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

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the outhouse in the garden.

      The water came from the pump on the corner of Nezhyn and Gogol Streets, some forty meters from our wicket. The meter-tall pig-iron stub of a pump had the nose of the same material enclosing the waterpipe, you hung your pail over the nose and gave a big push-down to the iron handle behind the stub for the vigorous jet to bang into the pail, brim and go splashing over onto the road if not watched closely. 2 daily water-walks–4 pails, all in all–were enough for our khutta, if, of course, there was no washing that day, however, the water for Aunt Lyouda’s washing was fetched by Uncle Tolik…

      When the rains set in, the water-walks became a little longer—you had to navigate bypassing the wide puddles in the road. In winter the pump got surrounded by a small, ripping slippery, skating rink of its own from thanks to the water spillage by the pump users, the smooth ice had to be walked in careful step-shuffles. The dark winter nights made you appreciate the perfect positioning of the log lamppost next to the pump…

      And also on me was the fuel delivery for the kerogas that looked like a small gas stove of 2 burners and had 2 cups on its backside to fill them with kerosene that soaked, thru 2 thin tubes, 2 circular wicks of asbestos in the burners which were lit when cooking dinner, heating water for tea or imminent washing on the smelly yellow flames edged by jagged jerky tips of oily soot.

      After kerosene, I went to Bazaar with a twenty-liter tin canister… Fairly aside from the Bazaar counters, stood the huge cubic tank of rusty sheet iron. The sale day was announced in the chalk note over the tank side – "kerosene will be …" and there followed the date when they were to bring it. However, so too many dates had changed each other—wiped and written over and over again—that no figures could be read within the thick chalk smudge, that’s why they just dropped writing and the tank side greeted you with the perpetually optimistic line, "kerosene will be …!”

      A shallow brick-faced trench under the tank side accommodated the short length of pipe from its bottom ending with a tap blocked by a padlock. On the proclaimed day, a saleswoman in a blue satin smock descended into the trench and sat by the tap on a small stool ferried along. She also brought a multi-liter aluminum cauldron, and put it under the tap, took the padlock away and filled the vessel, up to three-quarters, with the foamy yellowish jet of kerosene.

      The queue started moving to her with their bottles, canisters, and cans which she filled with a dipper thru a tin funnel, collecting the pay into her blue pocket. When the dipper began to dub the cauldron bottom, she turned the tap on to restore the fluid level.

      In fact, they didn't need at all to bother about writing the sale date, because each morning Grandma Katya visited Bazaar and two days ahead brought the news when "kerosene will be …!" indeed. So, on the kerosene sale day after coming from school, I took the canister and went to spend a couple of hours in the line to the trench under the tank. Sometimes, they were also selling it in the Nezhyn Store backyard equipped with the same facility, but that happened not as often and the line was no shorter…

      ~ ~ ~

      Soon after the summer vacations, I was elected Chairman of the Pioneer Platoon Council of our 7th "B" grade because the former Chairman (the red-haired skinny Yemets) moved to some other city together with her parents.

      At the Pioneer Platoon meeting, two of the nominees announced self-withdrawal without giving any particular reasons for their refusal, and the Senior Pioneer Leader of our school pushed forward my candidature.

      Following the trend, I also started sluggish excuses, which he rebuffed with energetic clarification that all that was not for long because we all were soon to become members of the Leninist Young Communist League, aka Komsomol.

      (…the structure of the pioneer organizations in the Soviet Union presented an awesome example of organization based on precise and well-thought-out organizational principles for organizing any workable organization.

      In every Soviet school, each class of students on reaching the proper age automatically became a Platoon of Young Pioneers of 4 or 5 Pioneer Rings. Ring Leaders together with Platoon Chairman formed the Council of the Pioneer Platoon. Chairmen of the Pioneer Platoons made up the Council of the School Pioneer Company. Then there came District or City Pioneer Organizations converging into Republican ones (15 of them) which, in their turn, composed the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

      Such a crystal-wise-structured pyramid for convenient handling… That is why the heroes of Komsomol resistance underground during the German occupation of Krasnodon City did not have to reinvent the wheel. They used the all too familiar structure after renaming "rings" into "cells"…

      If, of course, we take for granted the attestation found in The Young Guard, the novel written by A. Fadeyev. He composed his work on the basis of information provided by the relatives of Oleg Koshevoy. In the resulting literary work, Oleg became the underground leader while Victor Tretyakevich, who, actually, accepted Oleg to the resistance organization, was depicted there as the mean traitor under the fictional name of Stakhevich.

      Fourteen years after the book publication, Tretyakevich was rehabilitated and awarded an order posthumously because he did not die during interrogations at organs of the Soviet NKVD but was executed by the fascist invaders when they busted the Krasnodon underground.

      In the early sixties, a few other secondary traitors from the book, whose names the writer did not bother to disguise, had served from ten to fifteen years in the NKVD camps and got rehabilitated as well. By that moment, the writer himself had time enough to put a bullet thru his head in May 1956, shortly after his participation in the meeting of Nikita Khrushchev, the then leader of the USSR, with the survived young guardsmen of Krasnodon.

      At the mentioned meeting, Fadeyev grew inadequately nervous and yelled at Khrushchev in front of all the present, calling him names considered especially defamatory at that period, and two days later he committed suicide. Or else, they committed his suicide though, of course, such an expression—"they committed his suicide"—is unacceptable by the language norms.

      Hence the moral – even the cleverest structure cannot guarantee from a collapse if your pyramid is not made of at least 16-ton stone blocks…)

      Late September, Chairman of our School Pioneer Company fell ill and, in his stead, I was delegated to the City Pioneer Organization Account Meeting of the Chairmen of the Councils of City School Pioneer Companies. The Meeting was held at the Konotop House of Pioneers in a pleasantly secluded location behind the Monument to Fallen Heroes on the rise above Lenin Street.

      By the organization regulations, an Account Meeting should elect its Chairman and Secretary. The Meeting Chairman’s job consisted of announcements whose turn it was to account while Secretary would take notes of how much waste paper and scrap metal was collected by the pioneers of the reporting Chairman’s school during the specified period, which cultural events were organized, and what places were taken by their pioneers in the city-wide contests and competitions.

      The Senior Pioneer Leader of our school had supplied me with a sheet of paper to be read at the Account Meeting but, in the House of Pioneers, they charged me with the additional responsibility of the appointed Chairman of the Meeting. I was assured that presiding an Account Meeting was as easy as pie. All you had to do was to declare, “And now the floor for the account report is given to Chairman of the Pioneer Company Council from School number such-and-such!” after which the such-and-such Chairman would march to the rostrum on stage with their sheet of report. The paper read up, the accounting Chairman leaves the sheet to Secretary of the Meeting, because what’s the point in sticking all those figures down on the fly if they are written already, right?.

      At first, everything went without a hitch. I and Secretary of Account Meeting, a girl in her ceremonial white shirt and the scarlet pioneer necktie, as anyone else around, were sitting next to each other behind the small desk under a dark red cloth on a small stage in a small hall, where Chairmen of the City Pioneer Companies were seated in rows waiting for their turn to read their accounts. Back in the last row, Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee—responsible for the work with the pioneers—sat in her red pioneer necktie.

      The Chairmen in a well-oiled manner followed each other, read from their sheets, piled them by Secretary of Account Meeting,

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