Сергей Огольцов – Rascally Romance. The Vagabond Cherub (страница 13)

The worst horror is when they announce that today is injection day.

The children take off their shirts and line up in a quiet queue toward the table. And on it, the nurse's box jingles with its steel lid as she takes out replacement needles for her syringe.

The closer you get to the table, the more horrified you become, full of the envy of the lucky ones who have already received the injection. They walk off, pressing tight the scrap of cotton wool put by the nurse onto their shoulders, happily boasting that it didn't hurt, not even a little bit…

The children in line whisper to each other how good it is that today's injection isn't "under the shoulder blade", which is the most horrid of all…

And the best days, of course, are Saturdays. Besides the usual lunch of hated bean soup, sour cream is placed on the tables—almost half a glass at a time!—with grains of granulated sugar sprinkled on top, and a teaspoon stuck into the middle.

And on Saturdays, the children aren't sent to their beds for nap time. Instead, the lunchroom windows are tightly covered with blankets, and filmstrips—pictures with captions underneath—are shown on one of the white walls.

The teacher slowly reads the white caption, then asks if all the children have considered the picture in detail.

And only then will she twirl ahead to the next frame, where Sailor Zheleznyak captures the Whites' armored train, or Rusty Nail becomes brand new after a bath in a steel furnace. It all depended on the film loaded into the slide projector…

I was thrilled by these Saturday sessions: a soft voice from the darkness, a glowing ladder of slits on the side of the projector, images slowly floating into a bright square on the wall—everything coalesced into an inexplicably magical mystery…

~ ~ ~

Perhaps I sooner liked kindergarten than otherwise, though at times hidden reefs awaited me there. I stumbled upon one of them when Dad repaired the alarm clock at home.

He handed it to Mom and said, ‘Done! You owe me a bottle!’

I don't know why, but these words delighted me so much that at kindergarten, I enthusiastically replayed them for my groupmates to share the feeling. And the teacher replayed my replay for Mom when she came to pick me up.

On our way up the dense, dark spruce coppice, Mom said that what I'd done was a shame and disgrace. A boy shouldn’t tell strangers everything that happens in the family. Now they might think our dad's an alcoholic—is that what I want, huh? Do I need that?

Oh, how I hated myself in that spruce coppice!…

And it was in kindergarten that I fell in love for the first time in my life. I had to use all my might to overcome the unbidden feeling.

No, I didn't confess it, I simply turned away and left… Perhaps I even ran away—sadly realizing the hopelessness of that love. A bottomless age gap—abysmally deep—separated me from the dark-skinned girl with the cherry-fruit glint of her dark eyes… She was two years younger.

And how beyond reach grown-up seemed the former kindergarteners when they visited us after their first day in their first grade! In their white ceremonial aprons, pompously prim and proper, they barely deigned to respond to the animated querying of our (their former) Teacher.

…

At the kindergarten, the teachers and other workers wore white habits not on special occasions, but constantly, never taking them off…

However, exceptions happen anywhere. Like with the woman sitting next to me, on the same bench nearby a sandbox. She wasn't wearing a habit, and she was comforting me from yet another (I can't remember which one) of my woes—a bruise, a scratch, perhaps a new bump on my forehead.

However, I will never forget that her name was Zina…

Her quiet hand gently stroked my head, and I forgot to cry, pressing my cheek and temple to her left breast. My other cheek and the closed eyelids were basking in the warm sun, and I listened to the muffled thump of her heart beneath her green dress smelling of summer…

Until a piercing, unnecessary yell rang out from the building: ’Zinaida! Come here!’

~ ~ ~

And at home, we now had a grandmother, who had come from Ryazan, because Mom goes to work, and someone has to look after Sasha and Natasha, besides many other household chores…

Granny Marfa wore a cotton blouse loose over her dark, straight, almost floor-length skirt. Over her hair, she wore a white scarf with blue specks. Its large, soft square of cloth was folded diagonally to form a triangle.

