The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life). Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
of sheets and pillowcases, except for the one at the bottom where I once discovered the blue square of a seaman collar cut off a sailor’s shirt. And, wrapped into it, there was a dagger of a naval officer with spiral ribs in the yellow hilt and the long steel body tapering to the needle-sharp point hidden in the taut black scabbard. A couple of days later, I couldn’t keep the temptation back and shared the great secret with the younger ones. However, Natasha casually shrugged the news away and answered that she knew about the dagger all along and even showed it to Sasha…
And now Natasha, with happy giggles, was following my vain search and after my frantic cry addressed to our absent brother that, okay, I agreed to be the “it” one more time, only let him go out from wherever he was now, Natasha also yelled instructing him to sit tight and quiet, and not to give up. I ran out of patience completely and refused to play anymore, but she suggested that I leave the room for a moment. Returning from the corridor, I saw Sasha in the middle of the room pleased and silent, and blinking bemusedly at Natasha’s report how he climbed the fourth drawer in the wardrobe where she piled socks over him…
At times there happened exclusively family games at home, with no neighbors taking part…
Merry laughter of several voices was heard from the parents' room, I put the book aside got up from the big sofa and trotted over there.
"What’s the fuss?" asked I envious of the mutual mirth.
"Checking the pots!"
"How’s that?"
"Come on and have a check!"
I was told to sit on Dad's back and grab him by the neck while he was firmly holding my legs. So far, so good, I liked it. But then he turned my back towards Mom and I felt her finger rooting my ass as deep as the pants let go.
"This pot is leaky!" announced Mom.
Everyone laughed and me too, although I felt somehow ashamed…
Another time Dad asks me, "Wanna see Moscow?"
"Wow! Sure!"
Coming from behind, he puts his hands over my ears, tight, and lifts me up above the floor by my head squeezed in between his hands.
"How now? D'you, see Moscow?"
"Yes! Yes!" scream I.
He puts me back where taken and I do my best not to hide the tears from the smarting pain in my ears flattened against the skull.
"Aha! Got fooled! It's so easy to fool you!"
(…much later I figured out that he just was repeating the practical jokes played on him in his childhood…)
In the course of the Hide-and-seek with Sasha’s disappearance, when checking the cloth wardrobe in the hallway, I noticed a bottle of lemonade stuck all by itself in the narrow cleft between the wall and the wicker chest. Lemonade then was something I adored in earnest, that carbonated nectar had only one annoying feature— it disappeared so too fast from my glass. As for the discovered bottle, it obviously was stored for some holiday and then just forgotten about.
I did not care to remind of it to anyone and the following day, or maybe the day after the following day, taking the opportunity of being home alone, I pulled the lemonade from behind the chest and hurried to the kitchen. Still in the corridor, my impatient fingers felt some slackness in the bottle cap, I tore it off and clapped the bottle up to my eager lips… Half-way through the second gulp, I realized that the lemonade was not somehow not quite it, but quite not it at all. Reversing the bottle to the normal position, I saw that after the holiday it was filled with sunflower oil for storage.
It’s good that no one witnessed my attempt at drinking sunflower oil, except for the small white box with a red cross on its door, the hoard of first-aid kits, unknown pills and dark glass phials, fixed up in the wall between the cloth wardrobe and the door to the storeroom, and also the black electric meter just above the entrance door. But they were not to tell anyone…
My next gastronomical misconduct was filching of a bun freshly baked, which Mom took out from the electric oven “Kharkov” together with a bunch of others and spread them on a towel over the kitchen table.
The round brownish backs gleamed so tempting that I violated Mom’s order to let them cool off little bit before the all-out tea party. Sneaking into the empty kitchen, I yanked one of them off, hid behind my back, and smuggled it into the lair on the wicker chest in the ill-illuminated cloth cave.
Probably, that bun was really too hot or else the sense of guilt culled taste sensations but, hastily chomping the forbidden fruit of culinary art, I didn’t feel the customary pleasure and wanted only the unpalatable bun to be over, the sooner the better. When from the kitchen Mom called all to come over and enjoy the tea with buns, I did not feel like that at all…
Yet in general, though a skill-less slow-goer, I was a fairly law-abiding child ever diligent-in-earnest, and if something went wrong it was not on purpose but because it simply turned out that way.
Dad grumbled that my Sloth-Mommy got born a moment before me and all I was good at was basking on the big sofa all day long gripping a book, like, a true copy of Oblomov!. But Mom protested that reading was beneficial and because of it I might become a doctor and look so very elegant in the white smock.
I did not want to become a doctor, I never liked the smell in doctors’ offices…
~ ~ ~
At school, Seraphima Sergeevna showed us a plywood frame 10 cm x 10 cm, like, a prototype of a loom with two rows of small nails on two opposite sides. A thick wool thread, stretched between the nails on different sides, served the warp. Motley other threads interwoven across the warp formed rainbow streaks in a miniature rug. Our home assignment was to make a similar frame and bring it for the next lesson, the parents would certainly help us in manufacturing the tool, the teacher said.
However, Dad was not home, he worked the second shift that week, and Mom was busy in the kitchen. Yet, she helped with finding a piece of plywood from an old parcel-box and she allowed taking the saw from the storeroom in the hallway.
I worked in the bathroom pinning the workpiece with my foot to the stool. The saw got stuck so too often, and it kept tearing out small chips and scraps from the plywood, but after long tedious labor efforts a crooked, zigzag sided, square was sawed off.
Putting the tool aside, I got aware of the major problem – how could you ever cut out a smaller square inside the readied one so as to turn it into a frame?
I tried to hack out the square hole within the readied plywood square by use of a kitchen knife and a hammer, but only split the piece cut off with so many ‘a hem!’ in the intense exertion. By the time when I had to go to bed, all of the plywood supply was spoiled in fruitless attempts, and I realized that I was not fit to be a master. The disappointment was so bitter that I raised a mournful howling in the kitchen before Mom.
Lying in the folding bed, I tried not to fall asleep but stay awake till Dad was home after work and ask for his help. However, I overslept his coming, though at some point through overpowering drowsiness I did hear Dad’s voice in the kitchen, giving Mom an angry reply, “What? Again “Kolya”? I know I’m “Kolya” so what?” And I fell back asleep.
In the morning at breakfast, Mom said, “Look at what Dad has made for you to take to school.”
It was a flood of happiness and admiration, when I saw the plywood loom-frame finished with neither a split nor a chip, nor a crack anywhere, and smoothed with sandpaper. The rows of small nails along two opposite sides were aligned straighter than a ruler…
In a year Dad brought home from his work a jigsaw for me, and I enrolled in the group “Skillful Hands” at school. It did not go well with my jigsawing though, because the thin blades kept breaking all too often. Still, I managed to produce a fanciful frame of plywood (with Dad’s help and polishing) for Mom’s photo.
Doing pyrography in pieces of plywood was much easier and I liked the smell of charring wood. Dad brought home a scorcher that he had constructed at his work, and I produced a couple of illustrations to Krylov’s fables copying them from The Book