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

      The very first Sunday after our arrival, Aunt Lyouda led me and my sister-'n'-brother to Professions Street that was the only asphalted street in the Settlement. We went along it in the direction of Bazaar and in 5 minutes reached the Plant Club for the 3 o’clock movie show for children.

      The Plant Club was a mighty two-story building but as tall as a four-storied one. The masonry in its walls and windows had lots of arches, ledges, and columns, like, a lace-work of smoky bricks. The concrete wall of the Plant enclosure did not miss to surround the backside of the Club as well. In the small square in front of it, there was the Plant Main Check-Entrance built in the same ornate ante-revolution style of masonry, opposed by the modernist structure of the two-story-as-two-story murkily-glazed cube of the Plant Canteen.

      We entered the lofty lobby in the Plant Club full of diverse-aged but equally shrill children lining to the small window in the tin-clad door of the ticket office. One boy, a second-grader by his looks, started leaching Aunt Lyouda for ten kopecks to buy himself a ticket, but she snapped at him and he shut up. She seemed to enjoy visiting the Plant Club for an afternoon show for children…

      So I learned the route to the Club where, among other things, there also was the Plant Library of two huge halls. The desks in the first one bore the layers of newspapers’ filings, wide and thick. Behind the glazed doors in the tall cabinets lined by the walls, there stood familiar rows of never-asked-for works by Lenin, and Marx, and Engels and other similarly popular multi-volume collections.

      The next hall had the stacks with normal books for reading. Needless to say, I enrolled immediately because the choice of books on the two shelves in our school library was niggardly poor…

      On May Day, our school marched out for the all-city demonstration. The school column looked lively and lovely thanks to the young pioneers and their ceremonial uniform—white shirts and red neckties, all washed, ironed, crisp—while the students of senior grades were responsible for weightier decorations, the heads of the current Members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in their portraits on roughly smoothed and painted red stocks in the hands of carriers (one Member per three-four carriers, in turn, rotating each 20-30 min.).

      Headed by the group of teachers, we walked the uneven cobbles in Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street to Bazaar where Professions Street shared its asphalt to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street for its dive thru the Under-Overpass. The ascend from the tunnel on its opposite end became an influent to Peace Avenue stretched away to the tall railway embankment in the distance, after which it ran thru the housing area of five-story buildings, named Zelenchuk, followed by the City center – Peace Square. Peace Avenue, tangentially passing Peace Square, separated it from the City Council concealed behind the greens opposite to the granite-rimmed, never working, fountain in the middle of Peace Square concluded by the edifice of Peace Movie Theater.

      The middle one of the three alleys in the greens which led directly to the City Council’s entrance porch was blocked, because of the demonstration, with the red platform past which the whole city marched in the holiday demonstrations, except for the tenants of the five-story buildings bounding the square who watched demonstrations from their balconies. I did envy the folks at first, but not for long…

      On our way to Peace Square, the column of School 13 had time and again to stop for long waits letting the schools of lower numbers overtake us and go ahead. But the working organizations gave way to us, like the columns of the Locomotive Depot, or the Railway Distance Of the South-West Railroad, as it stood in white bulging letters cut of polystyrol and mounted on the crimson-velvet covering in the shields on wheels at their columns’ heads. Neither streetcars nor vehicles were seen along all of Peace Avenue, only people, lots of people on foot both walking in the wide stream of columns, and standing by, kinda live banks scanning the current, which made May Day so special and unlike other days.

      On entering the vast Peace Square, we had to suddenly change our dignified marching step to a frivolous trotting and kinda run to attack, giggling and panting, with the portraits of those Members atilt, to catch up with the previous column of which we, as usual, had fallen too far behind because of bad timing. And since School 13 was the last but one among the city schools, by the moment when we, mixed up with the disordered ranks of School 14, were passing the red platform, the loudspeakers shouted from up there, “The column of the Konotop Railway Technical School is entering Square! Hooray, comrades!”, making us hooray to others and not to ourselves.

      After Peace Square the road passed the entrance to the Central Park of Recreation and turned right, descending towards Lenin Street, but we didn’t go down there. In the nearest lane, we piled the Political Bureau Members and red banners on a truck that took them back to our school to sit in the Household Manager’s storeroom till the next demonstration. And we also went back, on foot, giving Peace Square a pretty wide berth because the passages between the buildings around it were blocked by empty buses, face to face, and in the vast of the empty square solitary figures of militiamen were strolling leisurely.

      Yet, it still was a holiday, because before we started for the demonstration Mother gave each of us fifty kopecks, of which there even remained, afterward, some change for a bar of Plombir ice-cream in thin paper wrapping cost 18 kopecks and that of Creamy just only 13. The saleswomen in white robes sold ice-cream from their plywood, double-walled, boxes at every crossing along the trafficless Peace Avenue…

      When I returned home, the schoolchildren in festive white shirts and red pioneer ties were still walking along Nezhyn Street returning to the Settlement lanes after the demonstration.

      And then I committed the first dastardly act in my life. I went out from the wicket of our khutta and wantonly shot with my crook pistol in the guilty of nothing white back of a passer-by boy pioneer. He chased me, but I ran back into the yard up to the kennel of Zhoolka who kept barking and yanking his chain violently, so the boy did not dare come up and only shouted his threats and abuses thru the open wicket…

      In summer our parents bought a nanny-goat from Bazaar because when Father received his first payment at the Plant and brought home 74 rubles, Mother, confusedly looking at the money in his hand, asked, “How? Is that all?”

      The purchase was meant to make living easier but, in fact, it only complicated life because now I had to walk the white nanny-goat on a rope into Foundry Street or Smithy Street where she grazed the dust-covered grass along the weather-worn fences.

      To drink any of the goat milk I refused downright in spite of all Mother's wheedling how hugely beneficial it was for health. After a while, the goat was slaughtered and tenderized into cutlets which I ignored completely…

      Sometimes Grandma Katya’s son, Uncle Vadya, came to our khutta in his boiler-oil smeared spetzovka during the midday breaks at the Plant to beg hooch because his colleagues were a-waiting, but his plea seldom succeeded.

      Uncle Vadya had a smooth black hair combed back and a toothbrush mustache also black, the skin in his face was of slick olive hue, like that of young Arthur in The Gadfly by Lillian Voynich, and on his right hand he missed the middle finger lost at the beginning of his workingman career.

      “I couldn’t get it first. Well, okay, that’s my finger dropped upon the machine tool, but where's the water from that drips on it? A-ha! that’s my tears!” so he recounted the accident. Doctors sewed up the stump very nicely—smooth and no scars at all—so that when he made the fig it came out 2 at once. The double-barreled fig looked very funny and no chance for anyone to ape the trick even remotely.

      Uncle Vadya lived in the khutta of his mother-in-law near the Bus Station. There's a special term in Ukrainian for a man living with his in-laws, which is primmuck, aka Adoptee. Bitter is the share of an Adoptee! As reported by Uncle Vadya, a primmuck had to keep quieter than the still water and lower than the grass. His mother-in-law he had to address with “Mommy” and kowtow even to