Granny Marfa would place it on her head, the midpoint of the hypotenuse above the center of her upturned forehead, and then tie the long, hanging corners of the cloth triangle in a loose knot under her round chin…

. .. .

Mom worked three shifts at her place of work—at the Pumping Station. And Dad went to his—the Diesel Station. But he also had day, afternoon, and night shifts. Not all in one day, of course. He only worked one shift, but it changed after a week.

I never found out where his Diesel Station was, but most likely it was located in the forest, because Dad once brought a piece of bread wrapped in newspaper. And the package was given to him by a Bunny on his way home.

‘Well, I'm walking home after my shift, and I see Bunny under a tree, and she says to me: “Take this to Seryozhka, and Sanka, and Natasha!"’

Bunny's bread is much tastier than the one Mom slices for dinner…

. .. .

Sometimes parents' shifts don't coincide, and one of them is home while the other is at work.

One such time, Dad took me to Mom's work placed in a small brick building. The door was green, and behind it, as you entered, was a small room with a tiny window, high in the wall above a large old table with two chairs.

But if you don't go in there, but turn left through the brown door, you'll find a large, dark hall where something roars and howls all the time. And far away in the hall was another table, smaller, where Mom sat, working at her work.

She hadn’t expected us at all and was very surprised. Then she showed me a log under the lamp lighted over her desk. A very thick log, like a book, and you have to write down the time and the numbers from under the hands on the pressure gauges. They all have big round faces with the numbers, behind round glass. And they grow here and there at the very ends of various narrow iron walkways with railings, because the entire hall has no floor, only dark water for the pumps to pump.

And it's the pumps that make so terrible hum and noise all the time that you have to shout over them, but even then you can't hear everything. ‘What?! What?!’

So we returned to the room opposite the entrance, but now I knew who was howling behind the wall.

Mom took a pencil and a used log from a desk drawer, many pages missing roughly torn out, but not all so I could scribble doodles.

I started drawing, and they, even though they had nothing to busy themselves with, and the howl no longer prevented talking, kept silent. They were just looking at each other. When I finished the big round sun, Mom asked if I wanted to play in the yard.

I didn't want to go out at all, and I ughed and icked. But then Dad said that since I was disobeying Mom, he would never-never, ever bring me there again.

And so I went out.

The yard turned out to be just a stretch of road made of small pebbles, through which grass had grown—from the gate to a wooden shed, just past the far corner of the Pumping Station. And right behind the building stood a steep slope bristling with nettles, too thick to squeeze through.

I returned to the green door, from which a short concrete path descended to a very small whitewashed house. It had not a single window, but a large padlock on the iron door.

Well, how can you even play here?

True, there were two more round mounds, overgrown with grass. They stood on either side of the white house, which was just a tiny mushroom between them.

Grasping the long tufts of grass, I climbed onto the right one. From this height, the empty roof of the Pumping Station and the adjacent shed became visible. And the nettles I'd already seen.

On the other side, beyond the wire fence, there was a strip of bushes, behind which a fast-flowing river flowed, but I'd definitely be punished if I went beyond the gate…

Only the second mound with a thin tree at its top remained for any further play.

I climbed down to the white house, walked around it from behind, and upped the next mound. From up there, everything was the same, save the tree which you could touch.

Sweaty and hot from the climb, I lay down in the thin strip of shade from the tree.

Ouch! What's that?!… Something bit me on the thigh, then the other, then again and again. I turned to look over my shoulder.

A swarm of red ants was scurrying across my legs, below my yellow corduroy shorts. I brushed them away, but the sting of the bites only burned more…

At my howl, Mom leaped out from behind the green door, followed by Dad. He ran up to me and carried my agony down in his arms.

The ants were cleansed and shook off me, but my red, swollen thighs burned unbearably…

And this became a lesson for the rest of my life—there's no better remedy for the stinging bites of these red-chitin cannibals than to sit in the cooling silk of Mom's green dress, stretched tight by her hunched knees.