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

From the tall brick porch, I descended with a dizzy feeling that I was not myself, and not sure of now what, and how, and whereto. Probably, Galileo had the same odd feeling right after betrayal of his discovery.

At the gate, I stopped and opened my copybook. Underneath the essay there was put a fractional mark, the denominator (content evaluation) was blank, and the divisor (grammar evaluation) – 4. Below the incomplete mark, in the same red ink, Zoya Ilyinichna turned out, in that diligently pretty handwriting of hers, four pages of her own essay that I was wrong and belied the Soviet youth. I should have recollected the winged words from the novel How the Steel was Tempered, as well as the heroes of Krasnodon underground resistance, and the heroes of the Red Army…

(…from that time on, I wrote following the templates, the “berserk” blogger of XIX century Belinsky didn’t become out of me, nipped in the bud.

How to explain so close attention of the teaching stuff at School 13 to my incipient quill check?

Well, their generation grew up under the puttering of “black raven” vehicles’ engines awaiting in the dark for another bunch of arrested “people’s enemies” so they chose to preemptively react, just in case…)

~ ~ ~

Not every Konotop school could boast of a room so properly equipped for the classes in Physics as that at School 13. The blue blinds hung from the iron rings running along the string-cables fixed over the windows. They were pulled together before demonstrating educational films on this or that subject in the curriculum. But there was no screen – the films were projected onto the large square of frosted glass frame in the wall above the blackboard, like, a 2 m x 2 m TV for you.

The film projector itself was located in the back room behind the wall with that frame. Besides the aforesaid projector and round tin cans with the films, the room was furnished with lots of shelves to keep all kinds of lenses, tripods, rheostats, weighs and other untold treasures in boxes, caskets, cases to be used for staging various experiments from the textbooks on Physics and Chemistry. And on a separate stool, there also stood the gray trunk-like tape recorder “Saturn” loaded with the tape on two white reels.

The film projectionist and keeper of all the hoard was Teacher of Physics, Emil Grigoryevich Binkin, a calm handsome man of about thirty, with his eyebrows slightly twitched up his straight forehead to meet the curly short wisps of black hair, well matching the swarthy skin in his face. During the breaks, he stacked and reshuffled the things amassed in the treasury, while softly whistling all kinds of melodies, so clearly and subtly, without the slightest clam.

I had a wary attitude towards him. First, for terminating my unauthorized reading at his Physics lessons…

Normally, each day I smuggled to school a book from the Club library and at the lessons the hinged part in the desktop was flipped over to open the book placed upon the inner shelf-receptacle for a schoolbag and – full ahead, Captain Blood! Let’s board the bastards!

Teachers were also happy to have so quiet a boy in the class, no trouble at all. Still, some of them made occasional attempts at breaking the equilibrium of the serene co-existence because I obviously was busy with anything but their lesson.

“Ogoltsoff! What have I just said?”

But even when engulfed by adventures in a different, Antarctic-Tropical-Martian, world, I did not cut the ties with the surrounding school nuts and bolts completely. Some tiny buoy at the edge of my consciousness kept still receiving, in a form of muffled background, the concurrent sounds in the classroom.

“Ogoltsoff!”

Aha, it’s time to come up to the surface… The memory rewinds the recording of background for some half-minute back.

“You, Alla Iosifovna, have just said that ‘read’ is an irregular verb.”

“Get seated!!”

And then at the Class Parents Meeting, she would complain to Mother, “I do see that he’s busy with something miles away from the lesson it’s only that I can’t run him down.”

Binkin had no problems with running me down. He did not demand to repeat anything, he asked questions instead, “So, what conclusion do we come here to? Ogoltsoff?”

And that’s where no mechanical rewind of the previously registered background could come to the rescue. How to present conclusions from you didn’t know what, especially when in sight of the dark ironic eyes above the thin rim of his glasses? He was killing with his rock-solid calmness and seemed to know exactly what page the book for bootleg reading was open at. So I had to sometimes skim the Physics textbook at home and stray-reading at school was rescheduled to fill Chemistry and Algebra classes. No, I couldn’t brush Binkin off.

Only once I did come to grapples with him on a thermodynamics issue when he asked whether the temperature of the boiled potato and the soup around it was the same. I stated that, no, it’s different.

“Alas, but the laws of Physics confirm it’s the same in both.”

“Well, yesterday, I ate soup for the midday meal and it was fine, but then I bit thru a potato in the soup and burned my tongue. As a scorched victim, I plea the Physics to revise their law-enforcement policy among unruly potatoes.”

The supportive solidarity giggles from the classmates mingled with bell in its deafening uproar of a ring for the break…

That is why I was so astounded when our Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, announced that on Sunday, at 11 o’clock, I should be at School 11 for the City Physics Olympiad…

It was a sunny Sunday morning when I went out of Nezhyn Street to the tramway stop by our school to wait for a streetcar because the prestigious School 11 was on the other side of the Under-Overpass, halfway between our tram terminal and the Railway Station.

The Settlement red streetcar with its round, kinda clown’s nose, lamp beneath the driver cab windshield clanged up to the stop. Under the nose-lamp, there was the inventory number of the car – 33.

Fully aware that all that was a pure nonsense and stupid superstition, I, nonetheless, did not feel like letting such an opportunity pass by, to wit, when you happened to come across a double digit, like, 22 or 77 and so forth, in a car license plate, or in the number printed on your movie ticket, or on the ticket handed to you by a streetcar conductor, you were in luck, dead sure. Just don't omit secure it by balling your fist and pronouncing the inaudible incantation, “The luck is mine. Full-stop!” Which I did.

