The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
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The final, third, discovery of that day awaited me in the State Universal Shop, aka GUM, on the Red Square, where we arrived without any guide already. There, I learned that dreams do come true, you only need to be ready for their realization…
At the entrance to GUM, we were told to gather in the same spot after a half-hour and were dismissed to scatter in search for goods. From inside, GUM looked like sectioned wells of space within an ocean bulk-carrier enclosed by multi-story transitions up the hull sides.
In one of the compartments on the third floor, they were selling the billiards of my dream whose price was exactly ten rubles. O, how I did curse my gluttony! From the sum given by Mother, I had already paid for 2 ice-cream – one in the morning at the station, and the other at the V eh-Deh-eN-KHa. There remained nothing I could do but say goodbye to my dream so, to mitigate the grief, I ate one more ice-cream right in the GUM.
In the evening tired but wholly satisfied (if counting out the misfire about the billiards) we left Moscow for Leningrad…
In the city on the Neva river, we were billeted in a school on Vasilevsky Island, not far from the Zoo. At the school, we were allotted half of the gym, since the other half was occupied already by an excursion group from the Poltava city. We did not cause them any inconvenience—the gym was pretty spacious—and only moved several black sports mats they were not using into another corner. Additionally to the mats, we were given cloth blankets getting accommodated for sleep with much more comfort than the royal court of France, when fled from the rioting Paris in Twenty Years Later by Alexandre Dumas where poor aristocrats were provided for the purpose with just raw straw and no linen…
For 3 meals a day, we walked up a couple of blocks to a canteen next to a humpbacked bridge above the Moika river. A very quiet place it was, with hardly any traffic at all. There, our heads paid in advance with paper coupons and the girls from the excursion group laid the food on the square tables before inviting the rest of us to come in from the sidewalk. Sometimes we had to wait because apart from the Poltava’s and ours there were other groups as well – not from our gym though. In such a case we stood waiting on the nearby bridge over the narrow river with its indiscernible flow between the upright stone-lined banks.
p>“ On the Moika bank,we ate garbage skank”So ran the epigram composed by someone from our group.
(…the rhyme, of course, is flawless, but I personally had no complaints about the food there – everything was as it always was in any canteen I dropped in along my life path…)
We were a little late for the white nights but everything else was in place – both Nevsky Avenue, and the Palace Bridge, and trotting thru the halls of the Hermitage with the immense Pompeii demolition in the picture by Karl Bryullov, and luxurious, yet small-sized, oil paintings by Dutch masters…
In St. Isaac Cathedral they launched for us the Foucault’s Pendulum hanging all the way down from inside the main dome. It swung for some time swishing between the disgruntled, icon decorated, walls and then pegged down one of the sizable wooden pins lined on the polished floor.
“See?!” exclaimed the enthusiastic Cathedral guide.”The Earth is turning, after all. Foucault’s Pendulum has just proved this scientifically.”
The revolutionary battleship Aurora denied us admittance for some reason, but we listened to the Admiralty’s Cannon fired each day to mark the noon, and visited The Piskaryovskoye Cemetery with green lawns over the mass graves of people starved in the years of fascist Blockade and the pool by the dark wall for the visitors to drop their coins in.
The day when we went to Peterhof was cloudy, and crossing the Finnish Gulf we could not see the sea but only fog above the circle of yellowish water with shallow waves around the boat, like on a lake with a sandy bottom. It was boring and dank, and when I got out of the passenger hall and climbed down the short ladder to the low stern with the churned up mass of foam behind it, the boat boy came up to tell that passengers were not allowed there. I climbed back, and he hung a chain across the ladder and started to wash the stern deck with a mop.
But the Peterhof fountains jetted pillars of surprisingly white water along the channel banks below the hillock with the palace on its top closed for restoration…
Everything in Leningrad turned out to be as beautiful as one would expect of the Cradle of Revolution. The weather got nice again, and on the first floor in the Naval Museum there stood the boat of Peter the Great, almost the size of a brigantine, and all the walls on the second floor were decorated with the paintings depicting glorious sea battles of the Russian fleet, starting with the battle in the Sinop Bay.
On the first floor of the Zoological Museum, a skeleton of whale bones towered high, while the central attraction on the second floor was the composition of life in Antarctica, behind the glazed partition. The white snowfield was painted in the back, and behind the glass there stood a few adult penguins with their beaks up in the air. They were surrounded by a kindergarten of penguin chicks of different ages to show how they change when growing.
At first, I liked them dearly – those lovely fluffy cutie pies, but soon the nagging thought that all of them were stuffed animals abated my delight. 3 dozen living birds were killed for the exposition. I did not want
