The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

And making use of a slushy snowfall, the boys began to roll up snow in the Courtyard forming huge balls to build a fortress. For a start, you made a regular snowball, put it down onto a snowdrift, and began rolling it back and forth. The lump immediately swelled with layers of slush snow stuck all over its sides. The snowball turned bigger than a football, then grew above your knees, becoming denser, heavier and you had to call for help already and, in a team of two or three, roll it to the fortress construction site where the big boys hoisted it and fixed into the course of dense snow lumps making the circular wall taller than you…

We split into two parties—the besieged defenders and the assaulting troops. In a record short time, the ammo of snowballs was hurriedly produced and – off to the storm they rushed!

Shrieks, yells, babel; snowballs whooshing from all the sides and in every direction. I stuck my head out above the fortress wall looking for someone to hit with my snowball but a crack of yellow lightning flashed in my eyes, like an exploding electric bulb. With my back sliding against the wall, down I crouched, my hands firmly pressed to the eye whipped with a snowball.

(… " oh, I forgot, they killed me in the charge…”

so depicted such a moment Nikolai Gumilyov in his poem…)

Yet, the battle raged on, and no one cared about bodies of the fallen buddies. Everything fused and drowned in one united warcry, “A-a-a-a-a-ah!” After a period out of any time at all the battle was over. The fortress never surrendered but turned into a hillock of snow trampled firm and hard as ice. Yet, the roar still did not abated, with the same unrestrainable yell we kept sliding down the hillock on our bellies, the heads turned kinda hollow and filled with a sort of dull deafness because of your and others’ crazy, unceasing, howl, “A-a-a-a-a-ah!”

My eye could see already. I slapped up a snowball and hit the head of a boy older than me. What a blunder! Firstly, the battle was long since ended and that boy had already come with his skates on. How could I be so reckless? As always, because of trying to keep things in proper order, to make everything right. Ages before, at the beginning of fortress construction, the eldest boys—seventh-and-eighth-graders—announced, “who does not build will not play”, and I knew for sure that the boy in skates was not among the builders. But who now cared about the right things and justice? Many of the founder boys had left already. Those stuck behind had completely forgotten the pre-battle declaration.

Yet, there was no time to present justifications for the arrogant deed, and there was no one for listening to them or helping out, so – run for your life! And I plunged headlong towards the staircase-entrance door of our house. Maybe he wouldn’t catch up with his skates on in the trampled snow drifts?

Running, exhausted by the countless hours in the wild game, I was still running. The entrance door’s so nigh already! “But if he’ll still catch up?” flashed in my mind, and I got a skate kick in the ass for such an inappropriate fear. Slamming the door I shot thru the vestibule where he dared not follow – it’s someone else’s house…

(…if you want everything to work out as it should, you mustn’t doubt that so it would…)

In the spring that followed, my parents tried their hand at farming. That is, they decided to plant potatoes… When with a spade and a bagful of potatoes they started for the forest after work, I begged to take me too.

We came to the narrow endless clearing in the forest, the former border of Zona before the expansion of the Object’s area. Dad made holes in the soil which he turned the day before, and Mom dropped potatoes into them. Their faces looked sad and Dad wistfully shook his head asserting that the soil was not the right sort, mere loam on which nothing could possibly grow… Soon, the quiet spring twilight thickened, and we started home.

(…a little anticipatory, I can say that the attempted kitchen garden indeed yielded nothing. Was the failure because of the loam, or the doubt annulled any possibility for a success?.

And, what is really inconceivable, why was to start it at all? To save costs for potatoes? But we were not so poor then. In the parents’ room there appeared a fold-out couch-bed, two armchairs with lacquered armrests of wood, and a three-legged coffee table, all of them making one furniture set.

Probably, they simply wanted to take a break from all that furniture and the farming enterprise served an excuse for fleeing to the forest…)

~ ~ ~

And again it was summer only this time it started much earlier than in all the previous years. And together with that summer, the Rechka river rushed into my life. Or maybe, the limits of my living space had expanded enough to reach it.

To start the relations with the Rechka, at first, I needed a company of boys more advanced in their years who led along the downhill road avoiding the heat-softened tar in the joints, which leg I knew well though from my frequenting the Detachment’s Library. Then forked an unknown footpath thru the shady thicket over a steep slope until there, all at once, unfurled the sparkling sunlit stream of the Rechka lapping among innumerable boulders of any size.

You could cross the ten-meter-wide river without getting deeper than to your waist or you might stand instead knee-deep in its fast current and watch a school of translucent whitebait poking ticklishly at your ankles in the greenish twilight of the incessantly rolling mass of water…

When out of the river, we played Key-or-lock, betting