The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life). Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

      With the spring at hand, we, the fourth-graders, started active preparation for getting enrolled to the ranks of young pioneers to reach which goal we copied and memorized the Solemn Oath of Young Leninists. Then one day after the break, Seraphima Sergeevna entered the classroom with an unknown woman. She introduced her as the new School Pioneer Leader and said that we were going to have a Leninist Lesson and for that purpose we had to go out into the corridor now and keep very quiet there because the other classes were at their regular lessons.

      We went out into the long corridor on the second floor, where along its walls with the windows on the left and the rare doors to the classrooms on the right, there hung different pictures with differently-aged Lenin in all of them… The new School Pioneer Leader commenced from the very beginning. Here, he’s quite a young man, a youth, actually, after getting the news about the execution of his elder brother Alexander by the Czarist regime, he consoles his mother with the words “We’ll go another way”, which is the name of this famous picture, by the way.

      And our class followed her quietly to the next poster with his photograph in the group of comrades from the underground committee… The working silence reigned in school, we passed by the closed doors of the classrooms with the school children sitting behind them and only we, like secret conspirators, veered from the usual course of the school regime and seemed to have joined the life of underground, following the quiet voice directing us from a picture to a picture…

      Then the spring came, and again the thawed patches appeared on the slope between Block and the Recruit Depot Barracks but I wasn’t checking them anymore… One sunny day coming home from school, I took over an unfamiliar girl of my age. Maybe, from the parallel fourth grade. I get ahead of her and looked back at the face full of absolute lack of care about my walking along.

      The brag just asked for a small demonstration that I was a boy of consequence in the surrounding whereabouts. And besides, I had a gang of my own, like Robin Hood, the noble robber. Still walking on, I half-turned to the left and told with eloquent gestures to the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the decaying skating rink, “Hey! Don’t be so careless! Duck!! Don’t let them spot you!” So, if the snooty girl looked that way, no one would be seen there…

      Another time, with the snow, completely gone, I was going the same route and squinting because if you squint without closing your eyes completely, but only to the point when the eyelashes from your upper and lower eyelids meet and touch each other, you’d see the world as if thru the transparent wings of a dragonfly. That way I was not, actually, walking but flying in a tiny dragonfly-like helicopter and watching thru its Plexiglas roof which I saw in The Funny Pictures because even though I was past the preschool age I still turned pages of that magazine for small kids whenever it came my way.

      And then I remembered how rebellious Kotovsky, in the movie “Kotovsky” at the Regiment Club, answered the arrogant landlord, “I am Kotovsky!” After which he grabbed him and threw thru the window panes of the landlord’s house.

      So I also grabbed the rich scoundrel by the breast of his jacket and threw him into the roadside ditch. And I proudly called myself with the glorious name, “I am Kotovsky!” Yay! And it was so good to feel myself so strong. That’s why I replayed the episode several times walking uphill to Block. And why not? Who was to see me along the empty road?

      At home, Mom told how she and Paulyna Zimin had a hearty laugh watching thru the neighbor’s window my grabs and throws of nobody knew who. But I never confessed that I was Kotovsky at the moment….

      End April, we became young pioneers. The ceremony took place not at school but in front of the House of Officers because there stood the big gypsum head of Lenin upon the tall pedestal.

      The night before, Mom ironed my trousers thru gauze and also the white parade-shirt and the scarlet silk triangle of pioneer tie. All those things she hung over the back of a chair so that in the morning everything would be ready. When there was no one in the room, I touched the soft caressing fabric of the pioneer tie. Mom said she had bought it from the store, but it’s impossible for such things to be for sale.

      The bright morning sun was shining. We, the fourth-graders, stood facing the lined-up ranks of the school children. Our scarlet ties hung on our right arms bent at the elbow, the collars of our shirts were turned up for the senior graders to easily tie our ties around.

      Yet before that moment, we chanted the memorized Solemn Oath in front of our comrades to love our Homeland hotly, to live and learn and struggle as admonished by great Lenin, as we were always being taught by the Communist Party….

      One week before the end of the academic year I fell ill. Mom thought it was a cold and told me to stay in bed but could not bring the temperature down, and when it rose up to forty she called an ambulance from the Detachment’s Hospital because with two more degrees the temperature would become lethal.

      I was too lightheaded to be proud or frightened that a whole vehicle came after just me alone. At the hospital, they at once diagnosed pneumonia and began to knock the temperature down with penicillin injections every half-hour. I did not care. A day later the injection frequency was reduced to one per hour, the following day – one in two hours…

      The patients in the ward were all adults, soldiers from the Regiment. In four days, I was quite okay and walking in the garden around the Hospital, when our class together with the teacher came to visit me and hand over the report card with my grades.

      I felt uncomfortable and, for some reason, ashamed, so I ran away around the corner followed by the boys of our class. But then we returned, and the girls together with the teacher handed me my award for successful studies and exemplary behavior. It was the book of The Russian Epic Tales which Grandma Martha read to me, and my sister-'n'-brother, but only quite a new one… That way, little by little, things began somehow repeat themselves in my life…

      In summer we were again taken to the pioneer camp to the same canteen, lining-ups, bedroom ward, “stiff hours”, and Parental Days. Though certain things had notably changed because as a full-fledged pioneer, I already belonged to the Third Platoon which, together with the First and Second ones, was eligible for swimming in the lake. But first, we had to wait a week in anxious hope that it shouldn’t rain on the appointed day.

      We waited eagerly, and on the swimming day the weather was not rainy, so two trucks with canvas tops took us to the Sominsky lake. The road went thru the forest, along some narrow endless clearing. And the ride was also very long because we had sung all the pioneer songs, both my favorite “ah, potato’s so tasty-tasty-tasty-tasty…”, and the one I liked less, but still for pioneers – “we marched to the ding of the cannonade…”, and, well, all that we knew, anyway, but the road did not end and I felt sick with all those jolts on the bumps in the road. Then those, who sat at the square window cut in the front canvas wall, shouted that something was seen ahead and the truck pulled up on a grassy shore of a big lake amid the forest.

      They allowed us to enter the water not all at once but in turn, one platoon after another. The water was very dark, and the bottom felt unpleasantly quaggy, and they too soon yelled from the shore, “Third platoon – out!”

      At first,