The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 50

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With the nearing autumn, Mom started to teach me reading the ABC book, which was full of pictures and strings of letters skewered with dashes to aid at making the words up. Yet even spitted, the letters stayed reluctant to fuse into something sensible. At times, I tried to skulk and, staring at the picture next to the word, read: “Arr-hay-eye-enn. Rain!”

But Mom answered, “Stop cheating! It’s a “c-l-o-u-d”.

I poohed, and eeewed, and started over again converting the syllables into words, and in a few weeks I could already sing thru the texts at the end of the book where the harvester was mowing wheat in the collective farm field…

Grandma Martha’s worldview was not in the least affected by the Yuri Gagarin’s statement for the journalists that, while on his flight, he saw no God up there. On the contrary, she started an anti-atheistic propaganda and covert conversion of her eldest grandkid. She insistently advised me to mark well that God knew everything, could do anything and, most importantly, was able to fulfill your wishes. And in exchange for what? Just for praying regularly, as simple as that! Such a trifle, ain’t it? But then at school, I, with God’s help, would have no problems. The grade of “five” is needed? Just say a prayer and – get it! Some good trade, eh?.

And I wavered. I succumbed to her temptation and, even though never disclosing it, I turned a clandestine believer on my own. As no one enlightened me what a believer had to do, I came to inventing the rituals myself. Going out to play in the Courtyard, I for a second dropped behind the narrow door to the basement and there, in the darkness, pronounced—not even in whisper but silently, in my mind, “Alright, God, you know all yourself. See? I’m crossing me.” And I put a sign of the cross somewhere about my navel…

However, when before school there remained just a couple of days, something made me revolt and I became an apostate. I renounced Him. And I did it out loud. Openly. I went into the grassy grounds by the garbage bins enclosure and shouted at the top of my lungs, “There’s no god!”

And though there was no one around—not a single soul—I still took proper precautions, just in case if somebody would overhear accidentally, say, from behind the fencing around the garbage bins. “Aha!” they would think, “Now that boy shouts there is no god, which makes it clear even for a fool that till lately he has believed there was some.” And that was surely a shame for a boy who in a few days would become a schoolboy. For that reason, instead of articulating the blasphemous renunciation clearly, I took care to howl it with indistinct vowels: “Ou ou ouu!”

Nothing happened.

Turning my face upward, I hollered it once again and then, in a way of putting the final period in my relations with God, I spat in the sky.

Neither thunder nor lightning followed, only I felt the drizzle of spittle landing on my cheeks. So it was not a period but the dots of ellipsis. Not too much of a difference. And I went home liberated…

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