Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
At the Olympiad, in the group of fourteen-year-old students from the 14 city schools, I solved some of the problems about acceleration, and specific weight, and density, but not all.
To the concluding question: “Why do we first see the lightning and only then hear the thunder?”, I even draw a pencil sketch explaining the time interval between the flash and the bang.
Next week, Binkin, with an unconcealed surprise, announced that I took the first place among the eighth-graders at the city Physics Olympiad.
I did not know whether the number under the streetcar’s nose really brought luck, or the solution checkers were impressed by the clumsy lightning, but it’s nice to realize that you had beaten both a representative of the prestigious School 11 and even a guy from School 12 with its mathematical specialization… Now, get it, blockheads, from the Plant Settlement fellas!.
“The Dead Season” was on show at Club. The three of us bought tickets to ensure the show because, at times when no tickets were sold, the projectionists refused to show the film for only the check-passers. However, the audience turned out big enough, not as many as at the Indian “Zita and Guita” but no less than a quarter of the auditorium got filled.
The movie was about our secret agent in the United States starring Donatas Banionis from “No One Wanted to Die” where he got shot and killed in the end and collapsed on the desk with the unfinished note he was writing. And in America, they followed him for a long time, then caught and jailed for twenty years, but then exchanged for a CIA agent caught in the Soviet Union.
A black-and-white film, yet of the wide-screen format and Banionis had a luxurious white shirt on. You could see at glance that it was no nylon, but he wore that shirt even when cooking in the kitchen, just slightly turned the sleeves up. A cool movie, in general.
When it was over, we slowly moved towards the exit, envious that some folks could manage living interesting lives. And then Kuba clapped his muskrat-fur hat against his fist and said, “Okay! First thing in the morning to see Solovey about the secret agents school enrollment!” Skully and I burst our sides with laughter because Solovey was Precinct Militiamen at the Settlement.
Actually, no one ever referred to him as “Precinct Militiaman”, they just uttered “Solovey” and everyone got it at once. When he entered Bazaar, a muffled “Sol!..– Sol!..– Sol!..” swished over the counters and swarming caboodle. The old peasant women from Podlipnoye or Popovka buried deeper in their bags the glass jars and hot-water rubber bottles with the hooch, to keep them out of sight. Then they turned to the legitimate part of their trade standing behind the counter with a cup of black seeds or a braid of onions—law-abiding goods.
But no horsing about Solovey’s sniffing skill! And more than once, under loud curses from the trader, he poured onto the ground the bootlegged “samohrie” confiscated from her gunny sack. Once, an alky from the crowd could not stand the temptation, he fell on his four bones and lapped the hooch from the puddle. Solovey swooped at him, drove his boot a couple of times against the rummy's ribs, but the sot was in the Lap of Happiness already. Then the vehicle arrived and took him to the Sobering-up Station.
Occasionally, Solovey got his share too, and more than once they would trap him someplace in the dark and warm up with a blizzard of beating. One time they poured kerosene over him and set on fire, in another sorting out his both arms were broken with a crowbar. Well, the guys would get their times to serve, he’d recover and again – to Bazaar, in his red-topped militiaman cap, and there again, “Sol!..– Sol!..– Sol!..”
So, Kuba made a good one about becoming a secret serviceman thru Solovey…
During the winter vacations, the winners in the Physics Olympiad were taken to the city of Sumy, for the Regional Physics Olympiad. In the Konotop group, there were four boys and a girl, a ninth-grader, though she looked quite an adult girl.
In Sumy, we were accommodated for a night stay in a hotel. The number of boys coincided with the number of beds in the room. Our overseer, who was a teacher from School 12 with its Math and Physics specialization, stayed somewhere farther along the corridor, and the girl-like-an-adult in some female number.
Soon everyone gathered in our room around a two-volume paperback Collection of Tasks and Exercises in Physics for Matriculants brought in by the head of the group.
Gee! I had never seen such books and, until that moment, believed in earnest that school textbooks were all there was in Physics. It was a misconception. The rest of the future Einsteins from Konotop met both Collections volumes as their good acquaintances and even bosom friends. They began to actively discuss in which of their sections there were especially complex tasks and in which not that much so.
