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

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.

With its well-trodden snow, the Gorka served ideally for riding sleds. The start was taken from the concrete road surrounding the blocks. The deep rut left in the snow by tires of random cars confirmed that the road was still there and so did the bulbs shedding the light from their lamppost tops. One of those posts marked the start in the Sleigh Gorka. The cone of yellow light from its bulb drew a blurred circle—the meeting place for the sledding fans crowd.

Most of the sleds were a store purchase, you could see it by their aluminum runners and multi-colored cross-plank seats. Mine was made by Dad though. It was shorter and made of steel and much speedier than those store-bought things.

After a short run pushing the sled downhill with your hands on the backrest, you plonked with your tummy upon the seat and flew away to the foot of the hillock drowned in the dark of night pricked only by the lonely distant light above the gate of the Recruit Depot Barracks that bounced in time with the leaps and jerks of your fleeting sled. And the speed wind pressed tears out of your eyes.

When the sled came to a stop, you picked up the icy rope run thru two holes in the sled’s nose and stomped back uphill. The sled tamely ran after you, now and then knocking its muzzle against the heels of your felt boots. And with the approach of the roadside lamp, myriads of living sparks started to wink at you from the roadside snowdrifts varying their twinkle with each step.

Gee! Up there atop the Gorka, they already started to marshal a train of sleds, hitching them to each other and – hup-ho! – off the whole mass and wild screams and the frosty screech of sled runners went into the darkness…

At some point, probably, as thousands other boys both before me and after, I did something which should never be done, and we knew it all along that it was a no-no, yet the sled’s nose in the light of the bulb shimmered so beautifully with all those tiny frost-sparks that we couldn’t resist and licked it. Sure thing, as we knew beforehand, the tongue got stuck to the frost-gripped metal and we had to rip it off back with pain, and shame, and hope that no one noticed the folly inappropriate for so big a boy.

Then you plodded home, dragging your sled along with stiff hands and dropped it by the basement’s door in the staircase-entrance vestibule. You climbed upstairs to the second floor landing and knocked at your apartment door with your felt boots, and in the hallway your Mom pulled off your mittens with a bead of ice stuck to each filament of their wool, disclosing the white icicles of your hands.

She would run out into the yard to scoop up a basinful of snow and rub your senseless hands with it, and order to put them in the saucepan in the kitchen sink under the cold water running from the tap. And life would start to slowly come back to your hands. You’d whine from the piercing needles of unbearable pain in your fingers, and Mom would yell at you, “Serves you right! You, rascal roamer! You, bitter woe of mine!.”

And though still whimpering from the pain in your stiff fingers and in your tongue skinned by the savage frosty iron, you’d know for sure that everything will be fine because your Mom knew how to save you…

~ ~ ~

After the winter holidays, Seraphima Sergeevna brought to the classroom an issue of the newspaper The Pioneer Pravda and instead of the lesson she was reading aloud the news about Nikita Khrushchev’s promise that in 20 years we all would live in Communism built by that time in our state.

Coming back home, I shared the delightful news that in 20 years that day we were going to live in Communism when any item at the store would be given just for asking because at school they told us so. To that announcement, my parents only exchanged silent glances, yet abstained from partaking in my festive mood on account of so bright a future. I decided not to bother them any longer, but deep in my mind started arithmetic calculations to discover that being around in Communism at the age of seven-and-twenty, I wouldn’t be too badly old, still having some time to enjoy free things…

By that time all the pupils of our class had already become Octoberists, for which occasion a group of grown-up fifth-graders visited our classroom to pin Octoberist badges on our school uniforms. The badge was a small scarlet star of five tips around the yellow frame in the center out of which, as if from a medallion, peeped the angelic face of Volodya Ulyanov sporting long golden locks in his early childhood when playing with his sister he ordered her, “March out from under the sofa!.” And later he grew up, lost his hair and became Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and they wrote a great many books about him…

At home, there appeared a filmstrip projector – a clumsy device with a set of lenses in its nose tube, as well as a box of small plastic barrels to keep tight dark scrolls of filmstrips. Among the filmstrips, there happened some old acquaintances – the one about the hero of the Civil War, Zhelezniak the Seaman, another about the little daughter of a revolutionary, who smartly dropped the typesetting sorts, brought by her father for printing underground leaflets, into a jug of milk when the police raided their house late at night. They never had brains enough to check under the milk…

Of course, it was I who loaded the filmstrips and then rotated the black scroll-wheel to move the projected frames. And I also read the inscriptions under the pictures, which did not last long though, because my sister-’n’-brother learned them by heart and retold before the whole frame would creakily creep down into the rectangular of light shed onto the wallpaper.

