The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 109
By the point in the plank side to which the readied crook is pulled, you add the trigger-frame of the same aluminum wire strung crosswise so as to keep the crook in place until you pull the trigger. The pressure for keeping the trigger-frame in place and holding the cocked up crook at ready originates from a common rubber band, like that in underpants, stretched taut from the trigger to the screw in the downside of the planed plank.
The boys armed with such weapons do not run about yelling “ta-ta-ta!” as in War-Mommy. They leave those naive games for kindergarten kids and go down into basements and start hunting each other in the dark. Metallic “dzink!” of a crook against the cemented floor, or the wooden walls, hints that the enemy is near and opened fire at you. But securing the position in the pit above the floor at the end of the corridor, you are as safe as in an impregnable bunker. You have to just sit tight up there and send crooks to the sound of stealthy steps, and if you hear “ouch!” from the dark, then you have targeted him okay…
In autumn, they finished construction of the five-story apartment block across the road surrounding Block. The happy tenants were moving into their flats while deep down, in the endless basement corridors of so big a building (the first of that height and size at the Object), there unfolded unprecedented combat actions with the employment of crook weapons of all types.
Initially, the huge underground basement was illuminated with electric bulbs placed rarely but evenly, they lived but a short life: long-range crook shots burst them up, one by one, into fine splinters. Perhaps, the only drawback of the crook weapons was their almost complete noiselessness. For real self-assertion, you need your arms to do some major bangs…
(…life just cannot stand still, it has to flow. Where to? The direction conforms to the dearest dreams of those swimming in the flow, sort of…)
More and more often, the evening quietude in the Courtyard got disrupted by sharp snaps alike to gun reports because the boys had armed themselves with peelikkalkas but I, as usual, straggled behind the advanced trends in the flow of social life, which made me beg for instructions to manufacture a peelikkalka.
Take 15 cm. length of a narrow section (0.5 cm.) copper tube and bend till it resembles letter L. The foot of the resulting L is flattened with a hammer. Thru the remaining orifice, pore a small amount of molten lead into the tube to form a smooth leaden bottom by the angle to L’s foot.
Find a thick long nail reaching the leaden bottom and still sticking out from the tube for at least 5 cm. and bend the nail at 4 cm. from its head (you’ve got another L now).
Insert the nail into the tube (the contraption resembles the left bracket “[”, or right bracket “]”, depending on your point of view) and as a result, you have a working piston-cylinder shebang.
Connect the bent nail head and the flattened tube foot using a common rubber band, like that used in underpants, now the whole construction looks like a small bow and your peelikkalka is ready.
Pull the nail halfway out from the tube, the tension of the band forces the nail rest against the copper wall of the tube at the point to which you pulled the nail out.