The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life). Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
keep a-trotting about that doorsill firing his farewell rounds and only, maybe, hooraying less zealously, if it’s a boy possessing some sense of decency, before to slam, at last, that door behind himself and topple with undeniable theatrical gusto in a grass patch of softer looks.
For taking part in War-Mommy you needed a machine-gun sawed from a plank piece. Yet, some boys played automatic weapons of tin, a black-paint-coated acquisition from a store.
Such machine-guns had to be loaded with special ammunition – rolls of narrow paper strips with tiny sulfur blobs planted in them. When struck by the spring trigger hummer, such a blob gave a loud report and the paper strip got automatically pulled on bringing the next blob in the strip in place of the fired… Mom bought me a tin pistol and a box of pistons—small paper circles with the same sulfur blobs which had to be inserted manually for each separate shot. After the bang, a tiny wisp of sore smelling smoke rose from under the trigger.
One day when I was playing the pistol in the sand pile by the garbage enclosure, a boy from the corner building asked me to present the handgun to him and I readily gave it away. Being a son of an officer, he, of course, needed and had more rights to it than me… But Mom refused to believe that anyone would give his gun away to another boy just so casually. She demanded of me to confess the genuine truth about losing Mom’s present, yet I stuck to my truth so stubbornly, that she even had to lead me to the apartment of that boy in the corner building. The officer started to chastise his son, yet Mom said she was so sorry and asked to excuse her because she only wanted to make sure I did not lie.
~ ~ ~
That summer the boys from our Block began to play with yellowish cartridges of real firearms which they were hunting at the shooting range in the forest. I wanted so badly to see what shooting range might look like, yet bigger boys explained that you could visit it only on special days when there was no shooting because on any other day they’d shoo you off.
It took a long wait for a special day, but after all, it came and we went thru the forest… The shooting range was a vast opening about a huge rectangular excavation with a steep cave-in in one of the corners to get down there. The opposite wall of the pit was screened by a tall log barrier, all bullet-poked, keeping a couple shredded left-overs of gravely riddled paper sheets with the head-and-shoulders outline.
We looked for the cartridges in the sand underfoot. They were of two types – longish, neck-narrowed, cartridges from the AK assault-rifle, and small even cylinders from the TT pistol. The finds were loudly welcomed and busily exchanged between the boys. I had no luck at all and only envied the luckier seekers whose shrieks sounded flat and suppressed by the eerie silence of the shooting range displeased with our trespassing the forbidden grounds…
Beside the excavated hollow, the glade was cut across by a front-line trench whose sandy walls were kept in place by board shields. A narrow track of iron rails ran from one end of the opening to the other passing, on the way, the trench over. It was the railway for a large mock-up tank of plywood mounted upon its trolley which rumbled along the track when pulled by the cable of a hand-pedaled winch.
The boys started to play with all those things. I also sat in the trench once, while the plywood tank clanged overhead, and then I went to the call from the edge of the field where they needed my help.
We pulled at the steel cable looped thru the horizontal pulley to make it easier for the boys on the other end of the battlefield to turn the crank of the winch which set in motion the trolley with the tank. At some point, I got inattentive and failed to draw my hand off in time, the cable was quick to snatch and drag my pinky finger into the pulley groove. The pain in the squeezed finger made me rend surroundings by a shrill scream mixed with a jet of tears. Hearing my “oy-oy-oy!” as well as the shouts of other boys around me, “Stop! Finger!”, the winch operators managed to stop it when there remained a mere couple of centimeters for my finger to pass the pulley wheel turn and get out. They wound the winch crank in the opposite direction, dragging the poor finger backward all the way to where it was originally swallowed by the device.
The unnaturally flattened, dead pale finger smeared with the blood from the ripped skin, emerged from the pulley jaws and puffed up instantly. The boys wrapped it with my handkerchief and told me to run home. Quick! And I ran thru the forest feeling the painful beat of the pulse in the burning finger…
At home, Mom, without asking anything, at once told me to shove the wounded under the gush of water from the kitchen tap. She bent and straightened it several times and ordered not to bellow like a little cow. Then she bandaged it into a tight white cocoon and promised that by the wedding day it would be like new.
(…and, in the same breathe, childhood is not the nursery of sadomasochism, like, “Whoops, my finger got pinched! Oh, I bumped my head!” It’s just that some jolts leave deeper notches in the memory.
Yet, what a pity that the same memory does not retain the admiring state of ongoing discoveries when a speck of sand stuck to a penknife's blade holds countless galaxies and worlds, when any trifle, a scrap of trash, is the promise and pledge of future wanderings and unbelievable adventures.
We grow up gaining the protective armor necessary in the adult world—the doctor's smock on me, the traffic cop's uniform on you. Each of us becomes a necessary cog within the social machine. All needless things—like gaping at fire extinguishers or scanning the strange faces in the frost gripped windowpane—are chopped off…
Now there is a number of old scars on my fingers. This one from an awkwardly wielded knife, here a deep cut by ax, and only on my pinky fingers I cannot find any trace from that pulley injury. Because "body dissolves"…
But, hey! I know much fresher bywords, like that recent one: “summer is a miniature life”…)
When you are a child not only summer but each and every day is a miniature life. The childhood time is slowed down – it does not fly, it does not flow, it does not even move until you push it on. Poor kids would long since got extinct while crossing that boundless desert of the static time, were they not rescued by playing games.
And in that summer, if I got bored with a game or no one was in the Courtyard to play with, I had already a haven, a kinda “home” square in the game of Classlets. The big sofa it was, where life ran high indeed, the life full of adventures shared by the heroes from books by Gaidar, Belyaev, Jules Verne… And even outside the big sofa, you can always find a place suitable for all kinds of adventures. Like that balcony by the parents’ room, where I once spent a whole summer day reading a book about prehistoric people – Chung and Poma.
There was hair all over their bodies, like by animals, and they lived in the trees. But then a branch accidentally broke off a tree and helped to defend themselves against a saber-tooth tiger, so they started to always carry a stick about them and walk instead of leaping in the trees around. Then there happened a big jungle fire followed by the Ice Age. Their tribe wandered in search of food, learning how to build fire and talk to each other.
In the final chapter, the already old Poma could walk no farther and fell behind the tribe. Her faithful Chung stayed by her side to freeze to death together in the snow. But their children could not wait and just went on because they were already grown up and not so hairy as their parents, and they protected themselves from the cold with the skins of other animals…
The book was not especially thick, yet I read it all day long, while the sun, arisen on the left, from behind the forest outside our Block, was crossing in its indiscernible movement the sky over the Courtyard, towards the sunset on the right, behind the second block.
At some point, in a way of respite from the uninterrupted reading, I slipped out between the iron uprights of the handrail that bounded the balcony and started to promenade outside, along the concrete cornice beyond the safety grating, and it was not scary at all because I tightly grasped the bars, just like Chung and Poma when they were still living in the trees. But some unfamiliar unclie was passing down there that yelled at me and told to get back onto the balcony. He even threatened to inform my parents. However, they were not home so he took his complaint to our neighbors on the first floor. In the evening they told on me to Mom, and I had to promise her to never-never do it again…
~