The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 123

After exactly a minute and a half of waiting, the water around the egg did not look like being hot, so I decided, okay, let it be a hard-boiled egg. Additional one-and-a-half minutes past, some scanty vapors did start to rise from the pan, besides, the pan’s walls underwater developed lots of small bubbles, and I turned the gas off because I had exact instructions on how to cook boiled eggs…

The military game participants were mostly in sportswear and noticeably reluctant to enter the school building. So all of us crowded together in the yard idling the time in small separate groups. In the one I was with, everybody appreciated the minuscule stitches that kept my shoulder straps in place. I proudly patted the one on my left shoulder—no way to grab at it, eh? Nothing like by those boys who fixed theirs by just a couple of stitches and now their shoulder straps stuck out like a cat's arced back asking to be torn off with just your pinky finger.

At that moment some unfamiliar boy, maybe from the parallel class, started a scrap. He spread me on the ground and tore my shoulder straps in tatters.

In the forest, I took my jacket off… Instead of the shoulder straps, there only remained a dashed, serrated, frame-like paper-strip under the tight close stitches by a doubled black thread.

I plucked the paper scraps out and scattered over the fallen foliage. Maybe, I even cried full of resentment at being killed so unruly, prematurely, before the start of combat actions, shattering my eager dreams to capture the adversary headquarters…

For some period, my favorite pastime at classes became producing blueprint drawings of my secret shelter located in a cave inside a mighty impenetrable cliff like that one lived by people in The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. Yet, unlike their case, you could get to my cave only by the underground passage which began far from the cliff, in the depths of the surrounding forest. Well, and the cave itself had an additional passage upward, into a smaller cavity equipped with narrow crevices in the wall to peek out and see what’s going on around…

A grim mask alike to those stone idols in the Easter Island decorated the butt-end of the pencil which I drew my designs with… The skill of pencil carving was also obtained at school, it’s as easy as pie and all you needed was a razor blade.

At the pencil’s butt-end, scrape 2 lengthwise parallel grooves, about 1 centimeter long, 3 mm wide and 2 mm apart to produce the ridge of the would-be nose. Connect the grooves with a deep cross cut to mark off the nose tip.

Now, from about a centimeter down the nose start a wider scrape towards the cross-cut, it makes the nose stick out and also becomes the lower part of the face. The notch across that wider scrape passes for a thin-lipped mouth, and two short slits, one in each of the long grooves on both sides of the nose, are the idol’s eyes.

Just be careful about the razor blade, it’s horribly sharp and would cut your finger pads at once if wielded inattentively… The instrument for carving was picked up, as needed, from the tiny blue-paper pack of razors kept by Dad in the bathroom. The blue top bore the brand-name “Neva” and the neat drawing of a black sailboat above it. Each razor in the pack was wrapped in a separate blue envelope embellished with the same sailboat and inscription…