The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 98

The bright morning sun was shining. We, the fourth-graders, stood facing the lined-up ranks of the school children. Our scarlet ties hung on our right arms bent at the elbow, the collars of our shirts were turned up for the senior graders to easily tie our ties around.

Yet before that moment, we chanted the memorized Solemn Oath in front of our comrades to love our Homeland hotly, to live and learn and struggle as admonished by great Lenin, as we were always being taught by the Communist Party….

One week before the end of the academic year I fell ill. Mom thought it was a cold and told me to stay in bed but could not bring the temperature down, and when it rose up to forty she called an ambulance from the Detachment’s Hospital because with two more degrees the temperature would become lethal.

I was too lightheaded to be proud or frightened that a whole vehicle came after just me alone. At the hospital, they at once diagnosed pneumonia and began to knock the temperature down with penicillin injections every half-hour. I did not care. A day later the injection frequency was reduced to one per hour, the following day – one in two hours…

The patients in the ward were all adults, soldiers from the Regiment. In four days, I was quite okay and walking in the garden around the Hospital, when our class together with the teacher came to visit me and hand over the report card with my grades.

I felt uncomfortable and, for some reason, ashamed, so I ran away around the corner followed by the boys of our class. But then we returned, and the girls together with the teacher handed me my award for successful studies and exemplary behavior. It was the book of The Russian Epic Tales which Grandma Martha read to me, and my sister-'n'-brother, but only quite a new one… That way, little by little, things began somehow repeat themselves in my life…

In summer we were again taken to the pioneer camp to the same canteen, lining-ups, bedroom ward, “stiff hours”, and Parental Days. Though certain things had notably changed because as a full-fledged pioneer, I already belonged to the Third Platoon which, together with the First and Second ones, was eligible for swimming in the lake. But first, we had to wait a week in anxious hope that it shouldn’t rain on the appointed day.

We waited eagerly, and on the swimming day the weather was not rainy, so two trucks with canvas tops took us to the Sominsky lake. The road went thru the forest, along some narrow endless clearing. And the ride was also very long because we had sung all the pioneer songs, both my favorite “ah, potato’s so tasty-tasty-tasty-tasty…”, and the one I liked less, but still for pioneers – “we marched to the ding of the cannonade…”, and, well, all that we knew, anyway, but the road did not end and I felt sick with all those jolts on the bumps in the road. Then those, who sat at the square window cut in the front canvas wall, shouted that something was seen ahead and the truck pulled up on a grassy shore of a big lake amid the forest.

They allowed us to enter the water not all at once but in turn, one platoon after another. The water was very dark, and the bottom felt unpleasantly quaggy, and they too soon yelled from the shore, “Third platoon – out!”