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

(…every road, when you pass it for the first time, seems endlessly long because you cannot measure yet the past part of it against what is still ahead. When passing the same road again and again, it obviously shortens.

That keeps true with the school academic year as well. But I’d never discover it had I left the race at the beginning of the second year at school…)

It was a clear autumn day and our class left school going on the excursion to collect fallen leaves. Instead of Seraphima Sergeevna, who was absent that day, we were supervised by the School Pioneer Leader.

First, she led us thru the forest, then down the street towards the Detachment Library which we didn’t reach but turned into a short lane between the wooden houses that ended atop a steep slope bridged by two wide flights of timber steps in a pretty long and steep slant down to a real football field encircled by a wide cinder path.

Walking the flights, we descended to the large board-floor landing to both sides from which, there ran half-dozen bleachers made of lumber beams. No bleachers were seen on the field’s opposite side but a lonely white hut and a tall picture-stand of 2 footballers motionless forever at the zenith in their high jump fixed at the moment of strenuous scramble in the air by their feet for the ball.

The girls of our class stayed back collecting the leaves from between the bleachers, but the boys bypassed the football field along the cinder path behind the goal on the right and fled down the dip to the river running nearby. When I reached the riverbank, three or four of the boys with their pants rolled up to the knees were already wading about the stream that noisily rushed thru the gap in the broken dam while the most of classmates stayed on the bank just watching.

Without a moment’s deliberation, I pulled off my boots and socks and rolled the pants up. Entering the water was a little scary, what if it’s too cold? But it turned out quite tolerable. The stream roared angrily and leaned in constant drive on my legs below the knees, yet the river bottom felt pleasantly smooth and even. One of the boys who waded in the striving ripples next to me shouted thru the gurgling growl that it was a slab from the destroyed dam—wow! so classy!.

And so I waded hither-thither, wary of drenching the upturned pants when everything—the splashes of the running river, the eager yells of classmates, and the clear soft day—all at once vanished. Instead, on all sides, there was a completely different, silent, world filled with nothing but oppressive yellowish dusk and trickles of pallid bubbles waltzing up before my eyes. Still not realizing what happened, I waved my hands, or rather they did it on their own accord, and soon I broke free to the surface full of blinding sun glare, and the rumble of rushing water that kept slapping my nose and cheeks with choking splashes, strangely distant cries “drowns!” through the water plugs in my ears. My hands flip-flapped at random in the stream until the fingers grabbed the end of someone’s belt thrown from the edge of the slab so meanly cut-off under the water.

I was pulled out, helped to squeeze the water out of my clothes, and directed to a wide trail bypassing the whole stadium so as not to run into the School Pioneer Leader and peachy girls collecting fallen leaves for their autumn herbaria…

~ ~ ~

In a bird’s-eye view, the school building, supposedly, looked like a wide angular “U” with the entrance in the center of the underbelly. The tiled with brown ceramic lobby split into 2 corridors of parquet flooring of slippery glint which led to the opposite wings in the building, to those horns of the “U” from the bird’s viewpoint.

Along one wall in each of the corridors, there ran a row of wide windows looking into the wild-never-trodden space in between the horns, filled by a jumbled thicket of young Pines with thin sloughing off bark. The wall opposite the windows had only doors set far apart from each other, marked by numbers and letters of the grades studying behind them.

The same layout continued after the turn into the left wing, yet in the right one, there was the school gymnasium taking up the whole width and height of the two-story building. The huge hall was equipped with a vault followed by the thick cable of spirally twined strands hanging from the hook in the ceiling and the parallel bars next to the pile of black mats by the distant blind wall. And near the entrance, there was a small stage hiding behind its dark-blue curtain an upright piano and a stock of triple seats stacked up there until needed for the gym transformation into the assembly hall.

