The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 45
“To steal tomatoes in the Where-Where Mountains.”
“May I go with you?”
“Okay.”
I had already a vague idea that stealing was bad but in my whole life I hadn’t seen yet any mountains, only the low hillock of the overgrown with Fir-trees Bugorok-Knoll whose sandy drop-off side was facing the grassy level grounds by the garbage bins enclosure for our Block. However, first of anything else, I desired the wonderful tomatoes from the Where-Where Mountains. In my mind’s eye, I already could see their round ripe sides gleaming with solid red.
So it was a whole day of waiting for the hour when adults start to come after their children, when I promptly declined going home with someone else’s mother, “No, thank you, I go with the boys to reach Block sooner.”
The 4 of us went out of the gate but we didn’t take the short trail thru the forest. Instead, we turned left to follow the wide dirt road on which there never appeared any vehicle. The road went uphill and then dived with a tilt, and I kept looking out around and asking the same question about when the Where-Where Mountains would stand out. However, as the answers were getting more and more curt and reluctant, I kept down the eager question not to put at risk my taking part in the tomato adventure.
We went out to the road with the streaks of melting black tar over the joints of concrete slabs in the road surface. I knew that road which went down from the Gorka blocks towards the House of Officers. We did not follow it though and only crossed into the thicket of supple bushes cut with a narrow trail which brought us to a house of gray logs with a sign hanging above its door for those who could read.
The boys did not go any farther. They started dawdling aimlessly between the bushes and the weathered-gray logs in the house walls until an adult unclie came out of the door and crossly ordered us away. Our leader answered his parents sent him to pick up the newspapers and mail, but the unclie grew even more angry, and I went home well taught what they mean by mentioning the Where-Where Mountains…
Yet, I still believed that adventures and travels would certainly come my way and getting ready for them was the must. That’s why, spotting a maverick box of matches upon the kitchen table, I grabbed it without a moment’s hesitation or delay—you have to train yourself to get the knack at vital arts, right?
A couple of initial attempts proved that lighting a match against its box side was something easy indeed. And there at once popped up the urge to proudly demonstrate to someone my newly acquired skills. Who to? To Sasha and Natasha, sure thing, they would be much more impressed than Grandma. Besides, my authority by them called for repair and restoration after all the recent flops.
(…however, this list of motives is made by me in hindsight, from the immeasurably distant future—my current present over this here fire loaded with potatoes to bake.
But then, in that immeasurably distant past, without any philosophizing and logical justifications, I perfectly knew that…)
I should call the younger ones to some hide-out and show them my apt control of the fire. The most suitable place was, of course, under the parents’ bed in their room, where we crawled in the Indian file. At the sight of matches in my hands Natasha oh-ohed in a warning whisper. Sasha kept silent and watched the process closely.