meeting place. If going out to the Courtyard you could see no one to play with, the next move was going over to the Bugork-Knoll to find your playmates there…
Besides playing games, we educated each other in the main things to know about the wide world around us. Like, after a nasty fall apply the underbelly of Cart Track to the bleeding scratch on your knee or elbow. And the stalks of Soldier-grass with tiny scale-like leaves were edible, as well as the sorrel but not the “horse sorrel”, of course. Or, say, those long-leaved swamp weeds were also edible when you peeled the green leaves off and got to the white core. Here you are! Just chew, you’ll see yourself!
We learned how to see flint from other stones and which of the rest to use for striking against the flint to send forth a trickle of pale sparks. Yes, the hard and smooth flint and the murky yellowish stone give out profuse sparks leaving some strange—both foul and fetching—smell of seared chicken skin.
Thus, in games and chat, we learned the world and ourselves…
“Are you in for Hide-and-seek?”
“No go. Two are too few for it.”
“There are two more. Coming back from the swamp in a minute.”
“Went to the swamp? What for?”
“Wanking.”
Soon the promised two came from the swamp, chortling between them, each one clutching a whisker of grass in his grab. I couldn’t guess the purpose of the grass bunches, neither had I any clear idea what “wanking” was about. Though from the grunts by which boys usually accompanied the word, I saw that it was something bad and wrong.
(…all my life I have been a champion for righteousness. Everything should be as right as rain. Seeing something which is not right just puts my back up. If, say, a grown-up shoat with brazen squeals sucks on a cow’s udder, I’m tempted to disperse them.
And take a look at that cow too! So resigned and obedient! As if she doesn’t know that milk is for calves and people only…)
That’s why I stood akimbo and met the comers with the reprimand in question form: “So what? Enjoyed your wanking?”
And then I learned that the righteousness supporters sometimes would better keep mum. Besides, it’s a crying shame that I could so easily be stretched on the ground at an unexpected brush….
Football was played in the grassy field between the Bugorok-Knoll and the garbage bins enclosure. Team captains nomination was based on who’s older, taller, and shriller in their shrieks at bickering.
Then the boys, in pairs, went aside and put heads together, “You’re ‘hammer’ and I’m ‘tiger’, okay?”
“No! No! I’m ‘rocket’, you’re ‘tiger’.”
Having agreed on the placeholder handles, they returned to the captains-to-be and asked the one whose turn it was to choose, “Which one for your team: ‘Rocket’ or ‘Tiger’?”
With the human resources divided, the game began. How I wanted to be a captain! To be so popular that all the boys would hanker to play in my team! But the dream remained just a dream… I zealously scrambled thru the grass: from one football goal to the other. I was desperate to win and didn’t spare myself, ready to do anything for our victory. It’s only that I never could get near the ball. At times it did roll towards me, yet before I got prepared to kick it properly, the swarm of “ours” and “theirs” came racing around and send it far afield… And again I plodded in a clumsy trot, back and forth, and shrieked, “Pass! Me here!” but no one listened to me and everyone else screamed too and was also running after the ball, and the game rolled on without my actual participation…
~ ~ ~
In summer all our family, except for Grandma Martha, went to Konotop in the Sumy region of Ukraine, to the wedding of Mom’s sister Lyoudmilla and the region champion of weightlifting in the third weight class, young, but rapidly balding, Anatoly Arkhipenko from the city of Sumy.
A truck with a canvas top took us thru Checkpoint—the white gate in the barbed-wire fence surrounding the whole Zona—to the Valdai railway station where we boarded a local train to the Bologoye station to change trains there. The car was empty with no one but us on the wooden yellow benches paired back-to-back on both sides of the aisle. I liked the car swaying in time with the clatter of wheels on rail joints beneath the floor. And I liked to watch the dark log posts flicking across the windowpane, their crossbars loaded with the endless stream of wires sliding to the bottom in their sag only to go up to the next post’s leap-flick for the unrolling stream to slide into the next sag and tilting up, and again, and again, and… At the stops, the local train patiently waited to give way to more important trains and moved on only after their impetuous whoosh by.
One especially long wait happened at the station of Dno whose name I read in the glazed sign on the green timber-wall of its shed. And only after a solitary steam engine puff-puffed past the shed, slowly piercing with its long black body the white curls of its own steam, our train started on.
(…I recollected that station and the black glitter of the engine penetrating the milky mist of the steam when I read that at the station of Dno, Colonel of the Russian Army Nikolay Romanov signed his renunciation of the royal throne… However, by that act, he didn’t save himself nor his wife, nor the children of their royal family all lined up with their backs to the basement wall and shot at and then those not killed by the volley were finished off with the rifle bayonets.
I knew nothing of all that when sitting there in the local train by the shabby shed. Neither was I aware that it does not matter if I knew it or not. Either way, all that is part of me. It’s me at both ends of those Mosin rifles ridiculously long even when with no bayonets…
Still, it’s good that we don’t know all in childhood…)
Most of the houses along Nezhyn Street in the city of Konotop kept slightly off the road, standing behind their respective fences which reflected the owner’s level of prosperity, as well as the mainstream trends, brands, and stages in the evolution of the local fencing technologies. However, the left-side continuity of sundry fencing stretches in the street was briefly interrupted by the wall of Number 19 whitewashed ages ago, having 2 windows in bleached peeling-off paint-coat equipped by 4 hinged deal shutters to seal the windows off for the night.
To enter the house, one should have passed thru the wicket of tall weather-worn boards, side by side with the wider, yet constantly closed gate which separated the yard from the street. The comer should also know which of the 4 entrances they needed. The doors were identically distributed between two windowless verandas abutting the house in between the 4 windows looking in the yard.
The veranda next to the wicket, with both of its doors, as well as the half of the whole house, belonged then to Ignat Pilluta and his wife Pillutikha, therefore the pair of windows overlooking Nezhyn Street were theirs. The timber walls of the second veranda wore a coat of rambling Vine with wide green leaves and pale clusters of dinky, never ripening, berries; the blind partition, also of boards, divided the second veranda’s inside into 2 lengthwise sections, 1 for each of the 2 remaining owners.
The home, aka khutta, of our grandmother, Katerinna Ivanovna, comprised the half-dark veranda-hallway, the kitchen with a window viewing the 2 stairs beneath the outside entrance door to the veranda, and the brick stove in the opposite corner next to which stood the leaf of the constantly open door to the only room in the khutta. The space between the whitewashed walls there all day long remained submerged in the perpetual limbo-like