The upper floor was climbed up the stair-flights starting at the turn of the left corridor into the horn-wing, and the layout up there replicated that of the first floor, except for the lobby, of course, with its nickel-plated stand-hangers for school kids’ hats and coats behind low barriers, each with its own wicket, on both sides from the entrance door. That’s why the second-floor corridors ran straight and smooth between the wide windows in one wall and the doors of classrooms in the other.

Attending school in felt boots, you could take a spurt of run and skid along the slick parquet flooring, if only there were not black rubber galoshes on your boots neither a teacher in the corridor. My felt boots, at first, savagely chafed my legs behind the knees, then Dad slashed them a little with his shoemaker’s knife. He knew how to do anything.

In winter you came to school still in the dark. Sometimes I wandered around empty classrooms. In the seventh grade’s room, I peeked inside the small white bust of Comrade Kirov on the windowsill. It looked much like the insides of the porcelain puppy statuette in the parents’ room, only dustier.

Another time, switching on the light in the eighth grade, I saw a wax apple left behind on the teacher’s desk. Of course, I fully realized that it was not natural, yet the fruit looked so inviting, juicy, and as if glowing with some inner light that all that made me bite the hard unyielding wax, leaving dents from my teeth on its tasteless side. Immediately, I felt ashamed of being hooked by a bright fake. Yet, who saw it? Quietly turned I the light off and sneaked out into the corridor.

(…twenty-five years later, in the school of the Karabakh village of Noragyuogh, I saw exactly the same wax imitation, with the imprint of a child’s bite and smiled knowingly – I saw you, kid!..)

Kids of all nations and ages are much alike, take, for instance, their love for Hide-and-seek… That game we played not only in the Courtyard but at home as well, after all, we were a company of 3, at times more numerous, when added by the neighbor children—the Zimins and the Savkins who lived at the same landing.

Our apartment was not abundant in hiding places. Well, firstly, under the parents' bed, or then… behind the cupboard corner… er… O, yes! – the cloth wardrobe in the hallway.

My Dad made it himself. A vertical two-meter-tall bar planted off the hallway corner (and 2 rod-branches from its top reaching the walls) cut out a sizable parallelepiped of space. Now, it just remained to hang a cloth curtain on ringlets running along the horizontal rods and cover the whole contraption with a piece of plywood so that the dust did not collect inside. The do-it-yourself cloakroom at ready! On the paint-coated wall inside the cotton-walled vault, there was fixed a wide board with pegs for hanging coats and other things, the big brown wicker chest stood on the floor beneath the hanger-board, and there still remained a lot of room for the footwear…

Granted, the hiding places were pretty scanty, yet playing the game was interesting all the same. You holed up in one of the enumerated spots and, keeping your breath under a tense control, listened to the “it’s” cautious steps before… off you rushed! to win the run to the big sofa in the children’s room from where the “it” started their search, and assert your being the first by taps on the big sofa’s armrest and your loud yell, “knock-knock! that’s for me!”, so as not to be the “it” in the following round of Hide-and-seek.

Yet, one day Sasha managed to hide so successfully that I couldn’t find him, he just disappeared! I even checked both the bathroom and the storeroom in the hallway, although we had a standing agreement to never hide in there. And I felt thru each of the coats on the hanger-board behind the cloth curtain in the hallway.

Then I opened the wardrobe in the parents’ room with Mom’s dresses and Dad’s jackets hanging in the dark warm compartment behind the door that bore the big outside mirror. Just in case, I checked even behind the wardrobe’s right door though there was no room for hiding in the compartment filled with the drawers for stacks of sheets and pillowcases, except for the one at the bottom where I once discovered the blue square of a seaman collar cut off a sailor’s shirt. And, wrapped into it, there was a dagger of a naval officer with spiral ribs in the yellow hilt and the long steel body tapering to the needle-sharp point hidden in the taut black scabbard. A couple of days later, I couldn’t keep the temptation back and shared the great secret with the younger ones. However, Natasha casually shrugged the news away and answered that she knew about the dagger all along and even showed it to Sasha…