The challenge to my seniority from Natasha did not hurt so bitterly as Sasha’s disobedience. Just so recently as we two pranced, panting, into the kitchen to still our thirst with water from the tap, he readily conceded the white tin mug, adorned with the revolutionary battleship Aurora’s imprint on its side, to me as to the elder, bigger, brother. And emptying half of it, I generously handed the mug back for him to finish off the water, after all, that was the way for strength transmitting. How come that I became so strong? Because, without silly prissiness, I drank a couple of gulps from the bottle of water started by Sasha Nevelsky, the strongest boy in our class.

My younger brother listened with trust to my naive claptrap and dutifully grabbed the outstretched mug… Like me, he was over-credulous and once at midday meal, when Dad took out from his soup plate a cartilage without meat and announced: who’d gnaw it up was to get a prize—one kilo of gingerbread, Sasha volunteered and, after protracted munching, managed to swallow the cartilage but never got the promised sweetmeat, probably Dad forgot his promise…

A parcel arrived from the post-office, or rather Mom dropped in there to pick it on her way home after work, that box of faded plywood secured by a string glued to its sides with brown blobs of stamped sealing wax, with two addresses in block blue letters on its top: to our numbered mailbox from the city of Konotop.

The parcel was set on a stool in the kitchen and all of the family gathered around. The lid with the addresses, nailed firmly and aplenty, had to be removed by application of a big kitchen knife used as a lever, and revealed a sizable lump of lard, and a red hot-water bottle of hooch gurgling in between its rubber sides. The rest of the space within the box was filled to the brims with black sunflower seeds.

When slightly scorched in a frying pan, the seeds became simply delicious. We crushed them with our teeth, piled hulls away into a saucer placed in the center of the kitchen table, and enjoyed those small but so tasty, sharp-nosed, hearts.

And then Mom said if not eating them just so, one after another, but you amass, say, half a glass of husked seeds then add a sprinkle of sugar, that would be a treat indeed. Each of her 3 children was handed a tea glass to collect the hearts into. Instead of a saucer, Mom equipped us with 1 deep plate for all, and deftly rolled a huge cornet of a newspaper which she filled with the fried seeds.

We left the adults to eat unsweetened seeds in the kitchen and went over to the children’s room, where we lay upon the pieces of the carpet runner frizzled in the fire of long-ago past. As it should be expected, the level of peeled hearts in Natasha’s glass rose quicker than in ours, although she jabbered more than cracked. But when even my brother began to overtake me, I felt hurt.

The slowness of my progress resulted from considering a cartoon on the side of the newspaper cornet, a pot-bellied colonialist blasted off away from the continent of Africa, the black imprint of a boot kick in the seat of his white shorts. So I dropped the distracting contemplation of his flight and tried to husk faster, exercising a stricter self-control too, so as not to accidentally chew some of the harvested hearts, however, all my struggle for catching up with the younger proved useless.

The door opened and Mom entered the room with a half-glass of sugar and sprinkled a teaspoon of it over our personal achievements, but I was already sick and tired of them those foolish seeds, no matter sugared or not, and in my following life I stayed indifferent forever to the delights of sunflower seed orgies.

(…but still and all, consumption of seeds is much more than a trifling pastime combined with a sapid side-effect, no!. it's grown into a real art in itself.

