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

I grew curious about the unheard-of vegetable. Well, though sour, it still was tasty but picking it turned a literal toil because its leaves were so too tiny.

Or else, my sister Natasha would bring the news that in the swamp behind the next block, there were myriads of blueberries, and one boy from the other block brought home a whole milk-can of them! Now, the spirit of competition drove me to the same swamp, I had to collect more blueberries than any “one boy”! Good news the Lowlanders hadn’t come to pillage harvest from a swamp upon the Gorka…

But usually, I wandered there alone and almost without any purpose, well, except for hunting a Juniper to make another good bow, or collecting green Pine cones for all sorts of hand-crafted toys.

Stick 4 matches into a green cone and here you have the body of a quadruped. To the body standing on all the four, add a vertical match as the would-be neck, pierce a smaller cone and spit it with the ‘neck’ match—wow!—you’ve got a horse now! Just don’t forget to attach a tail to it.

After green cones, you have to climb up young Pine trees, whose light-brown bark peels off all too easily to smear your hands with sticky colorless resin, which a few minutes later turns into blackish spots all over your palms, while on your pants it stays as white stains, yet still as sticky as your blackened hands.

The young Pine trees are swaying with the wind and under your weight, Yea-hoo! Super whooper! And their cones are so nice: green scales pressed densely to each other, all glossy as if lacquered, quite different to the cones picked on the ground under big old trees whose cones also got old and black with their scales ruffled and sticking loosely all apart. Yet, even in big Pines, you can find green cones as well, only they’re hanging from the very tips of those boughs where you can't climb or pull and bend closer to the branch you’re sitting on because they're way too thick…

New occupations spread among boys much faster than a wildfire. As soon as one of them put his hand on some new trick, you’d hardly find the time to wink your eye but everyone already is, like a busy beaver, all in manufacturing explosives.

A land mine of delayed action you can produce just hands down. Fill a glass bottle with water, three-quarter up, and thru the bottle’s neck stuff in a wisp of grass, then pour the bluish powder of crushed carbide on top. (Carbide is stored in an iron barrel at the construction site of a five-story building across the road around Block, blackstrapper-soldiers would blink at your ladling handfuls of it into your pants pocket.) Now, seal the bottle tight with a cork whittled from a wood chip, turn the bottle upside down and insert it into some pile of earth or sand. The land mine is ready.

A word of warning!! Be cautious not to cut your fingers when whittling the cork and, secondly, when sitting on the ground and driving the cork into the charged bottle, don’t keep the bottle’s neck between your thighs because it might crack and some stray shard would cut your skin just where the shorts end, as it was in my case…

It only remains to wait until the carbide, after getting in contact with the water in the bottle, has issued too much gas for the bottle walls to hold the pressure and it explodes with a loud pop, sending sand and glass splinters in all directions.

Being a book-addict, I often failed to follow the mainstream developments in ever-changing public life…

When tired of reading, I spread the book next to a big sofa’s armrest, covers up for the seat to keep it open at the right page and ready to be read on by my return from the Courtyard. Then down I went and stepped out of the entrance door—surprise! A caravan of differently aged boys were crossing the Courtyard hauling pieces of boards, planks, beams… I ran up to ask: what’s up? how? where?

They told me to run to the construction site of the five-story building, where another group of boys still collected useful timber that a blackstrapper soldier-guard allowed to lift off. And I arrived there just in time to grab the end of a long plank, chiseled from the guard by elder boys. The soldier only said to be quick, before any one saw us.

Like a string of diligent ants, we dragged the pillage across the Courtyard and down the Gorka, then into the forest at the foot of the steep slope made of the earth chuted down by the bulldozer when leveling the ground for the skating rink.

There, between the trees, sounded hand-saws and hammers clapped in eager heat of enthusiastic labor. The bigger boys were sawing boards and nailing them to the pillars piled into the ground.

With the trained eye of a Construction Modeling Designer, I at a glance saw that it was a shed without any windows and with one, already hinged up, door. Inside, there stood a wooden ladder leaned on the wall beneath the square hatch in the ceiling of long boards. Up I climbed and out onto the flat roof and, at the same time, ceiling of the structure.

A couple of bigger boys were there discussing whether the roof was strong enough and reassuring one another that the shed would serve the headquarters for boys from our Block and not from the twin one.

I asked for a chance to work with a handsaw or hammer, but neither of them gave me his, and they even ordered me to go down and not strain the yielding roof by my additional weight.

I climbed down the ladder. In the half-dark shed and around it, there stayed no one of my peers, and going home to the book waiting for me upon the big sofa, I felt happy that the boys of