Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
In the fifth grade, instead of just one Mistress, we had separate teachers for different subjects because our elementary education was over.
The new Class Mistress' name was Makarenko Lyubov … er… Alexeevna?…Antonovna?…I don’t remember her patronymic. Between us, we called her just “Makar”, yes, checks with the handle of the most popular army pistol of 12 charges.
“Atas! Makar is coming!” (In the school lingo "atas!" meant “beware!”)
But all that came later, and for the first time, I met the would-be Class Mistress the day before school, when Mom brought me there to copy the curriculum and get acquainted with my new Class Mistress.
Makarenko asked me to help her about the class wall newspaper on a big sheet of Whatman paper, which had to be adorned with a frame for which there already was the mark of a pencil line five-centimeter offset from the edges. She gave me a brush and a box of watercolors and warned to use only the blue one before going out together with my Mom to further improve on their acquaintance.
Proud of being trusted with so important a job, I started immediately, dipped the brush in the glass of water, dampened the blue and began to paint the strip of the Whatman paper between its edge and the pencil mark, trying not to trespass it. The job turned out an up-hill one – you paint, and paint, and paint but there still remains so much to paint yet. The main problem though was that each watercolor stroke differed from others by its shade of blue, making it hard to keep the uniformly. I persevered in earnest because not every day a boy gets a chance of making frames on a sheet of Whatman. However, by the return of Mom and Mistress, I had only finished about a quarter of the frame.
The teacher said at once that was enough, even more than that because all she had wanted of me was just passing the brush along the pencil line, but now it’s too late. Mom promised to bring a sheet of Whatman paper from her work, but the teacher said “no-no!” Then I came up with a proposal to mount strips of paper on glue over the superfluously painted areas, but the idea was also turned down, I didn’t know why.
We left, and Mom did not rebuke me on our way home for it was not my fault if the new teacher had never in her life seen sturdy frames of plywood, but only those of thin lines as around the words of Marx and Lenin in the Regiment Club…
When school began there was a wall newspaper hanging in our classroom. Probably, I was the only schoolboy to study so carefully the blue line borders in the paper…
Nevertheless, our new Mistress retained some confidence in me and a month later entrusted with a verbal message for Seraphima Sergeevna in our former classroom.
I knocked on the familiar door and recited the message to my first teacher, who was sitting at her desk facing the new growth of first-graders. She thanked me and then asked to close the upper window leaf, thru which droughts got in whenever someone opened the door.
I readily climbed onto the windowsill and, standing on tip-toes, reached out and slammed shut the vicious leaf. The mission done and, rather than to kneel back on the sill and then lie on it with the stomach, I just jumped down on the floor. The jump turned out classy deft, and full of pride I strutted out of the silent classroom past the delight and reverence in the eyes of the small ones at their desks. How could I have thought those first-graders on a visit to my kindergarten group were so unreachably grown up? Arrogant swaggers!.
At home, we already had a TV set in which announcers read the news against the background of the Kremlin walls and towers, and hockey players rushed from one goal to the other at the European and World Championships. There were eagerly awaited for programs of Kinopanorama, and the Club of Jolly and Resourceful, and, of course, movies!
I would never have supposed that there could be a film longer than 2 sequels. The 4-sequeled “Bombard the area I’m in!” became an eye-opener. Only I did not like Italian cinema, because when Marcello Mastroianni suggested a possible abortion and I inquired what that word meant, our neighbor, auntie Paulyna, laughed out loud and Dad ordered me leave the parent’s room because that movie was not meant for children…
The arms race took place not only in the TV box but in our boyish life as well. We reached the stage of using sophisticated weaponry: crook pistols, crook rifles.
There’s hardly any need in a detailed explanation what a slingshot is, however, I’d like to point out that there are two types of slingshots: for shooting pebbles, and for shooting crooks.
(…pebble-shooters are a lethal weapon, in the hungry post-war years in Stepanakert, the boys were knocking sparrows down from the trees for their meal…)
Crook-shooting slingshot is almost a toy made of aluminum wire and a round rubber band for aircraft-modeling (instead of rubber straps cut out from a gas mask for pebble shooters). The non-lethal slingshots shoot with a small piece of aluminum wire bent into a narrow arc-like crook. Catching the rubber band within the crook’s bend, pull the band and let the missile go. It doesn’t kill but it is felt alright, bad news if the crook hits the eye.
