Сергей Огольцов – The Sweets At Dawn (страница 4)

The next and also the most spacious of the store's departments, was 'Industrial Goods'.

Pressed tightly against the dusty glass of a pair of display cases (symmetrically located on either side of a massive door), were meaningful decorations in the form of white burglar alarm boxes.

Three zombified by boredom supervisors watched over the goods, sentenced to life imprisonment behind the glass display counters. From 9 to 6, two or three pairs of customers visited them. At most.

The natives of the Settlement preferred to go to the City if they needed any industrial goods.

But a couple of saleswomen in the grocery department were busy like bees all day. Sometimes, there was even a line forming, especially on days when butter was delivered. Wielding their knife (a replica of gladiator's sword), they slashed at that yellow cube perched on the counter next to the scales. They weighed out your two hundred grams, including the square of loose, blue, slightly damp paper.

When a worker from the KeLCeaRP Plant entered the grocery department, he was served out of turn because the kopecks clutched in his laborious fist had been counted many times beforehand. A bottle's worth, exactly, no change, you could check it with a caliper.

Besides, he needed to quickly get back to work. He didn't even change out of his oil-stained overalls, so as not to make his fellow workers crest-fallen.

The selection of vodkas in the department was diverse in flavors and names. You could find 'Zubrovka', 'Erofeich', 'Just One More…', and so on. But everyone invariably bought only 'Moskovskaya,' with its green and white label.

The door to the final department, 'Fish and Vegetables', was located around the corner of the store. Here, the scent of dry earth from last year's potatoes lingered, and the combined lethargy of a half-sold barrel of pickles and dusty, empty shelves lingered. That's why it was never opened. Kindness is a quintessentially Slavic trait.

And beyond the Nezhin Store lay locksmith Street, and Wheels Street, and, in the still-unexplored depths of the Settlement, other streets, alleys, and dead ends…

~ ~ ~

On the very first Sunday after our arrival, Aunt Lyuda led my sister and brother and me down Forge Lane to Profession Street, the only paved street in the Settlement. We headed along it in the Bazaar direction and, five minutes later, reached our destination—the KeLCeaRP Club, with a children's movie showing at three o'clock in the afternoon.

The Plant Club presented an imposing sight—a two-story building, but the usual four stories tall. The masonry of the walls and windows was interspersed with projections, arches, and pillars, creating the impression of lacework made of old-fashioned smoked brick. The concrete wall enclosing the Plant didn't fail to encroach on the rear of the Club Mansion.

On the small square in front of the Club's façade stood the Main Gatehouse, in the same sophisticated pre-revolutionary style of masonry. Opposite the factory entrance and exit, the architecture transitioned to a modern two-story structure.

The opaque glass cube of the Factory Canteen esteblished the style change. From the stunted lawn to the left of the glass-cubist building, a pince-nez bust watched over pedestrians. No glass, of course, but with a Chekhov-like bow rim sculpted on the nose, for clarity.

Stepan Radchenko—a revolutionary from Konotop. Among those sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, there were only a couple of natives of Konotop—Stepan and his older brother. However, the elder had nowhere to go from his illegal position as treasurer of the underground RSDLP—(for those with a clue, we'll explain it in layman's terms: bro, the bird ran the brigade's common fund, proved shady and never lived to see October Revolution)—before its split into Menshevik and Bolshevik fractions. Though, I would’t advise to nag passersby for so deep details…

. .. .

We climbed the steps inside the echoing vestibule and entered the narrow but lofty lobby of the KeLCeaRP Club.

The crush of shrieking, giggling, jeering kids of all ages queued there to the leftmost tin-clad door in the corner. The move ticket box office sold them through the hinged square cutout in the door’s center.

Some kid, a second-grader by his looks, began to pester Aunt Lyuda, the only adult about, doing his best to wheedle 10 kopecks for a ticket. However, she barked once, and he shut up.

Aunt Lyuda was visibly happy with the delightful atmosphere, having the chance to immerse herself in the forgotten hubbub of pre-film tweens…

Thus, I learned the route to Club, which, among other things, housed the Factory library. The tables in its spacious hallway were groaning under layers of bound copies of national broadsheet newspapers. The city newspaper, 'Soviet Banner' (in Ukranian) despite its more than modest dimensions, enjoyed a separate table of its own.

Familiar rows of unread works by Lenin-Marx-Engels, and other multi-volume works of equal popularity, peeked through the glass doors of tall bookcases.

The next room was filled with wide rows of sturdy bookshelves. Needless to say, I immediately signed up because a couple of shelves of dog-eared fairy tales in the Pioneer Room of School No. 13 falsified the essence and purpose of libraries.

~ ~ ~

On May 1st, our school marched in a citywide festive demonstration. The column was enlivened by the colorful parade uniforms of the Young Pioneers (white shirts on top, red tie bands, and the darker below the belt, the better). The older students' outfits were marked by a general lack of uniformity.

Still, it were the young men in the marching, screaming crowd of School No. 13 who adorned it with the weighty decoration of the heads of members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Each black-and-white head-portrait, impaled on planed, blood-red stick, was assigned to a group of three to four Member-Bearers. They took turns, gradually disappearing, until the honorable burden of bearing and decorating was finally left for the most dull-witted. Following a group of teachers huddled around the Director like his personal bodyguard, we walked along the bumpy cobblestones of Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street to the Bazaar, where Profession Street shared its asphalt with the descent into the Underpass tunnel.

The rise at the end of the concrete tunnel merged with Peace Avenue, which ran like a string to a distant bridge on a stunningly high railway embankment. Diving under the bridge, the avenue instantly emerged in the Zelenchak residential area, past its brick five-story buildings, to reach the undisputed center of the city—Peace Square.

Piercing Peace Square tangentially, Peace Avenue separated it from the City Council building, already tucked into a park of dense Chestnut trees. But even from there, it continued to stare intently toward the granite ring surrounding the fountain in the center of the separated Square.

The fountain, however, never dared eject a tiniest squirt, so as not to dim the City Council's gaze on the building that concluded Peace Square: Peace Movie Theater. Incidentally, its façade steps were also made of granite. However, unlike a certain granite-ringed good-for-nothing, Peace Movie Theater did work, and seven days a week, by that.

The middle one in the three Chestnut Alleys park, led smack bang to the steps of the City Council entrance, yet, was closed on every national holiday. A tall barricade of the red podium got erected across it. And now the entire city had something to march by in festive columns of work collectives.

Except for the residents of the five-story buildings surrounding Peace Square, who watched the demonstrations patrician-style—from above. Their balconies served the Coliseum. Lucky folks, eh?

On the way to Peace Square, the column of School No. 13 was beset by frequent, long-term standstills. We had to wait for the schools of lower numbering to come up and go ahead of us.

However, all columns of the enterprises let us pass, just as, for instance, the Locomotive Depot or, say, the Track Department of the Southwestern Railway did.

White letters, embossed in foam, announced the affiliation of their columns, standing out in stark contrast against the crimson velvet of their bicycle-wheeled signs.

In honor of the demonstration, not a single vehicle risked showing itself, even accidentally, along the entire length of Peace Avenue.

Nope. Not a tram, not a truck, not even a car.

All around were only people, multitudes of people, walking in the flow of columns across the entire width of the Avenue or blocking the sidewalk to stand like living banks, gazing at the general flow. And that's what made May Day so special, unlike any other day…

At the finish line, entering Peace Square, we suddenly switched from the dignified marching to a frivolous trot.

We ran as if we were about to attack, breathless from laughter and running, the darn Members crookedly tilted their bold heads, because, as always, there had been a mix-up with the columns, and we were held up too long.