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

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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 on the form of the splash made by a stone hurled into the water. If the splash rose up like a stick, that was counted “a key”, while a wider, bush-like, splash went for “lock”. In controversy cases, the last word remained by the boy who played football better, or whose pebble did more leaps at “baking pancakes” over the water surface… Soon I began to go to the Rechka alone or with just one partner, yet on the river bank we parted because our main concern was fishing.

      All the tackle consisted of a fishing pole—a cut-down willow whip—with a length of line tied to the thinner end. The line was threaded thru the float and ended with the hook, accompanied by a tiny lead sinker. The float could be made of a brownish wine cork, a match stuck into the same hole by side the threaded line fixed its length from the hook, or you could use a float bought from the Sports Goods store—a plucked and pared goose feather painted red-and-white with 2 tiny rubber rings to keep it fixed on the line—they both popped equally well on the rushing ripples of rapid current, or turned thoughtfully still in a small backwater pockets behind the bigger boulders…

      Fishing is something personal. One boy pins his hopes on that quiet inlet, the other prefers to have his float hopping on the rapids. That’s why companions get parted on the river bank. Fishing is a rocket-fast surge of excitement at the slightest start of the float. Hush! Striking!. The line does not yield, it jibs, bends the pole end, cuts the water in zigzags, then suddenly gives up, jumps out and, in a fleeting arch over your head, carries to you the sparkling flutter of the caught fish! Then, of course, it turns to be not a fish but a small fry. Never mind! The next catch will be tha-a-at big!.

      More often than anything else there was one of the “miserables” on the hook. I never learned their scientific name. Those fools got caught even on a bare hook, without any bait at all. And they could be hooked at any part of them—at the tail, or the belly, or an eye. Who would bother classifying such a moron minnow?

      Back from fishing, I usually brought half-dozen of small fry sleeping in a milk-can, and Paulyna Zimin’s cat devoured them with greedy purr-and-snap from a saucer tap-tapping at the landing tiles….

      That day I started fishing from the bridge between the Pumping Station and Checkpoint on the road out from the Zona. As usual, I walked after the current, refreshing the bait, adjusting the depth of the hook immersion. Being a steadfast fisherman, I only once allowed myself get distracted from bobs and jerks of the float in the current. It happened on the sandy spit nearby the green bush, where I carried out some restoration work mending the sand sculpture of a woman stretched on her back.

      The masterpiece was created a couple of days before by 2 soldiers. You could guess at a glance that they were soldiers because of their black underpants and black high boots. Who else would wear such boots in summer?. So I increased the sagging breasts and slightly rounded the hips of the sculpture. They seemed wider than necessary but I did not correct it.

      Why did I do it at all? Very clear, it’s not right to let the work of art disappear in the rest of the sand with all the soldiers’ labor gone to ashes…

      (…or was I hooked by the opportunity to spank a female bust and thighs even if just made of sand?

      Eew! To hell with Freud and other miserables from psychoanalytic schools!

      Let’s go back fishing, it’s much more fun…)

      …and I did not roll on top of her like one of the soldiers two days before, but just returned to fishing.

      The current carried the float to the broken dam below the stadium, where ages ago I stumbled off the insidious slab. The point marked half of the Rechka having been passed already and after the other half it would run beyond the Zona, away from the barbed wire over 2 parallel rows of poles, breaking out thru the strip of loosened ground in between the wire-walls for catching the footprints of NATO spies. Half of the walk along the river was over and the three-liter milk-can contained just a couple of “miserables”. The neighbor’s cat would be disappointed.

      When down the stream there loomed the second (and also last) bridge in the Zona, I decided not to go any farther but try my luck at the sharp bend of the current under the precipitous drop-off in the bank. And

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