Now, if instead of the slingshot the round rubber band is fixed upon a piece of planed plank and you pull the crook along its even surface, the accuracy of the hit grows exponentially because the crook takes off the firm guide. The rest, cutting out of that piece of plank a sub-machine gun or a pistol, is up to you.
By the point in the plank side to which the readied crook is pulled, you add the trigger-frame of the same aluminum wire strung crosswise so as to keep the crook in place until you pull the trigger. The pressure for keeping the trigger-frame in place and holding the cocked up crook at ready originates from a common rubber band, like that in underpants, stretched taut from the trigger to the screw in the downside of the planed plank.
The boys armed with such weapons do not run about yelling “ta-ta-ta!” as in War-Mommy. They leave those naive games for kindergarten kids and go down into basements and start hunting each other in the dark. Metallic “dzink!” of a crook against the cemented floor, or the wooden walls, hints that the enemy is near and opened fire at you. But securing the position in the pit above the floor at the end of the corridor, you are as safe as in an impregnable bunker. You have to just sit tight up there and send crooks to the sound of stealthy steps, and if you hear “ouch!” from the dark, then you have targeted him okay…
In autumn, they finished construction of the five-story apartment block across the road surrounding Block. The happy tenants were moving into their flats while deep down, in the endless basement corridors of so big a building (the first of that height and size at the Object), there unfolded unprecedented combat actions with the employment of crook weapons of all types.
Initially, the huge underground basement was illuminated with electric bulbs placed rarely but evenly, they lived but a short life: long-range crook shots burst them up, one by one, into fine splinters. Perhaps, the only drawback of the crook weapons was their almost complete noiselessness. For real self-assertion, you need your arms to do some major bangs…
(…life just cannot stand still, it has to flow. Where to? The direction conforms to the dearest dreams of those swimming in the flow, sort of…)
More and more often, the evening quietude in the Courtyard got disrupted by sharp snaps alike to gun reports because the boys had armed themselves with peelikkalkas but I, as usual, straggled behind the advanced trends in the flow of social life, which made me beg for instructions to manufacture a peelikkalka.
Take 15 cm. length of a narrow section (0.5 cm.) copper tube and bend till it resembles letter L. The foot of the resulting L is flattened with a hammer. Thru the remaining orifice, pore a small amount of molten lead into the tube to form a smooth leaden bottom by the angle to L’s foot.
Find a thick long nail reaching the leaden bottom and still sticking out from the tube for at least 5 cm. and bend the nail at 4 cm. from its head (you’ve got another L now).
Insert the nail into the tube (the contraption resembles the left bracket “[”, or right bracket “]”, depending on your point of view) and as a result, you have a working piston-cylinder shebang.
Connect the bent nail head and the flattened tube foot using a common rubber band, like that used in underpants, now the whole construction looks like a small bow and your peelikkalka is ready.
Pull the nail halfway out from the tube, the tension of the band forces the nail rest against the copper wall of the tube at the point to which you pulled the nail out.
Squeeze the peelikkalka in your palm, the band pressed to the tube makes the nail slide inside and sharply hit the leaden bottom. So much for a trial blank shot.
Now, it remains only to load the firearms, for which purpose the nail is fully taken out and the tube loaded with scrapings of sulfur from a couple of match heads.
Insert the nail back, cock it up with the band and “Hello, world!” with a live shot from your weapon. Bang!…
In the evening dark, the splash of flame shooting out from the tube orifice looks quite impressive. On the whole, it’s the same principle as in toy pistols with paper pistons, yet distinctly enhanced in decibels…
On learning the theory, I wanted to manufacture a peelikkalka of my own, but Dad did not have a copper tube of the right size at his work.
Still and all, I had it. Probably, one of the boys gave me an odd one of his.
