the most final
concluding work

With the nearing autumn, Mom started to teach me reading the ABC book, which was full of pictures and strings of letters skewered with dashes to aid at making the words up. Yet even spitted, the letters stayed reluctant to fuse into something sensible. At times, I tried to skulk and, staring at the picture next to the word, read: “Arr-hay-eye-enn. Rain!”

But Mom answered, “Stop cheating! It’s a “c-l-o-u-d”.

I poohed, and eeewed, and started over again converting the syllables into words, and in a few weeks I could already sing thru the texts at the end of the book where the harvester was mowing wheat in the collective farm field…

Grandma Martha’s worldview was not in the least affected by the Yuri Gagarin’s statement for the journalists that, while on his flight, he saw no God up there. On the contrary, she started an anti-atheistic propaganda and covert conversion of her eldest grandkid. She insistently advised me to mark well that God knew everything, could do anything and, most importantly, was able to fulfill your wishes. And in exchange for what? Just for praying regularly, as simple as that! Such a trifle, ain’t it? But then at school, I, with God’s help, would have no problems. The grade of “five” is needed? Just say a prayer and – get it! Some good trade, eh?.

And I wavered. I succumbed to her temptation and, even though never disclosing it, I turned a clandestine believer on my own. As no one enlightened me what a believer had to do, I came to inventing the rituals myself. Going out to play in the Courtyard, I for a second dropped behind the narrow door to the basement and there, in the darkness, pronounced—not even in whisper but silently, in my mind, “Alright, God, you know all yourself. See? I’m crossing me.” And I put a sign of the cross somewhere about my navel…

However, when before school there remained just a couple of days, something made me revolt and I became an apostate. I renounced Him. And I did it out loud. Openly. I went into the grassy grounds by the garbage bins enclosure and shouted at the top of my lungs, “There’s no god!”

And though there was no one around—not a single soul—I still took proper precautions, just in case if somebody would overhear accidentally, say, from behind the fencing around the garbage bins. “Aha!” they would think, “Now that boy shouts there is no god, which makes it clear even for a fool that till lately he has believed there was some.” And that was surely a shame for a boy who in a few days would become a schoolboy. For that reason, instead of articulating the blasphemous renunciation clearly, I took care to howl it with indistinct vowels: “Ou ou ouu!”

Nothing happened.

Turning my face upward, I hollered it once again and then, in a way of putting the final period in my relations with God, I spat in the sky.

Neither thunder nor lightning followed, only I felt the drizzle of spittle landing on my cheeks. So it was not a period but the dots of ellipsis. Not too much of a difference. And I went home liberated…

~ ~ ~

The never-ending summer of the pivotal year pitied, at last, the little ignoramus and handed me over to September when, dressed in a bluish suit with shiny pewter buttons, my forelock trimmed in the real hair salon for grown-up men, where Mom took me the day before, clutching in my right hand the stalks in the newspaper-wrapped bunch of Dahlias brought the previous night from the small front garden of Dad’s friend Zatseppin who had a black motorcycle with a sidecar—I went for the first time to the first grade, escorted by Mom. I cannot remember whether she was holding my hand or I succeeded at my claim of being big enough to carry both the flowers and the schoolbag of dark brown leatherette.

We walked down the same road from which since long had disappeared the black columns of zeks though the sun shined as brightly as in their days. On that sunny morning, the road was walked by other than me first-graders with their parents and brand-new leatherette schoolbags, as well as by older, differently aged, schoolchildren, marching both separately and in groups. However, down the tilt, we did not turn to the all too familiar trail towards kindergarten but went straight ahead to the wide-open gate of the Recruit Depot Barracks. We crossed their empty yard and left it thru the side gate, and walked uphill along another, yet unknown, trail between the tall grayish trunks of Aspen.

From the pass, there started again a protracted tilt downward thru the leafy forest with a swamp on the right, after which a short, yet steep, climb led up to the road entering the open gate of the school grounds encircled by the openwork timber fence.

Inside the wide enclosure, the road ended by the short flight of concrete steps ascending to a concrete walk to the entrance of the two-story school building with 2 rows of wide frequent windows.

We did not enter but stopped outside the school and stood there for a long time, while bigger schoolchildren kept running roundabout and were yelled at by adults.

Then we, the first-graders, were lined to face the school. Our parents stayed behind us but still there, the runners ceased their scamper while we stood clutching our flower bunches and new schoolbags until told to form pairs and follow an elderly woman heading inside. And we awkwardly moved forward. One girl in our column burst into tears, her mother ran up to silence her sobs and urge her to keep walking.

I looked back at my Mom. She waved and smiled, and said something which I could not already hear. Black-haired, young, beautiful…

~ ~ ~

At home, Mom announced that everyone praised Seraphima Sergeevna Kasyanova as a very experienced teacher and it was so very good I got into her class.

For quite a few months, the experienced teacher kept instructing us in writing propped by the faded horizontal lines in special copybooks, crisscrossed by slanting ones, whose purpose was to develop identical right slant in our handwritings and all that period we were allowed to use nothing but pencils. We scribbled endless lines of leaning sticks and hooks which were supposed to become, later, in the due course, parts of letters written with an elegant bent even without the propping lines in the pages of ruled paper. It took an eternity and one day before the teacher’s information that we got readied for using pens and should bring them to school the following day together with no-spill ink-wells and replaceable nibs.

Those dip pens—slender wooden rods in lively monochrome color with cuffs of light tin at one end for the insertion of a nib—I kept bringing with me from the first school day under the long sliding lid in a wooden pencil-box. As for the plastic no-spill ink-wells, they indeed prevented the spillage of ink holding it in between their double walls if the ink-well got accidentally knocked over or deliberately turned upside down.

The pen’s nib was dipped into the ink-well, but not too deep because if you picked up too much of ink with the nib tip, the ink would drop down into the page—oops!—a splotch again… One dip was enough for a couple of words and then – dip the nib anew.

At school, each desk had a small round hollow in the middle of its front edge to place one ink-well for the pair of students sharing it to dip, in turn, their pens’ nibs in. The replaceable nib had a bifurcated tip, however, its halves, pressed tightly to each other, were leaving on the paper a hair-thin line (if you didn’t forget to dip the pen’s nib into the ink-well beforehand). Slight pressure applied to the pen in writing made nib’s halves part and draw a wider line. The alteration of thin and bold lines with gradual transitions from one into another presented in the illustrious samples of the penmanship textbook drove me to despair by their unattainable calligraphy refinement…

Much later, already as a third-grade student, I mastered one more application of dip pen’s nibs. Stab an apple with a nib and revolve it inside for one full rotation, then pulling the nib out you’ll have a little cone of the fruit’s flesh in it, while in the apple side there appeared a neat hole, into which you can insert the extracted cone, reversely. Got it? You’ve created a horned apple.

Then you may add more of such horns until the apple starts looking like a sea mine or a hedgehog – depending on the perseverance of the artificer. Finally, you can eat your piece of art but I, personally, never liked the taste of the resultant apple mutant…

And after one more year at school, in the fourth grade, you learned the way of turning the dip pen’s nib into a missile. First, break off one of the halves in the sharp tip of the nib to make it even sharper, then split the opposite insertion butt-end and jam into the crack a tiny piece of paper folded into four-wing tail-stabilizer to obtain bee-line flying mode.

Now, throw your dart into some wooden thing—the door, the blackboard, a window frame would equally do—the prickly nib’s half will pierce deep enough to keep the missile sticking out from the target…