Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The only occasion when I saw Eleonora without those tiny shining strips hanging from her ears was in the one-act play, where she was acting the underground communist caught by the White Guards. The Whites locked her in the same prison cell with a criminal, acted by Raissa, and Eleonora converted her into a Communist supporter before Stepan, Club House Manager, together with Head of Variety Band, Aksyonov, both in white Circassian coats and ballet high boots, took her away to face the firing squad…
If the Club Director was absent from his office, I had to buy a ticket like mere mortals from the ticket office next to his locked door. On one of such occasions, I entered the common auditorium and chose to land into a seat right in front of two girls, my classmates, Tanya and Larissa, because even though in the sold tickets they always marked the row and the place no one paid much attention to those marks.
Sometime before, I secretly liked Tanya, but she seemed overly unattainable, so I pulled wisely up and switched over to courting Larissa. After the classes at school, I tried to catch up with her in Nezhyn Street because she also went home that way. However, she invariably walked together with Tanya, her close girlfriend and also a neighbor in their Maruta Street.
When Larissa was a participant in Children Sector, I once happened to see her along Professions Street to the Gogol Street corner because she did not allow going with her any farther. At that period Tanya also participated in Children Sector activities and there, actually, were 3 of us walking Professions Street. On the way, Tanya kept urging Larissa to walk faster but then she just got angry and went ahead alone.
The 2 of us parted at the aforesaid corner, and I went along Gogol Street enthusiastically recollecting Larissa’s sweet laugh in response to my silly yakety-yak. On reaching the ice-coated water pump under the lamppost at the Nezhyn Street corner, all of my enthusiasm evaporated because of the two black figures, contrasting crisply against the white snow, who called me to come up.
I recognized both, one was a guy from the parallel class, and the other – Kolesnikov, a tenth-grader from our school, they both were from somewhere about Maruta Street. In a privately threatening tone, Kolesnikov began to make me understand that if I ever would come up to Larissa again and if he ever would hear or be told that I dared then, well, in general, I should get it what he would do to me. And so he kept rehearsing those general concepts in a circle, with slight variations in their order of priority, when I suddenly felt something snatching at my calf. I thought that was a street dog and looked back, but there was only a snowdrift and nothing else. That’s where and when the meaning of the idiom “hamstring shaking with fear” came to me completely.
He asked again if I understood, and I muttered that I got it. Then he asked if I understood everything of what he meant. I mumbled that, yes, everything. But I didn’t look at their faces and thought how good it would be if Uncle Tolik, the former regional welterweight champion in weightlifting, came to the pump for water. No, he never appeared. On the morning of that day, I fetched enough water to our khutta…
And now in public, before the pretty crowded auditorium, I took the seat in front of the two girls, my classmates, even though being fully aware of all the imprudence of such a move, yet, for some reason, unable to behave differently. I turned to them and tried to start a talk in the general hubbub of the audience present. However, Larissa kept mum and looked aside, and only Tanya was responding in rather a monosyllabic way before Larissa herself addressed me directly, “Stop following me, I’m laughed at by the guys because of you!”
Unable to find a word to answer her, crushed and dumb-stricken, rose I to my feet and walked away along the blind wall to the exit, carrying within my chest the fragments of my broken heart.
When I was nearing the back rows in the auditorium, my black sadness got drowned in the downright darkness because the lights went out to start the movie. To let my eyes get accustomed to the dark and prevent stumbling, I for a second took an empty seat by the passage and forgot to go and carry on my grief and pain because “Winnitoo the Chief of Apaches” was starting!.
~ ~ ~
At 19 Nezhyn Street, the old man Duzenko was no more and that part of the khutta was dwelt already by two old women: Duzenko’s widow and her sister who moved in from her village.
And in the half-khutta belonging to Ignat Pilluta there remained only his widow, Pillutikha. She never stuck her nose outside her den, keeping the window shutters in Nezhyn Street closed for weeks on end. Sure enough, she had to visit Bazaar or the Nezhyn Store but my treads never crossed hers…
In February Grandma Katya all of a sudden was taken to the hospital. Probably, only for me, with my life split between school, Club, books, and the TV it happened suddenly. Trying to get everywhere leaves no time to see things right by your side.
