RIMKA - A TEST

I want to test a theory. In the beginning, when I just started to write this blog, I simply posted the stories that I wrote about my family's and my own life. I had a lot more viewers then. I will post the part of the same stories again to see if the world is more interested in my writing than in day to day thoughts and occurrences. Here it goes!

  RIMKA


CHAPTER 1


RIMKA
He stood, awkwardly holding a warm bundle, clutching his Red Army cap under the baby's bottom. He didn't see the wrinkled, red-faced child in front of him. In his mind, over and over again, he kept seeing his young wife, struggling to stay alive. Her beautiful face was swollen and inflamed, her body arching desperately as the seizures overtook her. And then, she lay lost, pale and empty. Yakov searched his heart for any tenderness toward the child in his arms, but all he could master, were the feelings of guilt and anger. The tall, handsome officer handed the baby to the nurse and quickly strode out of the maternity ward, his long army overcoat almost tripping him in the doorway. Three months later, still reeling from grief and all the blood he had shed, he'll write to his mother from the great Asian steppes, where he fought the enemies of the Soviet Union. He'll tell her about the death of his wife and about the baby who lay waiting in a small town hospital. Yakov couldn't know what the abandonment of his daughter will cost her or her family.

Grandmother Velya

Grandmother Velya came to claim the little girl and took her back to Moscow. She called her Rimka and Rimka called her Momma. For a long while they were happy just to be together.


MEYER
Meyer's dad heard a strange sound behind him. Standing on the ladder, he turned to look. Meyer gazed at his father's work with shining eyes and grinning from ear to ear. Ever since he was small, they noticed that he couldn't keep back this strangled laughter whenever he encountered something beautiful. Right now, he watched his father, Jacob, painting the manager's apartment and couldn't help admiring it. Instead of using

Lev as an adult.

just one flat color, Ezra made it look like the walls were draped in silk, by shading the tops and bottoms of the walls slightly darker and putting vertical lighter stripes and a pattern though the whole perimeter of the apartment, from top of the wall to the bottom, which made the effect of the light playing on silk even more pronounced. Jacob smiled and returned to work. Meyer was his youngest. He was a lanky preteen, who always seemed to have a cold. His eyes were tiny and red rimmed, his ears stuck out of his head like huge mushrooms. Even so, he looked so amiable that almost everyone liked him immediately. His older brother, Lev, was the handsomest of the bunch, tall, with dark wavy hair and crinkly eyes, but he worried his parents the most.
About a year ago, the family's 25 year old Russian helper, Daria, dropped a bomb: she was pregnant by 16 year old Lev. He confessed, in tears, but insisted that she seduced him. The family was
mortified. Jacob worn out his belt, punishing Lev, then sent him to live with some relatives in Minsk. For many years after he was sending Daria money to support his grandchild, only to find out much later that, Lev's daughter died in infancy. Daria tried to meet Lev again, but he's had enough of her. Neither Lev nor Jacob were ever the same after this affair.


Copyright protected