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

of my Mom, who had not yet had time to take her coat off. Then, while they stood, oddly still and silent, facing each other, something ungraspable happened to Dad’s hand, which, as if the only moving part in their frozen confrontation, broke the stillness by an awkward short slap against each of Mom’s cheeks.

Mom said, “Kolya! What’s that?” and she burst into tears which I had never seen.

Dad started yelling and demonstrating a saucer with cigarette butts which he found behind the blind on the windowsill in the kitchen. Mom tried to say something about her woman-friend neighbor, but Dad rebuffed in a loud voice that Belomor-Canal cigarettes were not a women’s smoke. He flung his sheepskin overcoat on and, before getting out, yelled, “But you swore to never ever even shit within a mile off him!”

The door slammed furiously, Mom went to the kitchen and then across the landing to her new woman-friend in the former Zimins’ rooms. I put on my coat and felt boots, and went to the rink again. On my way I met my sister-’n’-brother coming back home, I did not say anything to them about what happened there.

At the rink, I was hanging around until full dark. I had no wish to play, neither wanted to go back home, so I just milled about aimlessly or sat by the stove in the shed.

Then Natasha came up to me on the ice empty of anyone already, she said that Mom and my brother were waiting for me on the road and that at home Dad dumped the Christmas Tree on the floor and kicked Sasha, and now we were going to sleepover at some acquaintances’.

Under the desolate light of lamps above the empty road, the 4 of us walked to the five-story building, where Mom knocked on the door to an apartment on the first door. There lived the family of some officer with two children, I knew the boy from the school, but not his sister, who was from a too senior grade.

Mom shared some sandwiches she brought along, but I did not feel like eating. She went to sleep together with my sister-’n’-brother on the folding coach, and I was bedded on the carpet next to the bookcase. Thru its glass doors, I saw The Captain Dare-Devil by Louis Bussenard and asked for permission to read it, while the light from the kitchen was reaching the carpet…

In the morning, we left and crossed the Courtyard to one of the corner buildings, I knew that it was the hostel for officers though I never had entered it. In the long corridor on the second floor, Mom told us to wait because she needed to talk with the man whose name she mentioned but I've forgotten it entirely.

For some time, the 3 of us waited silently on the landing, then Mom showed up in the corridor and led us home. She opened the door with her key. From the hallway, thru the open door to the parents’ room, the Christmas tree was seen dropped on its side by the balcony door, splinters of smashed decorations scattered the carpet around it.

The wardrobe stood with its doors ajar, and in front of it there was a soft mound of Mom’s clothes, each one ripped from top to bottom…

Dad was away from home for a whole week, but then Natasha said that he was coming back and so it happened the following day. And we started to live on further again…

~ ~ ~

When the vacations ended, I found a newspaper package in my schoolbag, the uneaten sandwich stayed there from the last school day in the previous term. The rotten ham imparted the schoolbag a putrid stench. Mom washed it from within with soap and the fetor got weaker but still stayed…

At school, they held the contest between the pioneer grades at collecting waste paper.

After classes, the pioneers from our class, in groups of threes or fours, visited the houses of Block and the five-story buildings, knocked on doors, and asked if they had some waste paper. At times, they presented us with huge piles of old newspapers and magazines, but I never went to the corner building housing the hostel for officers. Instead, I proposed my group of pioneer collectors to visit the Detachment’s Library, where they gave us a sizable score of books. Some of them were pretty worn and tattered but others quite fresh as, for instance, The last of Mohicans by Fennimore Cooper with nice engraving pictures which only missed some 10 pages at the end….

One evening, when we were playing Hide-and-seek in the snow burrows along the far side of the ice rink, some senior boy said that he could lift five people at once, and easily too, with just one hand. It seemed so improbable that I bet. He only warned that the five people should lie down in a compact group for him to grip conveniently.

So, he and I, as opponents, and a few more boys went towards the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the light of lamps illuminating the rink and found a level spot.

I lay down on my back in the snow and, following his instructions, stretched out my arms and legs, for the four boys to lie upon them: one boy on each, all in all, five people.

Yet, he never tried to lift us. I felt fingers of a stranger unbuttoning my pants and entering my underwear. Unable to break loose from under the four boys who pinned me to the ground, I only yelled and shouted them to get off and let me go.

Then suddenly I felt free because they all ran away. I buttoned my pants up and went home angry with myself that I could so easily be fooled. Scored one more visit to the topmast with a teapot.

(…and only quite recently it suddenly dawned on me that it was not a practical joke as with “showing Moscow”. It was the check to verify suspicions aroused by