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

Across the road opposite the corner buildings of our Block, there was a grocery store and, after Grandma Martha had left, Mom was sending me there for small purchases, like, bread, matches, salt or vegetable oil. More important products she bought herself—meat, potatoes, sore cream or chocolate butter. For holiday celebrations, large-beaded red or smaller-beaded black caviar was also bought because the Object was well catered for. And only ice-cream appeared at the store no sooner than once a month and was immediately sold out. As for the tasty cornbread, I never saw it on sale there.

To the right from the store, near the bend in the road around the blocks, the wall of the forest was slightly cleft by a narrow glade, where the car repair ramp constructed of sturdy logs provided another gathering place for children to play.

“To the ramp!” called a familiar boy running by. “They’ve caught a hedgehog there!”

All the hedgehogs seen by me up to that moment were only met in the pictures, so I also hurried to the scream-and-shouting group of boys. With the sticks in their hands, they checked the animal’s attempts at fleeing to the forest, and when the hedgehog turned into a defensive ball of gray-brown needles, they rolled it pushing with the same sticks into a small brook. In the water, the hedgehog unfolded, stuck his sharp muzzle with the black blob of the nose out from under the needles, and tried to escape thru the grass on his short crooked legs. Yet, he was spread on the ground and firmly pressed across his belly with a stick to prevent his folding up again.

“Look!” shouted one of the boys. “He’s constipated! Cannot shit!” To prove the statement, the boy poked a stalk of some rank grass into a dark bulge between the animal’s hind legs.

“The turd is too hard. He needs help.”

I recollected how Grandma Martha saved me.

Someone in the company had pliers in his pocket, the patient was crucified on the earth with a couple of additional sticks and the self-proclaimed vet pulled the jammed turd with the pliers. The turd, however, did not end and turned out having a strange bluish-white color.

“Damn fool! You tore his guts out!” cried another boy.

The hedgehog was set free and once again made for the forest dragging behind the pulled out part of the intestine. All followed to see the outcome.

I didn’t want any more of all that and, fortunately, my sister came to the rescue running from the Block to say that Mom was calling me. Without the slightest delay, I left the party of boys and hurried after her to the Courtyard. There I talked to Mom, greeted neighbors, ran some errand and all the time was thinking one and the same thought formulated in an oddly crisp, not childish way, “How to live on now, after what I’ve just seen? How to live on?”

(…but still and all, I survived. The blessing property of human memory, its aptitude to fade recorded by Vladimir Dahl in his dictionary, saved me.

Yet, in the series of atrocities registered by me, for the most part human beings torturing their likes into deformed pieces of tattered meat, the mutilated hedgehog comes the first, dragging thru the brittle grass the grayish length of the intestine with small pieces of dry earth stuck to it.

And I still lived on to understand that low brutes need lofty excuses for their barbarity: …to alleviate sufferings…as sacred revenge…to keep the race pristine…

But again, to be entirely frank: is there any guarantee that I myself would never and under no circumstances do anything of the kind? I can’t tell for sure…)

When you are a child, there is no time to look behind at all those series back in your memory. You have to go on—farther and beyond—to new discoveries. If only you’ve got the nerve to keep the course.

Once, slightly veering to the left from the accustomed “school—home” route, I went deeper into the broad-leaf part of the forest to come, on a gently rising hillock, across 4 tall Pine trees that grew a couple of meters apart from each other, in the corners of an almost regular square. The smooth wide columns of their trunks without branches nearer to the ground went upwards and at the height of six to seven meters were bridged by a platform you could reach climbing up the crossbeams cut of thick boughs and nailed to one of the trees, like rungs in a vertical ladder … I never found out the purpose of the contraption, nor who it was made by. All I learned was it’s not a fraidy-cat to climb a platform in the forest even if discovered by himself…

Much easier went on the exploration of the basement world. I was going down there together with Dad to fetch the firewood for Titan the Boiler who heated the water for bathing.

Because all the bulbs in the basement corridors were missing, Dad brought along the flashlight with the spring lever protruding from its belly. When you squeezed the flashlight in your hand, the springy lever resisted yet yielded and went inside, you loosened the grip and it popped out again. A couple of such pumping rounds awoke a small dynamo-machine buzzing inside the handle to produce the current for the lamp as long as you kept pushing-loosing the lever, and the faster you did it, the brighter was your flashlight.

A circle of light hopped along the walls and cemented floor in the left corridor of the basement with our section at the very end of it. The walls in the narrow corridor were made of boards and so were the sections’ doors locked with weighty padlocks.

Behind our door, there was a square room with two concrete walls and the timber partition from the neighboring section.

Dad unlocked the padlock and turned on the inside bulb whose crude light flooded the high stack of evenly sawed logs by the wall opposite the door, and all sorts of household things hanging from the walls or piled on shelves: the sled, the tools, the skies.

After a couple of plump logs were chopped with the ax, I collected the chips for kindling Titan the Boiler and a few thicker splinters, while Dad grabbed a whole armful of firewood.

Sometimes, he was tinkering at something or sawing in our basement section and I, bored with waiting, would go out in the corridor where a narrow grated ditch middle-lined the cemented floor. Thru the open door, the bulb threw a clear rectangle of light on the opposite section wall while the far end of the corridor, from where we had come, was lost in the dark. But I was not afraid of anything because behind my back Dad was working in his old black sailor’s pea jacket with two upright rows of copper buttons in its front each bearing a brave neatly embossed anchor….

~ ~ ~

The firewood got to the basement in early autumn. A slow-go truck would enter the Courtyard and dump a heap of ruffly halved bole chunks nearby the tin-clad lid of the cemented pit right in the center of every sidewall of the Block's houses. Inside one-and-a-half meter deep pit, slightly up from its bottom, there started a hole thru the foundation, 50 cm x 50 cm, which ended in the basement dark corridor at about a meter-and-half above the cemented floor. The chunks were dropped down into the pit, and thence, thru the hole, into the basement to be hauled into the section whose owner the firewood was brought for.

As I was a big boy already, Dad instructed me to throw the wood pieces into the pit so that he could drag them thru the hole down into the basement. Dropping them in, I could not see him, but heard his voice from down there when he shouted me to stop if the pile of chunks in the pit threatened to block the hole. Then I waited until there came muffled thuds of the pieces toppling onto the cemented floor in the basement corridor.

Everything went smooth and easy before Natasha told Sasha that they had brought the firewood for us and I was helping Dad to move the wood down there. Sasha came running to the heap of log chunks and started dragging them and dropping into the pit. To all my furious clarifications that he was violating the age limits for this particular job, and that the very next chunk he dropped would surely block the hole, he answered with silent but obstinate snuffling and just went on.

(…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…