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That line is simple, straight, and down-to-earth. In a word, Mikhail Ogoltsoff was a peasant.
In the depths of the Ryazan land, there is the district center of Sapozhok and at nine or eleven kilometers from it (the distance depends on who you ask the question), lies the village of Kanino. My father liked to brag that in its fat days the village had about four hundred households.
The shallow ravine with a sluggish soundless brook rolling along its bottom splits the village into two halves. Back in the blessed days of yore, the stream banks served the grounds for the long-standing folk amusement “Battling Walls”, aka collective fist-fight. The men from one half of the village devotedly punched the other-half dwellers, smashing their teeth out to mark some of church holidays or celebrate a mild-weathered Sunday. Yeah, once upon a time folks knew a thing or two about stimulating entertainment…
And so it went on for centuries before sinking into oblivion. Only vague memories remained of Alesha the Saddler, the legendary fighter and obedient son. But his Dad was a truly uptight geezer! “Where to?” would yell he at the scion. “Too filthy rich you are, eh? Back to work and no nonsense!”
And the mighty three-and-thirty-year-old son would stoop his hefty shoulders over the unfinished horse-collar poking it with his awl while all of him was out there, at the lists by the stream, from where little boys ran panting in with the updates, “Oy, Alesha! They are pressing indeed! Ours give in already!”
Yet, the warning snort from his father would keep Alesha silent and concentrated on his toil until many “a-heck!” and “plunks!” of a dogged retreat in the street reached the hut. At that point, Dad would no longer keep his temper down. Springing up to his feet, he would run to Alesha and deal him a huge box on the ear and yell, “Fuck it! Ours bite the dust but this dickhead still sits home!”
But Alesha didn’t hear the whole oration, he's out already, bypassing the battling “Walls” thru the village backyard kitchen gardens because the rules forbid attacking the opposite team from behind, a good game deserves fair play.
“Alesha’s out!” And “the ours” get a second breath right away while the opposite “Wall” show streaks of wavering. Some weaklings start falling down in advance—the rules do not allow to beat a fighter lying on the ground. And Alesha, deeply concentrated, knocks the standing fighters out one after another; and, mark you, without a single f-f..er..foul word… Yep, the village was in the pink then…
The Rural Collectivization in the USSR finished off that innocent merry-making and the well-orchestrated Great Hunger, called to solidify the revolutionary changes in the Russian rustic life, knocked Alesha off, and his father, sure enough, also starved to death…
My father’s mother, Martha, remembered the life under the Czar because at the break of the Great October Revolution she was a girl of about thirteen. Ten years later she was already married to Mikhail Ogoltsoff to bring forth three children: Kolya, Sehrguey, and Alexandra (respectively).
Mikhail lived thru the collectivization phase but the Great Hunger made him pass on and Martha remained a single mother. She cooked soup of saltbush and less edible herbs. Both she and her children were swelling up from starvation but survived.
Then there arrived the era of hard labor at the collective farm, aka kolkhoz, with its miserly paid workdays. Life kept spinning around those “workdays” paid in kind with the same products the villagers produced slaving in the kolkhoz fields, and the collective recreation at the kolkhoz club where twice a month they brought Soviet movies "Lenin in October", "Pigwoman and Shepherd" and other suchlike stuff. To make movie-watching possible, the village lads had to hand-pedal the crank of electricity-producing dynamo machine brought for the show together with the projector and cans of film spools.
In the summer of 1941, Comrade Joseph Stalin surprised everybody calling them in his address over the radio “dear brothers and sisters”. Then he announced the treacherous invasion of the fascist Germany into the Soviet Union, and the village mujiks were driven away to the war.
Germans never reached Kanino though the thunder of the front-line cannonade was rolling in from the horizon. Then in the village came detachments of the Red Army reserve, the mujiks from Siberia with their amazing custom to sit after taking a steam bath in the frosty winter night outside and have a thoughtful smoke in just their pants and undershirts on.
