The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
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Skully dropped out at once without any explanation except for he just did not want to. Kuba and I lasted longer, but very soon the group of prospective hegemony-busters disintegrated. And really what’s the point in going on, if my partner, Natasha Grigorenko, after finishing the eighth grade was moving to School 12 whose Math and Physics specialization boosted the chances of its students for entering some Institute on graduating?.
End May, Kuba and I had a bike ride to the Bay Beach on the Seim river to open the swimming season. It turned out that twelve kilometers of riding a bike by the even path alongside the railway embankment, was not an overly exhausting exercise…
On the beach, there was not a single soul except for us and our bikes dropped on the sand. And the water was still too chilly, but we took a swim all the same. Then from the nearby bushes there droned the buzzing swarms of mosquitoes who hungrily stung us from all the sides and very badly too. Probably, we had just fallen out of the habit during the winter. To get rid of the blood-suckers, we tried burying ourselves in the sand, but the sand was also too cold and didn’t protect from the bites of those flying cannibals. Our crazy cries echoed in the empty beach, and then we had another swim and rode back to Konotop. We didn’t know yet that life, actually, is a series of losses, but felt that from that beach our ways parted…
~ ~ ~
Yes, that year School 13 was hegemonic in everything except for the ballroom dancing. We even won the city competition at the concluding stage of the All-Union Game 'Zarnitsa'.
On a Sunday, the teams from city schools, six people each, under the supervision of their PE teachers, went on a one day hike to the forest near the Seim. There were all sorts of competitions: for the transportation of an “injured” without a stretcher, for putting up a two-man tent, for skillful bandaging…
My part in the competitions was measuring distances by eye. The umpire asked how many meters were to the tree over there, and then silently recorded the participants’ estimations. I was following changes in his facial expression.
Someone said the distance was 20 meters. The umpire lifted his right eyebrow, the guess seemed an overshoot. To the estimation in 14 meters, the umpire’s mouth dropped its left corner—not enough. So I called out the average—17 meters. After everyone got thru their attempts, the umpire checked his records and announced that the most accurate was my guess – I didn’t need a tape-meter…
However, everything was to be decided in the concluding contest of boiling water on the fire in a ten-liter tin bucket. No favoritism would help out, neither reading of facial expressions.
The start given, the matches stroke matchboxes by the brushwood mounds readied for bonfires. Dense white smoke gave way to crackling flames—it’s time to hang the bucket over the fire and feed the firewood to it; the drier, the better.
The red tongues of fire fluttered unsteadily under the bucket, licking its tin, painting it black with soot. The bastard of a wind! So much of flames driven away from under the bucket… The team of School 12, trying to control the situation, held a blanket in their hands, sort of a screen to block the wind, prevent its playing with the fire. But we? Our PE teacher Ivan Ivanovich, a wartime soldier and an experienced fisherman, scornfully waved aside their smartness. That’s all bullshit! Get more brushwood, the drier and smaller, the better. Put it over that side!
No textbook presented me with a clearer and more memorable idea of water-boiling stages. Heating; light steam over the water; formation of tiny bubbles on the vessel walls; the bubbles float up forming agitated foam and, at last, the water in the bucket starts to roll, jump and splash, it gushes the white steam up.
The umpire clicks his stopwatch. Hooray! We are the first!. And School 12 still about their bucket ogling the bubbles on the tin walls…
The competition over, the teams boarded the buses. Except for those who wished to spend the night in two large tents, and in the morning the bus would come to take them back to Konotop…
At twilight, I left the glade with the tents and went deeper into the forest. In general, it was the same as at the Object, only more deciduous than coniferous. Casting an appraising look around, I took a leak. Suddenly, some part of the forest next to me came into motion separating from the picture of stillness in the late evening woods. What’s happening?
The eye, perplexed at the unaccustomed sight reported nothing to the stunned mind until the thing little by little assumed a certain form and consistency… Wow! That’s a moose! What a whopper! And it had been standing so nigh… Looking after the giant disappearing among the trees, I thought it was not in vain that I did stay for the night.
At night I regretted my staying there. Because of inexperience and unbridled individualism, I had lain down by the canvas wall of the tent, becoming the last in the line of guys preparing for the night. The night chillness woke me up an hour later and forced to press my back against the last but one guy in our sleeping group to feel at least a drop of warmth.
In the small hours, chilled down to the point of freezing, I got out of the tent when the night darkness hardly started to turn gray. The ashes of the fire next to the tents were dead, but a couple of youths still sat near it—a girl and a boy. Probably, being foolish like me, they had tried sleeping at the edges and not in the midst of the group
