see the people among the retired people at the Retirement Home you will laugh, or want to cry.
There was a queer cheerful man named Matvey Zakharych. He wore a cap and box calf boots, played balalaika and sang Russian limerick-like rhymes. It was his daughter who settled him in the Retirement Home.
Now and then he took tobacco from his little pouch to roll a cigarette. Then his smile faded as he smoked sitting like a lonely bird on a branch at a frosty night in December. I was sorry for him. Sometimes I would come up to him and say jokingly to cheer him up:
- Well, Matvey Zakharich, will you teach me to play the balalaika?
He would smile sadly. The elderly people residing at the Retirement Home were like children. They were touchy and sensible. There were all kinds of personalities there, some cheerful, others sentimental. There was an elderly Georgian, snub-nosed, big-eyed and always unshaved. He would sadly recall his remote Georgia where he had spent his childhood, his relatives and school-mates.
Every morning he would greet us in Georgian:
- Gamarjoba, genazvaly.
- Gamarjoba - we would reply.
Georgy told us about his homeland with its mountain tops and cellars with the excellent wine Tsinandali. He explained to us that kvivra was a ceramic vessel used for keeping wine in the cellars. He who drank the flavored wine Tsinandali grew many years younger. The wine had healing power. Georgy, that was the man"s name, never had children. Perchance, he was not fated to have any.
He would often say hopefully:
- My relatives will come soon to take me out of here.
He was like a foster child who always looked at the road waiting for his relatives to come. Sometimes he talked to Aunt Tamara in Georgian. Although the woman had always lived in Tashkent she knew her mother tongue very well. Her husband had died in a plane crash. Her only daughter had also died, and Aunt Tamara was left alone. She, too, like a foster child that likes to watch TV, always looked out into the window as if it was a TV-set. I wrote a poem about her, and it went like this:
Our TV-set
Our TV-set is old
But it is as good as gold...
My old woman hasn"t cleaned
For a year the TV screen.
Our screen is very clean
For there isn"t any screen.
Here I lie in bed, that is
I have got paralysis.
Though bedridden, I"m OK
Looking at the screen all day.
My old granny, too, has been
All day staring at the screen.
Our screen is good because
We don"t see deceptive shows.
Our programs are all right
Everything is clear and bright.
Very bright. Two years ago
We saw an amazing show:
A drunk actor threw a stone
Fracturing my cranium bone.
I lost consciousness but I
Fortunately didn"t die.
We"ve got kids more than enough,
I should say, they"re all well off.
They have got their own cars,
But they do not visit us.
We would like so much to see
Our kids on our TV.
What we want is their faces
To be shown in good graces...
God grant them lots of joys and health,
Many years of life and wealth.
Now an action film is on,
Dad is walloped by his son.
Granny got out of bed
To turn off the TV-set.
She took a cushion from the bed
and closed with it the window dead.
When I finished reading the poem I saw tears in the eyes of the elderly people. A little later I had it placed in the wall newspaper called "The Sad Moon". Matvey Zakhrych had even composed music based on the poem and sang it to the accompaniment of balalaika. Thus we had a song dedicated to lonely elderly people. The song became the anthem of our Retirement Home.