The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 152
On his arrival to school from Palestine, he donned mixed paraphernalia of a very clean and well-ironed pioneer necktie and the golden profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s bald head and resolutely pointed wedge beard in the red enamel banner of the small badge of a Komsomol member pinned in the breast of his jacket. At shop-talks within the close circle of pioneer activists, Volodya Gourevitch liked to frequently announce, emphasizing his and the Leader of the Revolution coincidence in both name and patronymic, “Call me simply – Ilyich.” Following these words sounded his hearty laugh, loud and protracted, after which his lips did not immediately pulled back to the neutral position and he had to assist by pushing his thumb and forefinger at the short saliva threads in the corners of his mouth.
However, Volodya Sherudillo, a firmly built champion at Bitok gambling with the red turf of hair and a thick scatter of freckles in his round face, who studied in my class, in the close circle of us, his classmates, called Volodya Gourevitch – “a khannorik from CEC!”
(…at the shake-down period of the Soviet regime, before enslaving villagers into collective farms, the Communist leadership experimented about organizing rural population into fellowships of Collective Earth Cultivation, acronymically “CEC”
However, the meaning of “khannorik” is not recorded even in the multi-volume The Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great-Russian Language by Vladimir Dahl, probably, because the prominent linguist never visited the village of Podlipnoye.
Who remembers CEC’s nowadays? Yet, the collective memory of village folks still keeps them dearly and transfers from generation to generation.
The Konotop City Komsomol Committee was located on the second floor in the right wing of the City Council building. The building itself, somehow resembling the Smolny Institute from numerous movies about the Great October Revolution, faced Peace Square past the greens and across Peace Avenue. Three short, quiet, flag-stoned, alleys beneath the umbrage of splendid chestnuts in the greens connected the building and Peace Avenue.
None of the guys from our school had any problem whatsoever at the examination on Komsomol Charter, neither had them other students of our age from the rest of the city schools, we got admitted to the Leninist Young Communist League nice and smoothly…
~ ~ ~
In autumn, they started tramway construction in the Settlement. The track ascended from the Underpass tunnel to pass Bazaar and dive under the giant poplars lined along the rough cobbles in the road of Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street. Gray pillars of smooth concrete for supporting the contact wire above the tramway rose at regular intervals between the mighty tree-trunks. By the October holidays, the track had reached our school and even turned into May Day Street, which stretched to the city limit at the end of the Settlement.
Then three small streetcars started running from the terminal on the city-side of the Under-Overpass tunnel to the terminal at the end of May Day Street. Stout female conductors collected the fare in the streetcars selling a three-kopeck ticket per passenger which throwaways they tore off the narrow paper rolls fixed on the canvas strap of their plum duty bags cinched across their trunks to keep jingling change and uphold their mighty busts.