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

player sticks their thumb off their fist, inserts a match, a kinda spacer, between their thumb pad and the middle joint of the index finger, and holds it tight. The matches are slowly pressed against each other, the pressure grows and the player whose match withstands it without breaking up becomes the winner. The same idea as in tapping Easter eggs against each other, only you don’t have to wait a whole year for the game which wasted more than one matchbox nicked from the kitchen at home.

Or we just ran hither-thither playing War-Mommy, yelling, “Hurray!”, or “Ta-ta-ta!”

– Bang! Bang! I’ve shot and killed you!

– Yeah! Okay! I’m just on the doorsill to Death!

And long after the nominally dead warrior would keep a-trotting about that doorsill firing his farewell rounds and only, maybe, hooraying less zealously, if it’s a boy possessing some sense of decency, before to slam, at last, that door behind himself and topple with undeniable theatrical gusto in a grass patch of softer looks.

For taking part in War-Mommy you needed a machine-gun sawed from a plank piece. Yet, some boys played automatic weapons of tin, a black-paint-coated acquisition from a store.

Such machine-guns had to be loaded with special ammunition – rolls of narrow paper strips with tiny sulfur blobs planted in them. When struck by the spring trigger hummer, such a blob gave a loud report and the paper strip got automatically pulled on bringing the next blob in the strip in place of the fired… Mom bought me a tin pistol and a box of pistons—small paper circles with the same sulfur blobs which had to be inserted manually for each separate shot. After the bang, a tiny wisp of sore smelling smoke rose from under the trigger.

One day when I was playing the pistol in the sand pile by the garbage enclosure, a boy from the corner building asked me to present the handgun to him and I readily gave it away. Being a son of an officer, he, of course, needed and had more rights to it than me… But Mom refused to believe that anyone would give his gun away to another boy just so casually. She demanded of me to confess the genuine truth about losing Mom’s present, yet I stuck to my truth so stubbornly, that she even had to lead me to the apartment of that boy in the corner building. The officer started to chastise his son, yet Mom said she was so sorry and asked to excuse her because she only wanted to make sure I did not lie.

~ ~ ~

That summer the boys from our Block began to play with yellowish cartridges of real firearms which they were hunting at the shooting range in the forest. I wanted so badly to see what shooting range might look like, yet bigger boys explained that you could visit it only on special days when there was no shooting because on any other day they’d shoo you off.

It took a long wait for a special day, but after all, it came and we went thru the forest… The shooting range was a vast opening about a huge rectangular excavation with a steep cave-in in one of the corners to get down there. The opposite wall of the pit was screened by a tall log barrier, all bullet-poked, keeping a couple shredded left-overs of gravely riddled paper sheets with the head-and-shoulders outline.

We looked for the cartridges in the sand underfoot. They were of two types – longish, neck-narrowed, cartridges from the AK assault-rifle, and small even cylinders from the TT pistol. The finds were loudly welcomed and busily exchanged between the boys. I had no luck at all and only envied the luckier seekers whose shrieks sounded flat and suppressed by the eerie silence of the shooting range displeased with our trespassing the forbidden grounds…

Beside the excavated hollow, the glade was cut across by a front-line trench whose sandy walls were kept in place by board shields. A narrow track of iron rails ran from one end of the opening to the other passing, on the way, the trench over. It was the railway for a large mock-up tank of plywood mounted upon its trolley which rumbled along the track when pulled by the cable of a hand-pedaled winch.

The boys started to play with all those things. I also sat in the trench once, while the plywood tank clanged overhead, and then I went to the call from the edge of the field where they needed my help.

We pulled at the steel cable looped thru the horizontal pulley to make it easier for the boys on the other end of the battlefield to turn the crank of the winch which set in motion the trolley with the tank. At some point, I got inattentive and failed to draw my hand off in time, the cable was quick to snatch and drag my pinky finger into the pulley groove. The pain in the squeezed finger made me rend surroundings by a shrill scream mixed with a jet of tears. Hearing my “oy-oy-oy!” as well as the shouts of other boys around me, “Stop! Finger!”, the winch operators managed to stop it when there remained a mere couple of centimeters for my finger to pass the pulley wheel turn and get out. They wound the winch crank in the opposite direction, dragging the poor finger backward all the way to where it was originally swallowed by the device.

The unnaturally flattened, dead pale finger smeared with the blood from the ripped skin, emerged from the pulley jaws and puffed up instantly. The boys wrapped it with my handkerchief and told me to run home. Quick! And I ran thru the forest feeling the painful beat of the pulse in the burning finger…

At home, Mom, without asking anything, at once told me to shove the wounded under the gush of water from the kitchen tap. She bent and straightened it several times and ordered not to bellow