The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life). Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
“the whites”, or porcini, but I never came across any of them. The unfamiliar ones I took to Dad, and he explained that those were shiitake, or morels or simply poisonous throwaways.
At home, the mushrooms were poured from the pails into a big washing basin and kept overnight in the water, then Mom cooked or marinated them. All that was delicious, no doubt, but hunting them in the woods gave more delights…
One Sunday when the parents went on a visit somewhere, the three of us started chasing each other all over the apartment, just for fun. The merrymaking was cut short by a sharp knock at the door. On the landing, there stood the new neighbor from the first floor who said that our parents’ absence was not a reason to kick up such a bedlam and, when back, they’d be informed we couldn’t behave if left alone.
Later in the evening, Natasha ran in from the landing with the alert alarm: the parents were coming home already but stopped on the first floor by the neighbors from the apartment under ours. Oh-oh, we’re going to get hell!
How come she was at the right time in the right place? Quite easy. The landing was, like, the apartment’s extension wide for us to play balloon-volleyball, and Mom even started to use it as a gym, going out there in the evenings, when she was not at work, to jump a skipping rope. We followed her example, but I wasn’t as good at it as Natasha who practiced much oftener, and so she did at the moment of our parents’ intercepted return.
When they entered the hallway, Dad’s face was very angry. Without taking off his coat, he headed to the kitchen and brought a stool to the parents’ room, where he moved the rug aside and smashed the stool against the floor. “Keep quiet, eh?!” shouted he to the floorboards and squarely banged them once again with the stool’s seat, “Is it okay now?”
I realized that we would not be punished, but something still was somehow not right….
When leaving for school, we took along the sandwiches wrapped by Mom in newspaper sheets so that during a break we would take them out of our schoolbags and eat. For Sasha and Natasha, she put two sandwiches in one package because they studied in the same class. And before leaving for school, we also had breakfast in the kitchen.
However, on that particular Saturday, I left without my schoolbag and alone because that day the senior students were having a military game for which reason the classes for junior schoolchildren were canceled.
The game participants belonged to the competing groups of “the Blues” and “the Greens”, and for the start, they were to march into the forest in different directions. Their goal was to track down the opponent forces, surprise them, and capture their banner. Each trooper had to wear paper shoulder straps whose color indicated the group they were from. A gamester with one shoulder strap torn off became a prisoner of war while missing both meant they were "killed"…
That morning, I came to the kitchen late for breakfast because normally I got up wakened by the rise of the younger ones, but they enjoyed their day-off at the moment. Secondly, the previous night till late I kept sewing the shoulder straps onto my jacket with tiny, frequent, diligent stitches so that they would sit close to hinder tearing them off because of which military preparations I went to bed about midnight…
Now Mom was already leaving for her work and said there remained some pasta cooked for the previous day dinner or, if so be my wish, I could boil an egg for my breakfast.
I reminded her that I knew nothing about cooking eggs, but she answered it was as easy as pie: to have a soft-boiled egg you boil it for a minute and a half while three-minute boiling makes it hard-boiled. She even brought the alarm-clock from their room and put it on the windowsill next to the mushroom jar before taking a hurried leave…
Such three-liter jars were kept in almost every kitchen at the Object and they were filled with a mushroom that had nothing to do with the forest. It looked like some greenish slime upon the water in the jar and, in spite of the ugly looks, it turned the water into a tasty drink reminiscent of effervescent kvass, even though they called its producer ‘tea’-mushroom. When the jar contents neared their end with the mushroom wisps scratching the bottom, the jar was simply refilled with water and put aside for a couple of days to prepare the drink again. Women were gladly sharing pieces of the mushroom among themselves because when grown too thick it left no room for refilling the jar.
So, marking the time by the alarm clock next to the mushroom jar, I poured water into the small pan indicated by Mom before leaving, loaded it with an egg, lit the bluish springy fire in the gas stove and put the pan on it…
After exactly a minute and a half of waiting, the water around the egg did not look like being hot, so I decided, okay, let it be a hard-boiled egg. Additional one-and-a-half minutes past, some scanty vapors did start to rise from the pan, besides, the pan’s walls underwater developed lots of small bubbles, and I turned the gas off because I had exact instructions on how to cook boiled eggs…
(…the byword about the first pancake in the batch turning out a sorry lump can be safely expanded with “the first boiled egg is a slushy mess”…)
The military game participants were mostly in sportswear and noticeably reluctant to enter the school building. So all of us crowded together in the yard idling the time in small separate groups. In the one I was with, everybody appreciated the minuscule stitches that kept my shoulder straps in place. I proudly patted the one on my left shoulder—no way to grab at it, eh? Nothing like by those boys who fixed theirs by just a couple of stitches and now their shoulder straps stuck out like a cat's arced back asking to be torn off with just your pinky finger.
At that moment some unfamiliar boy, maybe from the parallel class, started a scrap. He spread me on the ground and tore my shoulder straps in tatters.
(…I never knew how to fight, neither do I now.
Most likely, I just called him “fool!” and ran away into the forest—back home…)
In the forest, I took my jacket off… Instead of the shoulder straps, there only remained a dashed, serrated, frame-like paper-strip under the tight close stitches by a doubled black thread.
I plucked the paper scraps out and scattered over the fallen foliage. Maybe, I even cried full of resentment at being killed so unruly, prematurely, before the start of combat actions, shattering my eager dreams to capture the adversary headquarters…
For some period, my favorite pastime at classes became producing blueprint drawings of my secret shelter located in a cave inside a mighty impenetrable cliff like that one lived by people in The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. Yet, unlike their case, you could get to my cave only by the underground passage which began far from the cliff, in the depths of the surrounding forest. Well, and the cave itself had an additional passage upward, into a smaller cavity equipped with narrow crevices in the wall to peek out and see what’s going on around…
A grim mask alike to those stone idols in the Easter Island decorated the butt-end of the pencil which I drew my designs with… The skill of pencil carving was also obtained at school, it’s as easy as pie and all you needed was a razor blade.
At the pencil’s butt-end, scrape 2 lengthwise parallel grooves, about 1 centimeter long, 3 mm wide and 2 mm apart to produce the ridge of the would-be nose. Connect the grooves with a deep cross cut to mark off the nose tip.
Now, from about a centimeter down the nose start a wider scrape towards the cross-cut, it makes the nose stick out and also becomes the lower part of the face. The notch across that wider scrape passes for a thin-lipped mouth, and two short slits, one in each of the long grooves on both sides of the nose, are the idol’s eyes.
Just be careful about the razor blade, it’s horribly sharp and would cut your finger pads at once if wielded inattentively… The instrument for carving was picked up, as needed, from the tiny blue-paper pack of razors kept by Dad in the bathroom. The blue top bore the brand-name “Neva” and the neat drawing of a black sailboat above it. Each razor in the pack was wrapped in a separate blue envelope embellished with the same sailboat and inscription…
When the winter sat in, the skin on my hands began to peel off. At first, there formed some small spots of dry skin and, when rubbed and pulled at, it would