True enough, in the ever-present yellowish twilight beneath the surface, you can’t see very far, yet sounds there turn more crisp and clear if you are sitting and knock, say, two gravels against each other, possibly because the water cuts off all unrelated noises. However, you cannot sit underwater for a long time— the air in your lungs pulls you up to the surface and there’s no other way to resist the upping but use your hands for counter-rawing which makes you drop the gravels…

~ ~ ~

Our parents’ leaves did not coincide that summer so they went for their vacations in turn. First, Dad visited his native village of Kanino in the Ryazan Region. He took me with him there, but strictly warned beforehand that on the way I should not ever tell anyone that we lived at the Atomic Object.

At the station of Bologoye, we had a long wait for the train to Moscow. Leaving me seated on our suitcase in the station waiting room, Dad went to punch the tickets. On a nearby bench, a girl was sitting with an open book in her lap. I got up and neared the girl to look in the book over her shoulder. It was The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.

I read a couple of paragraphs of the familiar lines I liked so much. She kept reading and didn’t pay any attention to me standing behind the bench back. I wanted to speak up to her, but I did not know what to say. That that was a good book? That I had also read it?

While I was looking for the right words to say, her adults came and announced that their train was arriving. They grabbed their trunks and went out to the platform to board the train. She never looked back…

Then my Dad returned with the punched tickets. At my request, he bought me a book from a bookstall about a Hungarian boy who later became a youth and fought against the Austrian invaders to his homeland. When the ping-ponging echo from the PA loudspeaker announced the arrival of our train, we went out to the platform. A ten-or-so-year-old boy passed by.

“See?” said Dad to me. “That’s what poverty is!”

I looked after the boy who walked away, and noticed the rough patches in the back of his pants…

In Moscow, we arrived the next morning. I wanted to see the Capital of our Homeland from its very beginning and kept asking when Moscow would, at last, start, until the conductor said that we were in the city already. But behind the pane in the car’s window, there were running the same shabby log huts as at the stations of Valdai, only much more of them and closer to each other, and they did not want to end in any way. And only when our train pulled in under the high arc of the station roof, I believed that it was Moscow.

We went on foot to the other station which was very close. There Dad again punched the tickets but that time we had to wait until evening for the train, so he handed the suitcase over to the storage room and we boarded an excursion bus going to the Kremlin.

Inside the Kremlin walls, they warned that we shouldn’t take any pictures whatsoever. Dad had to demonstrate there was no camera in the leather case hanging from his shoulder but his homemade radio which they allowed to keep, only now I had to carry it on.

There were white-walled houses in the Kremlin and dark Fir-trees, but too few, although thick-trunked and tall.

The excursion was brought to the Czar Bell with its chopped out wall. It happened when the Czar Bell fell from the belfry and couldn’t ring ever since, which is a pity. And when we came to the Czar Cannon, I instantly climbed the pile of the large polished cannonballs under her nose and shoot my head into the muzzle. It looked like insides of a huge pipe with lots of dust on the circular wall.