The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 110
Squeeze the peelikkalka in your palm, the band pressed to the tube makes the nail slide inside and sharply hit the leaden bottom. So much for a trial blank shot.
Now, it remains only to load the firearms, for which purpose the nail is fully taken out and the tube loaded with scrapings of sulfur from a couple of match heads.
Insert the nail back, cock it up with the band and “Hello, world!” with a live shot from your weapon. Bang!…
In the evening dark, the splash of flame shooting out from the tube orifice looks quite impressive. On the whole, it’s the same principle as in toy pistols with paper pistons, yet distinctly enhanced in decibels…
On learning the theory, I wanted to manufacture a peelikkalka of my own, but Dad did not have a copper tube of the right size at his work.
Still and all, I had it. Probably, one of the boys gave me an odd one of his.
You can't deny that in an extra-curricular way, a schoolboy gets better training for real life…
(…never heard the “peelikkalka” word, eh?. me neither—well, outside the Object—yet the name ain’t a jot less luring than that of “derringer”…)
~ ~ ~
As concerned mainstream schooling, our class was moved to the one-story building in the lower part of the school grounds, about a hundred meters from the principal building. Apart from our classroom, the building comprised a couple of workshop rooms for Handicraft classes equipped with vices and even a lathe in one of them. Because the school curriculum had more important subjects, that room was rarely open, two or three days a week to accommodate the grades visiting our territory.
Studying in the outskirts of school grounds has lots of advantages. During the breaks, you can have crazy races in the corridor free of the risk to stumble into some patrolling teacher as is their custom in the main building.
Besides, the teachers entered our class no sooner than some self-appointed sentinel or two of ours, playing outside, would race in with the announcement which subject was heading to us from up there. And an outdoors lookout was simply the must not to be caught at bullying a socket in the classroom wall into whose holes with 220 V we stuck the legs of radio-electronic resistances. In the resulting short circuit, the resistance would burst and spew around indignant sparks of blinding flame.
(…presently I’m just bewildered why none of us had ever got electroshocked. It seems, the mains sockets in that room were too human…)
Life was changing in our house too. The Zimins family left when Stepan was made redundant because Nikita Khrushchev, when in the position of the USSR’s Ruler, gave the West a promise of drastic cuts in the contingent of the Soviet Army reducing it to the meager twenty millions of servicemen. Soon after that, he was made to retire, yet the new leadership kept the promise true and the reduction policies affected even our Object.
Besides the Zimins, the tenants from the apartment beneath us left also. Their grown-up daughter Julia presented us, 3 children from the upper floor, with her album of matchbox stickers collection.
At those times matchboxes were made not of cardboard with printed pictures on it, but of very thin, one-layer, plywood blanketed by taut blue tissue upon which there was mounted one or another sticker portraying the famous ballet dancer Ulanova or some sea animal, or a hero astronaut in it. People collected matchbox stickers just like the post-stamp hobbyists only, first, you had to peel them off a box soaked in water and then, of course, to dry up.