The teacher offered to work out some of the tasks, just for a knock-up. Everyone immediately fell to scribbling formulas and explaining them to each other. I was “the sixth odd” at their laborious party. Those exercises advanced far beyond the problems which Binkin solved with us in the class blackboard.
Then we went out to the city to have a meal at a canteen. On the way back, I lagged to furtively admire the gait of the girl-like-an-adult. The green coat fitted her wide figure tightly and every step produced oblique folds in the coat’s fabric on her back. Flick to the right, flick to the left. Hither-thither. Flick-flick.
In fact, besides the long coat, high boots, and a knitted hat, there was nothing to look at but those rhythmic folds on her back… well, using the cant from the Onegin’s epoch, they drove me crazy. Though, seemingly, a fiddle-faddle, those folds were not a trifle for the connoisseur and collector of the like gems. Some books were reread for more than once just because I knew there were a couple of lines “about it”. A couple of miserly lines, but they contained a specific detail, which I would put into my secret casket for later use.
For instance, in a sci-fi story by Harry Harrison about time machine, a film-shooting crew jumped over into the year of one thousand, to make an action movie. Their male star had an accident there, and they had to replace him with an available local Viking.
Now, the film director instructs that newly baked Schwarzenegger about his action in the next scene: “You rush into a bedroom in the castle you’ve just seized. You see a half-awake beauty and throw away your weapon. Sit down on the bed next to her and slowly move her brassiere strap to fall from her shoulder. Cut! The scene is done. Everything else is left to the imagination of film-goers, where the sky’s the limit, and you can safely bet your bottom dollar on it.”
A-ha! That’s the long-awaited-for detail! The brassiere strap sliding slowly from the soft smooth round shoulder… No flat and vague “kiss on the sugar-sweet lips” for you.
And that same night, with the blanket pulled over my head and the eyes closed tightly, I burst into a half-asleep beauty’s bedroom. But, of course, without any stupid cameras and highlights, I am not a movie Viking but a real-life one, and it’s the real Middle Ages we are having around here. I throw away my shield and sword and flick her brassier strap off.
At first, she resists but, on taking a more attentive look at the regular features of my face, she willingly spreads over the bed. I roll on top of her body… A hot wave floods the lower part of my belly… My cock twitches in the boner… My eyes are shut… And I… What?!!.
I do not know what comes next. So, it’s time to take a rest before another dive into the coveted casket for some other secret detail to start building up a new situation about it and eventually bring about the painfully sweet state of cursed ignorance.
(…Leo Tolstoy fervently advocated against male masturbation.
Any seasoned saint starts their career in a form of unscrupulous sinner, otherwise, they would miss the stage of self-denying in their spiritual growth which is just null and void if the pains of disentangling from the ties to brute creation level were omitted.
I cannot make my mind precisely if my erection orgies might be classified as a commonplace masturbation. On the one hand, no cock chafing was applied thru the noose-like palm grip, and I had never cum. But on the other hand, what if that was just a contactless foreplay, kinda introductory knock up? What if not for presence of my brother, sniffling in peaceful innocence next to me on the folding couch-bed, I’d go astray, swap my wallowing in erotic speculations and no-touch hardon for the conventional friction toil and join the ranks of 95 percent of all male mankind with Leo Tolstoy and choryphaei of Italian cinematography in the head of the procession?.)
Once in the schoolyard, Kuba asked keenly, “Did you know, that wanking causes hair-growth on your palms?”
Skully and I simultaneously looked in our hands, to the Kuba’s happy guffaw. I knew that my palms were sinless, but I looked all the same, out of pure instinct… So, as it turns out, those folds, flicking this way and that way in front of me, were not a negligible trifle. Maybe at some future session of my contactless masturbation, the green coat would open and a tender voice call softly, “Are you also cold? Come closer. Let’s warm each other…” And I… What?!.
In the evening the mentor brought the same volumes again and persistently suggested to pay attention to exercises of such and such numbers. The winners gave them short shrift, and I only looked silently over their shoulders keeping the countenance of an inveterate problem cracker…
The Regional Olympiad took place at some institute for higher education. In the auditorium for eighth-graders, each competitor was given a thin copybook stamped on every other page. In the first one, you had to write your name and where you were from. The following two were for rewriting the problems from the blackboard, six of them, all in all. Gee! Three of the problems turned the very same which our mentor was solving the previous night in the hotel room with the wise guys. Yet, the morning had not made me any wiser, the problems seemed as unapproachable as they were the night before.
