The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 81
(… " oh, I forgot, they killed me in the charge…”
so depicted such a moment Nikolai Gumilyov in his poem…)
Yet, the battle raged on, and no one cared about bodies of the fallen buddies. Everything fused and drowned in one united warcry, “A-a-a-a-a-ah!” After a period out of any time at all the battle was over. The fortress never surrendered but turned into a hillock of snow trampled firm and hard as ice. Yet, the roar still did not abated, with the same unrestrainable yell we kept sliding down the hillock on our bellies, the heads turned kinda hollow and filled with a sort of dull deafness because of your and others’ crazy, unceasing, howl, “A-a-a-a-a-ah!”
My eye could see already. I slapped up a snowball and hit the head of a boy older than me. What a blunder! Firstly, the battle was long since ended and that boy had already come with his skates on. How could I be so reckless? As always, because of trying to keep things in proper order, to make everything right. Ages before, at the beginning of fortress construction, the eldest boys—seventh-and-eighth-graders—announced, “who does not build will not play”, and I knew for sure that the boy in skates was not among the builders. But who now cared about the right things and justice? Many of the founder boys had left already. Those stuck behind had completely forgotten the pre-battle declaration.
Yet, there was no time to present justifications for the arrogant deed, and there was no one for listening to them or helping out, so – run for your life! And I plunged headlong towards the staircase-entrance door of our house. Maybe he wouldn’t catch up with his skates on in the trampled snow drifts?
Running, exhausted by the countless hours in the wild game, I was still running. The entrance door’s so nigh already! “But if he’ll still catch up?” flashed in my mind, and I got a skate kick in the ass for such an inappropriate fear. Slamming the door I shot thru the vestibule where he dared not follow – it’s someone else’s house…
(…if you want everything to work out as it should, you mustn’t doubt that so it would…)
In the spring that followed, my parents tried their hand at farming. That is, they decided to plant potatoes… When with a spade and a bagful of potatoes they started for the forest after work, I begged to take me too.
We came to the narrow endless clearing in the forest, the former border of Zona before the expansion of the Object’s area. Dad made holes in the soil which he turned the day before, and Mom dropped potatoes into them. Their faces looked sad and Dad wistfully shook his head asserting that the soil was not the right sort, mere loam on which nothing could possibly grow… Soon, the quiet spring twilight thickened, and we started home.
(…a little anticipatory, I can say that the attempted kitchen garden indeed yielded nothing. Was the failure because of the loam, or the doubt annulled any possibility for a success?.
And, what is really inconceivable, why was to start it at all? To save costs for potatoes? But we were not so poor then. In the parents’ room there appeared a fold-out couch-bed, two armchairs with lacquered armrests of wood, and a three-legged coffee table, all of them making one furniture set.