The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 62
The unnaturally flattened, dead pale finger smeared with the blood from the ripped skin, emerged from the pulley jaws and puffed up instantly. The boys wrapped it with my handkerchief and told me to run home. Quick! And I ran thru the forest feeling the painful beat of the pulse in the burning finger…
At home, Mom, without asking anything, at once told me to shove the wounded under the gush of water from the kitchen tap. She bent and straightened it several times and ordered not to bellow like a little cow. Then she bandaged it into a tight white cocoon and promised that by the wedding day it would be like new.
(…and, in the same breathe, childhood is not the nursery of sadomasochism, like, “Whoops, my finger got pinched! Oh, I bumped my head!” It’s just that some jolts leave deeper notches in the memory.
Yet, what a pity that the same memory does not retain the admiring state of ongoing discoveries when a speck of sand stuck to a penknife's blade holds countless galaxies and worlds, when any trifle, a scrap of trash, is the promise and pledge of future wanderings and unbelievable adventures.
We grow up gaining the protective armor necessary in the adult world—the doctor's smock on me, the traffic cop's uniform on you. Each of us becomes a necessary cog within the social machine. All needless things—like gaping at fire extinguishers or scanning the strange faces in the frost gripped windowpane—are chopped off…
Now there is a number of old scars on my fingers. This one from an awkwardly wielded knife, here a deep cut by ax, and only on my pinky fingers I cannot find any trace from that pulley injury. Because "body dissolves"…
But, hey! I know much fresher bywords, like that recent one: “summer is a miniature life”…)
When you are a child not only summer but each and every day is a miniature life. The childhood time is slowed down – it does not fly, it does not flow, it does not even move until you push it on. Poor kids would long since got extinct while crossing that boundless desert of the static time, were they not rescued by playing games.
And in that summer, if I got bored with a game or no one was in the Courtyard to play with, I had already a haven, a kinda “home” square in the game of Classlets. The big sofa it was, where life ran high indeed, the life full of adventures shared by the heroes from books by Gaidar, Belyaev, Jules Verne… And even outside the big sofa, you can always find a place suitable for all kinds of adventures. Like that balcony by the parents’ room, where I once spent a whole summer day reading a book about prehistoric people – Chung and Poma.
There was hair all over their bodies, like by animals, and they lived in the trees. But then a branch accidentally broke off a tree and helped to defend themselves against a saber-tooth tiger, so they started to always carry a stick about them and walk instead of leaping in the trees around. Then there happened a big jungle fire followed by the Ice Age. Their tribe wandered in search of food, learning how to build fire and talk to each other.
In the final chapter, the already old Poma could walk no farther and fell behind the tribe. Her faithful Chung stayed by her side to freeze to death together in the snow. But their children could not wait and just went on because they were already grown up and not so hairy as their parents, and they protected themselves from the cold with the skins of other animals…