The omission of desired and deserved reward incites to the restoration of justice. And the following morning I readily forgot Mom’s instruction that 3 spoonfuls of sugar were absolutely enough for 1 cup of tea. At that moment, I was alone in the kitchen and, while adding sugar to my tea, I got distracted by considering the frost patterns in the kitchen windowpane, which was the reason why the count of the added spoonfuls was started not with the first one. That mistake somehow coincided with a slight negligence and instead of a teaspoon, I loaded sugar with a tablespoon… The resulting cloy treacle was good only for pouring it into the sink. And that became another lesson to me – filched pleasures are not as sweet as might have been expected…
The fact of having read an issue of The Pioneer Pravda so exhaustively inflated my self-confidence and at the next visit to the Detachment’s Library, from the shelf of French literature, I grabbed a weighty volume with a bouquet of swords in its cover, The Three Musketeers by Dumas-peré. The librarian, after a moment’s hesitation, registered the book in my reader-card and I proudly carried the bulky booty home.
The big sofa somehow didn’t seem appropriate for reading such an adult book, so I took it to the kitchen and spread open on the oil-clothed tabletop. The very first page, full of footnotes informing who was who in France of the XVII century, felt like pretty complicated stuff for reading. But it gradually got in the groove and by the scene of D’Artangan’s saying goodbye to his parents, I already figured out by myself the meaning of the abbreviated words “Mr.” and “Mrs.”, which were absolutely absent from The Pioneer Pravda…
Later that winter, Mom decided that I needed to get my squint corrected because it was not right to leave it as it was. Before she said so, I had never suspected I had anything of the sort.
She took me to the oculist at the Detachment’s Hospital, and he peeked into my eyes thru the narrow hole in the dazzling mirror circle that he wore raised to his white cap when not used. Then the nurse dropped some chilly drops into my eyes and told me to come next time alone because I was a big boy already and had just learned the way to their office.
Going home after the next visit, I suddenly lost the sharpness of vision—the light of bulbs on lampposts along the empty winter road turned into blurred yellow splotches and at home, when I opened a book, all the lines on the page were just unreadable dimmed strings. I got scared but Mom said it was okay only I had to wear glasses, so for a couple of following years I used some plastic-rimmed gear.
(…my eyes were straightened and made keep parallel when looking, however, the eyesight in the left one stayed unfocused. At checks by oculists, I cannot see their pointer or finger touching the check chart. Yet, as it turned out, you can live your life with just one working eye.
The squint was got rid of but ever since the expression in my eyes doesn’t match, which is easily noticeable in a photo when screening them in turn—the inquiring curiosity in the right eye gives way to a lifeless indifference of the left one.
At times I notice that same discrepancy in close-ups of some movie actors and I think to myself if they have also been treated for a squint, or possibly we all are being spied on by some unknown aliens thru our sinister eyes…)
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And again came the summer but no volleyball was played anymore. In the volleyball grounds at the foot of the Bugorok-Knoll, they cemented two big squares for playing the game of