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

The Nezhyn Store gained that name because it stood in Nezhyn Street and it was the largest of all the 3 stores in the Settlement. The smaller ones were named by their numbers.

The premises of Nezhyn Store occupied a separate one-story brick building and a backyard. It comprised 4 departments entered separately and marked by the time-worn tin frames over their doors: “Bread”, “Industrial Goods”, “Grocery”, and “Fish and Vegetables”.

The “Bread” opened in the morning to work until all of the “white” loaves and darker “brick”-bread there got sold out and they could safely lock the emptied department. In the afternoon, with the arrival of the food truck delivering another bunch of “bricks” and loaves from the Konotop Bread Factory, it opened again.

The next, and also the biggest, department—“Industrial Goods”—had two shop windows adorned by dust-smeared miniaturized boxes of security signalization pressed to their panes from inside, on both sides of its mighty door. The store-soiled goods in the glazed showcase-counters were looked after by 3 dead bored saleswomen because they hardly saw a couple of customers a day. The Settlement population, when in need of such goods, preferred to travel to shops in City.

But the 2 saleswomen in the “Grocery” department had their hands full all day long. At times, there even formed a queue, especially on the days when the butter was brought to the department and they cut its huge yellow cube, put next to the scales, with their enormously big knife and wrapped your 2 or 3 hundred grams into the friable blue paper.

And when the “Grocery” was entered by a workman from the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, he was served without standing in the queue because in his palm there was a thoroughly counted and readied amount of kopecks for his vodka, which saved the trouble of counting the change. Besides, he was to come back to his workplace as soon as possible for which end he arrived without changing from his boiler suites, aka spetzovka.

The choice of vodkas in the department was fairly extensive, of different colors and names— “Zubrovka”, “Erofeich”, “ Let’s Have One More…”, but people bought only “Moscow Vodka” with its green and white sticker.

The concluding “Fish and Vegetables” department was mostly locked not to disturb its empty dormant shelves and the dried-earth smell left by potatoes sold out last year…

And after the Nezhyn Store, there were Locksmith Street, Wheels Street and in the unexplored as yet depths of the Settlement other streets and lanes and blind alleys…

~ ~ ~

The very first Sunday after our arrival, Aunt Lyouda led me and my sister-'n'-brother to Professions Street that was the only asphalted street in the Settlement. We went along it in the direction of Bazaar and in 5 minutes reached the Plant Club for the 3 o’clock movie show for children.

The Plant Club was a mighty two-story building but as tall as a four-storied one. The masonry in its walls and windows had lots of arches, ledges, and columns, like, a lace-work of smoky bricks. The concrete wall of the Plant enclosure did not miss to surround the backside of the Club as well. In the small square in front of it, there was the Plant Main Check-Entrance built in the same ornate ante-revolution style of masonry, opposed by the modernist structure of the two-story-as-two-story murkily-glazed cube of the Plant Canteen.

We entered the lofty lobby in the Plant Club full of diverse-aged but equally shrill children lining to the small window in the tin-clad door of the ticket office. One boy, a second-grader by his looks, started leaching Aunt Lyouda for ten kopecks to buy himself a ticket, but she snapped at him and he shut up. She seemed to enjoy visiting the Plant Club for an afternoon show for children…

So I learned the route to the Club where, among other things, there also was the Plant Library of two huge halls. The desks in the first one bore the layers of newspapers’ filings, wide and thick. Behind the glazed doors in the tall cabinets lined by the walls, there stood familiar rows of never-asked-for works by Lenin, and Marx, and Engels and other similarly popular multi-volume collections.

The next hall had the stacks with normal books for reading. Needless to say, I enrolled immediately because the choice of books on the two shelves in our school library was niggardly poor…

On May Day, our school marched out for the all-city demonstration. The school column looked lively and lovely thanks to the young pioneers and their ceremonial uniform—white shirts and red neckties, all washed, ironed, crisp—while the students of senior grades were responsible for weightier decorations, the heads of the current Members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in their portraits on roughly smoothed and painted red stocks in the hands of carriers (one Member per three-four carriers, in turn, rotating each 20-30 min.).

Headed by the group of teachers, we walked the uneven cobbles in Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street to Bazaar where Professions Street shared its asphalt to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street for its dive thru the Under-Overpass. The ascend from the tunnel on its opposite end became an influent to Peace Avenue stretched away to the tall railway embankment in the distance, after which it ran thru the housing area of five-story buildings, named Zelenchuk, followed by the City center – Peace Square. Peace Avenue, tangentially passing Peace Square, separated it from the City Council concealed behind the greens opposite to the granite-rimmed, never working, fountain in the middle of Peace Square concluded by the edifice of Peace Movie Theater.

The middle one of the three alleys in the greens which led directly to the City Council’s entrance porch was blocked, because of the demonstration, with the red platform past which the whole city marched in the holiday demonstrations, except for the tenants of the five-story buildings bounding the square who watched demonstrations from their balconies. I did envy the