Сергей Огольцов – The Sweets At Dawn (страница 14)

Now I'll take off my shirt and pants, crawl into my Made in Germany sleeping bag, warm up, and—envy me, poor Kings and Emperors! It's good when such an ancient Eastern civilization unites with such a technocratic Western power, provide you with comfortable being at large.

Although, if you think deeper about it, they are merely executors of ideas accumulated by all of humanity, collectively. Any gadget, even the most advanced, even from the most developed power, is a common heritage, to which the Amazon Indians also contribute, simply by their existence. But they, like me, of course, have to pay for this common property of all humanity…

And take, for example, that same zipper at the tent entrance—do you know who invented it? Exactly… I don't know either. But it's unlikely to have been some ruler from the Qing dynasty, and certainly not Kaiser Wilhelm, even if he shaved his beard…)

~ ~ ~

The stage is a very complex mechanism. Take the system of pulleys manipulating the evolutions of the curtain, add the electrical panel with its myriad fuses, sockets, switches, and buttons changing the intensity and direction of the light beams. Count them out, but still you suddenly notice—high above the stage floor—an intricate web of open metalwork used to suspend the backdrop, spotlights, stage sets, and sidestage wings.

During concerts, we not only stood at the side of the beautifully nosed, virtuoso Aida, her accordion bellows undulating with unrivaled precision. Nor did we only chat with the Moldovan-Ukrainian peacocks from the incubator at the Ballet Studio poultry farm, quietly clucking as they waited for their number to be announced—no! Far from it!

We tirelessly explored the mysterious world of backstage. Curiosity led us to discover a vertical metal ladder built into the stage-right wall, its rungs ending at a short balcony, four meters above ground.

Looking closer and tweaking our glued-on mustaches, we discovered a way to climb the roof beams and cross to the opposite side, where there was also a balcony above the stage, but without the slightest ladder down.

Well, then, turn about your cart’s shafts and trundle back up there over the beams, short-sighted Chung!

But—hark! What could be there, behind that wooden partition that stretches high above the stage from wall to wall? Aha! That must be the attic above the audience!

‘Where are you crawling around all covered in dust? Raisa's screaming her head off, she's off to look for you in the Children’s Sector. Right now, after the snowflakes, they'll announce us!’

. . .

Thus, the plan for free access to film viewing was born and matured—from the attic to the balcony, down the ladder to the stage, wait for the lights in the hall to go down, duck under the screen, emerge on the other side into a free seat, sit and watch a movie.

On the first floor of the Club, next to the artists' room, a door, ajar on a permanent basis, opened onto a back alley within the Plant grounds. Next to it, a sturdy straight stairway began, with iron steps and railings, tightly hugging the wall.

A stroll up to the roof, where there's a convenient hatchway leading to the attic, a dormer window.

All it would take was drilling through the wooden partition separating the stage and the attic…

For some reason, Kuba didn't sign up to go along with the project. He left realization of the brilliant idea to Skully and me…

Soon, on a dark winter evening with a gusty wind that didn't have enough snow to become a blizzard, armed with an axe from the Skully's shed, we entered the Plant grounds by means of a nearby stile.

Without delay and unhindered, we approached the rear of the Club building, climbed up to the attic, and—looked around…

In the middle of the vast space, an incomprehensible disk-shaped object, approximately three meters in diameter, was discernible. Its approximate height was about a meter above the floor, or rather, above the boiler slag, usual attic filling.

A closer examination revealed that the object had a lid, also made of metal. It was as if someone had accidentally left a saucepan in the attic and then, for some reason, increased its volume to 999.88%. Partially sliding the lid to peer underneath, we confirmed that the disk was hollow inside, and its round bottom was noticeably deeper than the level of our standing outside.

Frequent, narrow slits radiated centrifugally from the center of the circle (at intervals of 20 cm from its center) toward the walls of the unidentified 'disk' not reaching them by also 20 cm.