The Siberians left in the direction of the cannonade and soon afterward it ceased to be heard. In the village, pervaded by thick silence, there stayed only women, girls and boys too young to be drafted. And—yes!—the collective farm chairman, a one-armed cripple in the military outfit.
And so it went on and on, not for days or weeks but for months, from year to year. Under the circumstances, there sprang up a veritable sexual quirk permeating the womenfolk. They would gather in one or another hut with a view to inspect one or another cunt from theirs, exchange comments and judgments, evaluate the appeal…
Getting on the scent of this Sapphism Renaissance, the kolkhoz chairman had a crack at eradication of the collective lesbian kink before the rumors of it reached the authorities in the district center, and he called a general meeting of exclusively women and girls in the kolkhoz club.
The male youths participated also, on the quiet. They penetrated stealthily the projectionist booth in the club and, with their jaws a-hanging, witnessed the chairman to cheer the congregation up with all the mighty curses. Repeatedly knocking his only fist against the rostrum top, he took his most solemn oath to cut out that rotten cunt-watching by use of an incandescent iron pry. (I mitigate, in part, the artless charm spread throughout the bucolic figures of speech in the chairman’s proclamation.)
My father never knew if the cripple did keep his promise because he (my father) was drafted into the Red Army. Or rather, in his case, it was the Navy but Red all the same…
~ ~ ~
The WWII was burning out but pigged up the cannon fodder as voraciously as always. Kolya, a youth from a Ryazan village, and lots of other youths from other places got outfitted in the striped Navy vests, black pants, black shirts under black pea-jackets and for a couple of months kept at a recruit depot to drill them military basics and know “Attention!” from “Dismissed!” They also were taught to tell between the bayonet and trigger before, finally, loaded, in their anti-khaki uniform on high-speed cutters for a landing operation somewhere up the Danube river in Austria.
But, for all the speed of the landing operation cutters, they didn’t get there in time because the fascist Germany had just capitulated and there was no one to attack.
(…long ago I secretly regretted at this point: eew! they left no time for my Dad to become a hero! Now, on the contrary, I'm glad that he never shot and killed anyone, not even accidentally…
Still, he was considered a vet of the Great Patriotic War and on special anniversaries, like 20 or 25 and so on Jubilees of the Great Victory they always awarded him commemorative medals which he stored in the sideboard drawer but never wore like those vets dangling their collections on their civvy jackets to mark another Victory Day…)
Then his detail were guarding for a couple of months the empty Serpent Island off the coast of Bulgaria, or maybe Romania, from where they transferred him to a minesweeper, a minuscule Naval trawler manned by a tiny crew.
My Dad’s seafaring career began with the passage from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk over the ruff Black Sea; it was not a full-blown storm but the sea was pretty choppy… Riding a swing in the park is fun but if you go on enjoying it for a couple of hours the stomach will throw up anything stuck in it from the day before yesterday’s breakfast. That sea crossing continued much longer…
When Red Navy man Ogoltsoff came ashore at the port of destination, even the land itself kept swaying under his feet. He tried to puke between the tall timber-stacks lined along the pier, but to no avail. The young sailor sat on the ground just where he stood and, watching the towering rows of timber that kept swaying up and down, decided that he'd inescapably die in that naval service…
(…you may easily figure it out that was a wrong assumption as long as he had not yet met your grandmother, nor persuaded her to go with him to ZAGS. And your grandmother hadn’t yet born three children without becoming a single mother, which constitutes an unprecedented instance in this story under way…)
So, seasickness did not kill my father. He learned to endure the pitching and tossing. He tattooed a blue anchor on the back of his left hand, and on his right arm a swift outline of a swallow in the flight—from the elbow to the wrist—pinching in his beak a tiny letter envelope (“fly with greetings…”); and he furrowed on his bitty minesweeper the vast expanses of the Black Sea, clearing it from the minefields which, actually, is what minesweepers are designed for.
