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

The midday meal over, the fugitive boys run stealthily in the direction opposite that to the barrack. I follow them, repulse the leader’s attempt at turning me back to the ward-bedroom, and crawl in the wake of the others under the barbed wire of the fence into the forest.

We arm ourselves with the rifles made of breakable tree branches and walk along a wide footpath among the Pines and shrubs. The leader steers into some glade after which we again enter the forest missing the footpath already. We wander for a long time without finding any raspberries but only the bushes of wolf-berries which you should skip eating because they’re poisonous.

Finally, we get fed up with the useless search, and our leader admits that he can’t not find the promised raspberries, for which news he gets the multi-voiced “eew! you!”, and our wandering thru the forest goes on until we come across 2 threads of barbed wire nailed to the trees, one above the other, to form a fence.

Following the prickly guidance of the camp fencing, we come up to the already familiar footpath and our perked-up leader commands to fall in. Looks like we’re going to play War-Mommy. The order is executed eagerly, we line up along the footpath, pressing the dried boughs of our assault rifles to our stomachs.

But suddenly, two grown-up women—the camp caretakers—jump out from behind a thick bush with a loud yell, “Drop weapons down!” We let our sticks fall and, in the already formed file, are convoyed to the camp gate. One of the captors walks ahead of us, the other closes the formation…

At the evening all-out line-up, Camp Director announced that there happened a disruptive incident at the camp, and the parents of those involved would be informed, besides, there would be raised the question of expelling the escapers from the camp.

After the line-up dispersed, my brother-’n’-sister came to me from their junior platoon, “Now, you’ll sure get hell!”

“Ah!” dismissively waved I, trying to conceal the fear caused by the uncertainty of the punishment for getting raised the question of expelling. That uncertainty nagged me till the end of the week with the Parents’ Day on Sunday…

Our parents came as usual, and Mom shared between us condensed milk and biscuits, but she never mentioned my involvement in the disruptive occurrence. A beam of hope flicked for me—perhaps, Camp Director forgot to inform my parents!

When they left, Natasha told me that Mom new about the incident all along and, in my absence, asked her who else was among the runaways.

On getting the exhaustive report, she turned to Dad and said, “Well, you bet, the kids of those aren’t going to be expelled.”

~ ~ ~

At the end of that same summer, there occurred a drastic change in our Block’s way of life. Now, every morning and evening, a slow-go garbage truck entered the Courtyard, honked loudly and waited for the tenants of the houses to bring their garbage buckets and empty them into its dump. Besides, they took away the rusty boxes from the garbage bins enclosure and nailed up its gate.

In September in the field between the Bugorok-Knoll and the defunct enclosure, there for several days roared and clattered a bulldozer moving mountains of earth. Then it disappeared, leaving behind a wide field leveled two meters lower than the one we used to play football, yet without a single grass blade crisscrossed instead by footprints of its caterpillar tracks in the raw ground…

A month later, they organized a Sunday of Collective Free Work for adults only, but my Dad allowed me to go with him too. On the edge of the wood behind the next block, there stood a long building very much alike to the barrack in the pioneer camp, and the people who participated in the Sunday of Collective Free Work attacked it from all ends and started to demolish.

My Dad climbed to the very top. He tore away whole chunks of the roof and sent them down shouting his farewell, “Eh! Pulling down differs from building up – no blueprints needed!”

I liked that Sunday of Collective Free Work very little because they would drive you away everywhere, “Don’t come closer!” And simply listening to the screams of nails being torn from the beams and boards, becomes boring quite soon…

(…I cannot now recollect if it was it on the eve of that Sunday or immediately after it, that Nikita Khrushchev got deposed and Leonid Brezhnev became the ruler of the USSR in his place.

Ew! So untimely! When there remained just 18 years before Communism get built in our country!.)

In his very practical book, Ernest Seton-Thompson insists that bows have to be made of Ash-tree boughs. But could you find an Ash-tree at the Object, please?

The woods around the Block were populated by Pines and Fir-trees, as well as deciduous Birch and Aspen, and all the rest might be considered just shrubs. That’s why, following the advice of the neighbor at our landing, Stepan Zimin, my bows were made of Juniper.

It’s important to make the right choice because the Juniper for a bow should not be too old, having lots of side branches, neither too thick which would be impossible to bend. A tree of about one-and-a-half-meter tall would be the thing, both springy and strong. The arrow shot with the bow made of such a Juniper would rise in the gray autumn sky about thirty meters or so, you’d barely see it before its precipitous down-fall to stick the ground by the arrowhead of a nail fixed, as tight as you can, with electrical tape.

The best material for an arrow shaft is a thin plaster lath, all you have to do is just split it lengthwise, round and shave the shaft with a knife, then smooth it with sandpaper. It’s only my arrows missed fletching, although Seton-Thompson explains how it is done. But where could I get the feathers from? No use to ask Dad, there’s nothing but machinery at his work….

On the winter vacations, I learned that the boys from both blocks on the Gorka often visited the Regiment Club for watching movies there. (The Regiment was where the soldiers carried on their army service after graduating from the Recruit Depot Barracks.) Going there for the first time was a bit scary because of the vague rumors among children about some soldier strangling some girl in the forest. No one could explain how and why, but that bad soldier must have been a “blackstrapper” while in the Regiment all the soldiers wore red shoulder straps.

