of light shed onto the wallpaper.
The challenge to my seniority from Natasha did not hurt so bitterly as Sasha’s disobedience. Just so recently as we two pranced, panting, into the kitchen to still our thirst with water from the tap, he readily conceded the white tin mug, adorned with the revolutionary battleship Aurora’s imprint on its side, to me as to the elder, bigger, brother. And emptying half of it, I generously handed the mug back for him to finish off the water, after all, that was the way for strength transmitting. How come that I became so strong? Because, without silly prissiness, I drank a couple of gulps from the bottle of water started by Sasha Nevelsky, the strongest boy in our class.
My younger brother listened with trust to my naive claptrap and dutifully grabbed the outstretched mug… Like me, he was over-credulous and once at midday meal, when Dad took out from his soup plate a cartilage without meat and announced: who’d gnaw it up was to get a prize—one kilo of gingerbread, Sasha volunteered and, after protracted munching, managed to swallow the cartilage but never got the promised sweetmeat, probably Dad forgot his promise…
A parcel arrived from the post-office, or rather Mom dropped in there to pick it on her way home after work, that box of faded plywood secured by a string glued to its sides with brown blobs of stamped sealing wax, with two addresses in block blue letters on its top: to our numbered mailbox from the city of Konotop.
The parcel was set on a stool in the kitchen and all of the family gathered around. The lid with the addresses, nailed firmly and aplenty, had to be removed by application of a big kitchen knife used as a lever, and revealed a sizable lump of lard, and a red hot-water bottle of hooch gurgling in between its rubber sides. The rest of the space within the box was filled to the brims with black sunflower seeds.
When slightly scorched in a frying pan, the seeds became simply delicious. We crushed them with our teeth, piled hulls away into a saucer placed in the center of the kitchen table, and enjoyed those small but so tasty, sharp-nosed, hearts.
And then Mom said if not eating them just so, one after another, but you amass, say, half a glass of husked seeds then add a sprinkle of sugar, that would be a treat indeed. Each of her 3 children was handed a tea glass to collect the hearts into. Instead of a saucer, Mom equipped us with 1 deep plate for all, and deftly rolled a huge cornet of a newspaper which she filled with the fried seeds.
We left the adults to eat unsweetened seeds in the kitchen and went over to the children’s room, where we lay upon the pieces of the carpet runner frizzled in the fire of long-ago past. As it should be expected, the level of peeled hearts in Natasha’s glass rose quicker than in ours, although she jabbered more than cracked. But when even my brother began to overtake me, I felt hurt.
The slowness of my progress resulted from considering a cartoon on the side of the newspaper cornet, a pot-bellied colonialist blasted off away from the continent of Africa, the black imprint of a boot kick in the seat of his white shorts. So I dropped the distracting contemplation of his flight and tried to husk faster, exercising a stricter self-control too, so as not to accidentally chew some of the harvested hearts, however, all my struggle for catching up with the younger proved useless.
The door opened and Mom entered the room with a half-glass of sugar and sprinkled a teaspoon of it over our personal achievements, but I was already sick and tired of them those foolish seeds, no matter sugared or not, and in my following life I stayed indifferent forever to the delights of sunflower seed orgies.
(…but still and all, consumption of seeds is much more than a trifling pastime combined with a sapid side-effect, no!. it's grown into a real art in itself.
To start with the purely Slavonic lavish way of eating them in the “piggy” style when the hollowed, or simply chewed together with the hearts, black hulls are not vivaciously spat out over the nearby environs, nope, they are set instead, by sluggish pushes of the tongue, on the move from out the corner of the mouth and keep sliding in a mutual, saliva-moisturized, mass down the chin to finally plop onto the eater’s chest. Excessive satiety, yes.
Or for a contrast, again a Slavonic but this time graceful “filigree” style when seeds are tossed by the snacker, one after another, into their mouth from a distance no less than twenty-five centimeters (20”).
And so on, down to the chaste Transcaucasia manner, when a seed for crushing is fed into the (yes, inescapably) mouth from a fixed position between the thumb tip and the joint of the index finger, so as to screen the intake of the seed, and then the processed husk is not spat out randomly but carefully returned into the burka-like contrivance of finger-screen to be scattered somewhere, or collected into something.
On the whole, the last of the presented methods leaves an impression of the eater biting their own thumb on the sly. But at who?
" Did you bite your thumb at me, Sir?!."
Oh, yes, sunflower seeds are miles aloft of dull popcorn. However, that’s more than enough about them.
Back to the green, cut-up, carpet runner…)
It was on those runner pieces where my brother felled my authority of the eldest by 1 dire blow… That day coming home after a PE lesson, I thoughtlessly stated that performing one hundred squats at one go was beyond human power. Sasha silently sniffled for a while and then said that he could do it.
Natasha and I were keeping the count, and after the fifteenth squat, I yelled that it was all wrong and unfair because he didn’t fully rise, but Sasha went on with squats as if I never said a word, and Natasha continued to keep the count. I shut up and soon after joined my sister in counting, though after “eighty-one!” he could no longer rise even above his bent knees. I felt pity for my brother over-strained by those incomplete squats. He staggered, tears welled up in his eyes, but the count was brought to a hundred and he barely hobbled to the big sofa. My authority collapsed like the colonialism in Africa; good news that before the fall I hadn’t promised any gingerbread…
~ ~ ~
Where did the filmstrip projector come from? Most likely, our parents bought it from a store. And in their room there appeared Radiola—combination of the radio and record player. 2 in 1, as they call it now.
The lid on top and both sidewalls of Radiola shed gentle gleam of brown varnish. The rear side had no gloss because it was hard cardboard with multiple rows of tiny portholes facing the wall. However, pulling Radiola a little forward, you could peep thru them and catch a patchy view of the murky interior landscape: the white of aluminum panel-houses, the dim glow in the pearly black turrets of vacuum-lamps of different height and thickness, and from one of those holes, a brown cable ran out ending by the plug for a mains socket.
Over the Radiola’s face was pulled a special sound-friendly cloth thru which you easily could trace the big oval speaker beneath the round sleeping eye whose glass flashed up with green when you clicked on the Two-in-One on. The long low plate of glass inserted along the front side bottom bridged the control knobs: the power and volume adjustment (2 in 1) above the range selection switch on the right, and only one knob on the left—for fine-tuning to the wavelength. The glass plate was glossy black except for four horizontal transparent stripes, from end to end, marked with irregular hair-width vertical snicks and the names of capital cities, like, Moscow, Bucharest, Warsaw. While twirling the knob of fine adjustment, you could follow, thru those transparent stripes in the glass, the progress of the thin red slider crawling from city to city along the inner side of the plate.
The radio was not very interesting though, it hissed and cracked and swished along with the slider movements, sometimes there would float up an announcer’s voice reading the news in some unknown Bucharestian language, a little farther along the stripe it would be replaced with a Russian voice repeating the news