The main difference of naval mines with their land counterparts is that the sea species must be tethered or else they would scatter drifting astray to destroy any ship met on the way without checking whether she was “theirs” or “ours”. That’s why a cocked up sea mine is fixed with a steel cable to an anchor that grabs at the seabed. The mines—iron balloons filled with air and TNT—soar up in the water not reaching the surface though restricted by the cable length correlated to the depth on the sea route dealt with. And there the naval mines hover, a couple of meters below the surface, waiting for a passing ship to hit any of its spike-like detonators poked out the mine-shell in different directions like in a babyish sketch of the sun.
Thanks to its shallow immersion, the Navy minesweeper passes over the minefield clear of being caught by detonator spikes. In its wake, the boat drags the long loop of thick steel cable over the bottom so as to cut the mines anchorage at the seabed and destroy the loose mines popping up to the surface. For that end a manned rowboat leaves the minesweeper heading towards the mine. The team's task is to fix a dynamite cartridge with the Bickford fuse onto the huge iron ball of the mine. (Which is performed not in a placid park pond but midst unsteady waves in the open sea with the mine's spherical skull heaving up above the rowboat and then falling under it, striving to ram with the horn of a detonator.)
The final step is done by the boatswain from the stern board, a lit cigarette in the firm bite of his disclosed teeth not as a means to show off his daredevilry, it’s as a tool readied to set the fuse off. Now it’s caught fire and – Hup! Hup! Ho! Everyone pulls on with might and main, no shirkers at the oars. Away as far as possible from the hiss of the fuse dwindling to the final “BOOM!”—the TNT charge in a naval mine is meant to tear up the hulls of line battleships…
When broken down into constituent elements, romantic heroism just melts away and maritime mine clearance starts to resemble the prosaic job of a tractor bumbling in a kolkhoz field. The minesweeper gets to the assigned water area and furrows it all day long, back and forth, with the cable released behind the stern; and on the following day – to the next area. On the whole, the minesweeper crew’s heroism consists in being a good team, and the fact that my father stayed alive resulted from their forthright cooperation.
For example, at the end of a typical working day, Nikolai Ogoltsoff watched over the stern winch when he noticed a mine approaching the boat because its anchorage line got entangled with the minesweeper’s loop cable when it crawled over the sea bottom. Now it was being reeled back to the windlass drum. Too late to switch off the winch which would spin on by inertia for a short, yet sufficient, time to drag and slap the mine against the boat. Dad’s shirt stood off away from his body like the hide of a beast at the moment of utmost danger, and his roar, “Full Ahead!”, was full of such animal force that Captain on the bridge lightning-haste duplicated his order on E. O. T. sending the bell signal to the engine room, the mechanic, Dad’s shift-man, did his job promptly, the boat propeller churned up the wave whose pressure pushed the nearing mine off. So the team saved each other…
Five years later there remained no unswept areas in the sea routes and my father was transferred from the minesweeper to a coastguard ship, again in charge of the diesel engine. The following year saw the end of his second term in the Navy service (because of the heavy losses in WWII, before new generations of draftees cropped up, the service term in the Soviet Army was doubled: 6 years in the Army, 8 in the Navy—yes, 2 years more and the only consolation that no other servicemen sport so spiffy breathtaking uniform, golden anchors and stuff) and they offered my father a job in a “mailbox”.
At those times the USSR had lots of secret institutions, secret factories, and even secret cities, none of which had an ordinary postal address so as to fool enemy spies and leave them clueless about all those secret objects location. As a result, the addressee stopped living in any street or city, he lived in no region neither district and he was referred to in a pretty short way: “N. Ogoltsoff, Mail Box №***.”
Since on his last furlough before the demobilization Red Navy man Ogoltsoff N. M. registered his marriage with Citizen Vakimova G. J., she landed up at the same “mailbox” in the Carpathian mountains.
The “box” was not fixed up with a maternity hospital and for bringing me forth my mother had to visit the town of Nadveerna, thirty kilometers from the regional center, the city of Stanislavl (later renamed into Ivano-Frankivsk after the end-of-the-century Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko). Going out the "box" gave her the frightful jitters because vehicles on the roads were often shot at by the Bandera men.
