The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 146

There happened falls, yet just a couple of times. The first one while riding over the field along the path on top of a meter high embankment with the tall grass flying by on both sides from the bike. I guessed it was an embankment because the tall grass was lower than our wheels, but what purpose could it serve for among the fields? The question remained unanswered because the embankment broke off suddenly among the tall grass concealing the pit into which “Jawa” nosedived after a long jump thru the air, and the hard landing threw us both far ahead over the bike.

The other time we had hardly started along Nezhyn Street when the motorbike got tripped by a piece of iron pipe piled nearby someone’s khutta's foundation so that vehicles would not go too close by and splash at it the dirt and water from the puddles developed in the road…

However, both times we got no injuries except for bumps because on our heads there were white plastic helmets. It’s only that after the fall in Nezhyn Street, the ride had to be canceled because “Jawa's” absorber started to leak oil and needed an urgent repair…

~ ~ ~

Square of the Konotop Divisions, was called so to commemorate the Soviet Army units that liberated the city in the Great Patriotic War, aka WWII, and were honored for that deed by the city’s name in their respective denominations.

For me, it, at first, seemed the end of world because it took eight streetcar stops to get there from the Station. Square of the Konotop Divisions was as wide as three roads put side by side, and it had a slight south-west slant along all of its considerable length.

At the Square’s upper right corner, there stood a metal openwork tower like the famous one in Paris, yet more useful because the Konotop tower held a huge water tank on its top adorned with “I love you, Olya!” in jerky splotches of paint brush strokes over its rust-smeared side overlooking Square of the Konotop Divisions. Beneath the tower, behind the high wall carrying neat dense rows of barbered wire along its top, was the city prison.

In the upper left corner, opposite the tower, the tall gate opened to the City Kolkhoz Market which, technically, was outside it and in Square itself the gate served the starting point for the line of small stores going down the gradual slant – “Furniture”, “Clothes”, “Shoes”…

At its right lower end, Square was delimited by a tall two-story building with more windows than walls—the Konotop Sewing Factory—followed by a squat house with more walls than windows— the City Sober-up Station, yet the facility stood already in the out-flowing street which led to the dangerous outskirt neighborhood of Zagrebelya. Its hazardous nature was established by nasty scumbags who intercepted guys from other city neighborhoods, brave enough to see girls of Zagrebelya home. The valiant were made perform their version of rooster cry, or measure with a match the length of the bridge to Zagrebelya or just got a vanilla beating from the villains…

Square of the Konotop Divisions was crossed, bend-sinister, by the tram-track which entered it on the left below the long blind wall with three exit doors from the Vorontsov Movie Theater, whose entrance was from Lenin Street.