Coming from school, I clinked the latch-hook in the wicket, trotted to and up our two-step porch past Pillutikha’s window with a profile glimpse of her standing figure cloaked in a black shawl hung loosely from her head, her hand menacingly aloft against the wall between her and our kitchens.
At home, I dropped the folder with school notebooks into the crevice between the folding couch-bed and the cabinet under the TV and went back to the kitchen to have a midday meal with my sister-'n'-brother, if they hadn’t had it yet. Mother and Aunt Lyouda cooked separately for their families, and Grandma Katya ate the meals by her youngest daughter, together with her younger grandkids, Irochka and Valerik, at the common kitchen table by the wall between our and Duzenko’s parts of the khutta.
In the daytime, there was nothing on television but the frozen circle and squares for adjusting image by small knobs at the back of the TV box, if the circle was uneven then the announcers’ faces would be flattened or overly long. That’s why until the All-Union Television started to broadcast at 5 o’clock the TV was turned off and the midday meal was eaten under the muffled drum-roll-like chant from behind the wall to the Pillutikha’s, whose blather at times peaked up into piercing but indistinct shrieks.
Then I went to Club and, coming back, again saw Pillutikha, back-lit by a distant bulb in the room, she never turned on the light in the kitchen where she stood up against the hateful wall. After all the 4 parents of our khutta returned from work, Pillutikha would increase her volume to which the usual comment from Father was, “Ew! Again that Goebbels at her hurdy-gurdy!”
Once Uncle Tolik put a large teacup to the wall to hear what she was croaking about. I also pressed my ear to the cup bottom, the gabble got nearer and sounded already not from behind the wall but inside the white teacup, yet remained as thick as before. Mother advised not to pay attention to the half-witted old woman, and Aunt Lyouda explained that Pillutikha was putting curses on all of us thru the wall. She turned to that same wall and pronounced with perfect poise, “Be all of that back to your bosom!”
I don’t know whether Pillutikha was crazy indeed. She managed to live alone, after all. By the end of the war, her daughter left Konotop for the safety’s sake, to avoid troubles for her cheerful behavior with the officers at the German Company Headquarters lodging in her parents’ khutta. Pillutikha’s son Grisha was doing his ten-year stretch in prison for some murder. Her husband died; no TV by her side. Maybe, she kept cursing so as not to go nuts, who knows…
Grandma Katya never commented or said anything about Pillutikha, she only smiled a guilty smile. On some days she moaned occasionally but not louder than the muffled Goebbels’ speeches from behind the wall… And suddenly an ambulance arrived and she was taken to the hospital.
Three days later they brought Grandma Katya back and laid her on the leatherette-covered mattress-couch, constructed from the remains of the big sofa brought from the Object and put under the window in the kitchen, opposite to the brick stove. She did not recognize nor spoke to anyone, and only moaned loudly. In the evening our two families gathered in front of the TV and shut the door to the kitchen to cut off her moans and heavy smell. The Arkhipenkos moved their beds to the room and it became a bedroom for 9.
The next day the ambulance was called again, but they did not take her away and only made an injection. Grandma Katya quieted for a short time but then again began to sway from side to side on her couch, repeating the same screams, “Oh, God! Ah, probby!” A few years later I guessed that “probby” was a shortened Ukrainian “forgive me, God”.
Grandma Katya was dying for 3 days.
Our families stayed at neighboring khuttas; the Arkhipenkos at Number 15, and we at 21, in the half of Ivan Kreepak. Older neighbors were giving our parents indistinct advice about breaking out the threshold to our khutta, or some of the floorboards inside it. The most common-sense proposal made Ivan Kreepak’s wife, auntie Tamara. She said that the couch with Grandma Katya stood under the window with a half-open leaf above her head, and the fresh air flow protracted the sufferings of the poor thing.
That same evening, Mother and Aunt Lyouda dropped into our khutta to grab more blankets, then they put out the light and got out onto the porch. There Aunt Lyouda neared the kitchen window and closed the leaf tightly. Then she stealthily stepped down to Mother and me—I was holding the blankets—with a smile of a naughty girl on her face, or so it seemed in the dark moonless night.
In the morning Mother woke us, sleeping on the floor in the living-room of Kreepak’s khutta, with the news that Grandma Katya died.