The object's location relative to the rest of the attic, as well as a vague recollection of the somewhat familiar outline of the slits in its bottom made us think deeper. Finally, we came to the conclusion that it was from the disk that a huge chandelier with milky glass pendants hung down into the hall.

This guess was immediately confirmed by long bursts of automatic fire from a Shpagin submachine gun, that filled the disk, backed by grenade explosions, through the slits in the bottom. The war movie had, in a brotherly way, abetted our not exactly lawful intentions.

Nervously skipping across the insulating slag layer, the circle of light from the torch tracked ahead of our stealthy steps.

Soon, it came up against the wide boards that vertically partitioned the entire attic. Having deduced the most likely location of the balcony (on the other side of the thick boards), we began splitting and chopping them, with the aim of producing, by means of the axe, a hole large enough for us to enter, one at a time.

The wood turned out to be quite hard, and the lulls between battles in the sub-attic space slowed the work.

Only after cutting through one of the boards in two did we realize we had an additional problem—the barrier was, in fact, a double partition (2 in 1)!

Made of boards on both outer sides, it contained a layer of sheet metal. The sandwich technology that would lead to the future prosperity of McDonald's…

Chopping steel with an axe is wrong, which is precisely what prevented us from gaining a personal sally port into the magical world of cinema.

The builders of antiquity knew the secret of constructing safe-like attics…

. .. .

As it turned out, and quite soon, the whole plan with the hole in the partition was completely unnecessary, because Raisa taught us how to split the Director into free tickets…

By six o'clock in the evening, Pavel Mitrofanovich was usually pretty fried. Whenever one or another Sectorian appeared in his office with a petition, the Director would tear off a strip of paper on his desk and, snorting through his nostrils to keep his fumes under control, write more illegibly than a doctor in a pharmacy.

The recipe, when deciphered, read 'azdmit 6 (six) persno.' (Or however many people wanted to attend the upcoming screening.) At the bottom, he added a fantastically elaborate signature—twice as long as the previous line.

After Aunt Shura let the Settlement moviegoers into the auditorium, and the opening credits gradually immersed them in the dreams of the bliss they’d come for, we'd go up to the second floor. The precious scrap of paper passed to the ticket inspector. She'd unlock the coveted door to the balcony and, with a piercing eye, check our numbers against the hieroglyphs in the throwaway…

. .. .

The KeLCeaRP Club director was short and stocky, but without a corporation. His slightly puffy (and often flushed) face suited his build perfectly, as did his grayish-wavy hair, which he combed back. When the Club staff, along with amateur performers, were preparing a full production of Ostrovsky's 'In a Busy Place', the Club Director simply parted his hair, smeared it with Vaseline, and turned into a more authentic Tsarist-era merchant than all the merchant guilds combined had ever managed…

Electrician Murashkovsky paced the stage as the Landowner, wearing a white Circassian coat from Aunt Tanya's Dress Room, and constantly snapped his whip, which he held in his claw instead of a lace handkerchief. Even the Head of the Children's Sector, Eleonora Nikolaevna, participated in the full-scale production of 19th-century classics…

Her position at the Club clearly exceeded that of Artistic Director of the Children's Sector, which Raisa held. That’s why Eleonora came to the Club much less frequently, and Raisa readily giggled at Eleonora remarks whenever the opportunity presented itself.

For her visits, as everywhere else, Eleonora arrived wearing dangling earrings with tiny sparkling stones. The effect was enhanced by a pristine white blouse with a lace collar. The overall aristocratic quality of her demeanor was further enhanced by the slow, affected movements of her hands, which contrasted so strongly with Raisa's plebeian, energetic gestures. The only time Eleanor's ears were free from those crushed beads’ sparks was during the performance of a one-act play where she played an underground communist captured by the White Guards.

The White Guards locked her in a prison cell with a criminal convict from Odessa-Mommy (played by Raisa), and Eleanor managed to recruit the thief for the Soviet cause in just one (and, fortunately, only) act of the play. And then Stepan, the Club's caretaker, and Aksyonov, the head of the Variety Orchestra (both in white Circassian coats and ballet boots), led her away to put before the firing squad.