The way to the Regiment was not short, two times as long as to school which you bypassed on the right and the trail became wider and straighter, bound by the walls of tall Fir-trees until you went out onto the tarmac road which ended by the gate guarded by sentries, however, they did not stop boys and you could go on to the building with the signboard Regiment Club.

Inside, you got into a wide long corridor with 3 double doors in its blind wall. The other wall had windows in it and between them, as well as between the double doors, there hung a row of same-sized pictures portraying different soldiers and officers with brief descriptions of their selfless deeds and heroic deaths defending our Soviet Homeland.

The wide double doors opened to a huge hall without windows and full of plywood seats arranged in rows facing the wide stage with crimson velvet curtains. Those were partly drawn to both sides so as to open the wide white screen for movies. From the stage to the back wall—which had a pair of square black holes high up, near the ceiling, for movie projection—stretched the long passage splitting the hall into two equal halves…

The soldiers entered in groups, speaking loudly, stomping their boots against the boards in the paint-coated floor and, gradually, they filled the seats with their uniformed mass and the whole of the hall with the thick indistinct hum of their talking to each other. Time dragged awfully slowly. There were no pictures on the whitewashed walls and I re-read, over and over again, the two inscriptions on the red-clothed frames that screened the speaker boxes on both sides of the stage.

A portrait of a cut-out bearded head with the thick turf of hair was mounted onto the left frame and followed by the lines: “In science, there is no wide highway, and only they who fear no fatigue but keep climbing its stony footpaths will reach its shiny peaks.” The concluding line underneath explained whose head and words they were: “K. Marx.”

And, next to the velvet folds in the curtain drawn to the right, a head without hair and with a small wedge-like beard made it clear (even before reaching the bottom-most line) that it was Lenin who curtly said, “The cinema is not only an agitator but also a remarkable organizer of the masses.”

As the soldiers filled the entire hall, the schoolboys moved from the front rows over onto the stage and watched the movies from the backside of the taut screen. Not much difference if Amphibian Man dived from the cliff left to right contrary to what saw the watchers in the hall. And the rebel Kotovsky would all the same escape from the courtroom thru the window… Although, some boys stayed in the hall perching on the armrests between the seats because the soldiers did not mind.

At times, in the darkness illuminated by the flicks of the running film, there sounded a yell from one of the 3 double doors, “Lance-corporal Solopov!.” Or else, “The second squad!.” But each yell from any of the doors ended the same way, “To the exit!”

If the movie suddenly broke off and the hall sank in complete darkness, there arose a deafening wall of whistles and rambling boot-stomp at the floor and yells “shoemaker!!.” from all the sides…

After the movies at the Regiment Club, we walked home thru the night forest retelling each other the episodes of what we had just watched together, “Now! I say! The way he punched him!” “Hey! Hey! I say! The guy never knew what hit him!”

Of course, the Regiment Club was not the only place for movie-going. There always remained the House of Officers but there you had to buy a ticket and, therefore, come with your parents, yet they never had time for movies. True, on Sundays, there was demonstrated a free film for schoolchildren: black-and-white fairy tales or a color film about the young partisan pioneer Volodya Dubinin…

~ ~ ~

One Sunday morning, I told Mom that I was going out to play.

“Think before you speak up! Who plays outside in such weather? Look!”

The scudding shoots of rime snow scratch-and-scraped the murky dusk outside the panes in the kitchen window.

“See this mayhem?”

But I croaked and grumbled and never got off her back until Mom grew angry and told me to go wherever I wished.

I went out into the boundless Courtyard. No one at all, the desolate space around looked so too gloomy to stay in. Turning my face away from the snappy slaps from the wild snow torrents, I bypassed the house corner and crossed the road to the field next to the nailed up garbage enclosure. There also was nobody except for me, but I couldn’t see myself. All I could see was the outright turmoil full of violent blizzard lashing the dull gray world by the serpent-like belt of prickly snow. I felt lonely and wished I were back home. But Mom would say, “So I told you!”, and the younger would start giggling.

Then from the far edge of the field where long-long ago they played volleyball and gorodki in summer, there came a voice of the aluminum loudspeaker on top of a wooden post not seen thru so hurly-burly weather, “Dear children! Today we’ll learn the song about Merry Drummer. Listen to it first.” And a well-trained quire of children's voices began to sing of a clear morning at the gate, and the maple drumsticks in the hands of Merry Drummer.

The song was over and the announcer commenced to dictate the lyrics so that the listeners by their radios would write it down word for word, “Get up ear-ly, get up ear-ly, get up ear-ly, with the first light of the mor-ning by the gate…”

And I already was not alone in the grim world getting belted. I waded thru the snowdrifts but the snow could not get to me because of my thick pants pulled tightly over my felt boots. The announcer finished dictating the first verse, and let me listen to it sung by the quire. Then he dictated the second, also with the subsequent singing thru it, and the third.

“Now, listen to the whole song, please.”

And there gathered quite a lot of us—both Merry Drummer, and the children with their merry voices, and even the blizzard turned into one of us and wandered by my side across the field, hither and thither. Only that I kept falling thru the crust into the sifted powder snow under it, and the blizzard danced above, scattering its prickly pellets.

When I got home Mom asked, “Well, seen anyone there?”

I said “no” but no one laughed.

~ ~ ~