The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life). Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
and kept repeating that he knew not a damn thing, although his thick copybook was already written down to the almost very end. And who cared, dammit, argued Dad, for another year at that Party Studies Evening School!
From Out-of-Zona he returned in a very merry mood because at the examination he had got a feeble “3” and now all his evenings would be free. Mom asked how come he passed the exam without knowing a damn thing. Then Dad opened his copybook for Party Studies and showed his good-luck charm—a pencil drawing of an ass with long ears and brush-like tail, which he made during the exam on the last page and, beneath the animal, inscribed his magic formula: “pull-me-thru!”
I did not know if Dad’s story was really worth believing because he laughed so much while telling it. So I decided that I’d better not say anyone about the ass who pulled my Dad from the Party Studies Evening School…
Mom was a regular book reader in our family. Going to her workplace, she took them along for reading in her time at the Pumping Station. Those books were borrowed from the Library of Detachment. (Yes, one more name because we lived not only in the Object-Zona-Mailbox but also in the Military Detachment number so and so.)
The library wasn’t too far away, about one kilometer of walking. First, down the concrete road, until, at the Gorka’s foot, it was crossed by the asphalt road and, after the intersection, the concrete road got replaced with the dirt-road street between two rows of wooden houses behind their low fencing and strips of narrow front gardens. The street ended by the House of Officers, but about a hundred meters before it there was a turn to the right, towards the one-story brick building of the Detachment’s Library.
Sometimes, Mom took me with her down there and, while she was exchanging her books in the back of the building, I waited in the big empty front room where instead of any furniture there hung lots of posters all over the walls. The central poster presented a cross-section outline of the atomic bomb (because the full name of the Object we lived in was the Atomic Object).
Besides the posters with the bomb anatomy and atomic blast mushrooms, there were also pictures about the training of NATO spies. In one of them the spy, who jumped from behind on a sentry’s back was tearing the soldier’s lips with his fingers. I felt creepy horror but could not look away from it and only thought to myself, O, come on, Mom, please, change the borrowed books sooner.
At one of such visits, I plucked the heart up to ask Mom if I also could borrow books from the library. She answered that, actually, that was the library for adults but still led me to the room where a librarian woman was sitting at her desk on which the stacks of various thick books left only room for a lamp and the long plywood box beneath it, filled with the readers’ cards, and my Mom told her that she did not know what to do about me because I had already read the entire library they had at school. Since then I always went to the Detachment’s Library alone, without Mom. Sometimes, I even exchanged her books and brought them home together with the two or three for me.
The books for my reading were scattered at ready over the big sofa because I read them in a scrambled way. On one of the sofa’s armrests, I crawled across the front line together with the reconnaissance group Zvezda on the mission to capture a German officer and, rolling over to the opposite armrest, I continued to gallop with White Chief of Mayne Reid among the cacti of Mexican pampas. And only the solid hardback volume of The Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece was, for some reason, read mostly in the bathroom sitting on a low stool with my back leaned against Titan the water-boiler. For such a messy lifestyle Dad handled me “Oblomov”, the lazybones whom he remembered from the lessons of Russian Literature at his village school…
~ ~ ~
That winter was endlessly long and full of heavy snowstorms as well as the frost-and-sun intervals, and some quieter snowfalls. Starting for school, I left home at dusk as thick as the night dark. But one day it was thawing and on my way back from school when reaching the tilt between the Recruit Depot Barrack and Block, I marked a strange dark strip to the left from the road.
There I turned and plowing the snow with my felt boots went to see what’s up. It was a strip of earth peeping out from under the snow, a patch of the thawed ground sticky with moisture. The next day the opening extended, and some visitor had left in it several blackened Fir-cones. And although in a day the frost gripped tenser, surfaced the snow by a thick rind of ice, and then the snowfalls set in anew and left no trace of the thaw on the hillside, I knew it for sure that the winter would pass all the same…
In mid-March, at the first class on Monday, Seraphima Sergeevna told us to put our dip pens aside and listen to what she had to say. As it turned out, two days before she went to the bathhouse together with her daughter, and when back home she noticed that her wallet had disappeared with all of her teacher’s salary. She was very upset together with her daughter, who told her it’s impossible to built Communism with thieves around. But the next day, a man came to their home, a worker from the bathhouse, who had stumbled there on the dropped wallet and figured it out who could lose it the night before, and took it to her place.
And Seraphima Sergeevna said that Communism would surely be built, and there’s no doubt about it. Then she also asked us to remember the name of that working man.
(…but I have already forgotten it because “body dissolves and memory forgets” as it stands in the dictionary by Vladimir Dahl…)
The Saturday bathed in the sun as warm as the spring sun can be. After school and the midday meal at home, I hurried outdoors in the Courtyard where there was a general Subbotnik in progress. People came out of the houses into the bright shining day and shoveled the snow from the concrete walks about the vast Courtyard. Bigger boys loaded the snow in huge cardboard boxes and sledded it aside on a pile where it would not be in the way. In the ditches below the roadsides, they dug deep channels, cutting the snow with shovels and hoisting out entire snow cubes darkly drenched at the bottom. And thru those channels, dark water ran lapping merrily.
So came the spring, and everything started to change every day…
And when at school they handed us the yellow sheets of report cards with our grades, the summer holidays began bringing about the everyday games of Hide-and-seek, Classlets, and Knifelets.
For the game of Knifelets, you need to choose a level area and draw a wide circle on the ground. The circle is divided into as many sectors as the number of participants who, standing upright, throw a knife, in turn, into the ground which belongs to some of their opponents.
If the hurled knife sticks in, the sector gets split up with the line drawn in the direction determined by the stuck knife’s blade sides. The owner of the divided sector has to decide which part of it he wants to keep while the other slice becomes a part of the successful knife-thrower’s domain.
A player stays in the game until they retain a patch of ground big enough to accommodate for their standing upon at least one foot, but with no space even for that, the game is over for them and the remaining players go on until there stays just 1. You win!
(…quoting Alexander Pushkin:
" Tale is a lie, yet holds some hint and even a lesson to learn…”
When playing knifelets, all I felt was an overwhelming yen to win. And presently, I can’t help feeling stunned by how readily the whole world’s history gets covered by a simplistic game for kids…)
And we also played matches, which is a game just for 2. Each player sticks their thumb off their fist, inserts a match, a kinda spacer, between their thumb pad and the middle joint of the index finger, and holds it tight. The matches are slowly pressed against each other, the pressure grows and the player whose match withstands it without breaking up becomes the winner. The same idea as in tapping Easter eggs against each other, only you don’t have to wait a whole year for the game which wasted more than one matchbox nicked from the kitchen at home.
Or we just ran hither-thither playing War-Mommy, yelling, “Hurray!”, or “Ta-ta-ta!”
– Bang! Bang! I’ve shot and killed you!
– Yeah! Okay! I’m just on the doorsill to Death!
And