The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 160
Sometime before, I secretly liked Tanya, but she seemed overly unattainable, so I pulled wisely up and switched over to courting Larissa. After the classes at school, I tried to catch up with her in Nezhyn Street because she also went home that way. However, she invariably walked together with Tanya, her close girlfriend and also a neighbor in their Maruta Street.
When Larissa was a participant in Children Sector, I once happened to see her along Professions Street to the Gogol Street corner because she did not allow going with her any farther. At that period Tanya also participated in Children Sector activities and there, actually, were 3 of us walking Professions Street. On the way, Tanya kept urging Larissa to walk faster but then she just got angry and went ahead alone.
The 2 of us parted at the aforesaid corner, and I went along Gogol Street enthusiastically recollecting Larissa’s sweet laugh in response to my silly yakety-yak. On reaching the ice-coated water pump under the lamppost at the Nezhyn Street corner, all of my enthusiasm evaporated because of the two black figures, contrasting crisply against the white snow, who called me to come up.
I recognized both, one was a guy from the parallel class, and the other – Kolesnikov, a tenth-grader from our school, they both were from somewhere about Maruta Street. In a privately threatening tone, Kolesnikov began to make me understand that if I ever would come up to Larissa again and if he ever would hear or be told that I dared then, well, in general, I should get it what he would do to me. And so he kept rehearsing those general concepts in a circle, with slight variations in their order of priority, when I suddenly felt something snatching at my calf. I thought that was a street dog and looked back, but there was only a snowdrift and nothing else. That’s where and when the meaning of the idiom “hamstring shaking with fear” came to me completely.
He asked again if I understood, and I muttered that I got it. Then he asked if I understood everything of what he meant. I mumbled that, yes, everything. But I didn’t look at their faces and thought how good it would be if Uncle Tolik, the former regional welterweight champion in weightlifting, came to the pump for water. No, he never appeared. On the morning of that day, I fetched enough water to our khutta…
And now in public, before the pretty crowded auditorium, I took the seat in front of the two girls, my classmates, even though being fully aware of all the imprudence of such a move, yet, for some reason, unable to behave differently. I turned to them and tried to start a talk in the general hubbub of the audience present. However, Larissa kept mum and looked aside, and only Tanya was responding in rather a monosyllabic way before Larissa herself addressed me directly, “Stop following me, I’m laughed at by the guys because of you!”
Unable to find a word to answer her, crushed and dumb-stricken, rose I to my feet and walked away along the blind wall to the exit, carrying within my chest the fragments of my broken heart.
When I was nearing the back rows in the auditorium, my black sadness got drowned in the downright darkness because the lights went out to start the movie. To let my eyes get accustomed to the dark and prevent stumbling, I for a second took an empty seat by the passage and forgot to go and carry on my grief and pain because “Winnitoo the Chief of Apaches” was starting!.