The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Шрифт:
The shift at the camp traditionally ended with the Farewell Bonfire which was built in the far end of the field with the rusty mast of the never-used attraction nearby the edge of the forest behind the barbed wire.
After the breakfast in the morning, the senior platoons marched to that forest thru a temporary passage in the 2-barbed-wire fence opened by a couple of 2-meter-tall spanner-boughs and harvested dry firewood for the Farewell Bonfire. The harvesting went on after the "stiff hour" too and by the evening on the field edge accumulated a heap of dry branches taller than a grown-up man. In the dusk of the nearing summer night, that heap was set on fire from all sides and burnt with high flames under our choral songs, and the marches from the accordionist.
Then Camp Director and the caretakers began to argue in agitated voices. Finally, Camp Director agreed and gave the orders to his chauffeur. The man shrugged and answered: “If you wish so,” walked to the camp buildings, and drove back in the Camp Director’s car. From the trunk, the chauffeur grabbed a metal canister while the pioneers were ordered to step back from the fire. He splashed onto it from the canister in his hands, and a huge ball of red-and-black flame buzzed and swirled up in the night, for at least three meters high, and then fell back again until the next splash.
In the morning, the buses were taking us home….
~ ~ ~
However, the end of the camp shift did not mean the end of summer. And again there was the Rechka river and playing War-Mommy, Cossacks-and-Robbers, American Ball, and Twelve Chips, as well as the new adventures, borrowed from the Detachment’s Library. However, besides the travels to distant planets and mysterious islands started from the opposite armrests of the big sofa, I also wandered in the forest for quite a few different reasons.
For instance, our neighbor Yura Zimin suggested going there to harvest the Hare Cabbage, and I grew curious about the unheard-of vegetable. Well, though sour, it still was tasty but picking it turned a literal toil because its leaves were so too tiny.
Or else, my sister Natasha would bring the news that in the swamp behind the next block, there were myriads of blueberries, and one boy from the other block brought home a whole milk-can of them! Now, the spirit of competition drove me to the same swamp, I had to collect more blueberries than any “one boy”! Good news the Lowlanders hadn’t come to pillage harvest from a swamp upon the Gorka…
But usually, I wandered there alone and almost without any purpose, well, except for hunting a Juniper to make another good bow, or collecting green Pine cones for all sorts of hand-crafted toys.
Stick 4 matches into a green cone and here you have the body of a quadruped. To the body standing on all the four, add a vertical match as the would-be neck, pierce a smaller cone and spit it with the ‘neck’ match—wow!—you’ve got a horse now! Just don’t forget to attach a tail to it.
After green cones, you have to climb up young Pine trees, whose light-brown bark peels off all too easily to smear your hands with sticky colorless resin, which a few minutes later turns into blackish spots all over your palms, while on your pants it stays as white stains, yet still as sticky as your blackened hands.
The young Pine trees are swaying with the wind and under your weight, Yea-hoo! Super whooper! And their cones are so nice: green scales pressed densely to each other, all glossy as if lacquered, quite different to the cones picked on the ground under big old trees whose cones also got old and black with their scales ruffled and sticking loosely all apart. Yet, even in big Pines, you can find green cones as well, only they’re hanging from the very tips of those boughs where you can't climb or pull and bend closer to the branch you’re sitting on because they're way too thick…
New occupations spread among boys much faster than a wildfire. As soon as one of them put his hand on some new trick, you’d hardly find the time to wink your eye but everyone already is, like a busy beaver, all in manufacturing explosives.
A land mine of delayed action you can produce just hands down. Fill a glass bottle with water, three-quarter up, and thru the bottle’s neck stuff in a wisp of grass, then pour the bluish powder of crushed carbide on top. (Carbide is stored in an iron barrel at the construction site of a five-story building across the road around Block, blackstrapper-soldiers would blink at your ladling handfuls of it into your pants pocket.) Now, seal the bottle tight with a cork whittled from a wood chip, turn the bottle upside down and insert it into some pile of earth or sand. The land mine is ready.
A word of warning!! Be cautious not to cut your fingers when whittling the cork and, secondly, when sitting on the ground and driving the cork into the charged bottle, don’t keep the bottle’s neck between your thighs because it might crack and some stray shard would cut your skin just where the shorts end, as it was in my case…
It only remains to wait until the carbide, after getting in contact with the water in the bottle, has issued too much gas for the bottle walls to hold the pressure and it explodes with a loud pop, sending sand and glass splinters in all directions.
Being a book-addict, I often failed to follow the mainstream developments in ever-changing public life…
When tired of reading, I spread the book next to a big sofa’s armrest, covers up for the seat to keep it open at the right page and ready to be read on by my return from the Courtyard. Then down I went and stepped out of the entrance door—surprise! A caravan of differently aged boys were crossing the Courtyard hauling pieces of boards, planks, beams… I ran up to ask: what’s up? how? where?
They told me to run to the construction site of the five-story building, where another group of boys still collected useful timber that a blackstrapper soldier-guard allowed to lift off. And I arrived there just in time to grab the end of a long plank, chiseled from the guard by elder boys. The soldier only said to be quick, before any one saw us.
Like a string of diligent ants, we dragged the pillage across the Courtyard and down the Gorka, then into the forest at the foot of the steep slope made of the earth chuted down by the bulldozer when leveling the ground for the skating rink.