The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 122

When they entered the hallway, Dad’s face was very angry. Without taking off his coat, he headed to the kitchen and brought a stool to the parents’ room, where he moved the rug aside and smashed the stool against the floor. “Keep quiet, eh?!” shouted he to the floorboards and squarely banged them once again with the stool’s seat, “Is it okay now?”

I realized that we would not be punished, but something still was somehow not right….

When leaving for school, we took along the sandwiches wrapped by Mom in newspaper sheets so that during a break we would take them out of our schoolbags and eat. For Sasha and Natasha, she put two sandwiches in one package because they studied in the same class. And before leaving for school, we also had breakfast in the kitchen.

However, on that particular Saturday, I left without my schoolbag and alone because that day the senior students were having a military game for which reason the classes for junior schoolchildren were canceled.

The game participants belonged to the competing groups of “the Blues” and “the Greens”, and for the start, they were to march into the forest in different directions. Their goal was to track down the opponent forces, surprise them, and capture their banner. Each trooper had to wear paper shoulder straps whose color indicated the group they were from. A gamester with one shoulder strap torn off became a prisoner of war while missing both meant they were "killed"…

That morning, I came to the kitchen late for breakfast because normally I got up wakened by the rise of the younger ones, but they enjoyed their day-off at the moment. Secondly, the previous night till late I kept sewing the shoulder straps onto my jacket with tiny, frequent, diligent stitches so that they would sit close to hinder tearing them off because of which military preparations I went to bed about midnight…

Now Mom was already leaving for her work and said there remained some pasta cooked for the previous day dinner or, if so be my wish, I could boil an egg for my breakfast.

I reminded her that I knew nothing about cooking eggs, but she answered it was as easy as pie: to have a soft-boiled egg you boil it for a minute and a half while three-minute boiling makes it hard-boiled. She even brought the alarm-clock from their room and put it on the windowsill next to the mushroom jar before taking a hurried leave…

Such three-liter jars were kept in almost every kitchen at the Object and they were filled with a mushroom that had nothing to do with the forest. It looked like some greenish slime upon the water in the jar and, in spite of the ugly looks, it turned the water into a tasty drink reminiscent of effervescent kvass, even though they called its producer ‘tea’-mushroom. When the jar contents neared their end with the mushroom wisps scratching the bottom, the jar was simply refilled with water and put aside for a couple of days to prepare the drink again. Women were gladly sharing pieces of the mushroom among themselves because when grown too thick it left no room for refilling the jar.

So, marking the time by the alarm clock next to the mushroom jar, I poured water into the small pan indicated by Mom before leaving, loaded it with an egg, lit the bluish springy fire in the gas stove and put the pan on it…