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

Огольцов Сергей Николаевич

Farther on along Lenin Street, past the first crossing, the House of Culture of the Red Metallurgist Plant stood a little way back, moved off the road by the tiny square of its own. Both sides of that square were bound by the stands planted for merrier ends, presenting glue-mounted pages from satirical magazines – the Russian “Crocodile” on the left, and the Ukrainian “Pepper” on the right.

Between the road and each of the stands, there was a tin-and-glass stall facing its symmetric twin across the square. The one by the “Crocodile” was selling ice-cream and lemonade, while all sorts of nick-knackery were the merchandise at that by the “Pepper”. There, among the motley keep-sake ceramic trifles, plastic necklaces, paper decks of cards, I spotted sets of matchbox stickers and, starting for my next trip to City, I asked for extra kopecks and bought one, with the pictures of animals. However, when I brought the purchase home to enhance the collection brought from the Object, I realized it wouldn’t be right. The older stickers, peeled off their matchboxes, bore the small-printed address of the match manufacturing factory, as well as “the price – 1 kopeck”, while the set bought from the stall was just a pack of sticker-sized pictures. Since then I had lost all interest in the collection, and passed it to my friend Skully…

Skully lived by the Nezhyn Store with his mother, and grandmother, and the dog named Pirate, although the last dwelt outside the puny house of so small a kitchen and bedroom that both would fit into the only room of our khutta, however, theirs was a detached property.

Next to their khutta there stood an adobe-plastered shed which, apart from usual household tools and the coal stored for winter, sheltered a handcart – an elongated box of deals fixed upon the axis of 2 iron wheels the length of iron pipe that jutted from under the box bottom ended with a crossbar for steering the juggernaut when you pushed it or pulled along.

Between the khutta and the wicket to the street, there stretched a long garden enclosed from both sides by the neighbors’ fences which, all in all, was bigger than those two or three vegetable beds of ours. In autumn and spring, I came to help Skully at the seasonal turning of dirt in their garden. Deeply stabbing the soil with our bayonet spades, we gave out the fashionable Settlement byword, “No Easter cake for you, buddy! Grab a piroshki and off to work, the beds wait for digging!” And red Pirate, cut loose, frisked and galloped about the old cherry trees bounding the narrow path to the rickety wicket…

When we moved to Konotop, my first and foremost responsibility became fetching water for our khutta. Daily supply averaged 50 liters. A pair of enamel pails full of water stood in the dark nook of the tiny veranda, on two stools next to the kerosene stove. From a nail in the plank wall above the pails, there hung a dipper for drinking or filling a cooking pan. But first, the pails were used to fill up the tank of the washstand in the kitchen that held exactly two pailfuls.

Mounted above the tin sink, the tank had a hinged lid and a tap jutting from its bottom. It was one of those spring-pin taps installed in the toilets of cars in a passenger train, so to make water run you pressed the pin from underneath. From the sink, the soapsuds dripped into the cabinet under it where stood the slop bucket which needed control checks to avoid brimming over and flooding the kitchen floor. The discharge was taken out and poured into the spill pit next to the outhouse in the garden.

The water came from the pump on the corner of Nezhyn and Gogol Streets, some forty meters from our wicket. The meter-tall pig-iron stub of a pump had the nose of the same material enclosing the waterpipe, you hung your pail over the nose and gave a big push-down to the iron handle behind the stub for the vigorous jet to bang into the pail, brim and go splashing over onto the road if not watched closely. 2 daily water-walks–4 pails, all in all–were enough for our khutta, if, of course, there was no washing that day, however, the water for Aunt Lyouda’s washing was fetched by Uncle Tolik…

When the rains set in, the water-walks became a little longer—you had to navigate bypassing the wide puddles in the road. In winter the pump got surrounded by a small, ripping slippery, skating rink of its own from thanks to the water spillage by the pump users, the smooth ice had to be walked in careful step-shuffles. The dark winter nights made you appreciate the perfect positioning of the log lamppost next to the pump…

And also on me was the fuel delivery for the kerogas that looked like a small gas stove of 2 burners and had 2 cups on its backside to fill them with kerosene that soaked, thru 2 thin tubes, 2 circular wicks of asbestos in the burners which were lit when cooking dinner, heating water for tea or imminent washing on the smelly yellow flames edged by jagged jerky tips of oily soot.

After kerosene, I went to Bazaar with a twenty-liter tin canister… Fairly aside from the Bazaar counters, stood the huge cubic tank of rusty sheet iron. The sale day was announced in the chalk note over the tank side – "kerosene will be …" and there followed the date when they were to bring it. However, so too many dates had changed each other—wiped and written over and over again—that no figures could be read within the thick chalk smudge, that’s why they just dropped writing and the tank side greeted you with the perpetually optimistic line, "kerosene will be …!”

A shallow brick-faced trench under the tank side accommodated the short length of pipe from its bottom ending with a tap blocked by a padlock. On the proclaimed day, a saleswoman in a blue satin smock descended into the trench and sat by the tap on a small stool ferried along. She also brought a multi-liter aluminum cauldron, and put it under the tap, took the padlock away and filled the vessel, up to three-quarters, with the foamy yellowish jet of kerosene.

The queue started moving to her with their bottles, canisters, and cans which she filled with a dipper thru a tin funnel, collecting the pay into her blue pocket. When the dipper began to dub the cauldron bottom, she turned the tap on to restore the fluid level.

In fact, they didn't need at all to bother about writing the sale date, because each morning Grandma Katya visited Bazaar and two days ahead brought the news when "kerosene will be …!" indeed. So, on the kerosene sale day after coming from school, I took the canister and went to spend a couple of hours in the line to the trench under the tank. Sometimes, they were also selling it in the Nezhyn Store backyard equipped with the same facility, but that happened not as often and the line was no shorter…