(…for a long time I considered the Bandera men bloody bandits and Nazi accomplices. What else to think of them if a full-scale military division named “Galichina” was manned by Western Ukrainians to fight against the Red Army? Then, gradually, it dawned on me that two years before the German invasion it was the Red Army who occupied Western Ukraine and assisted the Soviet secret police, aka NKVD, in executions and deportation of potential opponents to the Soviet system. Killed just in case, as a preventive measure, in thousands.
Besides, what is a division when compared to an army? Among the German Wehrmacht’s comrades-in-arms, there also was the Russian Liberation Army (RLA) of almost one million servicemen fighting against the USSR.
And last but not least, the rank-and-file Red Army men, participants in the events of that period, let me know that the Bandera men fought fiercely against both Soviet and German troops. They were Carpathian guerrillas defending their land against successive liberators, aka enslavers.
Still, my parents all their life long considered the Bandera men savage bandits…)
And even two years later, when my mother again was in need of the help by maternity hospital, the dogged machine-gun rounds still rumbled on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, but she could not hear them anymore because her husband had been transferred from one “mailbox” to another and left the Transcarpathia for the Valdai Upland…
The change in the life circumstances of my parents resulted from a snitch-on letter sent to the Special Division of the previous “mailbox” from Konotop. It was composed by the people living in the same house with Galina Vakimova before her marriage.
The house (in Konotop parlance “khutta”) of 12 by 12 meters was a divided property, half of which belonged to citizen Ignat Pilluta. The other half was equally divided between citizen Katerinna Vakimova with her children and citizens Duzenko with their daughter, so each of the two mentioned families owned an entrance hall, a kitchen, and a room.
The daughter of citizens Duzenko married citizen Starikov who moved into her father’s part of the
Special Divisions at “mailboxes” were notoriously vigilant and merciless, so the relatives of Joseph, who disappeared in so treacherous anti-Soviet way, would certainly be arrested and—the informers were quite sure—at least, deported. Too bad, in their logical calculations or, sooner, aping a commonplace trick of the period, they neglected the time factor. By that moment Great Leader and Teacher of Peoples, Comrade Stalin, rested in peace already. The nuts tightened under his rule to the utmost started to gradually let up.
Of course, Nikolai Ogoltsoff was repeatedly called and questioned in SD of the “mailbox”. There took place an exchange of official correspondence between the
The second lying-in of Galina Ogoltsova occurred again outside the new “box”, in the nearest, not secret district center.
(…it seems that the maternity hospital or, rather, its absence was the Achilles’ heel of the then “mailboxes”…)
On arrival to the maternity hospital out there, she was denied admittance because they took her for a Gypsy on account of her black hair and the dressing gown of large printed flowers. Suspiciously flashy, too red. Yet escorting her her husband emphatically condemned so erroneous assumption, his zealous attestation brought about change in the attitude of the segregationist nurses and they let her in for the labors at hand. An hour and a half later my father was told that his wife had born a girl, and five minutes later they heralded arrival of a boy baby. The news triggered a blissful yell by our father, “Switch off the lamp in the deliv'ry room! It’s to the light them babies scramble!.”
History, be it of a private person, or a developed nation, boils down to just two parts of which the first comes history immemorial, presented in loose legends, hazy myths, and dubious traditions; the latter, on the contrary, embraces stark facts caught, tagged, logged, and anchored to a certain calendar, preserved in the public chronicles of some kind, or in the personal memory, in case of a separate individual…
All the children of my parents were fascinated when Mom and Dad got into the mood for sharing the family lore about the deeds and adventures of the eager listeners at the times beyond their infant memories.
About how the first-born started toddling, for example, at the railway station on departure from the Carpathians to the Valdai. At the following train stops my father took me out onto the station platforms to consolidate my skills in feeble walking because the wobbly floor of the rolling car did not favor such hoopla…
At the new place, the family was allocated a timber house where they let me go for independent walks in the yard bounded by a fence of slender planks. My mother was greatly perplexed at my looks, mired as a piglet, on my returns from the yard. Where could I possibly find any dirt in so tiny and orderly corral? Changing me into clean once again, she asked my father to crack the enigma. So what he sees keeping the door open for a tiny crack to peek after the mud-lover? No idle roaming nor hesitation, the kid at once takes a beeline route to the fence plank in the corner fixed by just one—upper—nail, pushes the deal aside and off he goes! In the street, the boy busily scrambles atop the hillock of sand dumped for the construction of another house. Up there he plops on his tummy and slides down the sand slant drenched by the recent rains. A merry-go-happy laughter joins the ride. Could you manage washing things for that cheeky villain?.
