Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The initial issue I read in the stall, sitting on a wire box of empty bottles, before I got smart enough to move over onto a nearby bench outside, returning only to exchange the issues or act the Sale-Assistant in Mother’s absence while she went to the park toilet when I even sold something.
By the end of that day, I had lived thru the career of the Soviet intelligence officer Belov, aka Johann Weiss, starting as a private in the German Wehrmacht up to an officer for special missions in the intelligence service of Abwehr.
The trade during that day was rather sluggish, because 2 days earlier the stall ran out of draft beer, and the empty casks piled up outside the back door. However, by the onset of twilight, when I moved back to the booth to finish off the final issue under a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, at the very end of the Second World War, the flow of consumers began to increase.
That’s it!. And, with the collapse of the Third Reich, I stacked all the 3 The Novel-Gazettes on a box by the door and saw that the trickle of customers had turned already into a tight swarm across the outside counter-ledger. There cropped thick growth of hands held up, kinda in the Nazi salutation, only balled about crushed ruble notes and handfuls of kopecks.
Mother turned to me and said, “Wait a little, I’m closing in half-hour, we’ll go home together.”
I sat leaning my back against the door, so as not to be in the way when she reached for goods from here and there in the stall’s narrow innards.
The said half-hour later, the flurry by the stall in the park alley did not subside.
“Maman! A pair of Strong Blondes and a smaller one of cookies!”
“Auntie! Auntie! A pack of “Prima” cigarettes!”
“Sister! A bottle of white!”
“White is over.”
“And over there? In that box?”
“It’s Rkatsiteli for one ruble and 37.”
“Alright, come on! Let it be it, we’re not racists!”
Finally, the Georgian was over too, the crowd dissolved. Mother dropped the window shutter but had to open again for a latecomer that tattooed in a trot under the yellow lamplight from the posts over the asphalt up to the shut stall. Grieved by the fact that everything was sold out, he bought a bottle of the uncertain expensive Riesling for 1 ruble 78 kopecks, though it was already 30 minutes past the allowed by regulations hours for selling alcohol.
When Mother locked the stall and we walked to the streetcar stop by Peace Square, I asked if such mayhem was there every evening.
“No, Sehryozha. It’s because it’s Sunday today.”
~ ~ ~
And again the summertime Kandeebynno lake awaited us but now, apart from the swimming trunks and a sandwich with a slice of melted cheese, bringing along a deck of cards became the must.
“Whose move?”
“Yours.”
"No fake?”
“Take the shoes off your eyes! It’s Skully who’s been dealing!”
“That’s a good boy! He knows it was work to shape Man out of Ape… Here, two Knaves to lazy Kuba.”
"…and ultimately will shape Man into Drab Horse… Queen and Ace of same suits.”
On each and every beach blanket spread between the currant bushes, heated battles of Throw-in Fool went on to the music from portable radios. The most enviable receiver was, of course, Spidola produced at the Riga’s Radio Plant, with the face dimensions of a copybook and no thicker than a brick. All the body of its telescopic antenna was hidden in the receiver’s plastic case leaving outside only the tip button. Pulling that button, you obtained the shiny nickel-plated rod for fishing in SW, the LW and medium-wave were caught without extending the antenna.
Browsing for radio stations in short waves was a hopeless lick though. Half of the range drowned in a sizzling, hissing, and crackling because the ours choked all those “voices” in service of the CIA—“The Voice of America”, “Liberty”, “Russian Service of BBC” and their likes—by a godawful static. So, on the beach, all the receivers were tuned to “Mayak” – the All-Union Radio Station, which broadcast signals of the exact time and short news account every half-hour, filling the rest of the air by concerts at the requests of radio listeners…
But it’s better not to visit the Kandeebynno alone, and not only because you’d stay without partners for card-playing but merely for security reasons.
Once, not heeding the advice of Kuba and Skully, I swam across the Kandeebynno to the low dam of the fish lakes. A group of guys of my age was there on the bank. One of them asked me in Ukrainian, “Have you seen Peka?”
“Who’s Peka?” asked I in surprise and got an explanatory sucker punch on the chin, a kinda dab bonus for curious dumbos.
They all dived off and swam away. It did not hurt much but left a bitter resentment at such meanness on no provocation. Probably, the blades from Zagrebelya… and how, if one was allowed to ask, had I ever hurt them?
