The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
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At home, Mom told how she and Paulyna Zimin had a hearty laugh watching thru the neighbor’s window my grabs and throws of nobody knew who. But I never confessed that I was Kotovsky at the moment….
End April, we became young pioneers. The ceremony took place not at school but in front of the House of Officers because there stood the big gypsum head of Lenin upon the tall pedestal.
The night before, Mom ironed my trousers thru gauze and also the white parade-shirt and the scarlet silk triangle of pioneer tie. All those things she hung over the back of a chair so that in the morning everything would be ready. When there was no one in the room, I touched the soft caressing fabric of the pioneer tie. Mom said she had bought it from the store, but it’s impossible for such things to be for sale.
The bright morning sun was shining. We, the fourth-graders, stood facing the lined-up ranks of the school children. Our scarlet ties hung on our right arms bent at the elbow, the collars of our shirts were turned up for the senior graders to easily tie our ties around.
Yet before that moment, we chanted the memorized Solemn Oath in front of our comrades to love our Homeland hotly, to live and learn and struggle as admonished by great Lenin, as we were always being taught by the Communist Party….
One week before the end of the academic year I fell ill. Mom thought it was a cold and told me to stay in bed but could not bring the temperature down, and when it rose up to forty she called an ambulance from the Detachment’s Hospital because with two more degrees the temperature would become lethal.
I was too lightheaded to be proud or frightened that a whole vehicle came after just me alone. At the hospital, they at once diagnosed pneumonia and began to knock the temperature down with penicillin injections every half-hour. I did not care. A day later the injection frequency was reduced to one per hour, the following day – one in two hours…
The patients in the ward were all adults, soldiers from the Regiment. In four days, I was quite okay and walking in the garden around the Hospital, when our class together with the teacher came to visit me and hand over the report card with my grades.
I felt uncomfortable and, for some reason, ashamed, so I ran away around the corner followed by the boys of our class. But then we returned, and the girls together with the teacher handed me my award for successful studies and exemplary behavior. It was the book of The Russian Epic Tales which Grandma Martha read to me, and my sister-'n'-brother, but only quite a new one… That way, little by little, things began somehow repeat themselves in my life…
In summer we were again taken to the pioneer camp to the same canteen, lining-ups, bedroom ward, “stiff hours”, and Parental Days. Though certain things had notably changed because as a full-fledged pioneer, I already belonged to the Third Platoon which, together with the First and Second ones, was eligible for swimming in the lake. But first, we had to wait a week in anxious hope that it shouldn’t rain on the appointed day.
We waited eagerly, and on the swimming day the weather was not rainy, so two trucks with canvas tops took us to the Sominsky lake. The road went thru the forest, along some narrow endless clearing. And the ride was also very long because we had sung all the pioneer songs, both my favorite “ah, potato’s so tasty-tasty-tasty-tasty…”, and the one I liked less, but still for pioneers – “we marched to the ding of the cannonade…”, and, well, all that we knew, anyway, but the road did not end and I felt sick with all those jolts on the bumps in the road. Then those, who sat at the square window cut in the front canvas wall, shouted that something was seen ahead and the truck pulled up on a grassy shore of a big lake amid the forest.
They allowed us to enter the water not all at once but in turn, one platoon after another. The water was very dark, and the bottom felt unpleasantly quaggy, and they too soon yelled from the shore, “Third platoon – out!”
At first, I only stood up to the chest in the water doing shallow hops. But then they gave me an air-filled life ring of rubber and showed how to row with my hands and kick my legs for swimming. Soon both the caretakers and the pioneer leaders grew bored to command the platoons in and out of the water, so everybody stayed there as long as they wanted. I let the air out of the life ring and made sure that I could still swim for a couple of meters.
At the end of the day, when they yelled everyone to get ashore because we were leaving, I tarried a bit for the final check that the skill remained by me and gratefully uttered in my mind, “Thank you, the Sominsky lake!”
The next time, they took us to the Lake of Glubotskoye. The elder platoons said it was even better because the lake had a beach and sandy bottom. The way over there was much longer but asphalted, and we were going by bus so I was not sick at all.
Yay! What a huge lake it was! They said channels were connecting it to other lakes visited by passenger boats with excursions to the Ant Island. The island was so big that long ago there was a monastery surrounded with the forest full of giant ant-heaps. Whenever any of the monks was not behaving, they tied him up and dropped onto an ant-heap. The ants thought they got under attack and hurried out to defend their city, so in just one day they gnawed the punished away, leaving only his polished skeleton.
But from the bathing place neither boats nor islands were seen, only the very distant opposite shore. Yet, the bottom turned out sandy indeed, firm and pleasant to step along, only you had to wade and wade on before you reached a place deep enough for swimming.
When wading back, I deeply cut my feet near the big toe. The cut was bleeding profusely and, on the shore, they bandaged it at once. A dark spot showed thru the bandage, but the blood stopped spewing.
They yelled to everyone about the beach to be cautious, and then one of the adults found a broken bottle in the sandy bottom and threw it farther away in the direction of the opposite shore, but it did not console me. On our way back, I even began to whimper because it felt so hurting and unfair that in the whole bus only just one foot got cut and it was mine.
One of the caretakers told me, “What a shame! Are you a guy or a dishrag?”
The question stopped my sniveling, and in my subsequent life, whenever traumatized, I mulishly pretended not to feel pain and acted a manly man.…
Twice per shift, we were taken to the bath-house in the nearby village of Pistovo. The first time I missed because I went back to the platoon ward to pick the forgotten bar of soap, and when I came running back, the buses had already left.
The camp became quiet and empty, there remained only the cooks at the canteen and me. You could do whatever you wanted and go wherever you wished, even to the tents of First Platoon with iron beds on the rough floor-boards, where the finely carved shadows of the nearby tree foliage danced upon the sun-warmed canvas walls. But I, for some reason, climbed upon the narrow booth of deals with an iron barrel on its top.
It was the shower for the caretakers and pioneer leaders, who filled half the barrel with pails of water for the sun to heat it. The whole two-hour solitude I spent atop that booth, wandering along the narrow beams supporting the barrel, until the camp returned from Pistovo…
And I did not miss the second visit to the bath-house, but it disappointed me—the huge unbearably noisy room had no bath-tubs at all! You had to wash yourself throwing water up at you from a tin basin with tin ears for grabbing when carried. On the wall, there were two taps, side by side, one for boiling hot water, and the other for cold. You put your basin on a low table beneath the taps but it was hard to mix their waters to your liking because the line of boys with their empty basins yelled from behind your back to be quick…