The Gang
I grew up in two places in Minsk — in the courtyard next to my grandparent’s apartment building, where I enjoyed being a tomboy with four boys from the neighborhood, and at my parents’ apartment, hanging out with my best girlfriend.
The boys, most of them, with the exception of one (Oleg, who moved in just three years before I left the Soviet Union), I knew from babyhood. We were the wild bunch — playing war games (I was usually “the nurse,” but much preferred when I was “the spy”). We would run through the back streets, lay in the grass daydreaming about the clouds, and tell stories (I was the main storyteller, repeating stories my grandfather told me). Our gang had an unwritten rule about sharing whatever goodies anyone could get (a banana here, an apple there, a handful of nuts). We were one for all and all for one — me, Oleg, Victor, Sergei and his younger brother, Valera.
Since my parents and I have moved out when we got our own apartment, I could only visit and play on Sundays, which were the only days off from school and work in the old country. When I say old, I mean old. The city of Minsk was more than 900 years old, and more than 950 years old now.
It was late summer, maybe early autumn, late afternoon of a warm, dry and dusty day. We, the five of us, were walking back to the apartment building, taking back alleys. I don’t remember where we coming from, only that I…
