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

Standing under the wall radio at the Object, I had a fairly faint idea about bestriding a rocket in its flight, but if Dad said so, then that was the way to open a new era…

A month or two later there came the monetary reform. Instead of being large and long pieces of paper, the rubles shrunk considerably, yet kopecks remained the same. The mentioned as well as less obvious details of the reform became the standing subject in frequent agitated discussions by adults in the kitchen.

In an effort to join the world of grown-ups, at one of such debates, I stood up in the middle of the kitchen and proclaimed that those new one-ruble bills were disgustingly yellow and Lenin in them did not look like Lenin at all but like some petty deuce. Dad threw a brief glance at the couple of neighbors participating in the discourse and crisply told me not to mess around with conversations of elders and better go right away to the children’s room.

Though hurt, I bore the offense silently and left. But why if Grandma might say whatever she wanted, why wasn’t I allowed to?. Especially, that at times I heard Mom’s praises for my intelligence in her chatter to the neighbor women, “He happens to ask questions that even I have no answer to!” From those words, I felt proud tingling up inside the nose as after a hearty gulp of lemonade or fizzy water.

(…what if my megalomania took roots right there?

However, the setback at the exchange on the new money served me a good lesson – no plagiarizing from your grandma, be kind to present the wits of your own, if only there are any…

And, by the way, about the nose. When visiting homes of other people, be it a neighboring apartment or, say, in separate houses, like that of Dad’s friend Zatseppin, there was felt some kind of smell. Not necessarily rancid, yet always there, and it was different from place to place. Only at our home, there was no smack whatsoever…)

In the summer of 1961, the adults of the Gorka blocks took great interest in volleyball. After her work and home chores, Mom put on her sportswear and went out to the volleyball grounds, at a stone’s throw across the road, alongside the Bugorok-Knoll that looked like one of the hills in The Russian Epic Tales. The games were played by the “knock-out system” with the teams replacing one another till the velvety night darkness condensed around the yellowish bulb up on the lonely log lamppost nigh the volleyball grounds. The players chided each other for failures or hotly lambasted the opposite team’s protestations, but no one dared to argue with the umpire because he sat so high and silenced protesters by his whistle blows.

The on-lookers also rotated. They came and went, scream-and-shouted along with the game, manned teams of their own, slapped themselves to kill a biting mosquito or paddled the buzzing scourges away with green broad-leaved branches.

And I was there and also fed the mosquitoes, yet they are just a dim recollection while I remember dearly the rare feel of communion and belonging – all around were us and we were our very own people. Such a pity that some of us have to leave and go, but—see!—there are others coming. Ours. We.

(…so long ago was all that… Before the TV and the WIFI split us up and shoved into separate cells…)

~ ~ ~

With the nearing autumn, Mom started to teach me reading the ABC book, which was full of pictures and strings of letters skewered with dashes to aid at making the words up. Yet even spitted, the letters stayed reluctant to fuse into something sensible. At times, I tried to skulk and, staring at the picture next to the word, read: “Arr-hay-eye-enn. Rain!”

But Mom answered, “Stop cheating! It’s a “c-l-o-u-d”.

I poohed, and eeewed, and started over again converting the syllables into words, and in a few weeks I could already sing thru the texts at the end of the book where the harvester was mowing wheat in the collective farm field…

Grandma Martha’s worldview was not in the least affected by the Yuri Gagarin’s statement for the journalists that, while on his flight, he saw no God up there. On the contrary, she started an anti-atheistic propaganda and covert conversion of her eldest grandkid. She insistently advised me to mark well that God knew everything, could do anything and, most importantly, was able to fulfill your wishes. And in exchange for what? Just for praying regularly, as simple as that! Such a trifle, ain’t it? But then at school, I, with God’s help, would have no problems. The grade of “five” is needed? Just say a prayer and – get it! Some good trade, eh?.

