In the middle group of kindergarten for the September morning my grandfather prepared me. The theme of the festival was animals and birds: how they meet autumn and prepare for winter. Poems, as far as I remember, were not distributed to us, and if they were distributed, the grandfather rejected the teachers' proposals and said that we would read our own.

With this, he chose the outstanding, without fools, work of Nikolai Oleynikov "Tarakhan".

It’s hard to say what they were leading. Grandfather himself never visited the kindergarten, so revenge was for nothing. My teachers were wonderful women. I do not know. Per he wanted to make a note of high tragedy into the everyday flattery of whites and scourges.

So, in a gorgeous autumn morning, I went out into the middle of the hall, took on a dress sprinkled with leaves of barley paper, wrapped the gaze of the spectators and insightfully began:

The turkey sits in the glass.
The red foot.
He got caught. He is in a trap.
Now he is waiting for execution.

In the "Theatre" of Moem, Julia's first lessons of acting skills were given by her aunt. I had a grandfather instead of a aunt. We did everything: pauses, gestures, proper breathing.

The turtle clamped to the glass.
He looks, barely breathing.
He would not fear death.
If I knew there was a soul.

Gradually my voice strengthened and gained strength. I approached the most terrible moment.

He has sad eyes.
Looking at the couch,
Where with knives, blades
The visitor is sitting.

My grandfather didn’t see me, but he could be proud of me. I declared with a deep feeling. And the fact that on the "visisectors" the faces of educators and mothers began to change, explained for themselves by the influence of poetry and their talent.

“Here’s the cat coming to him,” I cried loudly. And when he touches his chest, he finds under the ribs what should be pierced!

The hero is mercilessly killed. One hundred and four instruments rub on the patient’s part! (My voice is trembling here.) From wounds and wounds, the cockroach dies.

In this place the drama has reached its peak. When I later read in Lermontov’s school “On the Death of the Poet,” it turned out that the entire dependable spectrum of emotions, from anger to sorrow, was overtaken by me at the age of five.

– All in the past, – condemned I breathed, – pain, trouble. There is nothing more. Underground water flows out of it.

I took a long pause here. The faces of the adults were shining with hope: apparently, they decided that I had finished. ha ha! The tragedy of an orphan?

There, in a large closet,
Everybody is abandoned, one.
The son whispers, “Daddy, Daddy!”
The poor son!

Crying out the last words. Look up there. Silence by breathing.
The room was silent with me.

But it was not the end, either.

“And there’s a lame visector above him,” I said with a dark hatred. Stupid, hairy, with spikes and a saw.

Some of the weak-minded children shouted.

You, the bastard wearing the pants! I shouted in someone’s face. A dead cockroach is a martyr of science. Not just a cockroach.

Dad gave a strange throat sound that I couldn’t explain. But it was also insignificant. The waves of poetry brought me to the end.

guard with a rough hand
From the window it will shake.
In the garden with the head down.
The pigeon will fall.

and pause. and pause. and pause. Behind the window still yellowed the chestnut, some kind of puddle ran on the roof of the veranda, but it was all over.

“On a flooded path,” I said sadly, “at the very doorstep, he will shake his legs and wait for a sad end.

Impossible to drop hands. to stumble. A person who has lost the meaning of life. And clearly, withholding the crying, say the last four lines:

His bones are dry.
It will rain,
His eyes are blue.
The chicken will cuddle.

and silence. Someone has blinked, maybe I myself. A barley leaf fell from my bottom, fell, rolling around, to the floor, breaking the shell with the oppressive silence, and then, finally, somewhere deep in the basement, the cockroaches flourished stormily, desperately, in full growth.

In fact, of course not. And we had no cockroaches, and the sheet did not fall away from me. I was struck very carefully, apparently afraid of causing a bust outbreak, brought crying children, struck on the cheeks of those who lost consciousness, gave water to the softened teacher of the younger group and handed me some kind of funny children's book like the stories of Bianka.

Why is? My grandmother asked my grandfather tonight. The anger was caused, among other things, by the fact that she was lonely in her anger. My parents didn’t have to wait for an understanding: my dad whispered, and my mom said she hated the mornings and I could even read “Mein Kampf” there, it’t get worse. Why did you teach this poem to your child?

“Because it is uncomfortable to declare ‘Antisemite’ in one person,” said the grandfather with sincere regret.