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

Огольцов Сергей Николаевич

Makarenko asked me to help her about the class wall newspaper on a big sheet of Whatman paper, which had to be adorned with a frame for which there already was the mark of a pencil line five-centimeter offset from the edges. She gave me a brush and a box of watercolors and warned to use only the blue one before going out together with my Mom to further improve on their acquaintance.

Proud of being trusted with so important a job, I started immediately, dipped the brush in the glass of water, dampened the blue and began to paint the strip of the Whatman paper between its edge and the pencil mark, trying not to trespass it. The job turned out an up-hill one – you paint, and paint, and paint but there still remains so much to paint yet. The main problem though was that each watercolor stroke differed from others by its shade of blue, making it hard to keep the uniformly. I persevered in earnest because not every day a boy gets a chance of making frames on a sheet of Whatman. However, by the return of Mom and Mistress, I had only finished about a quarter of the frame.

The teacher said at once that was enough, even more than that because all she had wanted of me was just passing the brush along the pencil line, but now it’s too late. Mom promised to bring a sheet of Whatman paper from her work, but the teacher said “no-no!” Then I came up with a proposal to mount strips of paper on glue over the superfluously painted areas, but the idea was also turned down, I didn’t know why.

We left, and Mom did not rebuke me on our way home for it was not my fault if the new teacher had never in her life seen sturdy frames of plywood, but only those of thin lines as around the words of Marx and Lenin in the Regiment Club…

When school began there was a wall newspaper hanging in our classroom. Probably, I was the only schoolboy to study so carefully the blue line borders in the paper…

Nevertheless, our new Mistress retained some confidence in me and a month later entrusted with a verbal message for Seraphima Sergeevna in our former classroom.

I knocked on the familiar door and recited the message to my first teacher, who was sitting at her desk facing the new growth of first-graders. She thanked me and then asked to close the upper window leaf, thru which droughts got in whenever someone opened the door.

I readily climbed onto the windowsill and, standing on tip-toes, reached out and slammed shut the vicious leaf. The mission done and, rather than to kneel back on the sill and then lie on it with the stomach, I just jumped down on the floor. The jump turned out classy deft, and full of pride I strutted out of the silent classroom past the delight and reverence in the eyes of the small ones at their desks. How could I have thought those first-graders on a visit to my kindergarten group were so unreachably grown up? Arrogant swaggers!.

At home, we already had a TV set in which announcers read the news against the background of the Kremlin walls and towers, and hockey players rushed from one goal to the other at the European and World Championships. There were eagerly awaited for programs of Kinopanorama, and the Club of Jolly and Resourceful, and, of course, movies!

I would never have supposed that there could be a film longer than 2 sequels. The 4-sequeled “Bombard the area I’m in!” became an eye-opener. Only I did not like Italian cinema, because when Marcello Mastroianni suggested a possible abortion and I inquired what that word meant, our neighbor, auntie Paulyna, laughed out loud and Dad ordered me leave the parent’s room because that movie was not meant for children…

The arms race took place not only in the TV box but in our boyish life as well. We reached the stage of using sophisticated weaponry: crook pistols, crook rifles.

There’s hardly any need in a detailed explanation what a slingshot is, however, I’d like to point out that there are two types of slingshots: for shooting pebbles, and for shooting crooks.

(…pebble-shooters are a lethal weapon, in the hungry post-war years in Stepanakert, the boys were knocking sparrows down from the trees for their meal…)

Crook-shooting slingshot is almost a toy made of aluminum wire and a round rubber band for aircraft-modeling (instead of rubber straps cut out from a gas mask for pebble shooters). The non-lethal slingshots shoot with a small piece of aluminum wire bent into a narrow arc-like crook. Catching the rubber band within the crook’s bend, pull the band and let the missile go. It doesn’t kill but it is felt alright, bad news if the crook hits the eye.

Now, if instead of the slingshot the round rubber band is fixed upon a piece of planed plank and you pull the crook along its even surface, the accuracy of the hit grows exponentially because the crook takes off the firm guide. The rest, cutting out of that piece of plank a sub-machine gun or a pistol, is up to you.

By the point in the plank side to which the readied crook is pulled, you add the trigger-frame of the same aluminum wire strung crosswise so as to keep the crook in place until you pull the trigger. The pressure for keeping the trigger-frame in place and holding the cocked up crook at ready originates from a common rubber band, like that in underpants, stretched taut from the trigger to the screw in the downside of the planed plank.

The boys armed with such weapons do not run about yelling “ta-ta-ta!” as in War-Mommy. They leave those naive games for kindergarten kids and go down into basements and start hunting each other in the dark. Metallic “dzink!” of a crook against the cemented floor, or the wooden walls, hints that the enemy is near and opened fire at you. But securing the position in the pit above the floor at the end of the corridor, you are as safe as in an impregnable bunker. You have to just sit tight up there and send crooks to the sound of stealthy steps, and if you hear “ouch!” from the dark, then you have targeted him okay…

In autumn, they finished construction of the five-story apartment block across the road surrounding Block. The happy tenants were moving into their flats while deep down, in the endless basement corridors of so big a building (the first of that height and size at the Object), there unfolded unprecedented combat actions with the employment of crook weapons of all types.

Initially, the huge underground basement was illuminated with electric bulbs placed rarely but evenly, they lived but a short life: long-range crook shots burst them up, one by one, into fine splinters. Perhaps, the only drawback of the crook weapons was their almost complete noiselessness. For real self-assertion, you need your arms to do some major bangs…

(…life just cannot stand still, it has to flow. Where to? The direction conforms to the dearest dreams of those swimming in the flow, sort of…)

More and more often, the evening quietude in the Courtyard got disrupted by sharp snaps alike to gun reports because the boys had armed themselves with peelikkalkas but I, as usual, straggled behind the advanced trends in the flow of social life, which made me beg for instructions to manufacture a peelikkalka.

Take 15 cm. length of a narrow section (0.5 cm.) copper tube and bend till it resembles letter L. The foot of the resulting L is flattened with a hammer. Thru the remaining orifice, pore a small amount of molten lead into the tube to form a smooth leaden bottom by the angle to L’s foot.