It was boring to sit idly there, yet to get up and leave at once, disrupting the tense silence of concentrated brain work that reigned around, seemed not too polite. So I opened the last page in the copybook and started a pencil sketch of a pirate. His face I could imagine vividly enough, both the broad mustache and the plum-like eyes staring from under the turban on his head in a half-turn over his shoulder. Yet, on the paper, everything went wrong. Even the blunderbuss pistol, like by those robbers in “The Snow Queen”, did not better the picture.
Hmm… Not only I did not live up to be a new Sir Isaac Newton, but also turned out a too lousy painter for a Repin… I recollected Father’s ass that pulled him out of the Party Studies School, in my case, it was walking out on foot. I took the copybook to the inspectors’ desk and left…
Of course, the fiasco in such essential fields as Physics and Painting dealt me a moral shock. To deaden the stingy feeling of defeat or, in a nutshell, to mitigate the grief, I bought a pack of cigarettes with filters. “Orbit” it was, for thirty kopecks. However, the orbital test was delayed until my return to Konotop, where I waited two more days before a suitable moment to retire with the tantalizing pack to the outhouse in the snow-clad garden.
One drag… Another… A fit of coughing… Transparent, greenish bagels floated before the eyes. Nausea. All the symptoms described by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer’s case. O, yes, respect and trust to the classic would spare throwing a barely started pack of “Orbit” thru the dark hole in the outhouse floor…
~ ~ ~
Opposite Railway Station Square, across the streetcar track and the asphalt road, there was the park named after Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Minister of Education, a wide area with alleys of tall trees connected by low curtains of trimmed bushes.
On entering the park, you were met by a white monument to Lenin who stood on its tall gray pedestal in a pensive deliberation of the Railway Station. Clutching the jacket lapel with his left hand, he lowered his right one at full arm’s length, and slightly withdrew it back in a both political and poetic attitude, like a harvester driver petting with his palm the ears of wheat: got ready to be cut down?.
Thru the trees lined-up behind the monument, there peeped the massive cube of the three-storied Culture Palace also named after Lunacharsky, but in the Konotop parlance shortened to just ‘Loony’ (not Minister of Education, of course, but the Culture Palace) and because of the name duplication you had at times to ask for clarification: Loony Park or Loony Palace?.
The building bore no architectural excesses—even walls, square windows, rectangular entrance. Contrary to the outside appearance, Loony had four floors, the hidden one, comprising the auditorium for film shows, sat deep in the basement. However, since the same films were run at Club just one week later and for free, thanks to check-passes from the Club Director, Loony remained out the scope of our interests.
The excitement about the Loony Culture Palace was breaking out in the second half of the academic year, when there started the season of games at Club of Jolly and Resourceful, aka CJR, in the competition between city school teams. That's when everyone wanted to get on the second floor of Loony, into the auditorium filled with blue-velvet-covered seats lined in too close rows over the smooth parquet floor.
They didn’t sell tickets to CJR games and to get there I had to beg it from our School Pioneer Leader, and Volodya Gourevitch would answer that the ticket distribution was controlled by the City Komsomol Committee, and the quota they allotted for School 13 was way too wee, which got further decimated by his senior colleagues in the Teachers’ Room ripping off their lion’s share and that was not his fault, right? Those tickets were always blank, marking neither seats nor rows, so it was only wise to come upfront and occupy a seat so as not to stand all the game in the narrow side passages or perch on the marble window sill at the back of the hall, leaning to the darkness behind the chilly panes, for that was winter, after all…
In winter the PE classes were held outside. The teacher, Lyubov Ivanovna, unlocked the dark “cell” next to the door of the consecutive Pioneer Room and School Library. Each student grabbed a pair of skis and poles leaned against the blind walls in the bulbless “cell”, and went to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street to run under the poplars along the streetcar track. Lyubov Ivanovna checked her big round stopwatch and announced the results. Next to her stood a pair of girls who on that particular day could not, for some reason, run and kept the class register for Lyubov Ivanovna to enter her evaluation of the class sporting achievements… Some interesting equality of sexes, eh? The girls could run or not run at their wish, but if you’re a male-student Lyubov Ivanovna would never ask how you feel about running and simply commanded: get ready! start! Run, boy, run!
