I didn’t want any more of all that and, fortunately, my sister came to the rescue running from the Block to say that Mom was calling me. Without the slightest delay, I left the party of boys and hurried after her to the Courtyard. There I talked to Mom, greeted neighbors, ran some errand and all the time was thinking one and the same thought formulated in an oddly crisp, not childish way, “How to live on now, after what I’ve just seen? How to live on?”
(…but still and all, I survived. The blessing property of human memory, its aptitude to fade recorded by Vladimir Dahl in his dictionary, saved me.
Yet, in the series of atrocities registered by me, for the most part human beings torturing their likes into deformed pieces of tattered meat, the mutilated hedgehog comes the first, dragging thru the brittle grass the grayish length of the intestine with small pieces of dry earth stuck to it.
And I still lived on to understand that low brutes need lofty excuses for their barbarity: …to alleviate sufferings…as sacred revenge…to keep the race pristine…
But again, to be entirely frank: is there any guarantee that I myself would never and under no circumstances do anything of the kind? I can’t tell for sure…)
When you are a child, there is no time to look behind at all those series back in your memory. You have to go on—farther and beyond—to new discoveries. If only you’ve got the nerve to keep the course.
Once, slightly veering to the left from the accustomed “school—home” route, I went deeper into the broad-leaf part of the forest to come, on a gently rising hillock, across 4 tall Pine trees that grew a couple of meters apart from each other, in the corners of an almost regular square. The smooth wide columns of their trunks without branches nearer to the ground went upwards and at the height of six to seven meters were bridged by a platform you could reach climbing up the crossbeams cut of thick boughs and nailed to one of the trees, like rungs in a vertical ladder … I never found out the purpose of the contraption, nor who it was made by. All I learned was it’s not a fraidy-cat to climb a platform in the forest even if discovered by himself…
Much easier went on the exploration of the basement world. I was going down there together with Dad to fetch the firewood for Titan the Boiler who heated the water for bathing.
Because all the bulbs in the basement corridors were missing, Dad brought along the flashlight with the spring lever protruding from its belly. When you squeezed the flashlight in your hand, the springy lever resisted yet yielded and went inside, you loosened the grip and it popped out again. A couple of such pumping rounds awoke a small dynamo-machine buzzing inside the handle to produce the current for the lamp as long as you kept pushing-loosing the lever, and the faster you did it, the brighter was your flashlight.
A circle of light hopped along the walls and cemented floor in the left corridor of the basement with our section at the very end of it. The walls in the narrow corridor were made of boards and so were the sections’ doors locked with weighty padlocks.
Behind our door, there was a square room with two concrete walls and the timber partition from the neighboring section.
Dad unlocked the padlock and turned on the inside bulb whose crude light flooded the high stack of evenly sawed logs by the wall opposite the door, and all sorts of household things hanging from the walls or piled on shelves: the sled, the tools, the skies.
After a couple of plump logs were chopped with the ax, I collected the chips for kindling Titan the Boiler and a few thicker splinters, while Dad grabbed a whole armful of firewood.