You can't deny that in an extra-curricular way, a schoolboy gets better training for real life…
(…never heard the “peelikkalka” word, eh?. me neither—well, outside the Object—yet the name ain’t a jot less luring than that of “derringer”…)
~ ~ ~
As concerned mainstream schooling, our class was moved to the one-story building in the lower part of the school grounds, about a hundred meters from the principal building. Apart from our classroom, the building comprised a couple of workshop rooms for Handicraft classes equipped with vices and even a lathe in one of them. Because the school curriculum had more important subjects, that room was rarely open, two or three days a week to accommodate the grades visiting our territory.
Studying in the outskirts of school grounds has lots of advantages. During the breaks, you can have crazy races in the corridor free of the risk to stumble into some patrolling teacher as is their custom in the main building.
Besides, the teachers entered our class no sooner than some self-appointed sentinel or two of ours, playing outside, would race in with the announcement which subject was heading to us from up there. And an outdoors lookout was simply the must not to be caught at bullying a socket in the classroom wall into whose holes with 220 V we stuck the legs of radio-electronic resistances. In the resulting short circuit, the resistance would burst and spew around indignant sparks of blinding flame.
(…presently I’m just bewildered why none of us had ever got electroshocked. It seems, the mains sockets in that room were too human…)
Life was changing in our house too. The Zimins family left when Stepan was made redundant because Nikita Khrushchev, when in the position of the USSR’s Ruler, gave the West a promise of drastic cuts in the contingent of the Soviet Army reducing it to the meager twenty millions of servicemen. Soon after that, he was made to retire, yet the new leadership kept the promise true and the reduction policies affected even our Object.
Besides the Zimins, the tenants from the apartment beneath us left also. Their grown-up daughter Julia presented us, 3 children from the upper floor, with her album of matchbox stickers collection.
At those times matchboxes were made not of cardboard with printed pictures on it, but of very thin, one-layer, plywood blanketed by taut blue tissue upon which there was mounted one or another sticker portraying the famous ballet dancer Ulanova or some sea animal, or a hero astronaut in it. People collected matchbox stickers just like the post-stamp hobbyists only, first, you had to peel them off a box soaked in water and then, of course, to dry up.
Julia’s collection was split into different sections: sports, aviation, Hero Cities, and so on. Surely, all 3 of us were delighted with so generous a gift and we stepped in her shoes at keeping the picturesque hobbyhorse…
In place of Yura Zimin, another Yura became my friend who had a different family name, yet, like the previous Yura, Yura Nikolayenko was also a neighbor, more distant though, who lived not on the same landing but in the same Block.
As the snow filled the forest, we ventured out there in search of foxholes or, at least, to catch an odd hare. We had pretty good chances of success because we were joined by a Lowlander-boy who brought a dog living in the yard of their wooden house. Only he was too greedy to share the linen rope tied to the dog’s collar and yanked at it himself. In the forest though, the dog began to drag him forward and backward over the snowdrifts with lots of hare footprints. Yura and I were running behind not to miss out on the moment of catching a hare.
Then we noticed that the dog was paying no attention to the hare footprints but constantly sniffing for something else. Finally, he started to excitedly dig into a tall snowdrift. Anticipating that the dog would dig out a fox burrow whose scent he nosed thru the snow, we armed ourselves with sticks to meet the beast. However, from under the snow, the dog pulled out a big old bone, and we stopped hunting…
~ ~ ~
On the winter vacations, many children of my age were invited to a neighboring corner house in the Courtyard, where some newly arrived tenants celebrated the birthday of their daughter, my future classmate. She looked like Malvina from The Golden Key tale, only her hair was neither blue nor curly, but straight.
After the guests finished all of the lemonade on the big table, the beautiful girl shared her memories of the place she lived before, where she was, like, Queen of the Courtyard and the boys living there were her pages, sort of…
Probably, I caught cold by the vacations end and started school later than my classmates because I could not get it what was happening the morning when I finally came to our classroom.
The lessons had not begun yet and the newcomer Malvina-like girl appeared in the doorway right after me. Like all the schoolgirls at any grade in those times, she wore the compulsory uniform in Queen-Victorian style—a dark brown dress with a white lace collar and a black apron on copious straps covering all of her shoulders.
She stepped into the room and stopped expectantly. The next moment a godawful hue and cry burst out, “The Cow of the Courtyard!”
