The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
Шрифт:
Интервал:
Закладка:
During the breaks in the two-story building of the "Cherevko's school", where the ninth grade was again transferred to, we gathered at the window on the staircase landing to make music. The triangle-ruler of light metal normally used for drawing figures in school copybooks was thrown on the windowsill to serve a musical instrument on which Sasha Rodionenko, handled Radya, was knocking out rhythmic backup to the songs.
Chuba at once crossed out any chance for me to be a singer though. The problem was not about my vocal cords but my ears, I just could not hear my own sharps from flats when singing. There was no way to argue with Chuba because he finished Music School in the class of button-accordion and, as an expert, should hear better. As for Vladya's musical ear, Chuba admitted its presence and the fact that Vladya even had some kind of a voice, only it was hard to tell in which part of his anatomy it was sitting. Thus, there remained only two vocalists – Chuba himself, and Radya.
It's more than likely though that with all our zeal we would never progress any further than the mentioned windowsill, if after the winter holidays there did not appear a new teacher of Music at our school, named Valentina. She looked like a tenth-grader girl but styled her hair in the ladies' way of making a round cushion of hair atop of their heads.
At the lessons, she widely spread the billows of her accordion out and squeezed them vigorously back, and before the endless strident bell announcing the break shut up, she collected her instrument and hurried to the streetcar stop because she also taught Music at School 12.
Valentina promised we could go to the Regional Review of Young Talents, only we had to work hard because the Review was taking place next month. The girls she worked with at School 12 were to perform there and we might accompaniment their singing, the whole combination would pass for a VIA from the Plant Club because the Regional Review ruled out the participation of school students… Anything can be solved exceedingly simple if you know how to go about it…
The rehearsals were held late in the evenings, behind the blue blinds on the windows in the Physics classroom. Our string group was enhanced with one more guitarist from School 12. He looked more mature than a tenth-grader and did not conceal his special relation with Valentina, wrapping her neck with a scarf after the rehearsals in an unmistakably owner's manner, and then she trustingly leaned her head on his shoulder, walking along the dark school corridor to the exit.
The girls from School 12 appeared at the rehearsals just a couple of times, and not in full, but Valentina promised us that the singers knew their part quite well. At the final stage preview in Club, the day before starting off to the regional center of Sumy, there popped up one more singer, a corpulent dude of no school affiliation, who sang solo:
"Hello there, the field of Russia,I'm a thin shoot of yours…"The chorus of eight girls from School 12 performed a patriotic number emphasizing the fact that Komsomol members, first and foremost, take care of their Homeland and only after that they cater for themselves. Then Sasha Rodionenko, aka Radya, was giving out a song by Vysotsky about the mass graves.
Supposedly, we cut a nice picture – the line of eight white-shirted girls in front of two microphones, Valentina with her shining accordion, Skully standing behind a single drum on its rack, three guitarists with their acoustic guitars hanged on package strings over their shoulders, and Volodya Elman handling the double bass.
Where did Elman come from and why without any handle? He was a tenth-grader from our school and lived in the end of Smithy Street, in the khutta next to a century-old Birch tree. In spring, they milked it, gathering about a dozen of three-liter glass jars of the Birch sap. But the sap, of course, was not all for Elman alone, because it was a long brick khutta-block of four apartments. And the absence of a handle was easily explained by the fact that his last name, by itself, sounded like a criminal handle— "L-man".
As for the double bass, it was handed out to him by Aksyonov, Head of the Variety Ensemble at Club. Head couldn't say "no" to the drummer at his Variety Ensemble. It’s hard to suppose though that Elman had much knowledge or any skills at playing the double bass, more likely his eagerness to get integrated into the glorious world of the music industry was as great as mine. He joined us without a single rehearsal, at the stage preview in Club. Valentina asked him to play the double bass as low as possible and not too often. However, Elman could not keep his zeal in check and, by the end of the stage preview, two fingers on his right hand were bleeding because their skin got rubbed off against the sturdy strings. To somehow pull them at the Regional Review in Sumy, he bandaged his torn fingers with electrical tape..
Eleonora Nikolayevna, the nominal Head of Children Sector, went along with us, as the official head of our Youth Ensemble, in one of her blouses of starched immaculateness and a cameo brooch under the collar. The long earring, no doubt, dangled in place…
We went to Sumy by the morning diesel train. While waiting for it, I was strangely struck by the sight of our three guitars leaning onto each other, like a stack of rifles on the snow-clad Platform 1. Some piercing nudity…
The Regional Palace of Culture buzzed like a beehive, crammed up with young talents who arrived to show themselves in the Review. We were auditioned in