The funeral was the next day. I did not want to go, but Mother said I should. I was burning with shame. It seemed to me that everyone knew that Grandma Katya was suffocated by her own daughters. That’s why I let loose the ear-flaps of my rabbit-fur hat and pulled it over my eyes. And so I went all the way from our khutta to the cemetery, keeping my guilty head low, and looking at the feet of those who walked ahead of me.
It’s possible though that no one ever guessed that such my stance was caused by shame and not because of the strong wind slapping my face with icy pellets.
At the cemetery, under the shrill crying of the three trumpets over the uneven mound of snow mixed with black earth lumps, all Grandma Katya’s children were sobbing too, both Mother, and Aunt Lyouda, and even Uncle Vadya.
(…living on, we harden more and more, someday I’ll grow less sensitive than those iron crackers from the thread-bare scrip of the wanderer in search for her beloved Finist the Falcon Radiant…)
The news of the Yuri Gagarin’s death shattered us, though not so tragically as the death of Vladimir Komarov eleven months before him – getting harder we had learned already that astronauts were also mortal. The TV announcer, keeping his eyes down to the sheet of text on his desk, read that in a training jet plane flight, Gagarin together with his partner-pilot Sehryogin crashed when approaching the airfield. Then he looked up thru his thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses and declared the All-Union mourning.
When a person reads from a sheet of paper it does not mean that they hide the eyes to conceal their shame, they just do their job, how else would we know the news? Shortly before Gagarin’s death, I heard in the adults’ gossip that after all, he didn’t live up to what you’d call an impeccable hero, because he became too vain and proud, and he cheated on his wife. Consider, for instance, that wide scar in his eyebrow which appeared after his jump from a lover’s apartment on the second floor.
(…but who’s interested today in all those rumors, be they true or false?
For my son Ahshaut, and so for all of his generation, Gagarin is just a name from a history textbook, as for me was, say, Marshal Tukhachevsky.
Orbited the Earth? Well, OK, good job.
Got executed by a firing squad? Well-well, bad luck.
However, for me Gagarin is not a textbook but a part of my own life and, as long as I’m alive, I am interested to find out what happened, how and why. And, when digging for certain facts, it’s hard not to fall in love with Internet search engines. The only venue for getting info then was the radio-voices from behind the crackle-’n’-burst static 24/7 or the yarn by Zone old-timers. The first was effectively unreadable, like the Pilutikha curses inside the pottery pressed to the wall, the lack of exact dating and absence of references made the eye-withesses’s tales sound fairly mythological. Still and yet, even before the rise of Netscape, I managed to learn that his attitude to the superiors in the chain of command grew markedly conceited after cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov returned to the Earth in form of a scorched firebrand…
Vladimir Komarov knew that he would not survive his space flight because his backup, Yuri Gagarin, when inspecting the spaceship Voskhod, found two hundred technical flaws which he listed in a written report of ten pages. He passed the report thru his higher commanders to Leonid Brezhnev, the then Ruler of the USSR. The commanders held the report by them, they knew that Brezhnev would never agree to postpone the launch date taking risks that Americans might get ahead of the Soviet Union in the space flight race.
Komarov could refuse to go to his obvious death, but then the doomed spaceship would be manned by his backup and personal friend, Yuri Gagarin. On the doomsday morning, Gagarin appeared at the launch pad wearing an astronaut spacesuit and demanded that he be sent instead of Komarov, but he was not listened to…
After the burial of Komarov’s ashes in the Kremlin wall, next to the ashes of Marshal Malinovsky, Gagarin’s behavior became extremely defiant and uncontrolled. By unconfirmed rumors, at one of the government banquets, Yuri Gagarin splattered his glass of vodka into Brezhnev’s face.
Americans rule out the plausibility of such an incident not because of the lack of perspicacity inherent in the mixed up nation taking root in simpletons unable to survive among the population of their origin but because of the different grammar. Since in the Russian language “mother” and “death” are of the same grammatical gender, for a Russian mujik, consciously or unconsciously, there feels some similarity in the 2. Well, how to plausibly bring over the meaning of “Death-Mommy” to Americans if all they've got is just “Mr. Death”? Not anything fits into one's mind until they got it under their skin… As a tangent effect, they shove an anti-tank mine under their belt and with the cry, “Try to bear me back, Mom!” throw themselves under the trucks of advancing tank… Then go and rack your brains over the mystery of the Russian soul. To crack the riddle check the language rules…
Unruly Gagarin was not expelled from the Cosmonauts’ Group – he already belonged to the entire Planet. He continued to attend the classes, flew jets in training flights. Did he realize that the countdown for his extermination had been already set a-ticking? I think, yes, he did. Cosmonauts were selected not only for physical but mental fitness as well. He did not only know when and where…
On March 27, 1968, Yuri Gagarin was killed in a plane crash near the village of Novosyolovo, Kirzhach District, Vladimir Region.
