With the human resources divided, the game began. How I wanted to be a captain! To be so popular that all the boys would hanker to play in my team! But the dream remained just a dream… I zealously scrambled thru the grass: from one football goal to the other. I was desperate to win and didn’t spare myself, ready to do anything for our victory. It’s only that I never could get near the ball. At times it did roll towards me, yet before I got prepared to kick it properly, the swarm of “ours” and “theirs” came racing around and send it far afield… And again I plodded in a clumsy trot, back and forth, and shrieked, “Pass! Me here!” but no one listened to me and everyone else screamed too and was also running after the ball, and the game rolled on without my actual participation…
~ ~ ~
In summer all our family, except for Grandma Martha, went to Konotop in the Sumy region of Ukraine, to the wedding of Mom’s sister Lyoudmilla and the region champion of weightlifting in the third weight class, young, but rapidly balding, Anatoly Arkhipenko from the city of Sumy.
A truck with a canvas top took us thru Checkpoint—the white gate in the barbed-wire fence surrounding the whole Zona—to the Valdai railway station where we boarded a local train to the Bologoye station to change trains there. The car was empty with no one but us on the wooden yellow benches paired back-to-back on both sides of the aisle. I liked the car swaying in time with the clatter of wheels on rail joints beneath the floor. And I liked to watch the dark log posts flicking across the windowpane, their crossbars loaded with the endless stream of wires sliding to the bottom in their sag only to go up to the next post’s leap-flick for the unrolling stream to slide into the next sag and tilting up, and again, and again, and… At the stops, the local train patiently waited to give way to more important trains and moved on only after their impetuous whoosh by.
One especially long wait happened at the station of Dno whose name I read in the glazed sign on the green timber-wall of its shed. And only after a solitary steam engine puff-puffed past the shed, slowly piercing with its long black body the white curls of its own steam, our train started on.
(…I recollected that station and the black glitter of the engine penetrating the milky mist of the steam when I read that at the station of Dno, Colonel of the Russian Army Nikolay Romanov signed his renunciation of the royal throne… However, by that act, he didn’t save himself nor his wife, nor the children of their royal family all lined up with their backs to the basement wall and shot at and then those not killed by the volley were finished off with the rifle bayonets.
I knew nothing of all that when sitting there in the local train by the shabby shed. Neither was I aware that it does not matter if I knew it or not. Either way, all that is part of me. It’s me at both ends of those Mosin rifles ridiculously long even when with no bayonets…
Still, it’s good that we don’t know all in childhood…)
Most of the houses along Nezhyn Street in the city of Konotop kept slightly off the road, standing behind their respective fences which reflected the owner’s level of prosperity, as well as the mainstream trends, brands, and stages in the evolution of the local fencing technologies. However, the left-side continuity of sundry fencing stretches in the street was briefly interrupted by the wall of Number 19 whitewashed ages ago, having 2 windows in bleached peeling-off paint-coat equipped by 4 hinged deal shutters to seal the windows off for the night.