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

by the uncertainty of the punishment for getting raised the question of expelling. That uncertainty nagged me till the end of the week with the Parents’ Day on Sunday…

Our parents came as usual, and Mom shared between us condensed milk and biscuits, but she never mentioned my involvement in the disruptive occurrence. A beam of hope flicked for me—perhaps, Camp Director forgot to inform my parents!

When they left, Natasha told me that Mom new about the incident all along and, in my absence, asked her who else was among the runaways.

On getting the exhaustive report, she turned to Dad and said, “Well, you bet, the kids of those aren’t going to be expelled.”

~ ~ ~

At the end of that same summer, there occurred a drastic change in our Block’s way of life. Now, every morning and evening, a slow-go garbage truck entered the Courtyard, honked loudly and waited for the tenants of the houses to bring their garbage buckets and empty them into its dump. Besides, they took away the rusty boxes from the garbage bins enclosure and nailed up its gate.

In September in the field between the Bugorok-Knoll and the defunct enclosure, there for several days roared and clattered a bulldozer moving mountains of earth. Then it disappeared, leaving behind a wide field leveled two meters lower than the one we used to play football, yet without a single grass blade crisscrossed instead by footprints of its caterpillar tracks in the raw ground…

A month later, they organized a Sunday of Collective Free Work for adults only, but my Dad allowed me to go with him too. On the edge of the wood behind the next block, there stood a long building very much alike to the barrack in the pioneer camp, and the people who participated in the Sunday of Collective Free Work attacked it from all ends and started to demolish.

My Dad climbed to the very top. He tore away whole chunks of the roof and sent them down shouting his farewell, “Eh! Pulling down differs from building up – no blueprints needed!”

I liked that Sunday of Collective Free Work very little because they would drive you away everywhere, “Don’t come closer!” And simply listening to the screams of nails being torn from the beams and boards, becomes boring quite soon…

(…I cannot now recollect if it was it on the eve of that Sunday or immediately after it, that Nikita Khrushchev got deposed and Leonid Brezhnev became the ruler of the USSR in his place.

Ew! So untimely! When there remained just 18 years before Communism get built in our country!.)

In his very practical book, Ernest Seton-Thompson insists that bows have to be made of Ash-tree boughs. But could you find an Ash-tree at the Object, please?

The woods around the Block were populated by Pines and Fir-trees, as well as deciduous Birch and Aspen, and all the rest might be considered just shrubs. That’s why, following the advice of the neighbor at our landing, Stepan Zimin, my bows were made of Juniper.

It’s important to make the right choice because the Juniper for a bow should not be too old, having lots of side branches, neither too thick which would be impossible to bend. A tree of about one-and-a-half-meter tall would be the thing, both springy and strong. The arrow shot with the bow made of such a Juniper would rise in the gray autumn sky about thirty meters or so, you’d barely see it before its precipitous down-fall to stick the ground by the arrowhead of a nail fixed, as tight as you can, with electrical tape.

The best material for an arrow shaft is a thin plaster lath, all you have to do is just split it lengthwise, round and shave the shaft with a knife, then smooth it with sandpaper. It’s only my arrows missed fletching, although Seton-Thompson explains how it is done. But where could I get the feathers from? No use to ask Dad, there’s nothing but machinery at his work….

On the winter vacations, I learned that the boys from both blocks on the Gorka often visited the Regiment Club for watching movies there. (The Regiment was where the soldiers carried on their army service after graduating from the Recruit Depot Barracks.) Going there for the first time was a bit scary because of the vague rumors among children about some soldier strangling some girl in the forest. No one could explain how and why, but that bad soldier must have been a “blackstrapper” while in the Regiment all the soldiers wore red shoulder straps.

The way to the Regiment was not short, two times as long as to school which you bypassed on the right and the trail became wider and straighter, bound by the walls of tall Fir-trees until you went out onto the tarmac road which ended by the gate guarded by sentries, however, they did not stop boys and you could go on to the building with the signboard Regiment Club.

Inside, you got into a wide long corridor with 3 double doors in its blind wall. The other wall had windows in it and between them, as well as between the double doors, there hung a row of same-sized pictures portraying different soldiers and officers with brief descriptions of their selfless deeds and heroic deaths defending our Soviet Homeland.

The wide double doors opened to a huge hall without windows and full of plywood seats arranged in rows facing the wide stage with crimson velvet curtains. Those were partly drawn to both sides so as to open the wide white screen for movies. From the stage to the back wall—which had a pair of square black holes high up, near the ceiling, for movie projection—stretched the long passage splitting the hall into two equal halves…

The soldiers entered in groups, speaking loudly, stomping their boots against the boards in the paint-coated floor and, gradually, they filled the seats with their uniformed mass and the whole of the hall with the thick indistinct hum of their