She dropped her school bag on the floor and, wrapping her arms around her head, ran along the aisle between the desks, while everyone else—both the boys and the girls—blocked her way, hooting and yelling something in her ears, and Yura Nikolayenko ran behind her and rubbed himself at her back, like dogs do, until she sat down at her desk and dropped her face into her hands.
The mayhem ceased only when the classroom was entered by a teacher asking, “What’s going on here?”, she was perplexed no less than me.
The girl got on her feet and ran out of the classroom without even picking her schoolbag up from the floor.
The next day she never showed up and we had a class meeting attended, instead of her, by her father who was red in the face and shouting that we were a bunch of scoundrels and pinched his daughter by the chest. He demonstrated with his hands where exactly were applied the pinches.
Then our Mistress told the meeting that pioneers shouldn’t disgrace themselves by nagging their classmates so disgustingly as we did because the Malvina-like girl was also a pioneer like all of us.
And I felt ashamed even though I had not been pinching or nagging anyone. The beautiful girl never more appeared in our class, probably, she was transferred to the parallel one.
(…” the crowd is a merciless beast…”
runs a line from Avetic Isahakian’s poem about Abu-Lala, which I learned very well even before reading it…)
Individual cruelty is no less ugly as collective one. In spring I got another deep scratch when witnessing an example of maternal pedagogy.
The empty afternoon Courtyard was entered, between our house and the corner building, by a woman heading to the buildings on the opposite side. Behind her, a six-year-old girl ran and sobbed holding her arm outstretched to the women and kept repeating the same words with the voice hoarse from non-stop wailing, “Mom, gimme your hand! Mom, gimme your hand!”
The rasping shrieks somehow reminded me of Masha’s screeching, when they came to slaughter her at Grandma Katya’s in Konotop.
The woman never slowed down only time and again looked back to lash with a thin rod the girl’s outstretched hand. The kid would respond with a somewhat louder shriek but neither withdraw her hand nor stop crying, “Mom, gimme your hand!”
They crossed the yard and went into their staircase-entrance leaving me harrowed by the unanswerable question – where could such fascist mothers be in our country from?.
~ ~ ~
Between the left wing of the school building and the tall openwork fence of timber that separated the school grounds from the surrounding forest, there were a couple or 3 beds passing for the school agronomy lot.
It’s highly unlikely that the mixture of loam and withered Pine needles from several trees left within the school territory, could yield a crop of any sort. However, when our class was told come to school on Sunday for turning dirt in the agronomy lot, I dutifully showed up at the appointed hour.
The morning was overcast, so Mom even tried to talk me into staying home. Indeed, everything turned out just as she had predicted – not a single soul around. But maybe they would come yet?
I hung about the locked school for a while, then bypassed the dismal agronomy lot and went down to the one-story building of our class plus the workshop in the lower part of the school grounds.
Opposite the building, there was a squat brick warehouse with two iron gates locked as anything else in the empty school grounds whose silent stillness could even be felt as some tangible substance. However, no lock could impede climbing up to the roof of the warehouse from the steep hillock behind which made it not a big deal.
The slight slant of the lean-to roof was covered with black roofing felt. I walked around the roof square to each of its corners, then looked back at the mum school building. Still nobody. Okay, five minutes more and I’d breeze off.
At that moment the sun peeped out thru the clouds making the wait not so gloomy because I marked light, transparent, wisps of steam rising from the black roof here and there. “Aha, the sun heats it!” guessed I.
What’s more, while drying up, the black felt began to develop streaks of dark-gray color, which widened, expanded, joined together and kept me enthralled with watching that gradual expansion of the solar possessions. I knew perfectly well already that no one would show up and I might just as well go home, yet let that stretch of wet roofing felt would also turn dry-gray making the Isle of Dry expand to the corner edge of the roof.
I returned home by the midday mealtime and didn’t tell Mom that the sun had recruited me to the ranks of his comrades-in-arms…
End spring, Dad was going fishing out of Zona and he agreed to take me along if I provide worms for bait. I knew some lavish spots for worm-digging and brought home a whole tangle of them in a rusty tin container from canned beef.
We left very early in the morning and, near Checkpoint, 2 more men joined us with the paper permitting all the 3 to leave Zona, I was the fourth in the company but the guards didn’t even notice me. Beyond the white Checkpoint gate, we turned right and went thru the forest.
