The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
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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.
~ ~ ~
The solitary walk in the big company, under the dictation about Merry Drummer, laid me up in bed with the temperature. It was strangely quiet all around with everyone gone to work and to school.
Because the books from the Detachment’s Library finished and there was no one to go and exchange them for me, I had to pick one from our home library that filled a shelf in the closet of the cupboard in the parents’ room. After a certain hesitation, I chose the one that for a long time had been attracting me by its title, but whose thickness shooed off, the four-volume War and Peace by Tolstoy.
The opening chapter confirmed my fears by its text in French running page after page, however, it eased off when I noticed that it was translated in the footnotes… Because of that novel, I did not notice my illness but hastily swallowed the medicines and hurried back to Pierre, Andrey, Petya, Natasha… at times forgetting to take thermometer from out of my armpit….
I read all the volumes and the epilogue, yet the concluding part—the discourse on predestination, I couldn’t overcome. Its endless sentences turned into a bluff of glass where, climbing up for a tad bit, I invariably slipped back to its foot. The insurmountable glass-wall stretched in both directions, and there was no way to figure out where I got to that point from. The last volume was closed without reading it up to the very end.
(…a couple of years ago I re-read the novel, from cover to cover, and said that if a person was capable of writing like Tolstoy in that concluding part of War and Peace then why bothering themselves with all that prelude fiction, including the epilogue?
Probably, I kinda showed off, in part, but only just in part…)
And while I was lying on my folding bed amid the battlefield of Austerlitz, life was not standing still. My sister-’n’-brother kept bringing news that the garbage enclosure had been pulled down and replaced by a shed. And the field between the shed and the Bugorok-Knoll turned into a skating rink! As big as all that field leveled by the solitary bulldozer back in autumn. Yes, there arrived a fire-engine, they dropped the hoses on the ground and leaked tons of water. It’s a real skating-rink now! And they were lending out skates at the shed! You could come and borrow skates or, optionally, bring your own and go skating!
I did not want to lag behind life, and promptly recovered. Still, I was late. They were no longer lending skates at the shed, and you had to bring some with you. The benches in the shed were still in place, so you could sit down and put on the skates you brought, leaving your felt boots under the bench or in a locker if there remained any vacant one, and go skating.
As it turned out, there were 2 sheds, cheek by jowl, and 2 doors upon a high wooden porch. The door on the right led to the locker-room, and the other one to the warm-up room equipped with the electric skate grinder and a stove made of a wide iron barrel. The hot fire crackled in the stove to warm your frozen hands or dry up your mittens. You had to look out though to take your mittens off the stove in time or they'd stink with singed wool they're knitted of. Yehk!
No words could ever describe my desire to become a skater. How deliciously crunched the ice under the skates! And you didn’t run, but flew like a winged swift shooting ahead of the crispy crunch of your steely blades!.
I started learning with double-bladed skates, which had strings to tie them to boots, and I was laughed at for using such kindergarten playthings. “Snegoorki” came in their place, the round-nosed skates of one blade each, but also with the strings for tying. And nothing came out with them either, no flight, no joy, just some odd iron pieces on my felt boots. Finally, Mom brought from someplace real “half-Canadians” riveted to the shoes of their own.