At the Olympiad, in the group of fourteen-year-old students from the 14 city schools, I solved some of the problems about acceleration, and specific weight, and density, but not all.

To the concluding question: “Why do we first see the lightning and only then hear the thunder?”, I even draw a pencil sketch explaining the time interval between the flash and the bang.

Next week, Binkin, with an unconcealed surprise, announced that I took the first place among the eighth-graders at the city Physics Olympiad.

I did not know whether the number under the streetcar’s nose really brought luck, or the solution checkers were impressed by the clumsy lightning, but it’s nice to realize that you had beaten both a representative of the prestigious School 11 and even a guy from School 12 with its mathematical specialization… Now, get it, blockheads, from the Plant Settlement fellas!.

“The Dead Season” was on show at Club. The three of us bought tickets to ensure the show because, at times when no tickets were sold, the projectionists refused to show the film for only the check-passers. However, the audience turned out big enough, not as many as at the Indian “Zita and Guita” but no less than a quarter of the auditorium got filled.

The movie was about our secret agent in the United States starring Donatas Banionis from “No One Wanted to Die” where he got shot and killed in the end and collapsed on the desk with the unfinished note he was writing. And in America, they followed him for a long time, then caught and jailed for twenty years, but then exchanged for a CIA agent caught in the Soviet Union.

A black-and-white film, yet of the wide-screen format and Banionis had a luxurious white shirt on. You could see at glance that it was no nylon, but he wore that shirt even when cooking in the kitchen, just slightly turned the sleeves up. A cool movie, in general.

When it was over, we slowly moved towards the exit, envious that some folks could manage living interesting lives. And then Kuba clapped his muskrat-fur hat against his fist and said, “Okay! First thing in the morning to see Solovey about the secret agents school enrollment!” Skully and I burst our sides with laughter because Solovey was Precinct Militiamen at the Settlement.

Actually, no one ever referred to him as “Precinct Militiaman”, they just uttered “Solovey” and everyone got it at once. When he entered Bazaar, a muffled “Sol!..– Sol!..– Sol!..” swished over the counters and swarming caboodle. The old peasant women from Podlipnoye or Popovka buried deeper in their bags the glass jars and hot-water rubber bottles with the hooch, to keep them out of sight. Then they turned to the legitimate part of their trade standing behind the counter with a cup of black seeds or a braid of onions—law-abiding goods.

But no horsing about Solovey’s sniffing skill! And more than once, under loud curses from the trader, he poured onto the ground the bootlegged “samohrie” confiscated from her gunny sack. Once, an alky from the crowd could not stand the temptation, he fell on his four bones and lapped the hooch from the puddle. Solovey swooped at him, drove his boot a couple of times against the rummy's ribs, but the sot was in the Lap of Happiness already. Then the vehicle arrived and took him to the Sobering-up Station.

Occasionally, Solovey got his share too, and more than once they would trap him someplace in the dark and warm up with a blizzard of beating. One time they poured kerosene over him and set on fire, in another sorting out his both arms were broken with a crowbar. Well, the guys would get their times to serve, he’d recover and again – to Bazaar, in his red-topped militiaman cap, and there again, “Sol!..– Sol!..– Sol!..”

So, Kuba made a good one about becoming a secret serviceman thru Solovey…

During the winter vacations, the winners in the Physics Olympiad were taken to the city of Sumy, for the Regional Physics Olympiad. In the Konotop group, there were four boys and a girl, a ninth-grader, though she looked quite an adult girl.

In Sumy, we were accommodated for a night stay in a hotel. The number of boys coincided with the number of beds in the room. Our overseer, who was a teacher from School 12 with its Math and Physics specialization, stayed somewhere farther along the corridor, and the girl-like-an-adult in some female number.

Soon everyone gathered in our room around a two-volume paperback Collection of Tasks and Exercises in Physics for Matriculants brought in by the head of the group.

Gee! I had never seen such books and, until that moment, believed in earnest that school textbooks were all there was in Physics. It was a misconception. The rest of the future Einsteins from Konotop met both Collections volumes as their good acquaintances and even bosom friends. They began to actively discuss in which of their sections there were especially complex tasks and in which not that much so.

The teacher offered to work out some of the tasks, just for a knock-up. Everyone immediately fell to scribbling formulas and explaining them to each other. I was “the sixth odd” at their laborious party. Those exercises advanced far beyond the problems which Binkin solved with us in the class blackboard.

Then we went out to the city to have a meal at a canteen. On the way back, I lagged to furtively admire the gait of the girl-like-an-adult. The green coat fitted her wide figure tightly and every step produced oblique folds in the coat’s fabric on her back. Flick to the right, flick to the left. Hither-thither. Flick-flick.

In fact, besides the long coat, high boots, and a knitted hat, there was nothing to look at but those rhythmic folds on her back… well, using the cant from the Onegin’s epoch, they drove me crazy. Though, seemingly, a fiddle-faddle, those folds were not a trifle for the connoisseur and collector of the like gems. Some books were reread for more than once just because I knew there were a couple of lines “about it”. A couple of miserly lines, but they contained a specific detail, which I would put into my secret casket for later use.

For instance, in a sci-fi story by Harry Harrison about time machine, a film-shooting crew jumped over into the year of one thousand, to make an action movie. Their male star had an accident there, and they had to replace him with an available local Viking.

Now, the film director instructs that newly baked Schwarzenegger about his action in the next scene: “You rush into a bedroom in the castle you’ve just seized. You see a half-awake beauty and throw away your weapon. Sit down on the bed next to her and slowly move her brassiere strap to fall from her shoulder. Cut! The scene is done. Everything else is left to the imagination of film-goers, where the sky’s the limit, and you can safely bet your bottom dollar on it.”