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

(…any rhetoric is lost on those whose Stubbornness-Mommy was born a moment before them!. )

Yet, I not only made speeches but also kept throwing the wood, so that later, at midday meal in the kitchen, Sasha would not make hints that he did more than me. And suddenly he tottered back from the pit, his blood-smeared fingers clutching his face. Natasha rushed home to call Mom, who came running with a damp cloth to wipe the blood off Sasha’s upturned face. Dad also raced from the basement and no one was listening to my defense that all that happened accidentally, not on purpose, when the piece of wood thrown by me scratched the skin on my brother’s nose. Mom yelled at Dad because he allowed all that to happen. Dad also grew angry and told everyone to go home, and he'd finish the work himself.

The scratch healed very soon, although Sasha stubbornly peeled the patch off his nose even before the midday meal.

(…I doubt if my brother would recollect the happening, it’s only me who remembers and feels guilty: yes, it was not deliberate, but instead of futile orations I should have been more watchful tossing them chunks…)

At school, I regularly enrolled in this or that Group, whenever its tutor entered our classroom to recruit volunteers. Group meetings were held in the late afternoon so that participants had time to go home, have their midday meal, and come back to school. After a one-hour session of learning and training at the Group, its members returned home thru the complete night darkness…

One evening after the Group activities were over, a bunch of participants dropped into the school gym where there was an upright piano on the stage behind the closed curtain, and where one boy once showed me that if you hit only the black keys then it sounded like Chinese music. But that evening I forgot all about the music because besides the piano on the stage, there were several boys from senior grades who had a pair of real boxing gloves!

We dared to ask permission to touch the gloves’ shiny leather and try them on. The senior graders kindly allowed us that, and then they had an idea of holding a match between the sprats, a fighter from the Gorka (that is someone from the blocks atop the hill) against someone of Lowlanders who dwelt in the rows of timber houses at the foot of the Gorka upland.

The choice fell on me—O! and I wanted it so dearly!—and so did red-haired fatty Vovka from among the Lowlanders. As the stage was illuminated too poorly for the match, all the present went over to the gym hallway under the bright bulb reflected in the ink-black winter darkness behind the wide window-pane, and they commanded “box!” to me and Vovka.

At first, we both chuckled punching each other with the bulky balls of gloves, but soon we grew hot and angry. I in earnest wanted to deal a good one in his head while in his eyes in that very head you unmistakably could read his craving to knock me down. Before long my left shoulder, which kept receiving all his blows, felt terribly sore, while my right hand, that kept hitting his shoulder, grew limp and floppy. Probably, his state was no better, our giggles turned into puffing and gasping. It was bad and unbearably painful because his blows, like, penetrated to the very bone of my forearm, but I would rather die than beat retreat. At last, the big boys got bored with such a monotony, they told us “enough!” and took away their gloves.

The next morning a purple-black bruise decorated my left forearm and for several following days I was very touchy at that spot, ducking even from a friendly pat and issuing the hiss of self-defending gander…

~ ~ ~

If the Courtyard was covered by powder snow but not too deep, all of our family went out to clean the carpet and the runner. We spread them face down on the snow and stomped on their backs. Then the carpet was turned over, the snow from the snowdrifts about it got swept with a broom onto all of the carpet’s face and then swept away. Done. And we folded the carpet.

The long green runner remained face down after the stomping, and the 4 of us—Mom and the 3 children—gathered upon it, and Dad dragged the runner over the snowdrifts with all of us standing upon its back, leaving a crumpled, dust-smeared, furrow thru the snow in our wake. Yes, our Dad was so strong and mighty!

And making use of a slushy snowfall, the boys began to roll up snow in the Courtyard forming huge balls to build a fortress. For a start, you made a regular snowball, put it down onto a snowdrift, and began rolling it back and forth. The lump immediately swelled with layers of slush snow stuck all over its sides. The snowball turned bigger than a football, then grew above your knees, becoming denser, heavier and you had to call for help already and, in a team of two or three, roll it to the fortress construction site where the big boys hoisted it and fixed into the course of dense snow lumps making the circular wall taller than you…

We split into two parties—the besieged defenders and the assaulting troops. In a record short time, the ammo of snowballs was hurriedly produced and – off to the storm they rushed!

Shrieks, yells, babel; snowballs whooshing from all the sides and in every direction. I stuck my head out above the fortress wall looking for someone to hit with my snowball but a crack of yellow lightning flashed in my eyes, like an exploding electric bulb. With my back sliding against the wall, down I crouched, my hands firmly pressed to the eye whipped with a snowball.

