The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 48
And when my Grandma turned 98, she also began to forget her own name. On such days she sought her daughter’s help, “Lyaksandra, I keep wondering lately—what could my name be?”
Well, yes, Aunt Alexandra was also a good sort, “Oy, Mom! But I can't recollect either! May it be, Anyuta?”
“No … Somehow different it was…”
And three days later she would triumphantly announce to her daughter, “I remembered! Martha, I am. Martha!.”
No wonder the fortune teller couldn’t deliver her exact name…
However, by this flashforward, I jumped ahead way too much because it’s me who had to serve in the army first, but in this here letter to you, I’m still at the kindergarten senior group.
I think I’d better turn off the tap that pours profound hooey on infantile megalomania, and return to the period when kindergarten was completing its share in the formation of my personality…)
Now, back to the pivotal 1961… What is remarkable about it (besides my graduating the senior group at the Object’s kindergarten)?
Well, firstly, whichever way you somersault this figure it'll still remain “1961”.
Additionally, in April the usual flow of programs from the radio on the wall in our room cut off yet didn’t die transmitting static for quite a while before the toll-like voice of Levitan chimed out that in an hour there would be read an important government declaration. Grandma started sighing and stealthily crossing herself… However, at the appointed time when all of the family gathered in the children’s room, Levitan gleefully announced the first manned spaceflight by our countryman Yuri Gagarin who in 108 minutes flew around the globe and opened a new era in the history of mankind.
In Moscow and other big-time cities of the Soviet Union, people walked the streets in an unplanned demonstration, straight from their workplaces, in robes and overalls, some carrying large paper sheets of handmade placards: “We are the first! Hooray!” And at the Object in our children’s room full of bravura marches by orchestras from the radio on the wall, Dad was impatiently driving it home to Mom and Grandma, “Well, and so what’s not clear, eh?! They put him on a rocket and he flew around!”
The special plane with Yuri Gagarin on board was nearing Moscow and, still in the air, he got promoted from Lieutenant straight to Major. Fortunately, the plane had a stock of military outfit and at the airport he descended the airplane stairs with a big star in each of the shoulder straps of his light-gray officer’s greatcoat to march in parade step, fine and proper, along the carpet runner stretched from the plane to the government in raincoats and hats. The laces in his polished shoes somehow untied on the way and whipped by this or that loose end the carpet runner at each stomping step, but he did not lose his demeanor and in the general jubilation no one even noticed them.
(…many years later watching the footage of the familiar newsreel, I suddenly saw them though before that as, probably, all other viewers, I could only stare at his face and the well-trained marching in.
Did he notice himself? I don’t know. But all the same, he came up so confidently and, holding his hand to the peak of his forage cap reported that the mission assigned by the Party and Government had been successfully accomplished…)