(…all I want to say is that both times—in that winter forest, and among the summer toombs—I had the same feeling that I was not alone and someone else was watching that ski-riding kid and the supine lazybones in the shade of burned slate pieces and, more strangely, I was a part of that someone and watched myself from the twilight of the winter forest and from the tall grass on the toomb slope because we all are involved…
Well, on the whole, some weird stuff, a folly accomplished…)
~ ~ ~
With the spring at hand, we, the fourth-graders, started active preparation for getting enrolled to the ranks of young pioneers to reach which goal we copied and memorized the Solemn Oath of Young Leninists. Then one day after the break, Seraphima Sergeevna entered the classroom with an unknown woman. She introduced her as the new School Pioneer Leader and said that we were going to have a Leninist Lesson and for that purpose we had to go out into the corridor now and keep very quiet there because the other classes were at their regular lessons.
We went out into the long corridor on the second floor, where along its walls with the windows on the left and the rare doors to the classrooms on the right, there hung different pictures with differently-aged Lenin in all of them… The new School Pioneer Leader commenced from the very beginning. Here, he’s quite a young man, a youth, actually, after getting the news about the execution of his elder brother Alexander by the Czarist regime, he consoles his mother with the words “We’ll go another way”, which is the name of this famous picture, by the way.
And our class followed her quietly to the next poster with his photograph in the group of comrades from the underground committee… The working silence reigned in school, we passed by the closed doors of the classrooms with the school children sitting behind them and only we, like secret conspirators, veered from the usual course of the school regime and seemed to have joined the life of underground, following the quiet voice directing us from a picture to a picture…
Then the spring came, and again the thawed patches appeared on the slope between Block and the Recruit Depot Barracks but I wasn’t checking them anymore… One sunny day coming home from school, I took over an unfamiliar girl of my age. Maybe, from the parallel fourth grade. I get ahead of her and looked back at the face full of absolute lack of care about my walking along.
The brag just asked for a small demonstration that I was a boy of consequence in the surrounding whereabouts. And besides, I had a gang of my own, like Robin Hood, the noble robber. Still walking on, I half-turned to the left and told with eloquent gestures to the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the decaying skating rink, “Hey! Don’t be so careless! Duck!! Don’t let them spot you!” So, if the snooty girl looked that way, no one would be seen there…
Another time, with the snow, completely gone, I was going the same route and squinting because if you squint without closing your eyes completely, but only to the point when the eyelashes from your upper and lower eyelids meet and touch each other, you’d see the world as if thru the transparent wings of a dragonfly. That way I was not, actually, walking but flying in a tiny dragonfly-like helicopter and watching thru its Plexiglas roof which I saw in The Funny Pictures because even though I was past the preschool age I still turned pages of that magazine for small kids whenever it came my way.
And then I remembered how rebellious Kotovsky, in the movie “Kotovsky” at the Regiment Club, answered the arrogant landlord, “I am Kotovsky!” After which he grabbed him and threw thru the window panes of the landlord’s house.