While my mother was changing me over again, my father took a hammer, stepped out and nailed the dangling plank in place. Then he came back and together with my mother watched: now what?
The kid walked to the usual place and pushed the plank. It didn’t stir. Neither did the planks on both sides from it. The railed in child went along the fence, twice, checking each of the planks then he stood still and burst into tears…. My memory retained neither timber house nor its yard, but at this point in the parents’ narration, I felt the emphatic tears welling up in my eyes.
And from another legend, the paw of horror ran up my bristled hair before to pierce the back of my neck by the grasp of its point-sharp talons because my mother grew suddenly anxious that I was nowhere around and for quite a stretch too, so she sent my father to look for me. He went into the yard then in the street—not a sight of me anywhere and no neighbor had seen me at all but it was getting dark already.
Dad walked the street again, from one end to the other, and then he paid attention to the rumbling noise of the river. He hurried to the steep, almost vertical, slope under which the river, swollen after the rains, rolled angrily on. And there, far down, he made out his son. Run, Daddy, run!.
The torrent of muddy water had engulfed the narrow strip of the bank under the cliff-like drop-off. He had to race knee-deep in the water.
The boy in a tight clench to the wall of clay, a tuft of withered grass in his pinch, his feet under the rushing torrent. He does not even cry already and only whimpers, “uhu-uhu..”
Dad wrapped him in his jacket and hardly managed to find a spot he could climb out without helping himself with his both hands…
And how proudly fluttered the wings of my nose at the story that it was me christened my brother and sister!
Since I was named after my father’s brother, the names of my mother’s siblings were readied for the twins that came next. In the maternity hospital, they were addressed just so—Vadik and Lyoudochka. However, when the babies were brought home and the parents asked me what we would call them, my immediate response was, “Sassa-’n’-Tattassa.” And no fast-talk could convince me to change my mind.
That’s how my brother became “Alexander” and my sister was called “Natalia”.
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ The Childhood
The very first notch to sum up my legendary past and start recording in my memory my life events by means of my personal recollections was scratched by the raw morning sun whose glare made me squint and turn my face sideways atop a small grassy mound upon which Mom had pulled me. There we stood, hand in hand, giving way to a black crowd of men marching across our route to kindergarten.
From their advancing mass, they saluted me with cheerful ‘hellos’. My hand raised up didn’t wave back grasped by Mom’s palm, still I felt big, pleased, and proud that my name's so popular among the adult convict-
Those
All in all, our Block comprised six two-story houses alongside the perimeter of a vast rectangular courtyard. All of the six houses were entered from the courtyard, four longer cranked buildings bounded its corners and had three entrances each, while each of the 2 shorter houses, inserted in 2 opposite sides, had only one. However, it was the presence of those shorties that made rectangular of a mere square. The road of hard concrete ran around Block and its twin under construction both uniting and separating them like loops in 8 or, maybe, ∞.
Allowed to play out, I often left the empty childless Courtyard and crossed the road to get to the block under construction.
The Gorka upland, most elevated part in the Object, shared its name to the two blocks atop of it. On all the four across the loop road around the blocks there grew the forest but no tree could ever make it over the concrete in the roadway… When the second of the Gorka blocks was completed,
The trail to kindergarten started right behind our house. There was a long straight dirt road tilt towards the gate in the barber wire fence surrounding the Recruit Depot Barracks. Yet before you reached it, a well-trodden path forked off into the Pine forest on the right. Bypassing the fenced barracks and a large black pond under big trees, the path went down thru the thicket of young Fir-trees. The descent ended at a wide clearing midst the forest enclosed by the openwork timber fence to keep the trees away from the two-story building, the hub to the web of narrow walks to separate playgrounds with sandboxes, small teremok-huts constructed of lining boards, see-saws and even a real bus, short but big-nosed. It had no wheels, to make it easy to step inside directly from the ground, but the steering wheel and the seats were all in place.
