The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 54

Then you plodded home, dragging your sled along with stiff hands and dropped it by the basement’s door in the staircase-entrance vestibule. You climbed upstairs to the second floor landing and knocked at your apartment door with your felt boots, and in the hallway your Mom pulled off your mittens with a bead of ice stuck to each filament of their wool, disclosing the white icicles of your hands.

She would run out into the yard to scoop up a basinful of snow and rub your senseless hands with it, and order to put them in the saucepan in the kitchen sink under the cold water running from the tap. And life would start to slowly come back to your hands. You’d whine from the piercing needles of unbearable pain in your fingers, and Mom would yell at you, “Serves you right! You, rascal roamer! You, bitter woe of mine!.”

And though still whimpering from the pain in your stiff fingers and in your tongue skinned by the savage frosty iron, you’d know for sure that everything will be fine because your Mom knew how to save you…

~ ~ ~

After the winter holidays, Seraphima Sergeevna brought to the classroom an issue of the newspaper The Pioneer Pravda and instead of the lesson she was reading aloud the news about Nikita Khrushchev’s promise that in 20 years we all would live in Communism built by that time in our state.

Coming back home, I shared the delightful news that in 20 years that day we were going to live in Communism when any item at the store would be given just for asking because at school they told us so. To that announcement, my parents only exchanged silent glances, yet abstained from partaking in my festive mood on account of so bright a future. I decided not to bother them any longer, but deep in my mind started arithmetic calculations to discover that being around in Communism at the age of seven-and-twenty, I wouldn’t be too badly old, still having some time to enjoy free things…

By that time all the pupils of our class had already become Octoberists, for which occasion a group of grown-up fifth-graders visited our classroom to pin Octoberist badges on our school uniforms. The badge was a small scarlet star of five tips around the yellow frame in the center out of which, as if from a medallion, peeped the angelic face of Volodya Ulyanov sporting long golden locks in his early childhood when playing with his sister he ordered her, “March out from under the sofa!.” And later he grew up, lost his hair and became Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and they wrote a great many books about him…

At home, there appeared a filmstrip projector – a clumsy device with a set of lenses in its nose tube, as well as a box of small plastic barrels to keep tight dark scrolls of filmstrips. Among the filmstrips, there happened some old acquaintances – the one about the hero of the Civil War, Zhelezniak the Seaman, another about the little daughter of a revolutionary, who smartly dropped the typesetting sorts, brought by her father for printing underground leaflets, into a jug of milk when the police raided their house late at night. They never had brains enough to check under the milk…

Of course, it was I who loaded the filmstrips and then rotated the black scroll-wheel to move the projected frames. And I also read the inscriptions under the pictures, which did not last long though, because my sister-’n’-brother learned them by heart and retold before the whole frame would creakily creep down into the rectangular of light shed onto the wallpaper.