(….in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn’t realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)
The Kandeebynno was not the only place in Konotop for beach-going. There, for instance, was a sizable water-filled gully in the field beyond the Settlement. Sometimes its grassy banks got overcrowded by the guys from all over the city swarming in a flash mob for unknown reasons.
And a couple of times our friendship-knit trinity traveled by bikes to the river of Yezooch in the Konotop outskirts diagonally opposite the Settlement. The dormant flow of the stream slumbering in the shade of thick Willows over the grassy banks was almost imperceptible. And it was deep indeed, so in one place there even stood a tower for high diving. The contraption made of iron pipes had three height levels: 1, 3 and 5 meters.
We climbed the ladder to the three-meter level but it took some time to pluck the heart, and even then it was not a headlong dive but just a jump heel-first. Then we proceeded onto the plank deck at five meters, yet, having looked at the water so too far down there, silently retracted to a lower level. Even Kuba.
When leaving already, we watched an adult guy in a nice “swift-like” dive from the highest level. The only drawback of the Yezooch was its lack of beach-goers, there was no one at all except for us and that lone diver.
And, of course, the most popular place for summer recreation of Konotopers was considered the sandy Bay beach on the Seim river reached after a short, two-stop, ride from the Station by any of the local trains.
Yet, that summer I wasn’t going there. Not because of the ticket price of twenty kopecks, like lots of other guys you could go there as a hidden traveler, aka “hare”, the crowd of Seim-goers was too thick for the conductors to squeeze thru all the cars in just ten minutes. So expenses were not the point, neither the grim harvest of a few drownings reaped by the Seim each summer – teenager guys they mostly were, with their funerals normally attended by a huge crowd, no, I was not afraid of that because nothing of the kind could ever happen to me.
The reason was that everybody who's somebody went to the Seim on weekends – the days when Uncle Tolik and I were gone fishing. Although a couple of times we dropped over to the Bay Beach—just so along the way, the fishing rods cinched to the “Jawa” rack…
Once we even had an overnight stay not far from the Bay Beach. It happened when Uncle Tolik’s brother, Vitya, came from the regional center, the city of Sumy, to propose to Natasha from Number 15 in Nezhyn Street where the Arkhipenkos stayed while Grandma Katya was dying.
Vitya was not balding like his elder brother, Uncle Tolik, no, Vitya’s hair was all in place – light brown, combed straight back in the style sported by young blades at the late fifties’. He was already over thirty, but then auntie Natasha from Number 15 was not a young girl either. On the other hand, the whole khutta and the garden at 15, Nezhyn Street belonged to her and her two parents.
That Saturday, Uncle Tolik and I came for overnight staying with the inseparable bunch of fishing tackle to go off the next morning to fish along the Seim bank. However, at the specified meeting place, we didn’t find the Moscvitch of auntie Natasha’s father who had to bring the rest of the away-night partakers in his car.
To pass the time, Uncle Tolik and I visited the pioneer camp in the Pine forest at about half-kilometer from the Seim. And while Uncle Tolik rode away somewhere else – “one place, not too far off”, I watched a movie in the camp open-air cinema. “A Million Years B.C.” was a classy film about Tumak banished from his black-haired tribe, and another tribe, that of blonds, adopted him because he had piled a dinosaur to save a small blonde kid. When the movie ended Uncle Tolik came back from his “not too far off” and warned me to tell, if asked, that we were watching the movie together.
We returned to the appointed spot, where auntie Natasha’s father had already brought her, and Aunt Lyouda with Irochka, and auntie Natasha’s groom Vitya with his and Uncle Tolik’s third brother. They even had set up a tent already, behind which there loomed the Moscvitch in the dark, lit by a small fire built in front of the tent.
I went down to the sand spit under the steep riverbank and touched the calm flowing water, it was so warm that I couldn’t resist and entered the river. I did not dive nor swam though and only wandered, hither and thither, along the smooth sandy bottom parallel to the bank bend.
Soon Vitya and his bride came down too. He decided to take a swim, despite all her tries to sway him off the intention, and I returned to the fire to dry up, it was a full night already. Then I crawled to the edge of the high bank over the river and looked down. Against the background of the stars glinting in the river flow, two silhouettes kissed each other – so romantic… Perhaps, my head was also seen from below, against the starry sky, because Vitya cried out “bitch!” and flung his arm.
The pebble, invisible in the dark, hit me on the forehead, I shouted “Missed!” and rolled away from the edge. Of course, I lied for had it missed, it would not hurt that much.
