Grandmother was quiet. Grandfather fell silent. He stared somewhere into the distance, his eyes not seeing anything.
He told us this story with reservation and calm, a story which sounded even more terrible in the surrounding stillness.
«So my father had an older brother and I would have had an uncle,» I thought. A picture rose before my eyes; I saw myself crawling across the steppe followed by the howls of jackals and cries of vultures and stumbling upon corpses of the people who had died of hunger. Strange as it may seem, this vision frightened me more than either the test bomb or the ghost of the snow leopard. Perhaps only the death of Kenje seemed as frightening… I was seven years old.
It was then that for the first time I began to think about the number of deaths, pain, suffering, humiliation and insult which had befallen the people of Genghiztau.
A truck came down from the hills and the dzhigits who spilled out of it came-towards us. As it turned out these people were from our village and it was precisely they who had been caught «unawares» by the explosion. They gravely greeted the old men and when they found out about the death of Kenje, they sat by her fresh grave in silence, for a long time. The doctors wore them out with their treatment. Till late in the evening they examined them several times with special instruments, instructing them to relax, close their eyes; in short, – in the opinion on the dzhigits, they were being treated like children.
«That’s enough, how long can one wait?» protested the accountant Talgat. «We are hungry, since morning neither food nor drink has passed our lips.»
«Be patient. If necessary, we’ll take you to Moscow for observation,» Zhavoronkov, who had no sense of humour, gloomily announced.
«To Moscow then! That’s a good idea. I’ve long dreamt of staying in the capital for a while. You can send me there as soon as you like,» said Talgat, boastfully, wishing to anger the doctor.
The old men and women – spread out a large table-cloth for the funeral feast for Kenje. The Russians also joined us.
«She-was beautiful, wasn’t she, Rollan?» Galya asked me.
I nodded in reply, «Yes, she was the most beautiful of all.»
«Anti you loved her of course?» Galya said shrewdly.
For «the first time, the adults talked to-me „as an equal“ and I thought, „Perhaps, I’m already an adult too, since they treat me like one. Yes, an adult…“
„Yes, I loved her and I’ll never love anyone else…“