The fastener-straps on the lousy school skis were much too hard, they didn’t hold a candle to the fixtures made by Father from thick rubber bands in the old days back at Object. But I never brought my skis to school for PE lessons saving them for extra-curriculum use…
That day after the midday meal we, the inseparable trinity of boy-friends, skied to the hill behind the Grove in the vicinity of Podlipnoye. The hill was quite steep, but we had glided no more than a couple of times before two slobs came from the village with the demand for our skis. One of them even tried to punch Kuba, but he ducked and glided down out of reach. Skully and I followed, but not in the steepest place like our friend.
Those two blockheads pursued running on foot and, at the edge of the Grove, the faster runner stepped on the end of my ski. I fell. When I got up, I saw that Skully had already removed his skis, bunched them onto the shoulder of his workman padded jacket and ran dodging between the dark trunks in the winter Grove. The picture got screened by a head in a black-fur hat with loosened flaps. The fur of the visor covered his eyes and only the thick-lipped smirk was visible. The portrait sharply splotched away as I took it on the nose and collapsed by a tree.
“Got it? Take off the skis, bitch!”
His partner ran up in a moment. Being either less drunk or more sensitive—the snow around was spattered with sizable drops of blood trickling from my nose—he just told me to get lost, and led his buddy away back to the village.
Full of sullen apathy, I skied thru the Grove plugging my nose with lumps of snow replacing those as they got red one after another. On the side street by the school, Kuba was waiting for me. He looked into my face and told to better wash it under a tap, he also said that Volodya Gourevitch wanted to see us in the tenth-grade classroom for some urgent talk.
In the schoolyard, I took off my skis and climbed up the porch to the empty school building, by five o’clock the janitors usually left it having done their job. The school remained empty with only the watchman in, and sometimes a group of pioneers preparing a collective recital by accompaniment of the button-accordion of the School Pioneer Leader.
The mirror above a sink showed that the blood was oozing no more and that it was not mine but some stranger’s face with the nose two times thicker than normal and the tooth-brush mustache painted under it with brown makeup. The gore-stained chin was no cleaner. I washed until Kuba said it wouldn’t get any better, then I wiped my face with a handkerchief. The pulse throbbed dully within the puffed nose.
In the appointed classroom, there was Volodya Gourevitch all alone. Delicately keeping his glances off my face, so as not to accidentally graze my huge nose, he made a speech about the crying shame that our school each year got kicked out from CJR in the initial pool of the game. And the disgrace was caused by our over-reliance on the graduation classes. We had to break that vicious practice. We had to find new forces. New blood was what we needed.
Alarmed, I looked back at Kuba. He shrugged his shoulders, and Volodya Gourevitch declared that I was the ready Captain for the School 13 CJR team. The throb of pulsation became more distinct and moved from inside the nose into the nape, where I felt it after that publication of the anonymous story signed by my name in The Pioneer magazine…
A month later the CJR team of School 13, quite unexpectedly, won their first game. In the initial contest of the game, exchange of greetings, Kuba and I came on stage in real tails and bicorns borrowed from auntie Tanya’s Costume Room at Club. Napoleon (acted by me) in his swell attitude—the right hand in his tails breast, the left one balled and pressed to the back above the buttocks—recited the famous line:
“…Moscow! This sound alone holds volumes for a Russian heart!”
Then, abruptly shedding off the poetic enchantment, I turned to Marshal Murat and ordered, “Burn Moscow down!”
Kuba sniffed up his nose and replied, “No problem, Sire! As you wish!”
The audience rocked with laughter and the rest of our team appeared on stage in casual clothes and bicorns made of Whatman paper under a merry air by the button-accordion from behind the scenes. We acted a couple of jokes more, won the contest and, eventually, the whole game.
In that same merry-go-happy, fine and dandy, way, we reached the final held in May, because everyone had learned already that we were a strong team, and if not to laugh at our jokes then at whose else? At every game in the contest of Captains, I acted some kind of Napoleonic postures adding a Mussolini-like pull to my chin, right to left and up, to provoke the willing guffaw from audience.
The only thing I did not like was that the script for our victorious start-up was copied from TV. We simply aped the performance of a CJR team who played on Central TV a few years before. Volodya Gourevitch met my scruples by loud laughter and proclamation about winners exempt from condemnation. Yet, all the same, it was like dubbing your name under the stuff by another guy.