When the romantic couple came back to the fire, Vitya asked me, “Do you know what ‘fingertips’ are?”
I said I did not and he told me to stand up and, when I did, he put his fist under my chin and chucked me flat to the ground. “That’s what the ‘fingertips’ are”, said he.
Lying prostrate next to the fire, I said, “Vitya, my friend Kuba is in the habit of saying ‘Don’t take offense when dealing with nuts’”. But I felt hurt all the same.
The women and the small Irochka slept in the car and all the rest inside the tent. In the morning, Uncle Tolik and I went to another place to fish but the catch was quite useless – not enough to feed a cat.
I didn’t see Vitya anymore because his and auntie Natasha’s wedding took place in the city of Sumy, and they stayed there for good….
In the middle of summer, in the middle of a week, and even in the middle of a working day, Uncle Tolik came suddenly home. “Fetch the fishing rods, quick!” yelled he, racing into the khutta.
Hastily cinching the tackle to the “Jawa” rack, he announced that there happened a breakage in the dam of the Kandeebynno fishery lakes and all the fish fled to the Yezooch river.
We rode across the city, shot over the bridge to Zagrebelya and only then Uncle Tolik slowed down, driving along the Yezooch in search of a vacant spot. And that was not an easy task. Along both riverbanks, the mixed crowd of boys, and youths, and grownup men were standing in almost uninterrupted line waving their fishing rods or poles towards and from the invigorated stream, jerking out empty hooks or flashing quiver of the catch.
It was a spontaneous all-out day off. It was the powerful, compelling, demonstration of angling forces of the Konotop city.
(…up till now, I am not quite certain if the breakout from the fishery lakes was in some weird way connected to the Mad Summer ‘68 in France or, after all, the revolutionary situation there was triggered off by the Kandeebynno events…
And lastly but also possibly, what if both developments had some third-party cause, not yet discovered but undeniably common…)
A few days later, Skully and I visited the Kandeebynno on foot. The fish lakes stretched like a vast field covered with the dingy crust of drying-up mud. Seldom spots of dark green algae were still peeping here and there. In one of such spots, there occurred a shallow, yet lengthy pit full of live fish. We were picking them out with bare hands; not very large fish though, about twenty centimeters or so. Skully did not miss bringing a mesh-bag by him, but I had to take off my tank top and tie its tail into a knot to make a sack for the catch.
At home, they fried the fish which was enough for both families and even Zhoolka had his share. Aunt Lyouda teased Uncle Tolik that he had never ever brought such a catch from his fishing tours…
~ ~ ~
Summer’s the rightest time for overhaul and reconstruction works. Father cut a hole in the dead wall of the kerogas section on the veranda and inserted a hinged glazed frame. The daylight came to the section and made it more comfortable canceling the need to switch the bulb every time when dropping in to have some water.
Then came the kitchen’s turn. One Sunday, everything was taken out of it into the yard, except for the too heavy refrigerator by the door. On the same day, Mother and Aunt Lyouda whitewashed all the walls, ceiling and the brick stove. They worked until finished and it was too late for bringing things in, they just washed the floor in the kitchen and everyone had to spend the night in our room.
Natasha gave up her folding bed to Irochka and Valerik, returning to her old place across the end of the folding couch-bed shared by us, her brothers. The spring mattress from the bed of the Arkhipenkos parents was put in the center of the room and there practically remained no place – you had to watch where to squeeze your step.
Sasha and I had also to go to bed, not bending as of yet our legs up to make room for our sister because Aunt Lyouda decided to take a dip in the kitchen while everyone else was watching TV.
From the things left out in the yard, she brought the mirror in the old wooden frame and returned it to its legitimate place on the wall above the fridge. Then she poured hot water into a big tin basin for washing and pulled together the striped curtains hanging in the doorway between the kitchen and the room. The light in the room was switched off so as to better see the TV screen, and the volume decreased but I still grumbled that I could not sleep with the sound on. The response, as always, was both disinterested and practical, “You don’t have to be listening. Pull the blanket over your head and sleep.”
Aunt Lyouda was splashing in the kitchen, then she called Uncle Tolik to rub her back. When he returned and sat, as before, upon the folding-bed filled with his children, I noticed a narrow gap left between the curtains with a glimpse of the mirror above the refrigerator containing a distanced reflection of the floorboards, half of the tin basin, and the back of Aunt Lyouda in it. And then I did what I had been told to, and pulled the blanket over my head, yet the good advice was followed no further. Instead of sleeping, I placed the blanket on the wooden armrest of the folding couch-bed and wrinkled it up into a rigid standing ripple so as to watch from under it the sight in the faraway mirror on the opposite wall of the kitchen.
