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

We went out into the long corridor on the second floor, where along its walls with the windows on the left and the rare doors to the classrooms on the right, there hung different pictures with differently-aged Lenin in all of them… The new School Pioneer Leader commenced from the very beginning. Here, he’s quite a young man, a youth, actually, after getting the news about the execution of his elder brother Alexander by the Czarist regime, he consoles his mother with the words “We’ll go another way”, which is the name of this famous picture, by the way.

And our class followed her quietly to the next poster with his photograph in the group of comrades from the underground committee… The working silence reigned in school, we passed by the closed doors of the classrooms with the school children sitting behind them and only we, like secret conspirators, veered from the usual course of the school regime and seemed to have joined the life of underground, following the quiet voice directing us from a picture to a picture…

Then the spring came, and again the thawed patches appeared on the slope between Block and the Recruit Depot Barracks but I wasn’t checking them anymore… One sunny day coming home from school, I took over an unfamiliar girl of my age. Maybe, from the parallel fourth grade. I get ahead of her and looked back at the face full of absolute lack of care about my walking along.

The brag just asked for a small demonstration that I was a boy of consequence in the surrounding whereabouts. And besides, I had a gang of my own, like Robin Hood, the noble robber. Still walking on, I half-turned to the left and told with eloquent gestures to the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the decaying skating rink, “Hey! Don’t be so careless! Duck!! Don’t let them spot you!” So, if the snooty girl looked that way, no one would be seen there…

Another time, with the snow, completely gone, I was going the same route and squinting because if you squint without closing your eyes completely, but only to the point when the eyelashes from your upper and lower eyelids meet and touch each other, you’d see the world as if thru the transparent wings of a dragonfly. That way I was not, actually, walking but flying in a tiny dragonfly-like helicopter and watching thru its Plexiglas roof which I saw in The Funny Pictures because even though I was past the preschool age I still turned pages of that magazine for small kids whenever it came my way.

And then I remembered how rebellious Kotovsky, in the movie “Kotovsky” at the Regiment Club, answered the arrogant landlord, “I am Kotovsky!” After which he grabbed him and threw thru the window panes of the landlord’s house.

So I also grabbed the rich scoundrel by the breast of his jacket and threw him into the roadside ditch. And I proudly called myself with the glorious name, “I am Kotovsky!” Yay! And it was so good to feel myself so strong. That’s why I replayed the episode several times walking uphill to Block. And why not? Who was to see me along the empty road?

At home, Mom told how she and Paulyna Zimin had a hearty laugh watching thru the neighbor’s window my grabs and throws of nobody knew who. But I never confessed that I was Kotovsky at the moment….

End April, we became young pioneers. The ceremony took place not at school but in front of the House of Officers because there stood the big gypsum head of Lenin upon the tall pedestal.

The night before, Mom ironed my trousers thru gauze and also the white parade-shirt and the scarlet silk triangle of pioneer tie. All those things she hung over the back of a chair so that in the morning everything would be ready. When there was no one in the room, I touched the soft caressing fabric of the pioneer tie. Mom said she had bought it from the store, but it’s impossible for such things to be for sale.

The bright morning sun was shining. We, the fourth-graders, stood facing the lined-up ranks of the school children. Our scarlet ties hung on our right arms bent at the elbow, the collars of our shirts were turned up for the senior graders to easily tie our ties around.

Yet before that moment, we chanted the memorized Solemn Oath in front of our comrades to love our Homeland hotly, to live and learn and struggle as admonished by great Lenin, as we were always being taught by the Communist Party….

One week before the end of the academic year I fell ill. Mom thought it was a cold and told me to stay in bed but could not bring the temperature down, and when it rose up to forty she called an ambulance from the Detachment’s Hospital because with two more degrees the temperature would become lethal.

I was too lightheaded to be proud or frightened that a whole vehicle came after just me alone. At the hospital, they at once diagnosed pneumonia and began to knock the temperature down with penicillin injections every half-hour. I did not care. A day later the injection frequency was reduced to one per hour, the following day – one in two hours…

The patients in the ward were all adults, soldiers from the Regiment. In four days, I was quite okay and walking in the garden around the Hospital, when our class together with the teacher came to visit me and hand over the report card with my grades.

I felt uncomfortable and, for some reason, ashamed, so I ran away around the corner followed by the boys of our class. But then we returned, and the girls together with the teacher handed me my award for successful studies and exemplary behavior. It was the book of The Russian Epic Tales which Grandma Martha read to me, and my sister-'n'-brother, but only quite a new one… That way, little by little, things began somehow repeat themselves in my life…

In summer we were again taken to the pioneer camp to the same canteen, lining-ups, bedroom ward, “stiff hours”, and Parental Days. Though certain things had notably changed because as a full-fledged pioneer, I already belonged to the Third Platoon which, together with the First and Second ones, was eligible for swimming in the lake. But first, we had to wait a week in anxious hope that it shouldn’t rain on the appointed day.

