At the end of year nine I invited my classmates to a party at the house where I lived. My aim was to get closer to the girl in our class I'd been secretly eyeing up. My parents had “gone visiting”.
Everyone was very pleased with the “venue”, except me. I'd managed only once to ask the classmate in question, Rosi, for a slow dance. During our dance, in the dark, I plucked up the courage to kiss her on the neck, but I did it so timidly that she can hardly have noticed. The next day I realised I hadn't asked her for either her phone number or her address, and there were three whole months of holidays ahead. For days on end nothing interested me, not even a football match in the neighbourhood, which I usually organised myself. As Y. Radichkov had put it, I was like “swoony cattle” – I kept lying down and sighing.
Luckily, a few days later our classmate Mambo turned up and announced that he had to return to Rosi the heavy tape recorder he'd lugged round to mine for the party, since I'd asked him to sort out some music for me. All of a sudden my spark came back. I quizzed him about her address and how to get there. He blushed and started digging his heels in – he'd promised her he'd do it in person. He struck me as far too slicked-down and spruced-up, and I told him I'll take care of it, at which he went dark red with white blotches. But even if he'd been Chuck Norris himself, after the suffering I'd been through there was no force on earth that could stop me. In the end Mambo resigned himself and carried the tiresome quiff on his forehead, along with all its dandruff, off somewhere.
I washed, changed and set off bravely with the featherweight tape recorder /about 15 kg/ for the distant neighbourhood. An hour later, sweaty and nervous, I reached Rosi's yard. I didn't dare go in and started pacing up and down along the fence, as if I were walking a tape recorder instead of a dog. Luckily she appeared and invited me into the house.
I was planning to show her that I'd kept her equipment safe by playing her the song “Delilah” and asking her for a slow dance, but a very old, thin, dishevelled granny came in on us, wearing glasses of at least 10 dioptres. She sat down on the sofa next to me, pulled up a chair, put one of her feet on it, took the woollen sock off it and asked me quite matter-of-factly:
“Katie, have a look at this thing that's popped up on my big toe, what d'you reckon it is – a bunion /she said it as ‘a bum-ion’/, a callus or a boil?”
I bent down squeamishly, pretending to look at the toe, but Rosi told her granny that I wasn't Katie. She looked up, inspected me at point-blank range and dashed off to her room. The two of us burst out laughing, which did us good, and we relaxed a bit.
Months later Granny Rada got used to me and wasn't startled any more. She'd pop up out of nowhere where we were, usually looking for something, whistling soundlessly or talking to herself. Once she started telling us:
“When I jumped off the roof of our house onto the neighbours' tiles, I wondered how I hadn't done meself in….”
I trod on Rosi's foot, as she wasn't listening to her at that moment. Her granny went on:
“Well then, I leapt onto the next roof, and the one after that, see, I was ever so light, and I did fancy a fly.” Rosi interrupted the action:
“Granny, now you're really overdoing it!”
The granny smiled like the Mona Lisa and answered her back:
“Why, I dreamt it, lass!”
Granny Rada rarely cooked, and afterwards the kitchen looked like a battlefield. Her stews were very tasty, but she ate only a tiny bit, as much as a sparrow, and at the end she always sighed with relief: “Phew, that's one more worry off my head for today!”
Once a week she invited her friends from the neighbourhood to a literary circle. They read extracts from books and discussed them. I found her likeable, especially when she told little stories or one of her dreams.
The incident with her and the clock was years later. My girlfriend's parents were going to visit relatives in the provinces and stay the night there. I went round to theirs early. I wanted everyone in the yard to see me there while they were present. Rosi and I were both 22 and had been “going out” for a long time, but we were careful not to offend anyone's sense of morality – the two of us weren't married yet. Towards evening her parents set off for the station. I was looking forward to a night of love, and in a bed at that, rather than somewhere improvised, as up to then.
I drew the curtains in the living room and switched on the television. Soon our only problem became Granny Rada, who popped in on us. She'd let her hair down, as she did just before going to bed. If, however, she got absorbed in the television, things might drag on. Rosi was doing a distance-learning degree in “Mining Electromechanics” and had mentioned that she was having trouble with the subject “Automation”, so I offered to try to help her – I was studying Automation.
