Сергей Огольцов – The Sweets At Dawn (страница 10)

The narrow parallelepiped tank, the width of the tin sink beneath it, was covered by a hinged lid. A push-button tap protruded from its bottom, like the one in a passenger train toilet—water flows as long as you press the spring-loaded pin.

A bucket, placed in the undersink box, catches the soapy waste. You have to keep a close eye on the wastewater bucket, because it's just one and it won't fit the two pails filled in the washbasin tank. When left uncontrolled, it'll flood the kitchen floor. So, it’s easier to check the wastewater level oftener to take the bucket out in time and pour into the cesspool next to the outhouse in the garden…

I hauled water from the pump at the crossing of Nezhin and Gogol Streets, about forty meters from our gate. A meter-tall cast-iron stump, with a spout of the same material, concealed a water pipe.

Hanging your bucket on the spout, you press down on the iron handle protruding from the stump at the back of its head, and a sharp stream hits the bottom of the hung container, overflowing it, and spills violently across the road if you're lost in your dreams again. Two trips a day, a total of four pails, were enough to supply the house with water. Unless it was a laundry day, of course. However, when Aunt Lyuda did her laundry, Uncle Tolik hauled water for her.

In rainy weather, the water carriers extended their route slightly to avoid wide puddles on the road…

In winter, the pump was surrounded by a small but very slippery skating rink, formed by the water lost by the water carriers. It's best to walk on the smooth ice with small steps, shuffling your feet.

Dark winter evenings helped appreciate the wisdom of placing the lamppost two meters from the pump…

~ ~ ~

Besides, fetching the fuel for the kerosene stove was on me as well.

This type of noiseless primus stove resembles a two-burner gas stove, with two cups at the back to feed kerosene in.

From there, kerosene flows through two thin tubes to soak asbestos ring-shaped wicks in the burners, of which there are also two. When lit, so as to cook or heat up dinner, or boil water for tea or the upcoming laundry, the tongues of its yellow flame, tapered into flickering tips of black soot, dance their slow, silent dance on the wicks. Not so bad. Yet, you’ll smell it at once if the kerosene stove is on. That's why they keep it on the veranda, so the house doesn't reek of soot and oil.

After kerosene, I'd made for the Bazaar along with an empty 20-liter canister…

At 50 meters off the Bazaar stalls stood a massive cubic tank, each rib 2 meter long. The day of the upcoming sale was announced in chalk on the cube's rusty-red side: 'Kerosene will be…', followed by the delivery date.

However, so many dates had replaced one another—written, erased, written again—that no numbers could be discerned anymore in the wide chalk stain, so they stopped writing. Logic is the foremost commodity. At least sometimes.

But the inscription, full of historical optimism, stayed forever: 'Kerosene WILL BE…!'

A shallow trench with brick-lined walls allowed a short pipe to be lowered into it from the cube’s bottom. The pipe terminated in a rotating tap. To make it impragnable to malicious intent, the tap was secured a padlock. On the day announced beforehand, a saleswoman in a blue robe would climd down into the trench, remove the lock, and get seated next to the tap on the stool she had brought along.

With her other hand, she would drag a 30-liter cooking pot under the tap, filling it (approximately three-quarters full) with a yellowish, foamy gush of kerosene.

The line would move, together with their bottles, canisters, cans, and she would fill those with a liter ladle through a tin funnel, pouring the paid in cash kopecks into her blue patch pocket.

When the ladle began to rattle against the bottom of the cooking pot, she would turn the tap on to restore the level to a convenient level for selling the fuel…

Actually, there was no need to write or read the date in chalk, because Grandma Katya went to the Bazaar every morning and, two days earlier, would bring news of when 'the kerosene indeed ‘will be…!' And on kerosene days, after school, I'd head off for a couple of hours with the canister to join the line crawling into the trench beneath the iron cube, only to emerge fragmented—one by one, laden with the coveted liquid with its distinctive odor…

Sometimes it was also sold in the driveway of the Nezhin Shop, from a pit constructed in exactly the same way. However, this didn't happen often, and the line there was no shorter than the one at the Baazar.

