The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 84

When they left, I realized that I couldn’t catch anything better, that it was time to cut the line and go home… I walked ascending the Gorka and the glory ran before me—a couple of boys jogged for a couple of hundred meters to meet before the Block. They wanted to take a look at The Burbot. And when I was already nearing our house, an unfamiliar auntie from the corner building stopped me on the walk to ask if that was true.

She peeped into the can at the round muzzle of The Burbot turned asleep by that time, and asked me to give it to her. I immediately handed the milk-can over and waited while she carried the fish to her home and brought the can back, because it’s only right to do what you’re told by grow-ups….

~ ~ ~

In those years, a year was much longer than nowadays and it was packed with bigger number of memorable events. For instance, in the same summer with The Burbot my sister, and brother, and I went to the pioneer camp, though we were not young pioneers yet.

One sunny morning the children from our Block, and from the twin one, and the Lowlander-children from the wooden houses by the foot of the Gorka upland collected at the House of Officers where two buses and two trucks with canvas tops were waiting for us. Parents gave their respective children suitcases with clothes, and bags full of sweets and other tasty things, and waved after the departing convoy.

We went over the bridge at the Pumping Station and passed the white gate of Checkpoint, leaving the Object behind the barbed wire that surrounded all of it together with the forest, hills, marshes and a stretch of the Rechka.

After Checkpoint, we turned to the right, climbing a protracted slant of the highway which we followed for about half an hour before another turn to the right to follow a dirt road in the forest of great Pine trees. There, the convoy had to slow down and, after a twenty-minute ride, we drove up to another gate in another fence of barbed wire. However, that fence wasn’t doubled, and there were no sentries at the gate because it was a pioneer camp.

Not far from the gate, there stood a one-story building with the canteen and the rooms for caretakers, and paramedic, and Camp Director, and other employees at the camp. Behind that building, there stretched a wide field marked by a tall iron mast of “giant leaps” crowned with the iron wheel from which there hung half-dozen canvas loops on thoroughly rusted chains because no one ever used the attraction. Beneath the row of tall Birch trees along the left edge of the field, there ran a neat cinder path to the pit for broad jumps. Across the field, the forest began again, parted from the camp by the couple lines of barbed wire nailed randomly to thicker trunks among the trees.

To the left of the canteen building, a growth of green bushes screened 4 square canvas tents with 4 beds each on the lining-board floor for the ninth-graders from the first platoon.

Then followed a level clearing with another iron mast, this time more slender and without chains but with one thin cable looped trough two small pulleys—atop the mast and near the ground—for the Red Flag of the camp. Each morning and each evening the platoons were lined-up along three sides of a large rectangular, facing inside. The iron mast, Camp Director, Senior Pioneer Leader, and the camp accordionist concluded the rectangular as the fourth—fairly rarefied—side of the perimeter. The commanders of the platoons, starting with the youngest, approached, in turn, Senior Pioneer Leader to report that their platoon was lined-up. During their report, both the commanders and Senior Pioneer Leader held their right elbows up, hands straightened and kept diagonally across their respective faces.