Dense lines of weighty, never opened books with embossed golden letters and numbers in their spines, enshrining countless lines between their heavy covers with the authors' convex relief portraits on the lid-like front ones…
However, there was a narrow cleft in the blue wall—the passage to that part of the Detachment’s Library where, forming a maze of narrow passages, stood shelves with the books of varying degree of wear. The books by Russian writers ranked alphabetically—Aseev, Belyaev, Bubentsoff…; the authors from abroad kept to the same order under inscriptions of their countries’ names—American literature, Belgian literature…; or under the branch they belonged to—Economics, Geography, Politics…
In the maze’s nooks, you could also come across multi-volume collections: Jack London, Fennimore Cooper, Walter Scott (for all my persistent searches I never found among his works a novel about Robin Hood, but only about Rob Roy).
I loved wandering in the condensed silence of the passages between the shelves, taking, now and then, from as far above as allowed my height, one or another book to consider the title and put it back. In the end, pressing the chosen couple to my chest, I returned to the librarian’s desk. Sometimes she put aside one of the books I brought, saying it was too early for me to read…
Once, meandering thru the treasury labyrinth, I suddenly farted. What an embarrassment! Though the sound was not very loud, yet, in case it reached the librarian’s desk thru the wall of Marxism-Leninism classic writers, I tried to iron the wrinkles out by issuing pensive blurblabs that distantly resembled the pesky escaped noise, but now it sounded more like innocent fancy of a boy promenading in the narrow stack passages, for whom reading of certain books was yet too early.
And so I diddled with my lip claps until one of the camouflaging farts turned out so successful, natural and rolling, that simply mortified me, if the first, unintentional, breaking of wind might have been missed, the counterfeit sounded too convincing.
(….as your mother’s mother would likely put it: “Kept fixing until mucked up.” She liked to use Ukrainian bywords in her speech…)
After the New Year holidays, the stack of subscriptions they dropped in the mailbox on our door got thicker by the addition of The Pioneer Pravda. Of course, I still was only an Octoberist, but at school they told us that we already had to subscribe to that newspaper and in any other way prepare ourselves to become pioneers in the future.
Handing me The Pioneer Pravda, Mom said, “Wow! They started to deliver a newspaper for you like for an adult.” I felt pleased with getting admitted to the world of grown-ups, at least from the postal point of view. And I kept reading the newspaper all day long. Each and every line printed in its four pages.
When the parents returned from work in the evening, I met them in the hallway to proudly report that I had read all, all, all of it!. They said, “Good job!”, then hung their coats behind the cotton curtain in the corner, and went over to the kitchen.
You can’t help feeling disappointment when paid for all your pains with a polite disinterested indifference. Like, a hero after a life-and-death battle with Gorynich the Dragon to free a beautiful captive is nodded off with her fleeting “Good job!” instead of the regular kiss on the sugar-sweet mouth. Next time he would think twice if the scrap was worth the while, after all.
Thus, never again I read The Pioneer Pravda entirely—from its red title, with the statement of the printed organ affiliation, down to (and including too) the editorial office telephone numbers and street address in the city of Moscow…