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

not to stand all the game in the narrow side passages or perch on the marble window sill at the back of the hall, leaning to the darkness behind the chilly panes, for that was winter, after all…

In winter the PE classes were held outside. The teacher, Lyubov Ivanovna, unlocked the dark “cell” next to the door of the consecutive Pioneer Room and School Library. Each student grabbed a pair of skis and poles leaned against the blind walls in the bulbless “cell”, and went to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street to run under the poplars along the streetcar track. Lyubov Ivanovna checked her big round stopwatch and announced the results. Next to her stood a pair of girls who on that particular day could not, for some reason, run and kept the class register for Lyubov Ivanovna to enter her evaluation of the class sporting achievements… Some interesting equality of sexes, eh? The girls could run or not run at their wish, but if you’re a male-student Lyubov Ivanovna would never ask how you feel about running and simply commanded: get ready! start! Run, boy, run!

The fastener-straps on the lousy school skis were much too hard, they didn’t hold a candle to the fixtures made by Father from thick rubber bands in the old days back at Object. But I never brought my skis to school for PE lessons saving them for extra-curriculum use…

That day after the midday meal we, the inseparable trinity of boy-friends, skied to the hill behind the Grove in the vicinity of Podlipnoye. The hill was quite steep, but we had glided no more than a couple of times before two slobs came from the village with the demand for our skis. One of them even tried to punch Kuba, but he ducked and glided down out of reach. Skully and I followed, but not in the steepest place like our friend.

Those two blockheads pursued running on foot and, at the edge of the Grove, the faster runner stepped on the end of my ski. I fell. When I got up, I saw that Skully had already removed his skis, bunched them onto the shoulder of his workman padded jacket and ran dodging between the dark trunks in the winter Grove. The picture got screened by a head in a black-fur hat with loosened flaps. The fur of the visor covered his eyes and only the thick-lipped smirk was visible. The portrait sharply splotched away as I took it on the nose and collapsed by a tree.

“Got it? Take off the skis, bitch!”

His partner ran up in a moment. Being either less drunk or more sensitive—the snow around was spattered with sizable drops of blood trickling from my nose—he just told me to get lost, and led his buddy away back to the village.

Full of sullen apathy, I skied thru the Grove plugging my nose with lumps of snow replacing those as they got red one after another. On the side street by the school, Kuba was waiting for me. He looked into my face and told to better wash it under a tap, he also said that Volodya Gourevitch wanted to see us in the tenth-grade classroom for some urgent talk.

In the schoolyard, I took off my skis and climbed up the porch to the empty school building, by five o’clock the janitors usually left it having done their job. The school remained empty with only the watchman in, and sometimes a group of pioneers preparing a collective recital by accompaniment of the button-accordion of the School Pioneer Leader.

The mirror above a sink showed that the blood was oozing no more and that it was not mine but some stranger’s face with the nose two times thicker than normal and the tooth-brush mustache painted under it with brown makeup. The gore-stained chin was no cleaner. I washed until Kuba said it wouldn’t get any better, then I wiped my face with a handkerchief. The pulse throbbed dully within the puffed nose.

In the appointed classroom, there was Volodya Gourevitch all alone. Delicately keeping his glances off my face, so as not to accidentally graze my huge nose, he made a speech about the crying shame that our school each year got kicked out from CJR in the initial pool of the game. And the disgrace was caused by our over-reliance on the graduation classes. We had to break that vicious practice. We had to find new forces. New blood was what we needed.

Alarmed, I looked back at Kuba. He shrugged his shoulders, and Volodya Gourevitch declared that I was the ready Captain for the School 13 CJR team. The throb of pulsation became more distinct and moved from inside the nose into the nape, where I felt it after that publication of the anonymous story signed by my name in The Pioneer magazine…

A month later the CJR team of School 13, quite unexpectedly, won their first game. In the initial contest of the game, exchange of greetings, Kuba and I came on stage in real tails and bicorns borrowed from auntie Tanya’s Costume Room at Club. Napoleon (acted by me) in his swell attitude—the right hand in his tails breast, the left one balled and pressed to the back above the buttocks—recited the famous line:

“…Moscow! This sound alone holds volumes for a Russian heart!”

Then, abruptly shedding off the poetic enchantment, I turned to Marshal Murat and ordered, “Burn Moscow down!”

Kuba sniffed up his nose and replied, “No problem, Sire! As you wish!”

The audience rocked with laughter and the rest of our team appeared on stage in casual clothes and bicorns made of Whatman paper under a merry air by the button-accordion from behind the scenes. We acted a couple of jokes more, won the contest and, eventually, the whole game.

In that same merry-go-happy, fine and dandy, way, we reached the final held in May, because everyone had learned already that we were a strong team, and if not to laugh at our jokes then at whose else?