Coming to the kindergarten, you had to take off your coat and shoes, leave them in your narrow tall locker marked by the picture of two merry cherries on the door and, after changing into slippers, you might climb the stairs to the second floor with 3 big rooms for separate groups and the common, even bigger, dining room.
My kindergarten life was a patchwork of various feelings and sensations. The victorious pride in the noisy locker-room where parents already started to pop up after their children and where, prompted by Mom, I discovered my ability to tie the shoelaces myself, without anyone’s help… The bitter humiliation of defeat from those same shoelaces on that morning when they were drenched, pulled, and made into tight knots and my Mom had to untangle them, distressed that she would be late for her work…
In kindergarten, you never know what awaits you there before Mom or, sometimes, Dad or a neighbor woman will come to take you home… Because while you are there they can catch you unawares and insert a chrome tube-end of a thin rubber hose deep into your nostril and blow in a powder of nasty scratchy smack, or else make you drink a whole tablespoon of pesky fish oil, “Come on! It’s so good for health!”
The most horrible thing when they announce that it is the injection day today. The children will line up towards the table with a loudly clinking steely box on it from where the nurse takes out replaceable needles for her syringe. The closer to the table the tighter the grip of horror. You envy those lucky ones for whom the procedure is already over and they go away from the table pressing a piece of cotton wool to their forearm and boast happily it didn’t hurt. No, not a tad bit!. The children in the line around whisper how good it is that today’s injection is not done under the shoulder blade. That’s the most fearful one…
Saturdays are the best. Besides the usual dinner of hateful bean soup, they give you almost half-glass of sour cream sprinkled with sugar around a teaspoon stuck in. And they do not send children to bed for the “quiet hour”. Instead, the dining room windows are sealed by dark blankets to show filmstrips on the wall. The caretaker reads the white lines of inscription beneath each frame and asks if everyone has reviewed everything in the picture, and only then she drags the next frame in where Zhelezniak the Seaman will capture the iron-clad train of the Whites or a rusty nail will become a brand new one after his visit to the steel furnace, depending on which of the filmstrips the projector was loaded with.
Those Saturday happenings fascinated me—a voice sounding from the darkness, the ladder of thin rays thru the slits in the projector’s tin side, the pictures slowly changing each other on the wall—all brought about a touch of some mysterious secrecy…
I sooner liked kindergarten than otherwise, even though it had certain reefs lying hidden in wait for me to run into. One of such skulkers tripped me up after Dad repaired an alarm clock at home and, handing it back to Mom, announced, “Here you are!. You owe me a bottle now.” Which words, for some reason, delighted me so dearly that I boasted of them in front of children in my kindergarten group which braggadocio was reported by the caretaker to my Mom when she came to take my home in the evening.
On our way home, Mom said I did a shameful thing because a boy should not share outside home everything that goes on among the family. Now, they might think that my Dad was an alcoholic. Was it what I wish? Eh? Was that so very nice? How I hated myself at that moment!.
And in kindergarten it was that, for the first time in my life, I fell in love. However, I did my level best to fight the feeling back. With bitter sadness, I grasped how useless was that love because of the insurmountable—like a bottomless abyss—difference in age between me and the swarthy girl with dark eyes of cherry-berry gleam in them. She was two years younger…
But how unreachable and adult looked the former kindergarten girls who came on a visit there after their first day at school. Clad in festive white aprons, putting on so reserved and mannerly airs, they scarcely deigned to answer the eager questions asked by our group’s caretaker.
