The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 58
From one of the evening classes, Dad brought home a couple of Party textbooks, which they distributed among the Party members who attended the Party Studies Evening School. However, he never opened even those books, which, as it turned out, was his mistake. The bitter fruit of his neglect came out 2 years later when in one of those Party books he found his stash—a part of salary concealed from the wife for expenses at one’s own discretion. Full of heartfelt regret and belated self-reproach lamented Dad over the find, because the stash was in the money used before the monetary reform which turned it into funny papers…
Among the many names used for the Object where we lived, there also was that of “Zona”, the vestige from those times when zeks were building the Object. (Zeks live and toil in “Zonas” as know all and everyone.) At the end of the second academic year at the Party Studies Evening School, Dad and other learners were taken for their examination “out of Zona” – to the nearest district center. Dad was noticeably worried and kept repeating that he knew not a damn thing, although his thick copybook was already written down to the almost very end. And who cared, dammit, argued Dad, for another year at that Party Studies Evening School!
From Out-of-Zona he returned in a very merry mood because at the examination he had got a feeble “3” and now all his evenings would be free. Mom asked how come he passed the exam without knowing a damn thing. Then Dad opened his copybook for Party Studies and showed his good-luck charm—a pencil drawing of an ass with long ears and brush-like tail, which he made during the exam on the last page and, beneath the animal, inscribed his magic formula: “pull-me-thru!”
I did not know if Dad’s story was really worth believing because he laughed so much while telling it. So I decided that I’d better not say anyone about the ass who pulled my Dad from the Party Studies Evening School…
Mom was a regular book reader in our family. Going to her workplace, she took them along for reading in her time at the Pumping Station. Those books were borrowed from the Library of Detachment. (Yes, one more name because we lived not only in the Object-Zona-Mailbox but also in the Military Detachment number so and so.)
The library wasn’t too far away, about one kilometer of walking. First, down the concrete road, until, at the Gorka’s foot, it was crossed by the asphalt road and, after the intersection, the concrete road got replaced with the dirt-road street between two rows of wooden houses behind their low fencing and strips of narrow front gardens. The street ended by the House of Officers, but about a hundred meters before it there was a turn to the right, towards the one-story brick building of the Detachment’s Library.
Sometimes, Mom took me with her down there and, while she was exchanging her books in the back of the building, I waited in the big empty front room where instead of any furniture there hung lots of posters all over the walls. The central poster presented a cross-section outline of the atomic bomb (because the full name of the Object we lived in was the Atomic Object).
Besides the posters with the bomb anatomy and atomic blast mushrooms, there were also pictures about the training of NATO spies. In one of them the spy, who jumped from behind on a sentry’s back was tearing the soldier’s lips with his fingers. I felt creepy horror but could not look away from it and only thought to myself, O, come on, Mom, please, change the borrowed books sooner.