And now Natasha, with happy giggles, was following my vain search and after my frantic cry addressed to our absent brother that, okay, I agreed to be the “it” one more time, only let him go out from wherever he was now, Natasha also yelled instructing him to sit tight and quiet, and not to give up. I ran out of patience completely and refused to play anymore, but she suggested that I leave the room for a moment. Returning from the corridor, I saw Sasha in the middle of the room pleased and silent, and blinking bemusedly at Natasha’s report how he climbed the fourth drawer in the wardrobe where she piled socks over him…

At times there happened exclusively family games at home, with no neighbors taking part…

Merry laughter of several voices was heard from the parents' room, I put the book aside got up from the big sofa and trotted over there.

"What’s the fuss?" asked I envious of the mutual mirth.

"Checking the pots!"

"How’s that?"

"Come on and have a check!"

I was told to sit on Dad's back and grab him by the neck while he was firmly holding my legs. So far, so good, I liked it. But then he turned my back towards Mom and I felt her finger rooting my ass as deep as the pants let go.

"This pot is leaky!" announced Mom.

Everyone laughed and me too, although I felt somehow ashamed…

Another time Dad asks me, "Wanna see Moscow?"

"Wow! Sure!"

Coming from behind, he puts his hands over my ears, tight, and lifts me up above the floor by my head squeezed in between his hands.

"How now? D'you, see Moscow?"

"Yes! Yes!" scream I.

He puts me back where taken and I do my best not to hide the tears from the smarting pain in my ears flattened against the skull.

"Aha! Got fooled! It's so easy to fool you!"

(…much later I figured out that he just was repeating the practical jokes played on him in his childhood…)

In the course of the Hide-and-seek with Sasha’s disappearance, when checking the cloth wardrobe in the hallway, I noticed a bottle of lemonade stuck all by itself in the narrow cleft between the wall and the wicker chest. Lemonade then was something I adored in earnest, that carbonated nectar had only one annoying feature— it disappeared so too fast from my glass. As for the discovered bottle, it obviously was stored for some holiday and then just forgotten about.

I did not care to remind of it to anyone and the following day, or maybe the day after the following day, taking the opportunity of being home alone, I pulled the lemonade from behind the chest and hurried to the kitchen. Still in the corridor, my impatient fingers felt some slackness in the bottle cap, I tore it off and clapped the bottle up to my eager lips… Half-way through the second gulp, I realized that the lemonade was not somehow not quite it, but quite not it at all. Reversing the bottle to the normal position, I saw that after the holiday it was filled with sunflower oil for storage.

It’s good that no one witnessed my attempt at drinking sunflower oil, except for the small white box with a red cross on its door, the hoard of first-aid kits, unknown pills and dark glass phials, fixed up in the wall between the cloth wardrobe and the door to the storeroom, and also the black electric meter just above the entrance door. But they were not to tell anyone…

My next gastronomical misconduct was filching of a bun freshly baked, which Mom took out from the electric oven “Kharkov” together with a bunch of others and spread them on a towel over the kitchen table.

The round brownish backs gleamed so tempting that I violated Mom’s order to let them cool off little bit before the all-out tea party. Sneaking into the empty kitchen, I yanked one of them off, hid behind my back, and smuggled it into the lair on the wicker chest in the ill-illuminated cloth cave.

Probably, that bun was really too hot or else the sense of guilt culled taste sensations but, hastily chomping the forbidden fruit of culinary art, I didn’t feel the customary pleasure and wanted only the unpalatable bun to be over, the sooner the better. When from the kitchen Mom called all to come over and enjoy the tea with buns, I did not feel like that at all…

Yet in general, though a skill-less slow-goer, I was a fairly law-abiding child ever diligent-in-earnest, and if something went wrong it was not on purpose but because it simply turned out that way.

Dad grumbled that my Sloth-Mommy got born a moment before me and all I was good at was basking on the big sofa all day long gripping a book, like, a true copy of Oblomov!. But Mom protested that reading was beneficial and because of it I might become a doctor and look so very elegant in the white smock.