We switched off the television and laid out textbooks, lecture notebooks, blank sheets of paper and pencils on the table. That ought to have made the granny clear off, or better still, go to bed, but she pulled her chair up to our table and listened with keen interest. During the lesson she clicked her tongue now and then. Let me open a bracket here. In their family everyone had mastered tongue-clicking to perfection. They used it to express various feelings, but above all – indignation. From experience I already knew that Granny Rada clicked only in surprise or admiration. She goggled now at me, now at the diagrams through her big magnifying lenses, and sometimes nodded: “Just so, just so!”
She did it more often than her granddaughter, and I began to wonder who on earth I was actually explaining things to now, and whether the granny didn't understand terms like sensor, feedback and controller as well. When I finally fell silent, Rosi sighed with relief, and Granny Rada with disappointment. She seemed to want me to carry on.
She stared at me, then at Rosi, and after quite a long think said to her:
“You listen to him, lass! When this lad talks, it's like he's reading from a book!”
After which she went off to the kitchen to gawp at the television there. I suggested to Rosi a way to trick her granny into going to bed earlier. At first she was against it, but in the end she gave in. In the kitchen I secretly wound the alarm clock, which was showing 20.20, on to 22.20.
In the evenings the granny kept it next to the television and glanced at it often, to see when it would be 22.00 so she could go to bed and have that worry off her head too.
“Gosh, how late it's got!” I said loudly, and Rosi confirmed:
“Blimey, it's gone 10 o'clock!”
The granny didn't react. Ten minutes later we repeated the same thing. I set the clock right up close to the television, even though I'd have liked to shove it into the middle of the screen.
Granny Rada, however, had become engrossed in a biographical film about Karl Marx and was clicking her tongue: “Look what a handsome man, what a magnificent beard, and him born in such a poky little hovel!” She paid no attention whatsoever to the alarm clock, and shushed us to talk more quietly. To our delight, at 23.40 Karl Marx died.
Straight after that I shoved the clock in front of the granny's eyes: “However did it get to be 23.40 already?” /actually – 21.40/. This time she peered at it and said: “Well I never, it's got ever so late! Funny, why am I not sleepy yet?”
Unlike her granny, her granddaughter started yawning more and more often. I said to myself angrily: “You aim at one thing and hit another!”
Rosi wasn't one of those feisty babes who'll ignore their need for sleep just for the sake of some boyfriend or other. Deeply disappointed, I said goodbye to both of them. When I got home, it was only 22.30. I wasn't in the habit of falling asleep “in broad daylight”, and besides, I was cross.
The next day I phoned Rosi to ask when her granny had finally gone to bed the night before. She replied that at exactly 22.00 she'd overheard her musing:
“Well, blow me, it's gone and got to 12 o'clock, and only now am I getting sleepy! Well I never, tsk-tsk-tsk!” Which had reminded her /Rosi, not the granny/ to set the same alarm clock for herself. At the time she slept in the kitchen. In the morning it turned out she'd gone to work 2 hours early.
By my reckoning, Granny Rada had fallen asleep at 22.00 as always. The two of us had a good laugh about this blunder of ours. In the end Rosi suggested that, since she'd got up far too early, we shouldn't see each other that evening. I studied a bit and went to bed “in broad daylight” again. In the morning, for once, I arrived on time for the early lectures, and the following evening, on our date, after 22.00 she yawned and kept saying wise things about the benefits of long and timely sleep.
I told her to go and tell that to her granny, but I yawned too. On our later dates we often argued about when to go home. The earlier time, suggested by her, usually won. I wasn't happy, but unlike me, Rosi did have a job after all, so I agreed. To my pleasant surprise, one evening as we parted she had observed
“Ever since I started going to bed early, like Granny Rada, I've put on 3 kilos. I know you want us to party till really late. Here's my proposal: from now on we'll go home when you say, but as soon as I've lost a bit of weight, we'll switch back to the regime of ‘Granny's Biological Clock’, which we've christened ‘Granny Rada's Bedtime’.”
We still use that expression to this day.