And I wavered. I succumbed to her temptation and, even though never disclosing it, I turned a clandestine believer on my own. As no one enlightened me what a believer had to do, I came to inventing the rituals myself. Going out to play in the Courtyard, I for a second dropped behind the narrow door to the basement and there, in the darkness, pronounced—not even in whisper but silently, in my mind, “Alright, God, you know all yourself. See? I’m crossing me.” And I put a sign of the cross somewhere about my navel…

However, when before school there remained just a couple of days, something made me revolt and I became an apostate. I renounced Him. And I did it out loud. Openly. I went into the grassy grounds by the garbage bins enclosure and shouted at the top of my lungs, “There’s no god!”

And though there was no one around—not a single soul—I still took proper precautions, just in case if somebody would overhear accidentally, say, from behind the fencing around the garbage bins. “Aha!” they would think, “Now that boy shouts there is no god, which makes it clear even for a fool that till lately he has believed there was some.” And that was surely a shame for a boy who in a few days would become a schoolboy. For that reason, instead of articulating the blasphemous renunciation clearly, I took care to howl it with indistinct vowels: “Ou ou ouu!”

Nothing happened.

Turning my face upward, I hollered it once again and then, in a way of putting the final period in my relations with God, I spat in the sky.

Neither thunder nor lightning followed, only I felt the drizzle of spittle landing on my cheeks. So it was not a period but the dots of ellipsis. Not too much of a difference. And I went home liberated…

~ ~ ~

(…the microscopic spittle fallout that sprinkled, in the aftermath of the God-defying spit in the sky, the upturned face of the seven-year-old I, proved up to the hilt my inability to draw conclusions from the personal experience: a handful of sand, when thrown up, invariably came back down. Additionally, it demonstrated my complete ignorance of Sir Isaac Newton’s conclusions in his law on the respective matters.

In short, it was really time for the young atheist to plop into the inescapable tide of compulsory school education…)

The never-ending summer of the pivotal year pitied, at last, the little ignoramus and handed me over to September when, dressed in a bluish suit with shiny pewter buttons, my forelock trimmed in the real hair salon for grown-up men, where Mom took me the day before, clutching in my right hand the stalks in the newspaper-wrapped bunch of Dahlias brought the previous night from the small front garden of Dad’s friend Zatseppin who had a black motorcycle with a sidecar—I went for the first time to the first grade, escorted by Mom. I cannot remember whether she was holding my hand or I succeeded at my claim of being big enough to carry both the flowers and the schoolbag of dark brown leatherette.

We walked down the same road from which since long had disappeared the black columns of zeks though the sun shined as brightly as in their days. On that sunny morning, the road was walked by other than me first-graders with their parents and brand-new leatherette schoolbags, as well as by older, differently aged, schoolchildren, marching both separately and in groups. However, down the tilt, we did not turn to the all too familiar trail towards kindergarten but went straight ahead to the wide-open gate of the Recruit Depot Barracks. We crossed their empty yard and left it thru the side gate, and walked uphill along another, yet unknown, trail between the tall grayish trunks of Aspen.

From the pass, there started again a protracted tilt downward thru the leafy forest with a swamp on the right, after which a short, yet steep, climb led up to the road entering the open gate of the school grounds encircled by the openwork timber fence.

Inside the wide enclosure, the road ended by the short flight of concrete steps ascending to a concrete walk to the entrance of the two-story school building with 2 rows of wide frequent windows.

We did not enter but stopped outside the school and stood there for a long time, while bigger schoolchildren kept running roundabout and were yelled at by adults.

Then we, the first-graders, were lined to face the school. Our parents stayed behind us but still there, the runners ceased their scamper while we stood clutching our flower bunches and new schoolbags until told to form pairs and follow an elderly woman heading inside. And we awkwardly moved forward. One girl in our column burst into tears, her mother ran up to silence her sobs and urge her to keep walking.

I looked back at my Mom. She waved and smiled, and said something which I could not already hear. Black-haired, young, beautiful…

~ ~ ~

At home, Mom announced that everyone praised Seraphima Sergeevna Kasyanova as a very experienced teacher and it was so very good I got into her class.

For quite a few months, the experienced teacher kept instructing us in writing propped by the faded horizontal lines in special copybooks, crisscrossed by slanting ones, whose purpose was to develop identical right slant in our handwritings and all that period we were allowed to use nothing but pencils. We scribbled endless lines of leaning sticks and hooks which were supposed to become, later, in the due course, parts of letters written with an elegant bent even without the propping lines in the pages of ruled paper. It took an eternity and one day before the teacher’s information that we got readied for using pens and should bring them to school the following day together with no-spill ink-wells and replaceable nibs.