On that the foggy morning, the MIG jet was coming in from the training flight, before the airfield there remained a couple of minutes of flight at the altitude of 500 meters, when from the low clouds the SU jet dropped down, though by the flights plan for that morning she was supposed taking flight at the altitude of 14 kilometers in a completely different compass.
Operated by the experienced test pilot, the huge, in comparison to the training aircraft, SU jet flashed by, too close to the MIG preparing for landing. The MIG, captured by turbulence, twirled like a sliver in the breaker, entered a tailspin and collapsed into the forest. The sound of the explosion reached the airfield.
Let them endowed with ears hear. Fadeyev – Khrushchev, Gagarin – Brezhnev.
Let them capable of reckoning get it…
But again I forked off and the story of my life got entered by strangers I never have met and only recently started to see that they are also a part of me.
So much for bemoaning the belated wisdom, let's get back to the twentieth century, year sixty-eight, when I am in my fourteenth year and…)
…and how not to resent them those Czechs who succumbed to the CIA subversive propaganda and started a counterrevolution in the fraternal camp of the socialist countries! And they so inhumanely lined baby carriages to block the way before our tank bucketing along. Of course, the driver turned abruptly, in case there were babies inside, the tank fell off the bridge and our soldier died. So the Central TV news program “Time”.
Then, of course, the Czech Communist Party restored the order in their country with the assistance of military contingents from the fraternal states, and we again began to live on, the camp of socialism properly united…
By the by, the Konotop of that period outstripped many of the larger cities in the field of television because by us the TV boxes had two working channels. The first was the Central Television broadcasting the news program “Time”, and the main New Year entertainment program “The Little Blue Light”, and the contest of teams at the Club of Jolly and Resourceful, aka CJR, and the live hockey matches. The other channel was the Konotop TV studio which broadcast only in the evening when people were back home from work, yet it demonstrated movies much oftener than on Central Television.
The TV-sets in those years were all black-and-white and color ones you could only see in color films from the Western Europe, for that reason Father installed a sheet of transparent isinglass over the TV screen. The sheets of that kind had certain color tints in some of its areas – the upper part blue for the sky, the lower one green for the grass. They even said that thru that isinglass the announcers’ faces looked of more natural color than without it. I could not discern any of the mentioned subtleties though never considered myself colorblind. Such mica sheets became a fashion throughout Konotop, and Uncle Tolik brought one for our TV from the Repair Base, aka the RepBase, where he worked on a milling machine tool. The RepBase specialized in renovating choppers so there they certainly had a better notion in the advanced matters like isinglass and stuff…
For switching TV channels you turned clockwise or counter it the biggest knob under the screen, it clicked and moved to the next of the fourteen positions. However, in the afternoon both the Central Television and Konotop TV Studio showed the same mute tuning circle, while to switching the knob outside those two channels the tube responded by an unbearable sizzling noise and jumping streaks of white against coarse-grained “snow” background.
And (returning to the available two channels) every day at 3 pm., the technicians at Konotop TV Studio switched on some music for about 30 minutes or so: “The Nocturne” by Tariverdiyev, the hits of Valery Obodzinsky or Larissa Mondrus served a soundtrack for the irreplaceable fine-tuning circle. We—Sasha, Natasha, and I—always switched the TV on at that time to have some music in the khutta though the tape-recorded numbers changed rarely if ever at all, and we knew beforehand which record would follow this or that particular song…
Besides, Konotop then was flooded with a wealth of indie radio stations that went on air in the MW range. There was both “The King of the Cemetery” and “Caravel”, and whichever name an independent guy would choose to call his underground station. They all had a common weak point though, which was their irregularity. You had no idea when to switch the receiver on so that to hear, “Hello to all, the radio station "Jolly Stickman” is now on air. Who hears me, confirm…” And he would put on the hoarsely roaring Vysotsky’s songs about the Archer who disgraced the Czar, or how we shoot thru the time in a spaceship, or about a dolphin’s belly ripped open by the boat propeller…
At some point, the radio station “Charming Nina” would cut into the broadcast and begin to point out to "Jolly Stickman” that he had sat on another guy’s wavelength, and that “Charming Nina” had been airing in that particular length for no less than a week. Little by little, they developed a quarrel: “Hey, you! Don’t swell too much! Look out, if I catch you in City you’ll have two blobs in place of your ears!”
