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

Besides the Zimins, the tenants from the apartment beneath us left also. Their grown-up daughter Julia presented us, 3 children from the upper floor, with her album of matchbox stickers collection.

At those times matchboxes were made not of cardboard with printed pictures on it, but of very thin, one-layer, plywood blanketed by taut blue tissue upon which there was mounted one or another sticker portraying the famous ballet dancer Ulanova or some sea animal, or a hero astronaut in it. People collected matchbox stickers just like the post-stamp hobbyists only, first, you had to peel them off a box soaked in water and then, of course, to dry up.

Julia’s collection was split into different sections: sports, aviation, Hero Cities, and so on. Surely, all 3 of us were delighted with so generous a gift and we stepped in her shoes at keeping the picturesque hobbyhorse…

In place of Yura Zimin, another Yura became my friend who had a different family name, yet, like the previous Yura, Yura Nikolayenko was also a neighbor, more distant though, who lived not on the same landing but in the same Block.

As the snow filled the forest, we ventured out there in search of foxholes or, at least, to catch an odd hare. We had pretty good chances of success because we were joined by a Lowlander-boy who brought a dog living in the yard of their wooden house. Only he was too greedy to share the linen rope tied to the dog’s collar and yanked at it himself. In the forest though, the dog began to drag him forward and backward over the snowdrifts with lots of hare footprints. Yura and I were running behind not to miss out on the moment of catching a hare.

Then we noticed that the dog was paying no attention to the hare footprints but constantly sniffing for something else. Finally, he started to excitedly dig into a tall snowdrift. Anticipating that the dog would dig out a fox burrow whose scent he nosed thru the snow, we armed ourselves with sticks to meet the beast. However, from under the snow, the dog pulled out a big old bone, and we stopped hunting…

~ ~ ~

On the winter vacations, many children of my age were invited to a neighboring corner house in the Courtyard, where some newly arrived tenants celebrated the birthday of their daughter, my future classmate. She looked like Malvina from The Golden Key tale, only her hair was neither blue nor curly, but straight.

After the guests finished all of the lemonade on the big table, the beautiful girl shared her memories of the place she lived before, where she was, like, Queen of the Courtyard and the boys living there were her pages, sort of…

Probably, I caught cold by the vacations end and started school later than my classmates because I could not get it what was happening the morning when I finally came to our classroom.

The lessons had not begun yet and the newcomer Malvina-like girl appeared in the doorway right after me. Like all the schoolgirls at any grade in those times, she wore the compulsory uniform in Queen-Victorian style—a dark brown dress with a white lace collar and a black apron on copious straps covering all of her shoulders.

She stepped into the room and stopped expectantly. The next moment a godawful hue and cry burst out, “The Cow of the Courtyard!”

She dropped her school bag on the floor and, wrapping her arms around her head, ran along the aisle between the desks, while everyone else—both the boys and the girls—blocked her way, hooting and yelling something in her ears, and Yura Nikolayenko ran behind her and rubbed himself at her back, like dogs do, until she sat down at her desk and dropped her face into her hands.

The mayhem ceased only when the classroom was entered by a teacher asking, “What’s going on here?”, she was perplexed no less than me.

The girl got on her feet and ran out of the classroom without even picking her schoolbag up from the floor.

The next day she never showed up and we had a class meeting attended, instead of her, by her father who was red in the face and shouting that we were a bunch of scoundrels and pinched his daughter by the chest. He demonstrated with his hands where exactly were applied the pinches.

Then our Mistress told the meeting that pioneers shouldn’t disgrace themselves by nagging their classmates so disgustingly as we did because the Malvina-like girl was also a pioneer like all of us.

And I felt ashamed even though I had not been pinching or nagging anyone. The beautiful girl never more appeared in our class, probably, she was transferred to the parallel one.

runs a line from Avetic Isahakian’s poem about Abu-Lala, which I learned very well even before reading it…)

Individual cruelty is no less ugly as collective one. In spring I got another deep scratch when witnessing an example of maternal pedagogy.

The empty afternoon Courtyard was entered, between our house and the corner building, by a woman heading to the buildings on the opposite side. Behind her, a six-year-old girl ran and sobbed holding her arm outstretched to the women and kept repeating the same words with the voice hoarse from non-stop wailing, “Mom, gimme your hand! Mom, gimme your hand!”

The rasping shrieks somehow reminded me of Masha’s screeching, when they came to slaughter her at Grandma Katya’s in Konotop.

The woman never slowed down only time and again looked back to lash with a thin rod the girl’s outstretched hand. The kid would respond with a somewhat louder shriek but neither withdraw her hand nor stop crying, “Mom, gimme your hand!”

They crossed the yard and went into their staircase-entrance leaving me harrowed by the unanswerable question – where could such fascist mothers be in our country from?.

~ ~ ~

Between the left wing of the school building