Actually, there was not much to watch – suds splotches in the wet floorboards and a slightly moving shoulder blade with the wet lock of black hair stuck to it. Then there remained only the floor and the empty half-basin left by Aunt Lyouda.
Yet, very soon she appeared again in the mirror frame—much closer and clearer—because she’d come up to it with a towel wrapped about her waist below the naked tits. She smiled a little cunning smile, licked her lips and looked straight into my eyes all the way thru my blanket periscope. I shut the eyes firmly and didn’t open them anymore, while she was wiping the floor in the kitchen and coming over to the room…
Then everyone got to their beds, the TV and light were turned off. Only then I, at last, removed the hot blanket from over my head. The room was pitch dark. Soon after, various snuffling from all the sides mixed with the darkness, and from the spot where the Arkhipenkos’ spring mattress was placed on the floor, there came some cautiously low crunch as if a bale of straw was getting squeezed then let go in slow rhythmic repetition.
I did not turn my head. Firstly, what the use amid such darkness? And then, after the tons of books read by me, I could tell even not seeing that they were making love down there…
Six months later, on a dark winter evening when I and Skully went to take a shower in the Plant, he called me to watch thru the windows of the female section in Plant Bath House shedding a warm yellow light on the snowdrifts in bluish darkness. I did not follow. Was I shy to do it in his presence? I don’t know. But even when going alone for a shower, I never watched thru those windows…
And that same summer Raissa asked us to tour, for the old good times' sake, the city kindergartens with a puppet show. In less than a week we gave ten performances. In the morning, we came to a kindergarten indicated by her the day before, installed in their dining room the screen brought by a Plant truck, hung the backdrop, set up tripods with the hut and a forest tree, performed the show before the much-respected toddler public, and moved to the next kindergarten – the scenery on the same truck, and the actors by a streetcar.
Kuba grumbled that we were slaving at the conveyor belt for just a “thank you” because no one knew how much Raissa ripped off the directors in eye-to-eye talk in their offices at kindergartens, but I did not care. First, every day Raissa treated us to ice-cream of the most expensive Plombir flavor, and one time she took everyone to a movie show in the Vorontsov Movie Theater, and it was not her fault that “The Western Corridor” turned out such an eerie splatter film. Besides, and most importantly, the money we had earned that week wouldn’t amount to the price of watching films in Club with the check-passes from Director, that we enjoyed for years after her lead…
The Club alone was not enough to satisfy my natural proclivities. Even though attending the temple of Melpomene disguised as Children Sector where the worshipers got blest by free access to film shows (which, undeniably, enhanced their faithfulness), I felt an additional pull to architecture and the only available grounds for practicing it was our khutta’s yard.
The parents allowed erecting an experimental structure there propped by the fence of the Turkovs from Number 17, if and only if it would in no way block access to the shed sections in the yard, to eschew complaints from other dwellers of the khutta.
Together with my brother and Skully, I went after construction materials to the Grove and from among the quagmire bogs of the Swamp, we cut a couple bundles of two-meter-long whips, added to the booty a generous bunch of green twigs, cinched everything onto two bikes and transported home.
A number of the procured whips became the lattice roof secured by pieces of wire and all sorts of strings. While the roof's one edge rested on the fence, the other one was supported by the lattice wall produced of the same whips in the likewise manner. Our skills at tying knots and diligent stickability to the task in hand resulted in a crisscross-styled contraption, a kinda sturdy cage where you could pace to and fro for three steps almost without stooping. The project was accomplished and furred with the finishing layer of leafy twigs over the roof and 2 walls because the fence served the third one and the concluding, fourth, wall provided, by its absence, a conveniently wide entrance. Wow!
When entered, the structure smelt pleasantly of withering leaves and, from outside, it caressed your sight by its presence in the yard corner… A week later, the foliage wilted but the delight and ecstasy with the creative efforts drooped even earlier because there arose the unavoidable pesky question which makes each and every creator scratch the back of their head: What now?