“Easy, mini-Willie! Who do you roll a barrel against? Haven’t leaked into your pants wet for a whole week?”
“The more you rant the more you’ll weep!”
“Close it up!”
Yet, they never switched over to four-letter words.
Father claimed that even our radio set could be readily converted into such a station, smooth and easy, if only there was a microphone. However, my and Skully’s wheedling of him the mentioned conversion, and we’d sure get a mike somewhere, met his downright refusal because it was radio hooliganism, and special vehicles were stalking the city to track those hooligans down, and fine them, and confiscate all the radio equipment from their khuttas, down to the TV box. We didn’t want to stay without our TV, didn’t we?
At times, the radio-hooligans instead of wished-for Vysotsky's songs entered into endless negotiations about who had which capacitor and which diodes he’d trade it for. Finally, they agreed to meet in Peace Square.
“How’d I know you?”
“Don’t worry. I know you. I’ll come up.”
And so we fell back to the TV tuning circle and listened, for the hundredth time, the same, yet more reliable, Obodzinsky…
~ ~ ~
Peace Square in front of the same-named movie theater was bounded by long five-story parallelepipeds of apartment blocks. The shallow round pit in its enclosure of gray granite ring located centrally contained the large fountain which was turned on no sooner than once in a couple of years to shoot up a high white jet of water for an hour or two. The asphalt walks, lined with beautiful chestnut trees, rayed off from the wide stone steps of the movie theater porch to the opposite square corners alongside the crosswise road of Peace Avenue. The lawns beneath the chestnuts were improved by a couple of well-trodden short-cuts not provided by the original layout. Each of the tree-shaded ray-alleys was equipped with a couple of lengthy timber benches in the dark green coat of paint and two more of their breed stood openly on the asphalt nearby the fountain.
In the warm evenings, the square turned into the so-called “whore-parade” grounds for dense waves of loungers walking leisurely the alleys, they didn't leave the square and just repeated their promenade circles, again and again, scanning the faces and clothes worn by the public in the counter-directed circulation, as well as by those seated on the benches. In their evenly flowing motion, they all shuffled thru the soft dark layer, which got denser in front of the benches because both the walkers and the sitters were engaged in ceaseless persistently purposeful chewing of sunflower seeds and spitting the black inedible husk out…
Sometimes after a movie show, I also went along with the lazy stream when making for the streetcar stop around the corner. It happened not too often though because from one sequel of “Fantômas” to another you had to wait for at least six months.
In the daytime, the benches were mostly empty, though Kuba and I once happened to be called from a bench seated by a pair of young grown-up idlers who demanded kopecks. Kuba fired up trustworthy oaths that we had no money whatsoever, but I suggested to the louts, “Catch all that falls out!” With those words, I snatched the left pocket bag of my pants inside-out and expressively dusted it with my palm. I did not bother with the right pocket though, because it held ten kopecks for a streetcar fee.
The slob in sunglasses looked around and threatened with a beating, yet he didn’t leave the bench. We took it for being dismissed and went on, while Kuba kept bitterly upbraiding me for such a stupid impudence which could quite easily end in a good scrub for my silly mug, and justly too. Probably, he was right, and I had missed to figure out such an outcome, carried away with the idea of making a fine gesture – to pull an empty pocket out.
What saved me? The rogue might have decided that I was under the protection of some guy with a pull among the thieves, how, otherwise, to explain such reckless arrogance?.
“Enters Sehrguey Ogoltsoff from Konotop!” announced Raissa, when I and Skully appeared in the Children Sector room. Marking that I couldn’t catch up with that particular piece of humor, she handed me The Pioneer magazine opened at a story, under which at the page bottom it stood in black on white: “Sehrguey Ogoltsoff, the city of Konotop”.
