The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 116

I looked after the boy who walked away, and noticed the rough patches in the back of his pants…

In Moscow, we arrived the next morning. I wanted to see the Capital of our Homeland from its very beginning and kept asking when Moscow would, at last, start, until the conductor said that we were in the city already. But behind the pane in the car’s window, there were running the same shabby log huts as at the stations of Valdai, only much more of them and closer to each other, and they did not want to end in any way. And only when our train pulled in under the high arc of the station roof, I believed that it was Moscow.

We went on foot to the other station which was very close. There Dad again punched the tickets but that time we had to wait until evening for the train, so he handed the suitcase over to the storage room and we boarded an excursion bus going to the Kremlin.

Inside the Kremlin walls, they warned that we shouldn’t take any pictures whatsoever. Dad had to demonstrate there was no camera in the leather case hanging from his shoulder but his homemade radio which they allowed to keep, only now I had to carry it on.

There were white-walled houses in the Kremlin and dark Fir-trees, but too few, although thick-trunked and tall.

The excursion was brought to the Czar Bell with its chopped out wall. It happened when the Czar Bell fell from the belfry and couldn’t ring ever since, which is a pity. And when we came to the Czar Cannon, I instantly climbed the pile of the large polished cannonballs under her nose and shoot my head into the muzzle. It looked like insides of a huge pipe with lots of dust on the circular wall.

“Whose kid is that?! Take him away!!” cried some man outside the cannon, running up from the nearest Fir-tree.

Dad admitted that I was his and, until we left the Kremlin, he had to hold me by the hand, though the day was hot.

When the bus returned to the railway station, Dad said that he needed to buy a watch, although he did not have much money. So, we entered a store where there were lots of different watches under the glass in the counter top, and Dad asked me which one to buy. Remembering his complaint that he was short of money, I pointed at the cheapest— for 7 rubles, but Dad did not accept and bought an expensive wristwatch— for 25….

In the village of Kanino, we lived in the log hut of Grandma Martha, made up of one large room with 2 windows opposite the wide-and-tall Russian stove.

Behind the hut, there was a lean-to of logs attached to it. The windowless lean-to was empty, strewn with stray wisps of old hay, and smelled of dust. There I found three books: a historical novel about the general Bagration in the war of 1812 against Napoleonic invasion, a long story of how they established the Soviet rule among the Indians in the Chukchi Peninsula chasing the Whites in dog sleds, and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Once, my Dad’s brother and sister came to visit, they both lived in the same village but were too busy at the collective farm, kolkhoz. Grandma Martha cooked a round yellow omelet for the occasion; I don’t remember the meals on other days…

The village of Kanino was divided into two parts by the hollow holding a slowly rolling, broad and noiseless, creek. Its both banks were solid walls of an uninterrupted willow thicket at some places closing overhead. And the stream was pretty shallow—a little bit above the knees, with a pleasant sandy bottom. I liked to wander in its slow current.