We were walking, and walking, and walking and the forest never ended. At times the footpath got near the edge of the woodland but then again led us back into the wilderness.
I walked patiently because Dad had warned me even before sending after the warms there was a walk of eight kilometers, to which I hastily answered then that it was okay with me, yes, I could do that. So I just walked on, though my fishing pole and the tin can with baiting grew very heavy.
Finally, we went out to a forest lake and the fishermen told it was the Sominsky which I couldn’t recognize though it was the lake where I once learned to swim. We walked along a grassy promontory by whose end there was a real raft. One of the fishermen remained on the shore, and we 3 boarded the raft that was made of logs from deciduous trees with smooth green bark, maybe, Aspen.
Dad and the other fisherman pushed the raft off, stepped onto it and kept jabbing slowly the lake bottom with long poles until we got some thirty meters away from the shore. There we stopped and began fishing.
The raft logs were not close to each other and thru the gaps between them, there were seen the openwork traverse logs drowned in the pitch-black depth, so we had to move carefully.
Our 3 fishing poles overhung 3 different sides of the raft. Fish struck pretty often though the catch was not as big as promised by the vigorous resistance to the pulled line, besides, you had to be very careful taking it off the hook because around their muzzles as well as on back fins there stuck out very prickly spikes.
Dad said it was the ruff, and the fisherman added that the ruff was the most delicious fish. Later, when we got ashore and cooked the soup in a pot hung over the fire I, of course, ate all of it but couldn’t decide how delicious it was because the steaming soup was way too hot.
After the meal, the fishermen advised there was no hope of good catch anymore because at that time of day fish went sleeping. So, they stretched under the trees and slept too, the fishermen and my Dad. When everyone woke up, we slowly started back home.
Returning, we didn’t take the shortcut footpath thru the forest, choosing to walk over the low hills and dales because the paper permitted to stay away till 6 in the evening.
From the top of one of the hills, we saw a small lake in the distance, it was perfectly round, rimmed by the growth of reeds. When we reached it, Dad wanted to take a swim at any rate, although the fishermen tried to talk him out of the idea. One of them told it was too often that in that round lake, called Witch’s Eye, someone got drowned caught by its duckweed.
But Dad doffed his clothes, all the same, grabbed hold of the stern of a skiff by the shore and, kicking up foamy splashes, moved off to the reeds by the opposite shore. Halfway thru, he remembered the watch on his wrist, took it off and hung on a nail in the stern. When he came back in the same manner, the duckweed clung all over his shoulders in long thickly spliced garlands.
He was ashore already and putting on his clothes when we saw a woman in a long skirt of villager womenfolks, who ran across the slanted field with indistinct yells. She ran up to us but didn’t say anything new and only repeated what we had heard from the fellow-fisherman.
Near Checkpoint, we were caught in a spell of bad weather and the rain thoroughly drenched us before we got home, but no one fell ill after…
~ ~ ~
With bicycles, I palled up since early childhood. I can’t even remotely remember my first tricycle, but some photos confirm: here it is with the pedals on the front wheel and me, astride, a three-year-old fat little man in a closely fitting skull cap.
However, the next one I recollect pretty well—a red three-wheeler with the chain drive—because I often had to argue with my sister-’n’-brother whose turn it was to take a ride. Later, Dad reassembled it into a two-wheeler but, after my fifth grade, the bicycle became too small for me and was hand-me-downed to the younger for good.
And then Dad got somewhere a real bike for me. Yes, it was a second-hand machine but not a bike for ladies or some kind of “Eaglet” for grown-up kids.
One evening after his work, Dad even tried to teach me riding it in the Courtyard, but without his supporting hand behind the saddle, I would fall on one side if not on the other. Dad got weary of my clumsiness, he said, “Learn it yourself!” and went home.
In a couple of days, I could already ride the bike. However, I didn’t get the nerve to throw my leg over the saddle and perch up properly, instead, I passed my leg thru the frame and rode standing on the pedals, which caused the bike to run askew.
