The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 88
I liked that Sunday of Collective Free Work very little because they would drive you away everywhere, “Don’t come closer!” And simply listening to the screams of nails being torn from the beams and boards, becomes boring quite soon…
(…I cannot now recollect if it was it on the eve of that Sunday or immediately after it, that Nikita Khrushchev got deposed and Leonid Brezhnev became the ruler of the USSR in his place.
Ew! So untimely! When there remained just 18 years before Communism get built in our country!.)
In his very practical book, Ernest Seton-Thompson insists that bows have to be made of Ash-tree boughs. But could you find an Ash-tree at the Object, please?
The woods around the Block were populated by Pines and Fir-trees, as well as deciduous Birch and Aspen, and all the rest might be considered just shrubs. That’s why, following the advice of the neighbor at our landing, Stepan Zimin, my bows were made of Juniper.
It’s important to make the right choice because the Juniper for a bow should not be too old, having lots of side branches, neither too thick which would be impossible to bend. A tree of about one-and-a-half-meter tall would be the thing, both springy and strong. The arrow shot with the bow made of such a Juniper would rise in the gray autumn sky about thirty meters or so, you’d barely see it before its precipitous down-fall to stick the ground by the arrowhead of a nail fixed, as tight as you can, with electrical tape.
The best material for an arrow shaft is a thin plaster lath, all you have to do is just split it lengthwise, round and shave the shaft with a knife, then smooth it with sandpaper. It’s only my arrows missed fletching, although Seton-Thompson explains how it is done. But where could I get the feathers from? No use to ask Dad, there’s nothing but machinery at his work….
On the winter vacations, I learned that the boys from both blocks on the Gorka often visited the Regiment Club for watching movies there. (The Regiment was where the soldiers carried on their army service after graduating from the Recruit Depot Barracks.) Going there for the first time was a bit scary because of the vague rumors among children about some soldier strangling some girl in the forest. No one could explain how and why, but that bad soldier must have been a “blackstrapper” while in the Regiment all the soldiers wore red shoulder straps.
The way to the Regiment was not short, two times as long as to school which you bypassed on the right and the trail became wider and straighter, bound by the walls of tall Fir-trees until you went out onto the tarmac road which ended by the gate guarded by sentries, however, they did not stop boys and you could go on to the building with the signboard Regiment Club.
Inside, you got into a wide long corridor with 3 double doors in its blind wall. The other wall had windows in it and between them, as well as between the double doors, there hung a row of same-sized pictures portraying different soldiers and officers with brief descriptions of their selfless deeds and heroic deaths defending our Soviet Homeland.
The wide double doors opened to a huge hall without windows and full of plywood seats arranged in rows facing the wide stage with crimson velvet curtains. Those were partly drawn to both sides so as to open the wide white screen for movies. From the stage to the back wall—which had a pair of square black holes high up, near the ceiling, for movie projection—stretched the long passage splitting the hall into two equal halves…