The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 86

On Sundays, a big bus was bringing to the camp a pack of parents to treat their children with gingerbread, and sweets, and – lemonade!

Our Mom was taking us over into the greenish shade of trees and watched as we chewed and swallowed, and asked questions about the camp life, while Dad clicked his brand new FED-2 camera. Consuming the treats, we were sharing that the camp life was quite like a camp life. That not long before, all the platoons went out for a hike in the forest and on our return – surprise! There was a restaurant waiting for us on the floor-boarded platform of the pergola, outside the cinema room in the barrack.

As it turned out, the girls from the senior platoon did not participate in hiking and instead set up tables and chairs in the pergola, and cooked the dinner together with the canteen workers. Handwritten menu sheets were put on the tables, and everyone sitting around them summoned the girls with the adult word “Waitress!” And they approached to get the order for “May Salad” or “Onion Salad”, the only two items on the menu.

When the restaurant was over, I accidentally overheard two of the waitresses giggling between themselves that everyone asked for “May Salad” while “Onion Salad” was way more delicious and thus the waitresses’ share became bigger thanks to the fools easily hooked by mere look of words on a piece of paper.

Regrettably, the daily schedule in the camp retained an obnoxious vestige from the kindergarten past under the new name of “stiff hour”. After the midday meal, everyone should go to their wards and to their beds. Get asleep!

Sleeping in the middle of a day just did not work and the two-hour-long “stiff hour” progressed at a snail rate. All the spooky stories been told and listened to for the millionth time, both about the woman in white who drank her own blood, and about the flying black hand that had no body to it but kept regularly strangling anyone on its way, and all the other gory horrors, yet there still remained the same unchanging 38 minutes before the long-awaited-for shout “Get up!.”

Once at the midday meal in the canteen, I got aware of obviously clandestine gestures of 3 boys at my table, their exchange of silent nods and winks was nothing but some double talk with secret code signs. Clear as daylight – there was some collusion. And me?

So I accosted one of them in earnest until he shared the secret scheme. They conspired to flee the “stiff hour” that day and go to the forest, where one of them knew a spot of such raspberries that had more berries than leaves in their bushes.

The midday meal over, the fugitive boys run stealthily in the direction opposite that to the barrack. I follow them, repulse the leader’s attempt at turning me back to the ward-bedroom, and crawl in the wake of the others under the barbed wire of the fence into the forest.

We arm ourselves with the rifles made of breakable tree branches and walk along a wide footpath among the Pines and shrubs. The leader steers into some glade after which we again enter the forest missing the footpath already. We wander for a long time without finding any raspberries but only the bushes of wolf-berries which you should skip eating because they’re poisonous.