The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 97

And our class followed her quietly to the next poster with his photograph in the group of comrades from the underground committee… The working silence reigned in school, we passed by the closed doors of the classrooms with the school children sitting behind them and only we, like secret conspirators, veered from the usual course of the school regime and seemed to have joined the life of underground, following the quiet voice directing us from a picture to a picture…

Then the spring came, and again the thawed patches appeared on the slope between Block and the Recruit Depot Barracks but I wasn’t checking them anymore… One sunny day coming home from school, I took over an unfamiliar girl of my age. Maybe, from the parallel fourth grade. I get ahead of her and looked back at the face full of absolute lack of care about my walking along.

The brag just asked for a small demonstration that I was a boy of consequence in the surrounding whereabouts. And besides, I had a gang of my own, like Robin Hood, the noble robber. Still walking on, I half-turned to the left and told with eloquent gestures to the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the decaying skating rink, “Hey! Don’t be so careless! Duck!! Don’t let them spot you!” So, if the snooty girl looked that way, no one would be seen there…

Another time, with the snow, completely gone, I was going the same route and squinting because if you squint without closing your eyes completely, but only to the point when the eyelashes from your upper and lower eyelids meet and touch each other, you’d see the world as if thru the transparent wings of a dragonfly. That way I was not, actually, walking but flying in a tiny dragonfly-like helicopter and watching thru its Plexiglas roof which I saw in The Funny Pictures because even though I was past the preschool age I still turned pages of that magazine for small kids whenever it came my way.

And then I remembered how rebellious Kotovsky, in the movie “Kotovsky” at the Regiment Club, answered the arrogant landlord, “I am Kotovsky!” After which he grabbed him and threw thru the window panes of the landlord’s house.

So I also grabbed the rich scoundrel by the breast of his jacket and threw him into the roadside ditch. And I proudly called myself with the glorious name, “I am Kotovsky!” Yay! And it was so good to feel myself so strong. That’s why I replayed the episode several times walking uphill to Block. And why not? Who was to see me along the empty road?

At home, Mom told how she and Paulyna Zimin had a hearty laugh watching thru the neighbor’s window my grabs and throws of nobody knew who. But I never confessed that I was Kotovsky at the moment….

End April, we became young pioneers. The ceremony took place not at school but in front of the House of Officers because there stood the big gypsum head of Lenin upon the tall pedestal.

The night before, Mom ironed my trousers thru gauze and also the white parade-shirt and the scarlet silk triangle of pioneer tie. All those things she hung over the back of a chair so that in the morning everything would be ready. When there was no one in the room, I touched the soft caressing fabric of the pioneer tie. Mom said she had bought it from the store, but it’s impossible for such things to be for sale.