To start with the purely Slavonic lavish way of eating them in the “piggy” style when the hollowed, or simply chewed together with the hearts, black hulls are not vivaciously spat out over the nearby environs, nope, they are set instead, by sluggish pushes of the tongue, on the move from out the corner of the mouth and keep sliding in a mutual, saliva-moisturized, mass down the chin to finally plop onto the eater’s chest. Excessive satiety, yes.

Or for a contrast, again a Slavonic but this time graceful “filigree” style when seeds are tossed by the snacker, one after another, into their mouth from a distance no less than twenty-five centimeters (20”).

And so on, down to the chaste Transcaucasia manner, when a seed for crushing is fed into the (yes, inescapably) mouth from a fixed position between the thumb tip and the joint of the index finger, so as to screen the intake of the seed, and then the processed husk is not spat out randomly but carefully returned into the burka-like contrivance of finger-screen to be scattered somewhere, or collected into something.

On the whole, the last of the presented methods leaves an impression of the eater biting their own thumb on the sly. But at who?

" Did you bite your thumb at me, Sir?!."

Oh, yes, sunflower seeds are miles aloft of dull popcorn. However, that’s more than enough about them.

Back to the green, cut-up, carpet runner…)

It was on those runner pieces where my brother felled my authority of the eldest by 1 dire blow… That day coming home after a PE lesson, I thoughtlessly stated that performing one hundred squats at one go was beyond human power. Sasha silently sniffled for a while and then said that he could do it.

Natasha and I were keeping the count, and after the fifteenth squat, I yelled that it was all wrong and unfair because he didn’t fully rise, but Sasha went on with squats as if I never said a word, and Natasha continued to keep the count. I shut up and soon after joined my sister in counting, though after “eighty-one!” he could no longer rise even above his bent knees. I felt pity for my brother over-strained by those incomplete squats. He staggered, tears welled up in his eyes, but the count was brought to a hundred and he barely hobbled to the big sofa. My authority collapsed like the colonialism in Africa; good news that before the fall I hadn’t promised any gingerbread…

~ ~ ~

Where did the filmstrip projector come from? Most likely, our parents bought it from a store. And in their room there appeared Radiola—combination of the radio and record player. 2 in 1, as they call it now.

The lid on top and both sidewalls of Radiola shed gentle gleam of brown varnish. The rear side had no gloss because it was hard cardboard with multiple rows of tiny portholes facing the wall. However, pulling Radiola a little forward, you could peep thru them and catch a patchy view of the murky interior landscape: the white of aluminum panel-houses, the dim glow in the pearly black turrets of vacuum-lamps of different height and thickness, and from one of those holes, a brown cable ran out ending by the plug for a mains socket.

Over the Radiola’s face was pulled a special sound-friendly cloth thru which you easily could trace the big oval speaker beneath the round sleeping eye whose glass flashed up with green when you clicked on the Two-in-One on. The long low plate of glass inserted along the front side bottom bridged the control knobs: the power and volume adjustment (2 in 1) above the range selection switch on the right, and only one knob on the left—for fine-tuning to the wavelength. The glass plate was glossy black except for four horizontal transparent stripes, from end to end, marked with irregular hair-width vertical snicks and the names of capital cities, like, Moscow, Bucharest, Warsaw. While twirling the knob of fine adjustment, you could follow, thru those transparent stripes in the glass, the progress of the thin red slider crawling from city to city along the inner side of the plate.

The radio was not very interesting though, it hissed and cracked and swished along with the slider movements, sometimes there would float up an announcer’s voice reading the news in some unknown Bucharestian language, a little farther along the stripe it would be replaced with a Russian voice repeating the news from the wall radio. Yet, lifting the lid on top of Radiola, you kinda opened a tiny theater with the round stage of red velvet having a shining pin in the center to slip on it the hole in a record disk when loading it on the pad. Next to it, the slightly crooked poker of the white plastic adapter sat on its stand.

With the turntable switched on and spinning the disk, the adapter had to be carefully picked up from its stand, brought over the whirling disk's surface and lowered in between the wide-set initial grooves running round and round and after a couple of hissing turns there would start a song about Chico-Chico from Costa Rica, or about O, Mae Caro, or about a war soldier marching in a field along the steep river bank.