~ ~ ~

A week after summer break, I was elected Chairman of the Pioneer Squad Council for our 7B class, because the former Chairman (the skinny, red-head Yemets) had moved to another city with her parents.

At the general Pioneer meeting of the class, a couple of the proposed candidates withdrew without explanation. Then the Senior Pioneer Leader of the school, who was present and setting the tone for the event, nominated me. In an attempt to follow the general lead, I also began to reluctantly make excuses. But he interrupted my half-hearted 'Why me? Aren’t there others?' with an energetic clarification that all this would not last long—as we’d soon be enrolled to the Komsomol, aka the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth Union (VLKSM).

(… the structure of the Soviet Union's children's pioneer organization is a model of the well-thought-out and clear organization of any organization.

In every Soviet school, students in each class, upon reaching the appropriate age, automatically became pioneers, and their class was transformed into a Young Pioneer (Leninist) Squad of four to five Units (Rings). The Unit Leaders, together with the Squad Chairman, formed the Squad Council Council.

The school Squads Council Chairmen, together, became the Council of the school's Pioneer Squad. Then came the District or City levels of pioneer organizations, which merged into Republican (15 in all), which formed the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

Thus, you have a crystal-clear, structured pyramid for ease of use… And so the heroes of the Komsomol underground, who fought the German occupation of the city of Krasnodon, didn't bother reinventing the wheel. They copied the structure they had known since childhood and simply renamed . 'Rings' into 'Cells'…

If, of course, we take the word of 'The Young Guard', A. Fadeev's novel, which he, in turn, credulously wrote based on the accounts of Oleg Koshevoy's relatives. The grateful writer made his literary character the leader of the underground. In his literary work, Oleg Koshevoy becomes the leader, and Viktor Tretyakevich, who effectively recruited Oleg into the resistance, is presented as a vile traitor, under the fictitious name of Stakhevich.

Fourteen years after the novel's publication, Tretyakevich was rehabilitated and awarded a medal posthumously, as he did not die during interrogation by the Soviet NKVD, but was executed by the Nazi invaders when they crushed the Krasnodon underground.

In the early 1960s, a couple of the book's minor traitors, whose names the author had been too lazy to change, served ten to fifteen years in NKVD camps and were also rehabilitated.

By that time, the writer himself had already put a bullet thrugh his own head, in May 1956, shortly after Nikita Khrushchev, the then head of the USSR, met with the surviving Young Guards of Krasnodon.

During the aforementioned meeting, Fadeyev behaved inappropriately and yelled full of wrath at Khrushchev in front of the assembled people, calling him names that were particularly offensive and dangerous for that period in Soviet history.

Two days later, he committed suicide. Or, equally possible, he was killed by suicide, although, of course, such an expression as 'they killed him with his suicide' is unacceptable from a linguistic standpoint.

The moral of the story is that even the most carefully thought-out structure won't prevent a pyramid from collapsing unless it's constructed from stone blocks weighing at least 16 tons each…)

End September, the Chairperson of our school's Pioneer Squad Council fell ill, and I was delegated in her place to the Reporting Meeting of the Chairpersons of the City Pioneer Organization's Pioneer Squads. The meeting was held at the Konotop House of Pioneers, located in a pleasantly secluded spot behind the Fallen Heroes Monument, above Lenin Street.

According to the regulations, a Reporting Meeting of this level requires a Chairman and a Secretary. The Chairman is responsible for presiding over the meeting, and the Secretary is responsible for taking minutes: how much waste paper and scrap metal the Pioneers in the reporting Chairman's Squad collected during the period in question, what places they took in which citywide competitions, and what cultural events they held at their school.

The Senior Pioneer Leader of our school provided me with a piece of paper to read at the Reporting Meeting, but at the House of Pioneers, they assigned me the additional burden by appointing me Chairman of the Reporting Meeting.