The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 27

All in all, our Block comprised six two-story houses alongside the perimeter of a vast rectangular courtyard. All of the six houses were entered from the courtyard, four longer cranked buildings bounded its corners and had three entrances each, while each of the 2 shorter houses, inserted in 2 opposite sides, had only one. However, it was the presence of those shorties that made rectangular of a mere square. The road of hard concrete ran around Block and its twin under construction both uniting and separating them like loops in 8 or, maybe, ∞.

Allowed to play out, I often left the empty childless Courtyard and crossed the road to get to the block under construction. Zeks working there never discouraged my visiting the site and at the midday breaks they treated me to their balanda soup. The speedy buildup of a stock of expressive embellishments to my—otherwise babyish—talk soon made my parents aware of who were my current gossip milieu and they posthaste entered me to kindergarten.

The Gorka upland, most elevated part in the Object, shared its name to the two blocks atop of it. On all the four across the loop road around the blocks there grew the forest but no tree could ever make it over the concrete in the roadway… When the second of the Gorka blocks was completed, zeks disappeared altogether and all the subsequent construction works at the Object (people around preferred this name to “Mailbox”) were performed by soldiers with black shoulder straps in their uniform, blackstrappers. Apart from them, there also were redstrapper soldiers at the Object but as for their mission there I am not sure up to now…

~ ~ ~

The trail to kindergarten started right behind our house. There was a long straight dirt road tilt towards the gate in the barber wire fence surrounding the Recruit Depot Barracks. Yet before you reached it, a well-trodden path forked off into the Pine forest on the right. Bypassing the fenced barracks and a large black pond under big trees, the path went down thru the thicket of young Fir-trees. The descent ended at a wide clearing midst the forest enclosed by the openwork timber fence to keep the trees away from the two-story building, the hub to the web of narrow walks to separate playgrounds with sandboxes, small teremok-huts constructed of lining boards, see-saws and even a real bus, short but big-nosed. It had no wheels, to make it easy to step inside directly from the ground, but the steering wheel and the seats were all in place.

Coming to the kindergarten, you had to take off your coat and shoes, leave them in your narrow tall locker marked by the picture of two merry cherries on the door and, after changing into slippers, you might climb the stairs to the second floor with 3 big rooms for separate groups and the common, even bigger, dining room.

My kindergarten life was a patchwork of various feelings and sensations. The victorious pride in the noisy locker-room where parents already started to pop up after their children and where, prompted by Mom, I discovered my ability to tie the shoelaces myself, without anyone’s help… The bitter humiliation of defeat from those same shoelaces on that morning when they were drenched, pulled, and made into tight knots and my Mom had to untangle them, distressed that she would be late for her work…