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

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The trail to kindergarten started right behind our house. There was a long straight dirt road tilt towards the gate in the barber wire fence surrounding the Recruit Depot Barracks. Yet before you reached it, a well-trodden path forked off into the Pine forest on the right. Bypassing the fenced barracks and a large black pond under big trees, the path went down thru the thicket of young Fir-trees. The descent ended at a wide clearing midst the forest enclosed by the openwork timber fence to keep the trees away from the two-story building, the hub to the web of narrow walks to separate playgrounds with sandboxes, small teremok-huts constructed of lining boards, see-saws and even a real bus, short but big-nosed. It had no wheels, to make it easy to step inside directly from the ground, but the steering wheel and the seats were all in place.

Coming to the kindergarten, you had to take off your coat and shoes, leave them in your narrow tall locker marked by the picture of two merry cherries on the door and, after changing into slippers, you might climb the stairs to the second floor with 3 big rooms for separate groups and the common, even bigger, dining room.

My kindergarten life was a patchwork of various feelings and sensations. The victorious pride in the noisy locker-room where parents already started to pop up after their children and where, prompted by Mom, I discovered my ability to tie the shoelaces myself, without anyone’s help… The bitter humiliation of defeat from those same shoelaces on that morning when they were drenched, pulled, and made into tight knots and my Mom had to untangle them, distressed that she would be late for her work…

In kindergarten, you never know what awaits you there before Mom or, sometimes, Dad or a neighbor woman will come to take you home… Because while you are there they can catch you unawares and insert a chrome tube-end of a thin rubber hose deep into your nostril and blow in a powder of nasty scratchy smack, or else make you drink a whole tablespoon of pesky fish oil, “Come on! It’s so good for health!”

The most horrible thing when they announce that it is the injection day today. The children will line up towards the table with a loudly clinking steely box on it from where the nurse takes out replaceable needles for her syringe. The closer to the table the tighter the grip of horror. You envy those lucky ones for whom the procedure is already over and they go away from the table pressing a piece of cotton wool to their forearm and boast happily it didn’t hurt. No, not a tad bit!. The children in the line around whisper how good it is that today’s injection is not done under the shoulder blade. That’s the most fearful one…

Saturdays are the best. Besides the usual dinner of hateful bean soup, they give you almost half-glass of sour cream sprinkled with sugar around a teaspoon stuck in. And they do not send children to bed for the “quiet hour”. Instead, the dining room windows are sealed by dark blankets to show filmstrips on the wall. The caretaker reads the white lines of inscription beneath each frame and asks if everyone has reviewed everything in the picture, and only then she drags the next frame in where Zhelezniak the Seaman will capture the iron-clad train of the Whites or a rusty nail will become a brand new one after his visit to the steel furnace, depending on which of the filmstrips the projector was loaded with.

Those Saturday happenings fascinated me—a voice sounding from the darkness, the ladder of thin rays thru the slits in the projector’s tin side, the pictures slowly changing each other on the wall—all brought about a touch of some mysterious secrecy…

I sooner liked kindergarten than otherwise, even though it had certain reefs lying hidden in wait for me to run into. One of such skulkers tripped me up after Dad repaired an alarm clock at home and, handing it back to Mom, announced, “Here you are!. You owe me a bottle now.” Which words, for some reason, delighted me so dearly that I boasted of them in front of children in my kindergarten group which braggadocio was reported by the caretaker to my Mom when she came to take my home in the evening.

On our way home, Mom said I did a shameful thing because a boy should not share outside home everything that goes on among the family. Now, they might think that my Dad was an alcoholic. Was it what I wish? Eh? Was that so very nice? How I hated myself at that moment!.

And in kindergarten it was that, for the first time in my life, I fell in love. However, I did my level best to fight the feeling back. With bitter sadness, I grasped how useless was that love because of the insurmountable—like a bottomless abyss—difference in age between me and the swarthy girl with dark eyes of cherry-berry gleam in them. She was two years younger…

But how unreachable and adult looked the former kindergarten girls who came on a visit there after their first day at school. Clad in festive white aprons, putting on so reserved and mannerly airs, they scarcely deigned to answer the eager questions asked by our group’s caretaker.

The caretakers and other workers at the kindergarten wore white robes, however, not always all of them. Anyway, not the one seated outdoors on a bench next to me allaying my distress. It’s hard to say what exactly it was – a fresh scratch on my knee or a new bump on my forehead, yet as for her name, it was positively Zeena… Her gentle palm was petting my head, and I forgot to cry with my cheek