Those dip pens—slender wooden rods in lively monochrome color with cuffs of light tin at one end for the insertion of a nib—I kept bringing with me from the first school day under the long sliding lid in a wooden pencil-box. As for the plastic no-spill ink-wells, they indeed prevented the spillage of ink holding it in between their double walls if the ink-well got accidentally knocked over or deliberately turned upside down.

The pen’s nib was dipped into the ink-well, but not too deep because if you picked up too much of ink with the nib tip, the ink would drop down into the page—oops!—a splotch again… One dip was enough for a couple of words and then – dip the nib anew.

At school, each desk had a small round hollow in the middle of its front edge to place one ink-well for the pair of students sharing it to dip, in turn, their pens’ nibs in. The replaceable nib had a bifurcated tip, however, its halves, pressed tightly to each other, were leaving on the paper a hair-thin line (if you didn’t forget to dip the pen’s nib into the ink-well beforehand). Slight pressure applied to the pen in writing made nib’s halves part and draw a wider line. The alteration of thin and bold lines with gradual transitions from one into another presented in the illustrious samples of the penmanship textbook drove me to despair by their unattainable calligraphy refinement…

Much later, already as a third-grade student, I mastered one more application of dip pen’s nibs. Stab an apple with a nib and revolve it inside for one full rotation, then pulling the nib out you’ll have a little cone of the fruit’s flesh in it, while in the apple side there appeared a neat hole, into which you can insert the extracted cone, reversely. Got it? You’ve created a horned apple.

Then you may add more of such horns until the apple starts looking like a sea mine or a hedgehog – depending on the perseverance of the artificer. Finally, you can eat your piece of art but I, personally, never liked the taste of the resultant apple mutant…

And after one more year at school, in the fourth grade, you learned the way of turning the dip pen’s nib into a missile. First, break off one of the halves in the sharp tip of the nib to make it even sharper, then split the opposite insertion butt-end and jam into the crack a tiny piece of paper folded into four-wing tail-stabilizer to obtain bee-line flying mode.

Now, throw your dart into some wooden thing—the door, the blackboard, a window frame would equally do—the prickly nib’s half will pierce deep enough to keep the missile sticking out from the target…

The trail to school had become quite familiar, yet each time a little different. The foliage fell, the droughts began roaming between the naked tree trunks and the school was peeping thru them even before you reached the big Aspen by the swamp, on whose smooth bark there stood the knife-cut inscription: “It’s where the youtth is wasted”.

(…until now the literary magazine The Youth shocks me with a crying deficiency they spell the periodical's name with…)

Then the snowfalls began, however, by the end of the day, the wide path thru deep snowdrifts to the school got trodden anew. The sun sparkled blindingly from both sides of that road to knowledge transformed into a trench with orange marks of urine on its snow walls. Totally obliterated by the next snowfall, they would persistently pop up again at other spots in the restored and deepened trench-trail thru the forest…

A few weeks before the New Year, our class finished studying the primer and Seraphima Sergeevna brought us to the school library, a narrow room with one window on the second floor. There she introduced us to the librarian as accomplished readers who had the right to visit her and borrow books for our personal reading at home.

That day, returning home with my first book, I stretched upon the big sofa and never left it but only turned from one side to the other, and from my tummy to my back, until finished the entire book which was a fairy-tale about the city with narrow streets walked by tall hammer-creatures who banged on the heads of shorter bell-creatures to make them ring. Just so a story by Aksakov about a music-playing snuff-box…

~ ~ ~

Winter evenings were so hasty rides, you had barely had your meal and scribbled away your calligraphy home assignment when – look! – it’s already deep dusk outside the window.

Yet, even the dark could not cancel the social life and you hurriedly put your felt boots on, and pulled warm pants over them, and got into your winter coat followed by the fur hat and – off you ran to the Gorka! How far away? Just around the corner! Because “the Gorka” indicated not only the two blocks as well as the whole upland but also that very tilt towards the Recruit Depot Barracks which we walked down on our way to school.