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

heap of ruffly halved bole chunks nearby the tin-clad lid of the cemented pit right in the center of every sidewall of the Block's houses. Inside one-and-a-half meter deep pit, slightly up from its bottom, there started a hole thru the foundation, 50 cm x 50 cm, which ended in the basement dark corridor at about a meter-and-half above the cemented floor. The chunks were dropped down into the pit, and thence, thru the hole, into the basement to be hauled into the section whose owner the firewood was brought for.

As I was a big boy already, Dad instructed me to throw the wood pieces into the pit so that he could drag them thru the hole down into the basement. Dropping them in, I could not see him, but heard his voice from down there when he shouted me to stop if the pile of chunks in the pit threatened to block the hole. Then I waited until there came muffled thuds of the pieces toppling onto the cemented floor in the basement corridor.

Everything went smooth and easy before Natasha told Sasha that they had brought the firewood for us and I was helping Dad to move the wood down there. Sasha came running to the heap of log chunks and started dragging them and dropping into the pit. To all my furious clarifications that he was violating the age limits for this particular job, and that the very next chunk he dropped would surely block the hole, he answered with silent but obstinate snuffling and just went on.

(…any rhetoric is lost on those whose Stubbornness-Mommy was born a moment before them!. )

Yet, I not only made speeches but also kept throwing the wood, so that later, at midday meal in the kitchen, Sasha would not make hints that he did more than me. And suddenly he tottered back from the pit, his blood-smeared fingers clutching his face. Natasha rushed home to call Mom, who came running with a damp cloth to wipe the blood off Sasha’s upturned face. Dad also raced from the basement and no one was listening to my defense that all that happened accidentally, not on purpose, when the piece of wood thrown by me scratched the skin on my brother’s nose. Mom yelled at Dad because he allowed all that to happen. Dad also grew angry and told everyone to go home, and he'd finish the work himself.

The scratch healed very soon, although Sasha stubbornly peeled the patch off his nose even before the midday meal.

(…I doubt if my brother would recollect the happening, it’s only me who remembers and feels guilty: yes, it was not deliberate, but instead of futile orations I should have been more watchful tossing them chunks…)

At school, I regularly enrolled in this or that Group, whenever its tutor entered our classroom to recruit volunteers. Group meetings were held in the late afternoon so that participants had time to go home, have their midday meal, and come back to school. After a one-hour session of learning and training at the Group, its members returned home thru the complete night darkness…

One evening after the Group activities were over, a bunch of participants dropped into the school gym where there was an upright piano on the stage behind the closed curtain, and where one boy once showed me that if you hit only the black keys then it sounded like Chinese music. But that evening I forgot all about the music because besides the piano on the stage, there were several boys from senior grades who had a pair of real boxing gloves!

We dared to ask permission to touch the gloves’ shiny leather and try them on. The senior graders kindly allowed us that, and then they had an idea of holding a match between the sprats, a fighter from the Gorka (that is someone from the blocks atop the hill) against someone of Lowlanders who dwelt in the rows of timber houses at the foot of the Gorka upland.

The choice fell on me—O! and I wanted it so dearly!—and so did red-haired fatty Vovka from among the Lowlanders. As the stage was illuminated too poorly for the match, all the present went over to the gym hallway under the bright bulb reflected in the ink-black winter darkness behind the wide window-pane, and they commanded “box!” to me and Vovka.

At first, we both chuckled punching each other with the bulky balls of gloves, but soon we grew hot and angry. I in earnest wanted to deal a good one in his head while in his eyes in that very head you unmistakably could read his craving to knock me down. Before long my left shoulder, which kept receiving all his blows, felt terribly sore, while my right hand, that kept hitting his shoulder, grew limp and floppy. Probably, his state was no better, our giggles turned into puffing and gasping. It was bad and unbearably painful because his blows, like, penetrated to the very bone of my forearm, but I would rather die than beat retreat. At last, the big boys got bored with such a monotony, they told us “enough!” and took away their gloves.

The next morning a purple-black bruise decorated my left forearm and for several following days I was very touchy at that spot, ducking even from a friendly pat and issuing the hiss of self-defending gander…

~ ~ ~

If the Courtyard was covered by powder snow but not too deep, all of our family went out to clean the carpet and the runner. We spread them face down on the snow and stomped on their backs. Then the carpet was turned over, the snow from the snowdrifts about it got swept with a broom onto all of the carpet’s face and then swept away. Done. And we folded the carpet.

The long green runner remained face down after the stomping, and the 4 of us—Mom and the 3 children—gathered upon it, and Dad dragged the runner over the snowdrifts with