Сергей Огольцов – The Sweets At Dawn (страница 11)

All you have to do is stand up and announce, 'The floor is now given to the Chairman of the Pioneer Squad of School №…' Then Chairman №. steps up to the podium and reads his report, prepared by his Senior Pioneer Leader, and when he's finished, hands it over to the Meeting Secretary, because it's completely illogical to rewrite the numbers already written, right?

At first, everything went swimmingly. Both I and the Secretary of the Reporting Meeting, a girl in a ceremonial white shirt and a red Pioneer tie, like everyone else present, sat at a small table covered in red calico, on a small stage in a small hall where a small group of Squad Council Chairmen sat in line to read their reports. Out loud. In the back row, behind the small group of people waiting in line, the Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee, responsible for work with the Pioneer organizations, sat comfortably, alone in the entire back row, wearing the same scarlet tie as everyone else.

The chairmen, like well-oiled clockwork, came out, made their reports, stacked their papers on the red tablecloth of a small table, and, with a sense of duty fulfilled, descended into the hall.

I also did as I was told, but after the fourth announcement, something came over me, or rather, inundated.

My mouth was a flood. Salivary. I barely swallowed, and my glands instantly gushed with another surge of secretion, filling me with shame in front of the Secretary sitting next to me. She probably didn't know what to make of my incessant swallowing. What if they could hear me even in the hall? It was so small, damn it, so cozy.

It felt a little better when she went to report on School № 10, but when she returned, a flood of shameful torment erupted again. What's wrong with me?!

Now it's my turn… Having gurgled the report from the piece of paper, in just four steps from the podium to the chair at the small table, I swallowed three times. It didn't help.

Okay, all that's left is to serve out № 14… Oh, damn! The Second Secretary of the City Committee, too, with her closing speech!

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—out of reach, recall, redress—I hadn’t realized yet that all my grieves, and joys, and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who, brazenly wrapped in my sleeping bag, busy himself with composing this letter to you stretched out on my back, exhausted from a day's march, inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the incessant whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)

. .. .

In October, seventh-graders began preparing for admission to the Komsomol.

Young Communist League membership wasn't granted simply for a pretty face. People didn't join in droves, nothing of the sort! You had to first prove your worth, which was the purpose of an exam at the City Komsomol Committee on the second floor of the City Council building, in its right wing.

This is where your suitability would be tested, because by joining this youth organization, you became a comrade of the Party, a future communist.

During the preparation process, Volodya Gurevich, Senior Pioneer Leader of School No. 13—a handsome young man with black hair and bluish-skined jowls (due to a thick but always clean-shaven stubble)—distributed the Komsomol Charter leaflets among future Komsomol members. The very small print allowed all the statutory sections to fit on both sides of a single sheet of paper, folded into a booklet.

He also warned that at sittings dedicated to new members admission, the examiners from the City Komsomol Committee would be especially keen of the rights and responsibilities of Komsomol members…

Volodya Gurevich graduated from the prestigious School No. 11, between the Train Station and the Under-Overpass, as well as from the Konotop Music School, where he majored in button accordion. He had to commute to work from the City, where he lived just below Peace Square, in a small neighborhood of five-story buildings that Konotopers, for some reason, dubbed 'Palestine.'

Having arrived from Palestine to school, he sported a jumble of paraphernalia in his dress: a very clean and well-ironed Young Pioneer tie around his neck, coupled with the golden profile of a bald head and the pointed beard of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in the Komsomol badge pinned to the chest of his jacket.

Among his own (in the small circle of Young Pioneer activists), Volodya Gurevich would often announce, to emphasize the complete coincidence of his name and patronimic with those of the Leader of the Revolution: 'Just call me Ilyich'.

After these words, he’d burst in a loud drawn-out laugh. When it was over his prominent lips wouldn’t immediately return to a neutral position, and he would have to help them by removing the short strands of saliva from the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger.

Volodya Sherudilo, a redhead well-built round-faced lavishly-freckled Bittok gambling champion, among the narrow circle of his own (classmates) called Volodya ('Ilyich') Gurevich 'Khanorik from SOZ!'

Our red-haired classmate lived in the village of Podlipnoye, and came to school on foot.

(… in the initial stages of the consolidation of the Soviet regime, before the enslavement of the rural population on collective farms, the communist leadership experimented with herding the peasantry into Joint Cultivation Partnerships, abbreviated from Russian as SOZ.

However, the meaning of 'khanorik' cannot be found even in Vladimir Dahl's 'Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Bigger-Russian Language'. The sad gap most likely caused by the fact that the great linguist never visited the village of Podlipnoye.

Who remembers SOZs today? But the collective memory of the villagers carefully preserves and passes them on from generation to generation.

'Though the meaning’s lost, the feeling still abides…')

The large two-story City Council building, which also housed the City Komsomol Committee, was somewhat reminiscent of the Smolny Institute from various films about the October Revolution. This role was especially well-suited to the façade, overlooking Peace Square across Peace Avenue.

Three short, smooth-paved alleys beneath the unkempt, magnificent Chestnuts allowed the Smolny redouble dispatching capture teams to the Post Office, the Train Station, and the Bank… A belated convenience, alas—everything has long since fallen into Soviet hands, and all that's left is to stare blankly at the dry rim of the emasculated fountain…

. .. .

All the kids from our school passed the Komsomol Charter exam without a hitch. No one from the other schools in the city failed either…

~ ~ ~

Towards the end of the year, tram civilization arrived in the Settlement. A track emerged from the depths of the Underpass, ran parallel to the Baazar fence, and dived beneath the canopy of giant Poplars, in their mighty line along the cobblestones of Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street. Smoothly polished gray concrete pillars wedged themselves into the line of giant trunks to hold the overhead electrical contact wire above the rail track.

On the eve of the October Revolution celebration, the track had already passed our school and even turned onto May Day Street, which continued all the way to the edge of the Settlement, where fields begins.

Then, three small tram cars began running along the Third Route: from the terminus on the city side of the Under-Overpass to the terminus at the end of May Day Street.

Squeezing through the thicket of passengers, plump conductors sold tickets to the masses, 3 kopecks werth of scrap off the paper-roll on the strap of a pot-bellied bag slung around their necks to hold up their generously-sized busts. The bags also provided place where to spill in the kopecks collected from passengers for fares, 2 in 1.

In the large tramcars on city routes—the First and Second—the driver had only one cabin, at the head of the car. At the end of the line, the tram would run the circle of the turnaround loop and head back along the route.

But the Settlement terminuss lived up to their name, and didn't meander around, so once you'd reached there, that was it, the end.

That's why the small tramcars had two cabins, like a pair of Pushmi-Pullyu heads, and at the loopless terminuss, the driver simply moved from the front cabin to the back (though who knows which was the back and which was the front), that is, she headed for the front, which had been back while running to the terminus.

The conductor, standing on the step of the rear (currently) door, helped her colleague get the car going—she pulled a sturdy canvas rein tied to the hoop above the roof. It should be set in the position for a smooth glide along the overhead wire, pointing toward the rear like ears of a hare on the run, rather than goring into the wire with its horns, slowing the car down.

And with the hoop correctly positioned, the car set off on its return journey.

The door arrangements also didn't match. To close them on larger trams, the driver tugged at something in his cabin, and the doors would slam shut with an automatic hiss.