Besides, what’s the use of idle lying for a whole hour staring at the white ceiling or the white window curtains, or along the long row of cots with a narrow passage after each pair of them? The children would lie silently in that row ending by the far off white wall with the far-off-white-robed caretaker in her chair reading silently her book, distracted at times by some or other child who would approach her to ask in whisper for permission to go out to the toilet. And, after her whispered permit, she would in a low voice silence the rustle of whispering arising along the row of cots, “Now, everyone shuts their eyes and sleep!” Maybe, now and then I did fall asleep at some “quiet hours”, though more often it was kinda still stupor with my eyes open but not seeing the white ceiling from the white sheet drawn over my head…

And suddenly the drowsiness was cast away by a gentle touch of cautious fingers creeping from my knee up over the thigh. I looked out from under the sheet. Irochka Likhachova was lying on the next cot with her eyes closed tightly but, in between the sheets over our cots, I could clearly make out a length of her outstretched arm. The quiet fingers dived into my underpants to enclose my flesh in a warm soft palm. It felt unspeakably pleasant. But then her touch moved away from my private parts – why? yet more!

Her hand found mine and pulled it under her sheet to put my palm on something soft and yielding that had no name, which it did not need at all because all I needed was that all that just went on and on. However, when I, with my eyes tightly closed, once again brought her hand back under my sheet, she stayed there all too briefly before pulling mine over to hers… At that moment the caretaker announced the end of “quiet hour” and called all to get up. The room filled with the hubbub of dressing children.

“And we don’t forget to make our beds,” the caretaker repeated instructively, walking to and fro along the runner by the row of cots, when all of a sudden Irochka Likhachova shouted, “And Ogoltsoff sneaked into my panties!”

The children lulled in expectation. Sledgehammered with the disgraceful truth, I feel a hot wave of shame rolling up to spill in tears out of my eyes. They mingle with my roar, “It’s you who sneaked! Fool!”, and I and run out of the room to the second-floor landing tiled with alternating squares of yellow and brown.

Stopping there, I decide to never ever any more return to that group and that kindergarten. No, never ever anymore. That is enough of enoughs. But I don’t have time to think about how I will live further on because I get spellbound by the red fire extinguisher on the wall.

In fact, it was not the whole fire extinguisher that mesmerized me but the yellow square on its side framing the picture where a man in a cap on his head held exactly the same fire extinguisher only in action already, upside down, to spurt the widening gush towards a fat bush of flames.

The picture was intended, probably, to serve a kind of visual instruction on how to use this or any other fire extinguisher, for which reason the one in the man’s hands was painted true to life in every detail. Even the yellow square with the instructive picture on its side was scrupulously reproduced, portraying a little man in a tiny cap who fought, standing upside down, the undersized fire with the bushy spurt from his miniature fire extinguisher.

Then and there it dawned on me that in the next, already blurred, picture on that miniature extinguisher the already indiscernible man was back again to his normal position, feet down. Yet in the still next, further reduced, picture he would be on his head once more and—the most breathtaking discovery!—these diminishing men just could not end, they would only grow smaller, receding to the state of unimaginably tiny specks and dwindle on without ever ending their dwarfish tumbles, serving each other a link and a spring-board to ever turning tinier simply because of that Fire Extinguisher who started them off from his nail in the wall on the second floor landing next to the white door to the senior group, opposite the door to the toilet.