The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 63
The book was not especially thick, yet I read it all day long, while the sun, arisen on the left, from behind the forest outside our Block, was crossing in its indiscernible movement the sky over the Courtyard, towards the sunset on the right, behind the second block.
At some point, in a way of respite from the uninterrupted reading, I slipped out between the iron uprights of the handrail that bounded the balcony and started to promenade outside, along the concrete cornice beyond the safety grating, and it was not scary at all because I tightly grasped the bars, just like Chung and Poma when they were still living in the trees. But some unfamiliar unclie was passing down there that yelled at me and told to get back onto the balcony. He even threatened to inform my parents. However, they were not home so he took his complaint to our neighbors on the first floor. In the evening they told on me to Mom, and I had to promise her to never-never do it again…
~ ~ ~
(…every road, when you pass it for the first time, seems endlessly long because you cannot measure yet the past part of it against what is still ahead. When passing the same road again and again, it obviously shortens.
That keeps true with the school academic year as well. But I’d never discover it had I left the race at the beginning of the second year at school…)
It was a clear autumn day and our class left school going on the excursion to collect fallen leaves. Instead of Seraphima Sergeevna, who was absent that day, we were supervised by the School Pioneer Leader.
First, she led us thru the forest, then down the street towards the Detachment Library which we didn’t reach but turned into a short lane between the wooden houses that ended atop a steep slope bridged by two wide flights of timber steps in a pretty long and steep slant down to a real football field encircled by a wide cinder path.
Walking the flights, we descended to the large board-floor landing to both sides from which, there ran half-dozen bleachers made of lumber beams. No bleachers were seen on the field’s opposite side but a lonely white hut and a tall picture-stand of 2 footballers motionless forever at the zenith in their high jump fixed at the moment of strenuous scramble in the air by their feet for the ball.
The girls of our class stayed back collecting the leaves from between the bleachers, but the boys bypassed the football field along the cinder path behind the goal on the right and fled down the dip to the river running nearby. When I reached the riverbank, three or four of the boys with their pants rolled up to the knees were already wading about the stream that noisily rushed thru the gap in the broken dam while the most of classmates stayed on the bank just watching.
Without a moment’s deliberation, I pulled off my boots and socks and rolled the pants up. Entering the water was a little scary, what if it’s too cold? But it turned out quite tolerable. The stream roared angrily and leaned in constant drive on my legs below the knees, yet the river bottom felt pleasantly smooth and even. One of the boys who waded in the striving ripples next to me shouted thru the gurgling growl that it was a slab from the destroyed dam—wow! so classy!.