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

a hinged lid and a tap jutting from its bottom. It was one of those spring-pin taps installed in the toilets of cars in a passenger train, so to make water run you pressed the pin from underneath. From the sink, the soapsuds dripped into the cabinet under it where stood the slop bucket which needed control checks to avoid brimming over and flooding the kitchen floor. The discharge was taken out and poured into the spill pit next to the outhouse in the garden.

The water came from the pump on the corner of Nezhyn and Gogol Streets, some forty meters from our wicket. The meter-tall pig-iron stub of a pump had the nose of the same material enclosing the waterpipe, you hung your pail over the nose and gave a big push-down to the iron handle behind the stub for the vigorous jet to bang into the pail, brim and go splashing over onto the road if not watched closely. 2 daily water-walks–4 pails, all in all–were enough for our khutta, if, of course, there was no washing that day, however, the water for Aunt Lyouda’s washing was fetched by Uncle Tolik…

When the rains set in, the water-walks became a little longer—you had to navigate bypassing the wide puddles in the road. In winter the pump got surrounded by a small, ripping slippery, skating rink of its own from thanks to the water spillage by the pump users, the smooth ice had to be walked in careful step-shuffles. The dark winter nights made you appreciate the perfect positioning of the log lamppost next to the pump…

And also on me was the fuel delivery for the kerogas that looked like a small gas stove of 2 burners and had 2 cups on its backside to fill them with kerosene that soaked, thru 2 thin tubes, 2 circular wicks of asbestos in the burners which were lit when cooking dinner, heating water for tea or imminent washing on the smelly yellow flames edged by jagged jerky tips of oily soot.

After kerosene, I went to Bazaar with a twenty-liter tin canister… Fairly aside from the Bazaar counters, stood the huge cubic tank of rusty sheet iron. The sale day was announced in the chalk note over the tank side – "kerosene will be …" and there followed the date when they were to bring it. However, so too many dates had changed each other—wiped and written over and over again—that no figures could be read within the thick chalk smudge, that’s why they just dropped writing and the tank side greeted you with the perpetually optimistic line, "kerosene will be …!”

A shallow brick-faced trench under the tank side accommodated the short length of pipe from its bottom ending with a tap blocked by a padlock. On the proclaimed day, a saleswoman in a blue satin smock descended into the trench and sat by the tap on a small stool ferried along. She also brought a multi-liter aluminum cauldron, and put it under the tap, took the padlock away and filled the vessel, up to three-quarters, with the foamy yellowish jet of kerosene.

The queue started moving to her with their bottles, canisters, and cans which she filled with a dipper thru a tin funnel, collecting the pay into her blue pocket. When the dipper began to dub the cauldron bottom, she turned the tap on to restore the fluid level.

In fact, they didn't need at all to bother about writing the sale date, because each morning Grandma Katya visited Bazaar and two days ahead brought the news when "kerosene will be …!" indeed. So, on the kerosene sale day after coming from school, I took the canister and went to spend a couple of hours in the line to the trench under the tank. Sometimes, they were also selling it in the Nezhyn Store backyard equipped with the same facility, but that happened not as often and the line was no shorter…

~ ~ ~

Soon after the summer vacations, I was elected Chairman of the Pioneer Platoon Council of our 7th "B" grade because the former Chairman (the red-haired skinny Yemets) moved to some other city together with her parents.

At the Pioneer Platoon meeting, two of the nominees announced self-withdrawal without giving any particular reasons for their refusal, and the Senior Pioneer Leader of our school pushed forward my candidature.

Following the trend, I also started sluggish excuses, which he rebuffed with energetic clarification that all that was not for long because we all were soon to become members of the Leninist Young Communist League, aka Komsomol.

(…the structure of the pioneer organizations in the Soviet Union presented an awesome example of organization based on precise and well-thought-out organizational principles for organizing any workable organization.

In every Soviet school, each class of students on reaching the proper age automatically became a Platoon of Young Pioneers of 4 or 5 Pioneer Rings. Ring Leaders together with Platoon Chairman formed the Council of the Pioneer Platoon. Chairmen of the Pioneer Platoons made up the Council of the School Pioneer Company. Then there came District or City Pioneer Organizations converging into Republican ones (15 of them) which, in their turn, composed the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

Such a crystal-wise-structured pyramid for convenient handling… That is why the heroes of Komsomol resistance underground during the German occupation of Krasnodon City did not have to reinvent the wheel. They used the all too familiar structure after renaming "rings" into "cells"…

If, of course, we take for granted the attestation found in The Young Guard, the novel written by A. Fadeyev. He composed his work on the basis of information provided by the relatives of Oleg Koshevoy. In the resulting literary work, Oleg became the underground leader while Victor Tretyakevich, who, actually, accepted Oleg to the resistance organization, was depicted there as the mean traitor under the fictional name of Stakhevich.

Fourteen years after the book publication, Tretyakevich was rehabilitated and awarded an order posthumously because he did not die during interrogations at organs of the Soviet