The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 145
When we turned off onto the field roads, the dawn was gradually catching up “Jawa”. I sat behind, grabbing Uncle Tolik by sides with my hands stuck in the pockets of his motorcyclist jacket of artificial leather so that they wouldn’t freeze away in the chilly headwind. The night around little by little transformed into twilight with the darker stretches of windbreak belts showing up about the fields, the sky grew lighter, showed ragged shreds of clouds in their transition from white to pink glad to feel the touches of sky-long sun rays sent beforehand from beyond the horizon…The breathtaking views stirred thrill intense no less than by wild-flight riding…
Our usual bait was worms dug in the kitchen garden but one time the fishermen-gurus advised Uncle Tolik to try dragonfly larvae. Those critters live underwater in clumps of clay by the higher river bank, and the fish just go crazy about them, like, snapping the larva-rigged hook from each other…
We drove up to the riverbank amid murky twilight. “Java” coughed out its last breath and stopped. The river lapped sleepily, wrapped in thin wisps of fog rising from the water. Uncle Tolik explained that it was me who had to fetch those lumps of clay onto the bank. A mere thought of entering that dark water in the dusk of still lingering night threw a shiver up the spine, but a good ride deserved a good dive. I undressed and, on the advice of the elder, took a headlong dive into the river.
Wow! As it turned out, the water was much warmer than the damp morning chill on the bank! I dragged slippery lumps out of the river and Uncle Tolik broke them ashore to pick the larvae out from the tunnels drilled by them for living in clay. When he said it was enough I even didn’t want to leave the engulfing warmth of the stream…
Still and all, it was an instance of unmasked exploitation of adolescent labor and that same day I got square with him for the molesting misuse…
Uncle Tolik preferred a spinner to a fishing rod and, with a sharp whipping thrust, he could send the lure to a splashdown almost halfway to the opposite bank of the wide river and then started to spin the reel on the tackle handle zig-zag pulling the flip-flap flash of the lure back. Predatory fish, like pine or bass, chased it and swallowed the triple hook in the tail of the lure, if the fisherman luck would have it.
So, by noon we moved to another place with a wooden bridge across the river and Uncle Tolik walked over to the opposite, steep, bank to go along and throw the lure here and there. I remained alone and watched the floats of the two fishing rods stuck in the sand by the current and then stretched out in the nearby grass…
When Uncle Tolik walked the opposite bank coming back to the bridge, I didn’t raise my head above the grass about me and watched him struggling thru the jungle of knotgrass and other weeds I lay in. In the movie-making business they call this trick “forced perspective” by use of which he acted a Lilliputian for me. Up to the very bridge…
Once Aunt Lyouda asked if I had ever seen her husband entering some khutta during our fishing trips. It gave me no qualms to give an absolutely honest direct answer that, no, I hadn’t. As for that one time in the Popovka village, when he suddenly remembered that we had set off without any bait and dumped me in an empty village street to wait while he would quickly ride to someplace—not too far off—to dig up worms and be straight back, all what I saw around was the soft deep sand in the road between the towering walls of nettles and the blackened straw in the roof of the barn by whose side I was dropped off but no entering, nor any