I had completely forgotten about those couple sheets from a school notebook reporting on my chat with the dwarf a-straddle a pen on my desk, sent half a year before to the contest of fantasy stories announced by the magazine. The talkative dwarf chattered then of this and that making me more and more sleepy. And now, all of a sudden – wake up!
The sweet whiff of fresh typography print from the magazine pages set my head off in a slow swerve. My legs kinda weakened, and I felt a soft blow at the back of my head, only somehow from inside. Carefully, I lighted upon a seat in the 3-in-1 auditorium set put under the ballet rail beneath the windows and read the publication where there hardly remained a paragraph from what I had sent to the contest. Yes, the dwarf still was there but talked nineteen to the dozen about a certain filmmaker Ptushko I had never heard of in my life. However, neither in Children Sector nor at home had I ever shared to anyone that the story comprised practically nothing by me except for the opening settings because not every day, after all, they print your story in a thick monthly magazine…
In summertime Mother grew fat and Father, with a somewhat uneasy chortle, asked us—their children—what about having one more brother? The babe might be given a good name, like, Alyoshka, huh?
Natasha wrinkled her nose, Sasha kept silent as well, and I responded with a shrug, “What for?”
The suggested increase in the family seemed unnecessary not as a threat of deterioration our living conditions, but because of the awkward crying difference in age between the would-be parents and the suggested baby. So Father effaced his ingratiating smirk, dropped the subject and never picked it up again. A couple of weeks later, I accidentally heard Mother’s casual gossip with Aunt Lyouda, “I used the pill and the same day draft beer casks were brought to the stall, I rolled them in and – that’s it.” That way the proposed quantity changes in our generation of the Konotop Ogoltsoffs were canceled, yet Mother stayed looking fat forever…
Her stall, a round sheet-iron hut under a tin roof, was advantageously located in the main alley of the Central Park of Recreation opposite Peace Square. The heavy padlock from the back door was taken off and brought inside to start trading thru the front window whose square ledge served the counter jutting over the asphalted walk in the shade of mighty poplars.
Besides the draft beer running from the faucet which she connected by a removable hose to the dark wooden casks, in turn, the goods on sale included briquettes of packed cookies, loose candies of a couple of cheap sorts, cigarettes, lemonade and bottled wine – the Ukrainian fruit-and-berry “White Strong”, the dark-red Georgian “Rkatsiteli”, and some wine of uncertain origin named “Riesling” never asked for by anyone. “White Strong” was going out like hotcakes because of its price – one ruble and two kopecks for a half-liter bottle. Cigarettes also did not stick around for long, yet the main trade-pulling engine was draft beer. When there happened a delivery delay and they did not bring beer casks from the trade base of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, Mother began to sigh and complain beforehand that the trade plan for her stall in the current month seemed hardly doable and they again would cut her salary…
My life rollicked on along its tracks which somehow bypassed the Central Park of Recreation, although my sister and brother occasionally boasted of dropping to Mother’s workplace for free lemonade. However, there occurred one day which I spent at the stall from its beginning to end because of the secret service agent Alexander Belov, under the guise of Johann Weiss…
In those abysmally past times, to get subscribed to The Novel-Gazette was next to impossible. The monthly justified its name being turned out on inexpensive newsprint and in two columns per page, yet the thickness of an issue was on a par with The Pioneer or The Youth magazines. Albeit absent from the subscription lists at the post-offices, The Novel-Gazette could still be found at libraries or borrowed from one or another luckier person who had asked it from the previous lucky beggar who, in their turn… If some novel happened to be too long for one issue, it was continued in the following month. At times, deviating from the magazine name, they printed collections of stories or (quite rarely) poems, but no more than by a couple of authors per issue.
Now, getting the word of mouth that in The Novel-Gazette they had recently published The Shield and Sword by Vadim Kozhevnikov, I rushed to the Club Library and was told that all the three consequential issues were already lent out, and they had to put together the queue-list of those wishing to borrow the masterpiece. No wonder, after Mother casually mentioned some colleague lending her all the issues of the epic spy saga for 3 days, my accustomed routes got torn from where they were embedded and with the inaudible tectonic bang swayed over, re-cast, to reach their new terminal by the standard snack-stall between the hefty trunks of drowsy poplars in the center of the City Park of Recreation shadowing the main, asphalted, walk where I arrived the very next morning soon after the opening hour…