So, the concluding seconds in the final game were running out and Jury Chairman, aptly pumping up suspension, read on his mike, “…And the season's winner… becomes the CJR team of School … 13!”
Still not believing in what has been just announced, I, together with the whole hall, shouted, “A-a-a!” and turned to our team to see that all of them were galloping towards me – both Kuba, and Skully, and Sasha Uniat from the ninth grade, and Sasha Rodionenko from ours, and everyone else roaring “A-a-a!” on the run.
And suddenly, instead of them, white light in between blue curtains flew at me. I did not immediately realize that they were the fluorescent lamps above the stage, a-swaying to me and back. Our team was tossing me in the air…
The following year the victory again was ours, yet no Captain tossing performed…
Already in the tenth grade, before the graduation, we reached the finals, yet lost to the prestigious School 11. At that concluding game, we once again re-played performance of a CJR team on Central Television from the current year. The game on TV still was too fresh in the memory of many, and we were accused of brazen plagiarism…
However, all of that was still in the lap of the future, when I was listening to the fiery speech about the change of school generations, and the throbbing pulsation moved from my nose to the back of my head. With amazement, I thought of fancy swerves in tides of fate that could uplift you, in just a single day span, from a trampled skier to Captain, dammit! So, there's no grounds for grumbling about monotony in the course of events I was destined to undergo. It’s only that from that day, my flawlessly Roman nose remained a bit turned to the right…
~ ~ ~
Destiny, aka fate, aka fortune, ain't in favor of a beeline course but prefer some wiggly sine curves, like a drunk alky, and, to make it funnier, swings up and down …crest—trough… peak—pothole.
One day ago, for example, Volodya Gourevitch, laughing his loud merry laugh, handed me a card posted on School 13 in my name. It was sent by the ninth-grader girl-like-adult who participated in the Regional Physics Olympiad and now sent her congrats on our victory at CJR concluding with a screwed-in quotation from Mayakovsky:
" Shine everywhere, always shine!..”
Something kept me from answering the card, either the heinously joyful School Pioneer Leader’s laughter or my being ashamed at her unawareness that more than once I had unbuttoned her green coat under my blanket on the folding couch-bed shared with my younger brother.
And just a couple of days later I went to Peace Square because my sister told that by that building where in summer they sold kvass from the two-wheeled yellow barrel-trailer, they put a booth to refill ballpoint pen ampoules for just 10 kopecks. Such ampoules, for both short and long ball pens, you could buy in bookshops but at the double price—for 20 and 22 kopecks apiece.
Riding a streetcar on my way back, I stood by the large poster fixed behind the glass wall in the driver’s cab, as big as a spread-out newspaper only the title much longer: “Rules For Streetcar Usage in the City of Konotop of Sumy Region”. As if other cities had different rules, eh? Or if anyone but me had ever read the articles in those Rules… The rules on how to correctly ride a streetcar… on paying 3 kopecks for a ticket… and who you’re supposed to cede your seat to… And the concluding article about the measures of administrative penalties up to the three-ruble fine if being caught without a ticket. A good quality paper in that poster, so glossy and obviously thicker than the common newsprint…
The conductors with their puffy bags on gunny straps had since long disappeared from the streetcars. And the tickets were replaced with paper coupons sold by drivers thru a small hole in the cabin door. The stupidly located hole made you bow way too low when buying coupons, yet for a driver seated in the cab, the height was comfortable enough.
And in the streetcar walls, between the windows, they fixed small boxes with lever-handles. You insert your coupon in the slot of a box, pull the lever—click!—your slip's marred by punched holes which, if closely scrutinized, made up the pattern of digits. Occasionally, a couple of inspectors boarded the streetcar at the stops asking the passengers to deliver their coupons and checked those digits. Because in Tramway Depot, they periodically changed the pattern in the levered boxes: ain’t it smart?
Yet, any smartness could be outsmarted and some bilkers kept by them a handful of used coupons to travel for free, and when addressed by the inspector they would present a whole bunch of paper trash angled from their pocket, “How could I know which one is from this streetcar? Look yourself for the right one…” At times some too stubborn ass of an inspector might start to kick the dust up because after a month of riding in the pocket many a coupon got travel-fretted. However, they would sooner give up and move along to the next passenger…
So, under those Rules, I stood, although there were vacant seats, it’s only that in winter standing seemed warmer than sitting.