The caretakers and other workers at the kindergarten wore white robes, however, not always all of them. Anyway, not the one seated outdoors on a bench next to me allaying my distress. It’s hard to say what exactly it was – a fresh scratch on my knee or a new bump on my forehead, yet as for her name, it was positively Zeena… Her gentle palm was petting my head, and I forgot to cry with my cheek and temple pressed to her left breast. The other cheek and closed eyelids felt the warmth of the sun, I listened to the thuds of her heart beneath the green dress that smelt of summer until there came a shrill call from the building, “Zeena!.”
And at home, we had Grandmother who came from Ryazan because Mom started going to work and there should be someone to look after Sasha and Natasha besides other house-keeping chores. Grandma Martha wore a cotton blouse over a straight skirt nearly reaching the floor and a white blue-dotted kerchief on her head whose large square she folded diagonally to form a big triangle and cover her hair tying the acute angles of the cloth in a loose knot under her round chin…
Mom worked three shifts doing the job of a Watcher at the Pumping Station. And Dad had as many shifts at the Diesel Station. I never learned the location of his workplace but it surely was somewhere in the forest because one day Dad brought a piece of bread wrapped in a newspaper which parcel was given him by a bunny on his way home. “Now, I go home after the shift when – lo! – there's a bunny under a tree, who says, “Here you are, take it to Sehryozha, and Sasha, and Natasha.” The bread from bunny was much more delicious than the bread which Mom sliced for the dinner…
At times the parents’ shifts did not coincide so that one of them was home while the other at work. At one such time, Dad brought me to Mom’s workplace – a squat brick building with a dark green door behind which, just opposite the entrance, there was a small room with a small window high above a big old desk and 2 chairs. But if, bypassing that room, you turned to the left thru a brown door, there would be a huge murky hall full of incessant rumble and with another desk at which Mom sat doing her job.
She didn’t expect us and was so very much surprised. Then she showed me the log under the lamp on her desk because it was her job to enter the time and copy figures from the round manometers’ faces to which there led narrow bridges of iron-sheets all rigged up with handrails because under them everywhere was dark water for the pumps to pump. And it was those pumps to make that terrible noise all the time so that for talking we had to shout loud but even then not all the words were heard, “What!? What!?”
So, we returned to the room by the entrance where Mom took from a drawer in the desk a pencil and some throwaway log with missing pages for me to do some hazy-mazy drawings. I began to draw and was busy but they also stopped talking and only looked at each other though the noise remained back behind the wall. When I finished a big sun, she asked if I wanted to go and play in the yard. I did not want to go out, but then Dad said if I didn’t listen to Mom he never-never would bring me there again anymore, and I went out.
The yard was just the piece of a grass-grown pebble road from the gate to the log shed a bit off the right corner of the Pumping Station. And behind the Station building, there rose a sheer steep overgrown with nettles. I returned to the green door from which a short concrete walk led to the white-washed cube of a small hut without any window and a padlock on the black iron door. Now, what could you play here really indeed?
Two rounded knolls bulged high on either side of the hut, twice taller than it. Grabbing at the long tufts of grass, I climbed the right one. From its height, both roofs, of the hut and Pumping Station, were seen in full but so what? In the opposite direction, beyond the wire fence at the knoll’s foot, there stretched a strip of bush and ran a river sparkling brightly, but I would certainly get punished if I went out of the gate.
For any further playing at all, there remained only the other knoll with a thin tree on its top. I went down to the hut, bypassed it from behind and climbed the second knoll. From up there, everything looked quite the same as from the previous knoll top, only that there you could touch the tree. Hot and sweaty after the climbing, I lay down under it.
What’s that?!. Something stung me at the thigh and then at the other, and then over and over again. I turned around and peeked over my shoulder behind my back. A swarm of red ants was busily bustling about my legs below the shorts of yellow corduroy. I smacked them away but the scorching merciless stings kept increasing in numbers…
Mom jumped out from behind the green door to my wailing, and Dad after her too. He ran up to me and carried me down on his hands. The ants were brushed off, but the swollen, reddened thighs still burned unbearably… And that served me a lesson for the rest of my life – there is no better remedy for the bites of those red beasts than being seated into the sling of the cool green silk in the hem of Mom’s dress stretched taut between her knees.
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