You would not organize a clandestine pioneer group like that in The Timur’s Team just because there was a suitable structure for the headquarters of such an organization in your yard, would you? Especially if you were past the age for pioneer games…
So, Skully and I switched over to our usual pastime – vain hurling of a kitchen knife into the trunk of the old Maple tree by the stack of bricks crumbling with age because that year the first Soviet Western “The Untraceable Avengers” reached, at long last, the Konotop cinemas and the Gypsy’s knife swished across the silver screen to deeply stuck in the white slender trunk of a young Birch tree. In real life though, the home-made knife just bounced from the hard bark even when hitting it with the tip of its blade, and that’s the meaning of being born into a wrong era after all the romantic revolutions and splendid wars dried up and left you no chance of riding a horse after the scattered enemies or shooting a fiery machine-gun to beat off their assault…
The leaves of the structure dried, blackened and fell off but the cage-like skeleton withstood another couple of years…
~ ~ ~
Still and all, my itch for architecture did not subside, but the following, inimitable, creation I built all by myself. The sheds over the Duzenko’s and our earth-pit cellars stood slightly apart and the half-meter gap between them was boarded up from the yard, yet squeezing behind the sheds, along the neighbor’s fence, you got access to that narrow board-sealed cleft. That was where I built my private study room.
A piece of plywood, fixed horizontally to the aforesaid couple of boards nailed from the yard, became a decent desk squeezed between 2 walls of the blind passage. A length of plank, inserted lower the desk edge, served a stool. Absence of any other item of furniture made the interior truly Spartan, but then the study would attract no intruders, neither my sister-'n'-brother nor the little Arkhipenkos. Okay, let’s imagine someone sneaked in when I was not home and… what then? Of course, Natasha made sure to check it all the same and to wrinkle her nose scoffing at my level best creation—that fairly snug and cozy nook in the inter-shed cleavage space.
On finishing construction works, there again arose the mentioned doggone question: what now, eh? Well… let's say… Aha! the place could be enjoyed for unobserved secluded speculations neither disturbed nor seen by anyone, except for Zhoolka who resented my presence on his turf, even behind the clumsy stop-boarding in the gap. And he never cared to conceal his indignation, but got upon his paws and scornfully retired, the chain rattled in his wake, jerked in over his kennel sill, kinda his slam to the door, whenever I squeezed into my Spartan cleft from behind. Yet, what namely can a person use the nook of solitude they've so cleverly created for?
That’s when I had to give free reign to my next long-standing itch, that for graphomania. I have no idea what specific label from their scientific cant they use for my particular case—expressed or manifest graphomania—yet I always felt a certain longing for clear notebooks, albums, block-notes, and suchlike stationery items. It gave me real thrill to spread them wide open and began to cover their innocent pureness with the jerks and strokes of my crinkly scribbling.
Thus, there remained only a minor drag of finding content for those ripping lines, an easy quiz for an expressed (or manifest?) graphomaniac. I simply grabbed a book about the adventures of a group of circus actors in the turbulent years of the Civil War, added a pen and a thick notebook, not finished off during the last academic year, and dragged them to my study—so to say—room…
(…here’s a queer, yet scientifically noteworthy, fact – the written exercises assigned at school for homework somehow made my graphomania fade into the woodwork…)
There, the book and notebook were placed on the desk of unvarnished plywood piece, and I started to copy the content from the first into the ruled—but otherwise untouched—pages of the latter. And I did not bother to ask myself about the purpose of such an occupation. Would it make any difference? I just enjoyed the process of doing it.
After a week or so, the process neared the middle in the second chapter, when a spell of bad weather made my study room too damp and chilly, and the printed adventure story remained un-hand-copied….
In good weather, I even had a private reading room, not of my personal creation though… The plots, unfurling behind the long sectioned shed and the lean-tos over the earth-pit cellars, were split by narrow treads between the beds of turned soil for kitchen crops. Those beds, however, did not merge into integral landholdings of respective owners because sundry historical processes led to land swapping, as well as using it as a means of paying for goods or services obtained from the adjacent landlords. As a result, the land possessions turned into the streak of complicated patchwork. For instance, our tomato bed was located right behind the common shed and followed by Duzenko’s stretch, which separated it from our cucumber-and-sunflower bed as well as from the booth of our outhouse next to the slop pit. And our potatoes were planted past the Pilluta’s strip, at the very end of the khutta's garden, beneath the old sprawling Apple tree.
After our potatoes bed, there began, or rather ended, the plot belonging to the khutta in Kotsubinsky Street, which ran parallel to Nezhyn Street. So, the vegetable and fruit gardens, embraced by the khuttas of 3 adjacent streets and 1 lane, composed a vast area with vegetable beds and fruit trees of different sorts.