But then I got ashamed seeing a boy who, though younger than me, was not afraid to race along with his bike, step onto a pedal and flung the other leg over the saddle to the second pedal. His body length did not allow to use the saddle without losing touch with the pedals so turning them he rubbed his crotch against the frame which also served him for sitting upon with his left or right thigh, alternatively. On such a brave shortie’s background, riding the bike “under the frame” was quite a shame…
And at last, after so many tries and falls ending both with and without bruises or scratches, I did it! Wow! How swiftly carried me the bike above the ground, no one would ever catch up be they even running! And—most important—riding a bicycle was such an easy thing!
I rode it non-stop driving along the concrete walks in the Courtyard, orbiting its two wooden gazebos until, a bit warily, I steered out to the road of concrete slabs surrounding the two Gorka blocks…
Later, already as an expert rider, I started mastering the bikerobatics— “no-hand riding”, when you take your hands off the steer and pilot the bicycle by feeding your body weight to the side of your intended turn. And the bike understood and complied!.
Another achievement of that summer became keeping the eyes open when under the water.
The dam where I once slipped off the slab was restored to bring about a wide bathing pool which attracted numerous beach-goers.
Among us, boys, the favorite game in the water was “spotting” where the “it” should catch up with and touch anyone of the fleeing players. Your speed when walking thru the water is slower than that of fleeing swimmers so you have also to swim which reduces your visibility. Besides, a player can take a dive and sharply turn down there, so it’s hard to guess where he’d re-emerge for a breather. Ever before, when plunging in the water, I firmly closed my eyes but that way you cannot catch a glimpse of flicking white heels that kick full ahead underwater.
True enough, in the ever-present yellowish twilight beneath the surface, you can’t see very far, yet sounds there turn more crisp and clear if you are sitting and knock, say, two gravels against each other, possibly because the water cuts off all unrelated noises. However, you cannot sit underwater for a long time— the air in your lungs pulls you up to the surface and there’s no other way to resist the upping but use your hands for counter-rawing which makes you drop the gravels…
~ ~ ~
Our parents’ leaves did not coincide that summer so they went for their vacations in turn. First, Dad visited his native village of Kanino in the Ryazan Region. He took me with him there, but strictly warned beforehand that on the way I should not ever tell anyone that we lived at the Atomic Object.
At the station of Bologoye, we had a long wait for the train to Moscow. Leaving me seated on our suitcase in the station waiting room, Dad went to punch the tickets. On a nearby bench, a girl was sitting with an open book in her lap. I got up and neared the girl to look in the book over her shoulder. It was The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.
I read a couple of paragraphs of the familiar lines I liked so much. She kept reading and didn’t pay any attention to me standing behind the bench back. I wanted to speak up to her, but I did not know what to say. That that was a good book? That I had also read it?
While I was looking for the right words to say, her adults came and announced that their train was arriving. They grabbed their trunks and went out to the platform to board the train. She never looked back…
Then my Dad returned with the punched tickets. At my request, he bought me a book from a bookstall about a Hungarian boy who later became a youth and fought against the Austrian invaders to his homeland. When the ping-ponging echo from the PA loudspeaker announced the arrival of our train, we went out to the platform. A ten-or-so-year-old boy passed by.
“See?” said Dad to me. “That’s what poverty is!”
I looked after the boy who walked away, and noticed the rough patches in the back of his pants…
In Moscow, we arrived the next morning. I wanted to see the Capital of our Homeland from its very beginning and kept asking when Moscow would, at last, start, until the conductor said that we were in the city already. But behind the pane in the car’s window, there were running the same shabby log huts as at the stations of Valdai, only much more of them and closer to each other, and they did not want to end in any way. And only when our train pulled in under the high arc of the station roof, I believed that it was Moscow.
We went on foot to the other station which was very close. There Dad again punched the tickets but that time we had to wait until evening for the train, so he handed the suitcase over to the storage room and we boarded an excursion bus going to the Kremlin.
Inside the Kremlin walls, they warned that we shouldn’t take any pictures whatsoever. Dad had to demonstrate there was no camera in the leather case hanging from his shoulder but his homemade radio which they allowed to keep, only now I had to carry it on.
There were white-walled houses in the Kremlin and dark Fir-trees, but too few, although thick-trunked and tall.
