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

bedded in the sofa for the night. At the bottom of the top plank in the back’s frame, there ran a narrow shelf alongside the low strip of mirror inserted above it to reflect the small figurines of white elephant parade lined in a file on the shelf, from the tallest leader to the bantam baby. The elephants had long since lost and the varnished shelf remained empty, except for when we were playing Train constructed of legs-up stools brought from the kitchen and chairs tumbled on their backs, and with the nightfall in the train car, I climbed onto the shelf although its narrowness allowed for stretching on only one your side and to change position you had to go down onto the seat and climb back accordingly.

The Train game became more interesting when Lyda and Yura Zimins, the children of our neighbors, crossed the landing to join us in our room. Then Train became even longer and, sitting inside the up-legged stool-cars, we swayed them with all might and main, so that they tap-tapped against the floor, evoking Grandma’s grumpy orders to stop raging like zealots.

When the games and supper were over, my aluminum folding bed was set up in the center of the room. Mom brought and spread the mattress over it, and a blue oilcloth too, under the sheet, in case I peed in sleep, then a huge pillow, and the thick wool-filled blanket to complete my bed. Grandma Martha turned off the radio box hanging on the left wall by the door and clicked the light switcher. However, the darkness in the room was quite relative – the lights from the windows in the neighboring corner building and from the lampposts in the Courtyard penetrated the tulle mesh of window curtains, and from under the door, there sneaked in a sliver of light from the corridor between the kitchen and the parents’ bedroom.

I watched the dark silhouette of Grandma Martha as she stood by her bed and whispered something up to the ceiling corner above her head. That strange behavior didn’t bother me in the least after Mom's' explanation that it was Grandma Martha’s way of praying to God and that the parents could not allow her to hang an icon in that corner because our Dad was a Party member…

The hardest part of the morning was discovering my stockings. Believe it or not, but even boys in those days wore stockings. Over the underpants, there was donned a special suspender belt with 2 two short rubber straps buttoned on its front. Each strap had a clip-fastener on its hanging end, some gizmo of a rubber nipple squeezed thru a tight-fitting wireframe. You raised the frame to pull a pinch of the stocking top over the nipple which then was forced back into the tight loophole of the wireframe – clip!. Ugh!.

All that harness, of course, was put on me by Mom, however, locating the stockings was my responsibility, and they somehow managed to always find a new place for hiding. Mom would keep urging from the kitchen to come for breakfast, “Can you dress quicker, slow duck?!” Because she, after all, had to be in time for her work, while those meanies were nowhere to dig up… At last – peekaboo! – I spotted the nose of one of them sticking from under the hinged armrest of the sofa with the still sleeping twins. Of course, it called for Mom’s help to pull them out and not to waken Sasha up…

Weary of regular morning earfuls, I found an elegant solution to the problem of disappearing stockings and, with the light in the room switched off already but Grandma Martha still gossiping in whisper with her God, I tied them around my ankles, in secret, separately, one for each. My sister-’n’-brother with their pillows on the opposite armrests of the big sofa were, as always, kicking each other under their common blanket and could not follow my subtle manipulations in the dark. And I was in time to cover my legs when Mom entered our room to kiss her children goodnight. Yet, quite unexpectedly she did something never done before. Mom switched on the light, who lived under the ceiling within the bulb surrounded by the orange shade of silk, lush fringes hanging from the rim let him sleep comfortably in daytime. But now he had to spring at once from his bed and show—as she threw the blanket off my legs—the stocking shackles on each of my ankles. “Something had just pulled me to do it”, she told Dad later with a laugh. I had to untie the stockings and leave them atop the bundle of my other clothes on the chair next to my folding bed and never realize so a brilliant solution…

~ ~ ~

In all fairness, the most unpleasant part in my kindergarten life was going to bed after the midday meal for the “quiet hour”. You had to take off your clothes and put them on a small white stool and, no matter how carefully you did it, at getting up after the “quiet hour” the clothes would be in full mess, and the stocking fastener in one or another garter would stubbornly refuse to do its job.

Besides, what’s the use of idle lying for a whole hour staring at the white ceiling or the white window curtains, or along the long row of cots with a narrow passage after each pair of them? The children would lie silently in that row ending by the far off white wall with the far-off-white-robed caretaker in her chair reading silently her book, distracted at times by some or other child who would approach her to ask in whisper for permission to go out to the toilet. And, after her whispered permit, she would in a low voice silence the rustle of whispering arising along the row of cots, “Now, everyone shuts their eyes and sleep!” Maybe, now and then I did fall asleep at