The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
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When a mobile menagerie arrived in the city, they would arrange their trailers and cages into a big square camp in the sector between the streetcar track and the Sewing Factory. The temporary enclosure looked like the Czech Taborites defense camp from the Hussite wars in The Medieval History textbook. Yet, inside their corral of wagons, they placed two additional rows of cages, back to back, for the thick crowd of Konotopers and folks from the nearby villages to walk around them as well as along the cages in the inner side of the mobile perimeter wall.
Square legends in the cage gratings announced the name and age of the inmate, and the surf-like hum from the throng of on-lookers hung over Square of the Konotop Divisions, interspersed with wild shrieks and wailing of the caged animals. That happened once every three years….
And a couple of times the Wall of Death riders also visited Square of the Konotop Divisions. In front of the gate to the City Kolkhoz Market, they erected a high tarpaulin tent with a five-meter-tall ring-wall of planks inside.
Two times a day, they let the on-lookers to climb in from outside under the tent roof and crane their on-looking faces over the wall top and watch how the riders circled arena on two motorcycles to gain the speed sufficient for getting over the ramp onto the ring-wall, and bucket along it in a horizontal plane with the deafening rumble of their motors…
Leaving Square of the Konotop Divisions by Lenin Street, you passed the Vorontsov Movie Theater on the left followed by the three-story cube of House of Householding with all kinds of repair workshops and ateliers. By the fence between the 2 landmarks and parallel to it was placed a tall stand of iron pipes and sheets. The catching legend “DO NOT PASS BY!” crowned the sturdy construction used for hanging black-and-white photos of people taken to the Sober-up Station, a paper slip beneath each glazed frame reported their name and what organizations they worked at. Some ripper creepy pictures they were, the close-ups of faces as if got skinned, or something. I felt a kinda pity for the alcoholics hanged there. Probably, because of that another, far away stand at the Object which I abhorred so much. The two stands established sort of affinity between me and, well… at least, their kids… No, I don’t think I exercised in any psycho-analytical speculations then, yet how come whenever passing that particular segment of Lenin Street I always found something else to look at beyond the ugly stand?
Farther on along Lenin Street, past the first crossing, the House of Culture of the Red Metallurgist Plant stood a little way back, moved off the road by the tiny square of its own. Both sides of that square were bound by the stands planted for merrier ends, presenting glue-mounted pages from satirical magazines – the Russian “Crocodile” on the left, and the Ukrainian “Pepper” on the right.
Between the road and each of the stands, there was a tin-and-glass stall facing its symmetric twin across the square. The one by the “Crocodile” was selling ice-cream and lemonade, while all sorts of nick-knackery were the merchandise at that by the “Pepper”. There, among the motley keep-sake ceramic trifles, plastic necklaces, paper decks of cards, I spotted sets of matchbox stickers and, starting for my next trip to City, I asked for extra kopecks and bought one, with the pictures of animals. However, when I brought the purchase home to enhance the collection brought from the Object, I realized it wouldn’t be right. The older stickers, peeled off their matchboxes, bore the small-printed address of the match manufacturing factory, as well as “the price – 1 kopeck”, while the set bought from the stall was just a pack of sticker-sized pictures. Since then I had lost all interest in the collection, and passed it to my friend Skully…
Skully lived by the Nezhyn Store with his mother, and grandmother, and the dog named Pirate, although the last dwelt outside the puny house of so small a kitchen and bedroom that both would fit into the only room of our khutta, however, theirs was a detached property.
Next to their khutta there stood an adobe-plastered shed which, apart from usual household tools and the coal stored for winter, sheltered a handcart – an elongated box of deals fixed upon the axis of 2 iron wheels the length of iron pipe that jutted from under the box bottom ended with a crossbar for steering the juggernaut when you pushed it or pulled along.
Between the khutta and the wicket to the street, there stretched a long garden enclosed from both sides by the neighbors’ fences which, all in all, was bigger than those two or three vegetable beds of ours. In autumn and spring, I came to help Skully at the seasonal turning of dirt in their garden. Deeply stabbing the soil with our bayonet spades, we gave out the fashionable Settlement byword, “No Easter cake for you, buddy! Grab a piroshki and off to work, the beds wait for digging!” And red Pirate, cut loose, frisked and galloped about the old cherry trees bounding the narrow path to the rickety wicket…
When we moved to Konotop, my first and foremost responsibility became fetching water for our khutta. Daily supply averaged 50 liters. A pair of enamel pails full of water stood in the dark nook of the tiny veranda, on two stools next to the kerosene stove. From a nail in the plank wall above the pails, there hung a dipper for drinking or filling a cooking pan. But first, the pails were used to fill up the tank of the washstand in the kitchen that held exactly two pailfuls.
Mounted above the tin sink, the tank had
