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

“In Nezhyn Street,” answered I.

He began to drive it home to me, that it absolutely didn’t matter – be it Nezhyn Street, or Professions Street, or Depot Street, but the sky always remained the same, both in the center and along its edges. And the blue was always blue, it stayed as blue in summer as it did in fall because blue was always blue.

At my timorous attempt to maintain a slightly different view on the sky blueness, he once again rolled out his weighty arguments and I surrendered.

“Yes, the same,” said I.

“That’s good. Now, we've agreed that this here sentence of yours is wrong.”

And in the same unalterable manner, we proceeded to agree about the wrongness of my views. With stolid ponderosity, he shattered each and every sentence in my essay to pieces, one by one, and, after a short, forlorn, resistance, I gave in and surrendered them, one after another.

From the left bottom corner in the window, thin iron bars fanned up diagonally, the walls squeezed the high ceiling of the corridor-like office to narrow its span, the heavy desk towered over the disciplined row of the lined-up chairs, the bulging sphere of Principal’s skull hovered over the desk with his crosswise hair wisps unable to hide the bald and only clinging to it like the cobweb over a still globe in the locked storeroom of School House Manager…

And I recanted, line by line, from the beginning to the essay’s end, each and every word that seemed so true and right to me when writing them. Yes, Pyotr Ivanovich, you’re right, I was completely wrong…

I was wrong refusing to use the template suggested by the teacher to start the essay smoothly: “Walking down the street, I heard schoolchildren arguing about Tatyana Larina from the immortal poem by Pushkin and, when already home, I got seated by the window and started to think once again about Tatyana, analyzing her social background and her love to Russian nature…”

Yes, it’s a completely wrong statement that schoolchildren would rather discuss motorcycles, karate, and fishing but not Tatyana Larina’s characteristic features. That’s absolutely thoughtless and erroneous…

When I agreed with him on all the points, he handed me the copybook and said that I could go, yet I should think it over again.

I went out to the empty school. From the entrance door came clangs of tin pails against the iron sinks and the swish of water from the taps filling the pails—the janitors had already started washing the floors. I numbly went by those 5 taps without looking at my reflection passing thru 5 mirrors above the sinks.

From the tall brick porch, I descended with a dizzy feeling that I was not myself, and not sure of now what, and how, and whereto. Probably, Galileo had the same odd feeling right after betrayal of his discovery.

At the gate, I stopped and opened my copybook. Underneath the essay there was put a fractional mark, the denominator (content evaluation) was blank, and the divisor (grammar evaluation) – 4. Below the incomplete mark, in the same red ink, Zoya Ilyinichna turned out, in that diligently pretty handwriting of hers, four pages of her own essay that I was wrong and belied the Soviet youth. I should have recollected the winged words from the novel How the Steel was Tempered, as well as the heroes of Krasnodon underground resistance, and the heroes of the Red Army…

(…from that time on, I wrote following the templates, the “berserk” blogger of XIX century Belinsky didn’t become out of me, nipped in the bud.

How to explain so close attention of the teaching stuff at School 13 to my incipient quill check?

Well, their generation grew up under the puttering of “black raven” vehicles’ engines awaiting in the dark for another bunch of arrested “people’s enemies” so they chose to preemptively react, just in case…)

~ ~ ~

Not every Konotop school could boast of a room so properly equipped for the classes in Physics as that at School 13. The blue blinds hung from the iron rings running along the string-cables fixed over the windows. They were pulled together before demonstrating educational films on this or that subject in the curriculum. But there was no screen – the films were projected onto the large square of frosted glass frame in the wall above the blackboard, like, a 2 m x 2 m TV for you.

The film projector itself was located in the back room behind the wall with that frame. Besides the aforesaid projector and round tin cans with the films, the room was furnished with lots of shelves to keep all kinds of lenses, tripods, rheostats, weighs and other untold treasures in boxes, caskets, cases to be used for staging various experiments from the textbooks on Physics and Chemistry. And on a separate stool, there also stood the gray trunk-like tape recorder “Saturn” loaded with the tape on two white reels.

The film projectionist and keeper of all the hoard was Teacher of Physics, Emil Grigoryevich Binkin, a calm handsome man of about thirty, with his eyebrows slightly twitched up his straight forehead to meet the curly short wisps of black hair, well matching the swarthy skin in his face. During the breaks, he stacked and reshuffled the things amassed in the treasury, while softly whistling all kinds of melodies, so clearly and subtly, without the slightest clam.

I had a wary attitude towards him. First, for terminating my unauthorized reading at his Physics lessons…

Normally, each day I smuggled to school a book from the Club library and at the lessons the hinged part in the desktop was flipped over to open the book placed upon the inner shelf-receptacle for a schoolbag and – full ahead, Captain Blood! Let’s board the bastards!

Teachers were also happy to have so quiet a boy in the class, no trouble at all. Still, some of them made occasional attempts at breaking the equilibrium of the serene co-existence because I obviously was busy with anything but their lesson.

“Ogoltsoff!