(… " oh, I forgot, they killed me in the charge…”

so depicted such a moment Nikolai Gumilyov in his poem…)

Yet, the battle raged on, and no one cared about bodies of the fallen buddies. Everything fused and drowned in one united warcry, “A-a-a-a-a-ah!” After a period out of any time at all the battle was over. The fortress never surrendered but turned into a hillock of snow trampled firm and hard as ice. Yet, the roar still did not abated, with the same unrestrainable yell we kept sliding down the hillock on our bellies, the heads turned kinda hollow and filled with a sort of dull deafness because of your and others’ crazy, unceasing, howl, “A-a-a-a-a-ah!”

My eye could see already. I slapped up a snowball and hit the head of a boy older than me. What a blunder! Firstly, the battle was long since ended and that boy had already come with his skates on. How could I be so reckless? As always, because of trying to keep things in proper order, to make everything right. Ages before, at the beginning of fortress construction, the eldest boys—seventh-and-eighth-graders—announced, “who does not build will not play”, and I knew for sure that the boy in skates was not among the builders. But who now cared about the right things and justice? Many of the founder boys had left already. Those stuck behind had completely forgotten the pre-battle declaration.

Yet, there was no time to present justifications for the arrogant deed, and there was no one for listening to them or helping out, so – run for your life! And I plunged headlong towards the staircase-entrance door of our house. Maybe he wouldn’t catch up with his skates on in the trampled snow drifts?

Running, exhausted by the countless hours in the wild game, I was still running. The entrance door’s so nigh already! “But if he’ll still catch up?” flashed in my mind, and I got a skate kick in the ass for such an inappropriate fear. Slamming the door I shot thru the vestibule where he dared not follow – it’s someone else’s house…

(…if you want everything to work out as it should, you mustn’t doubt that so it would…)

In the spring that followed, my parents tried their hand at farming. That is, they decided to plant potatoes… When with a spade and a bagful of potatoes they started for the forest after work, I begged to take me too.

We came to the narrow endless clearing in the forest, the former border of Zona before the expansion of the Object’s area. Dad made holes in the soil which he turned the day before, and Mom dropped potatoes into them. Their faces looked sad and Dad wistfully shook his head asserting that the soil was not the right sort, mere loam on which nothing could possibly grow… Soon, the quiet spring twilight thickened, and we started home.

(…a little anticipatory, I can say that the attempted kitchen garden indeed yielded nothing. Was the failure because of the loam, or the doubt annulled any possibility for a success?.

And, what is really inconceivable, why was to start it at all? To save costs for potatoes? But we were not so poor then. In the parents’ room there appeared a fold-out couch-bed, two armchairs with lacquered armrests of wood, and a three-legged coffee table, all of them making one furniture set.

Probably, they simply wanted to take a break from all that furniture and the farming enterprise served an excuse for fleeing to the forest…)

~ ~ ~

And again it was summer only this time it started much earlier than in all the previous years. And together with that summer, the Rechka river rushed into my life. Or maybe, the limits of my living space had expanded enough to reach it.

To start the relations with the Rechka, at first, I needed a company of boys more advanced in their years who led along the downhill road avoiding the heat-softened tar in the joints, which leg I knew well though from my frequenting the Detachment’s Library. Then forked an unknown footpath thru the shady thicket over a steep slope until there, all at once, unfurled the sparkling sunlit stream of the Rechka lapping among innumerable boulders of any size.

You could cross the ten-meter-wide river without getting deeper than to your waist or you might stand instead knee-deep in its fast current and watch a school of translucent whitebait poking ticklishly at your ankles in the greenish twilight of the incessantly rolling mass of water…

When out of the river, we played Key-or-lock, betting on the form of the splash made by a stone hurled into the water. If the splash rose up like a stick, that was counted “a key”, while a wider, bush-like, splash went for “lock”. In controversy cases, the last word remained by the boy who played football better, or whose pebble did more leaps at “baking pancakes” over the water surface… Soon I began to go to the Rechka alone or with just one partner, yet on the river bank we parted because our main concern was fishing.

All the tackle consisted of a fishing pole—a cut-down willow whip—with a length of line tied to the thinner end. The line was threaded thru the float and ended with the hook, accompanied by a tiny lead sinker. The float could be made of a brownish wine cork, a match stuck into the same hole by side the threaded line fixed its length from the hook, or you could use a float bought from the Sports Goods store—a plucked and pared goose feather painted red-and-white with 2 tiny rubber rings to keep it fixed on the line—they both popped equally well on the rushing ripples of rapid current, or turned thoughtfully still in a small backwater pockets behind the bigger boulders…

Fishing is something personal. One boy pins his hopes on that quiet inlet, the other prefers to have his float hopping on the rapids. That’s why companions get parted on the river bank. Fishing is a rocket-fast surge of excitement at the slightest start of the float. Hush! Striking!. The line does not yield, it jibs, bends the pole end, cuts the water in zigzags, then suddenly gives up, jumps out and, in a fleeting arch over your head, carries to you the sparkling flutter of the caught fish! Then, of course, it turns to be not a fish but a small fry. Never mind! The next catch will be tha-a-at big!.