The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 52

Those dip pens—slender wooden rods in lively monochrome color with cuffs of light tin at one end for the insertion of a nib—I kept bringing with me from the first school day under the long sliding lid in a wooden pencil-box. As for the plastic no-spill ink-wells, they indeed prevented the spillage of ink holding it in between their double walls if the ink-well got accidentally knocked over or deliberately turned upside down.

The pen’s nib was dipped into the ink-well, but not too deep because if you picked up too much of ink with the nib tip, the ink would drop down into the page—oops!—a splotch again… One dip was enough for a couple of words and then – dip the nib anew.

At school, each desk had a small round hollow in the middle of its front edge to place one ink-well for the pair of students sharing it to dip, in turn, their pens’ nibs in. The replaceable nib had a bifurcated tip, however, its halves, pressed tightly to each other, were leaving on the paper a hair-thin line (if you didn’t forget to dip the pen’s nib into the ink-well beforehand). Slight pressure applied to the pen in writing made nib’s halves part and draw a wider line. The alteration of thin and bold lines with gradual transitions from one into another presented in the illustrious samples of the penmanship textbook drove me to despair by their unattainable calligraphy refinement…

Much later, already as a third-grade student, I mastered one more application of dip pen’s nibs. Stab an apple with a nib and revolve it inside for one full rotation, then pulling the nib out you’ll have a little cone of the fruit’s flesh in it, while in the apple side there appeared a neat hole, into which you can insert the extracted cone, reversely. Got it? You’ve created a horned apple.

Then you may add more of such horns until the apple starts looking like a sea mine or a hedgehog – depending on the perseverance of the artificer. Finally, you can eat your piece of art but I, personally, never liked the taste of the resultant apple mutant…

And after one more year at school, in the fourth grade, you learned the way of turning the dip pen’s nib into a missile. First, break off one of the halves in the sharp tip of the nib to make it even sharper, then split the opposite insertion butt-end and jam into the crack a tiny piece of paper folded into four-wing tail-stabilizer to obtain bee-line flying mode.

Now, throw your dart into some wooden thing—the door, the blackboard, a window frame would equally do—the prickly nib’s half will pierce deep enough to keep the missile sticking out from the target…

The trail to school had become quite familiar, yet each time a little different. The foliage fell, the droughts began roaming between the naked tree trunks and the school was peeping thru them even before you reached the big Aspen by the swamp, on whose smooth bark there stood the knife-cut inscription: “It’s where the youtth is wasted”.

Then the snowfalls began, however, by the end of the day, the wide path thru deep snowdrifts to the school got trodden anew. The sun sparkled blindingly from both sides of that road to knowledge transformed into a trench with orange marks of urine on its snow walls. Totally obliterated by the next snowfall, they would persistently pop up again at other spots in the restored and deepened trench-trail thru the forest…