Some familiar guy boarded at the stop in Zelenchuk Area. Although I didn’t know him by his name, he was from the graduating class at our school, and a couple of times I saw him in Club too. Well, so he moved near. Hey. Hey. How’s all? So-so. And we went on standing silently.
Then I saw the jerk started clamping me as if I was a girl. On the right, there's the window with the handrail across it and the driver cab behind me, with those darn Rules above another handrail. Now, the clown grabbed those 2 handrails and pressed me into the corner.
“Piss off! Stop horsing!” says I, but he only giggled and squinted his stupid eyes, yet didn’t let me go. Such a shame. I looked at the passengers. They were not many, like, about a dozen and everybody, as if mimicking each other, was looking out of the windows intently so, like, on an excursion to a famous city, like, something could be seen thru the ice-coated panes.
To put it short, I barely managed to wriggle out of his grip and stood on the steps by the cab door. There, I had to put my clothes in order because of both the jacket and the sweater, well, everything up to the naked skin, got jerked up. Some stupid asshole, if so was your bent, go and enroll the Greek-Roman wrestling group at the Club Gym and rub against your partners on the mats. But what a humiliation for the big-time CJR Captain getting into a such sinusoidal flop!.
And the next breathtaking crest rolled up end April at the All-Union military-patriotic game Zarnitsa, aka “Heat-Lightning”. Nominally, the game was for pioneer organizations but still involved all the senior classes. And I was appointed Commander of the United Formation at School 13!
No paper shoulder straps, no division into “blues” and “greens”, and everyone should have by themselves a knapsack with the field ammunition: a bowl and spoon, a needle and thread. After the line-up in the schoolyard where a PE teacher, Ivan Ivanovich, checked a pair of knapsacks for the presence of the told items, we went along Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, past Bazaar and turned into Budyonny Street. There we passed the Plant Park and went down to the Swamp, aka Grove. Thick fog was hiding progress of the column on march.
We stopped at the Grove and the PE teachers—Ivan Ivanovich and Lyubov Ivanovna—opened a sealed envelope with the directions for our further route and mission. The column proceeded to the bridge in the high railway embankment. Besides the main tracks, there was a sideway forking-off from under the bridge to the Meat-Packing Plant, we followed that lone track and outflanked the Grove from the left.
The fog was thinning and thru its rising wisps, there peeped fragments of a bumpy field. Ivan Ivanovich roared “To attack!” and we ran across the field shouting “Hurray!” I ran amid the disordered crowd and didn’t feel my body, which, like, dissolved in the general stampede and of all my senses there remained only the sight relaying sketchy pictures of torn fog locks over bumps and tussocks jumping before and past me…
Then we stopped not far from Podlipnoye in the field with occasional mighty-trunk Elms. The fog cleared up completely, and the day became glad and sunny. A real army field-kitchen arrived from the village and we were fed with hot soup. Then after a short-cut march thru the Grove, we returned to our schoolyard and lined up again. As the commander, I stood to face the ranks, ranging from the sixth to the tenth-graders, and some unknown cameraman shot us, buzzing his hand camera.
The following Monday Volodya Sherudillo mockingly (but very funny) acted me facing the ranks of my schoolmates, a slouch-shouldered weakling with a stoop but, whenever the camera turns my way, I'm bravely thrusting my chest out and stretching at attention almost to tiptoes.
(…at times I wonder if not for the daily fetching water from the pump to our khutta, might I have still become for at least an inch taller than the fourth in the line of boys when our class fell in at PE classes?..)
That spring I had a dream of a long journey and by no other means if not a raft. Most likely, I was impressed by the Tour Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition. The dream was shared with Kuba and Skully, and they approved it, yeah, that would be cool, they said. And we even began to discuss the details of its realization. If, say, the raft was built on the Seim river then, carried by its flow, we would reach the river of Desna and farther downstream to the mighty Dnieper, that flowed to the Black Sea. And the journey should be completed before August when Kuba had to leave for entrance examinations to the Odessa Sea School and Skully to some Mining Technical College in Donetsk.