The Apple tree, on whose widely sprawling branches I lounged in clear summer days reading a book under the blue dome of the sky with the remote motionless cumuli, was called Antonovka Apple. Some of its branches were long enough to allow stretching out at full length over them and lightly sway until a gentle breeze would run up to you from the heat-swept expanses of the summer.
Whenever my sides felt sore from so hard a hammock, I’d climb down and go on a stealthy visit to the raspberry plot somewhere between Numbers 15 and 13. In the gardens, you might occasionally come across a short span of a fencing fragment that served a landmark splitting the possessions, but not a barrier to a sneaky raid…
From among those environs I was carried away with The Interstellar Diaries of Jona Calm and The Return From a Space Mission by Stanislaw Lem, Khoja Nasreddin by Vladimir Solovyov, The Odyssey of Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, among other pulp fictions for unsystematic reading by the younger generations.
But then, for no obvious reason, I suddenly decided to meet the requirements of the school curriculum and started to learn by heart the novel-poem Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, although at school your home assignment would be to memorize not more than the opening stanza from the poem. In breach of the modest requirement in school curriculum, after solidifying the first stanza, I went on to the following ones and murmured, day after day, to the Antonovka Apple tree about the constant alertness of the Breguet watch, and the profitable merchandise enriching scrupulous London, and the pitiful lack of a couple or two of slender female legs about all of Russia…
When the number of memorized stanzas grew over twenty, I began to lose my way in the countless threads of lines at recital them all at once until Mother helped me out. Returning from a Sunday visit to Bazaar, she mentioned meeting there Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna, a teacher of the Russian Language and Literature from our school, who asked if I would like to go to Leningrad with an excursion of schoolchildren at a modest price.
You bet I would! But where could I get the money from? Mother paid, and she also gave me an incredible sum of 10 rubles for the journey. I made a firm decision to spend that money on a miniature billiards, like the one we were playing at Children Section using steel balls from crushed bearings.
(…yet now, not as a consistent narrator, but as a layman archaeologist wrapped up in my sleeping bag in this tent surrounded by the eerie symphony of the wild forest nightlife – would I be able to unearth the root reason for the strenuous memorization of the Pushkin’s masterpiece?
It seems, that only now and just from here, I would.
To begin with, the scheme “I decided and started to…” does not apply to me. Developing a use case is quite okay, especially if an accurate and reasonable one, but my way of doing things is exactly opposite. I act first, and only then start looking for a suitable reason to justify my action and give it some resemblance of logicality. That is, instead of being motivated by well-defined decisions, I do things on the spur of the moment.
But what or who is prodding me to act then?! Which are the secret springs and goads? The answer is simple: It’s because of my credulous and all-too-ready submissiveness to the impact of the printed word. Yes, the stuff read by me determines my subsequent actions.
The episode, when the Soviet secret agent, Alexander Belov, forces the fascist intelligence officer Dietrich to flip thru a folder with top-confidential documentation before his eyes, so that later, in a safe house, to dictate to his helper-asset hundreds of addresses, names, and figures from his memory, becomes the hidden underlying reason for my endeavor at memorizing the rhymed lines by Alexander Pushkin.
No, I did not want to compete or check my abilities, the root stimulus is the plain fact of my reading The Novel-Gazette filled with the work by Kozhevnikov which, frankly speaking, does not deserve the name of a novel.
Or let's take another case, when, impressed by the book The Baron in the Tree, about an aristocrat who refused to walk upon the ground anymore, and moved to live in the trees, I mounted the heap of bricks stacked under the too thick trunk of the American Maple and, from that elevation, climbed the less impregnable part of the tree. And from there I went on getting higher and higher, to the very clouds that floated quite low on that day, almost brushing the crown.
Viewed from the upper branches, distant khuttas far down under the tree decreased to the size of matchboxes. Taming fear and dizziness, I observed the bird-eye view of Bazaar, and the Plant, no more hidden behind the tall wall along Professions Street, and of the Station on the other side of the Plant.
The magic power of the printed word by Italo Calvino made me compliant like melted wax, turned into a docile slave, who was alighted atop of the American Maple tree…
Of course, the secret springs slip at times – how on earth could I possibly compete with D’Artagnan and ride twenty leagues in one day running down three horses which I did not have? Keep your legs to the length of the blanket, they say.
That’s why I like this sleeping bag so much – it fits any leg size…)
~ ~ ~