We waited eagerly, and on the swimming day the weather was not rainy, so two trucks with canvas tops took us to the Sominsky lake. The road went thru the forest, along some narrow endless clearing. And the ride was also very long because we had sung all the pioneer songs, both my favorite “ah, potato’s so tasty-tasty-tasty-tasty…”, and the one I liked less, but still for pioneers – “we marched to the ding of the cannonade…”, and, well, all that we knew, anyway, but the road did not end and I felt sick with all those jolts on the bumps in the road. Then those, who sat at the square window cut in the front canvas wall, shouted that something was seen ahead and the truck pulled up on a grassy shore of a big lake amid the forest.

They allowed us to enter the water not all at once but in turn, one platoon after another. The water was very dark, and the bottom felt unpleasantly quaggy, and they too soon yelled from the shore, “Third platoon – out!”

At first, I only stood up to the chest in the water doing shallow hops. But then they gave me an air-filled life ring of rubber and showed how to row with my hands and kick my legs for swimming. Soon both the caretakers and the pioneer leaders grew bored to command the platoons in and out of the water, so everybody stayed there as long as they wanted. I let the air out of the life ring and made sure that I could still swim for a couple of meters.

At the end of the day, when they yelled everyone to get ashore because we were leaving, I tarried a bit for the final check that the skill remained by me and gratefully uttered in my mind, “Thank you, the Sominsky lake!”

The next time, they took us to the Lake of Glubotskoye. The elder platoons said it was even better because the lake had a beach and sandy bottom. The way over there was much longer but asphalted, and we were going by bus so I was not sick at all.

Yay! What a huge lake it was! They said channels were connecting it to other lakes visited by passenger boats with excursions to the Ant Island. The island was so big that long ago there was a monastery surrounded with the forest full of giant ant-heaps. Whenever any of the monks was not behaving, they tied him up and dropped onto an ant-heap. The ants thought they got under attack and hurried out to defend their city, so in just one day they gnawed the punished away, leaving only his polished skeleton.

But from the bathing place neither boats nor islands were seen, only the very distant opposite shore. Yet, the bottom turned out sandy indeed, firm and pleasant to step along, only you had to wade and wade on before you reached a place deep enough for swimming.

When wading back, I deeply cut my feet near the big toe. The cut was bleeding profusely and, on the shore, they bandaged it at once. A dark spot showed thru the bandage, but the blood stopped spewing.

They yelled to everyone about the beach to be cautious, and then one of the adults found a broken bottle in the sandy bottom and threw it farther away in the direction of the opposite shore, but it did not console me. On our way back, I even began to whimper because it felt so hurting and unfair that in the whole bus only just one foot got cut and it was mine.

One of the caretakers told me, “What a shame! Are you a guy or a dishrag?”

The question stopped my sniveling, and in my subsequent life, whenever traumatized, I mulishly pretended not to feel pain and acted a manly man.…

Twice per shift, we were taken to the bath-house in the nearby village of Pistovo. The first time I missed because I went back to the platoon ward to pick the forgotten bar of soap, and when I came running back, the buses had already left.

The camp became quiet and empty, there remained only the cooks at the canteen and me. You could do whatever you wanted and go wherever you wished, even to the tents of First Platoon with iron beds on the rough floor-boards, where the finely carved shadows of the nearby tree foliage danced upon the sun-warmed canvas walls. But I, for some reason, climbed upon the narrow booth of deals with an iron barrel on its top.

It was the shower for the caretakers and pioneer leaders, who filled half the barrel with pails of water for the sun to heat it. The whole two-hour solitude I spent atop that booth, wandering along the narrow beams supporting the barrel, until the camp returned from Pistovo…

And I did not miss the second visit to the bath-house, but it disappointed me—the huge unbearably noisy room had no bath-tubs at all! You had to wash yourself throwing water up at you from a tin basin with tin ears for grabbing when carried. On the wall, there were two taps, side by side, one for boiling hot water, and the other for cold. You put your basin on a low table beneath the taps but it was hard to mix their waters to your liking because the line of boys with their empty basins yelled from behind your back to be quick…

The shift at the camp traditionally ended with the Farewell Bonfire which was built in the far end of the field with the rusty mast of the never-used attraction nearby the edge of the forest behind the barbed wire.

After the breakfast in the morning, the senior platoons marched to that forest thru a temporary passage in the 2-barbed-wire fence opened by a couple of 2-meter-tall spanner-boughs and harvested dry firewood for the Farewell Bonfire. The harvesting went on after the "stiff hour" too and by the evening on the field edge accumulated a heap of dry branches taller than a grown-up man. In the dusk of the nearing summer night, that heap was set on fire from all sides and burnt with high flames under our choral songs, and the marches from the accordionist.