the most final
concluding work

In October, the seventh-graders started their preparation for getting admitted to the ranks of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, aka ALYCL, aka Komsomol. The membership in Komsomol organization was not a cheap giveaway passed out indiscriminately to lined-up squads or companies. Not in the least! You had to prove that you deserved that high honor at the special admittance sitting of the City Komsomol Committee whose Members would ask you questions as in a real examination because on entering this youth organization you became an ally to the Party and a would-be communist.

For a preparatory reading up, the Senior Pioneer Leader of our school, Volodya Gourevitch—a pretty young man with black hair and bluish-skinned cheek-and-jowls because of the thick but always close shaved bristle—distributed among the would-be members the Charter of ALYCL printed in the smallest typeface so as to pack all of its sections into a small accordion-folding leaflet. He also warned that at the Admittance Sitting the City Komsomol Committee Members were especially keen about the Charter Section on the rights and duties of the Komsomol members.

Volodya Gourevitch graduated from the prestigious School 11, between the Station and the Under-Overpass, as well as the class of playing button-accordion at the Konotop Music School. He dwelt in City, rather far from the Settlement, in a compact block of five-story buildings between Peace Square and Square of the Konotop Divisions, which area among the local folks was, for some reason, referred to as Palestine.

On his arrival to school from Palestine, he donned mixed paraphernalia of a very clean and well-ironed pioneer necktie and the golden profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s bald head and resolutely pointed wedge beard in the red enamel banner of the small badge of a Komsomol member pinned in the breast of his jacket. At shop-talks within the close circle of pioneer activists, Volodya Gourevitch liked to frequently announce, emphasizing his and the Leader of the Revolution coincidence in both name and patronymic, “Call me simply – Ilyich.” Following these words sounded his hearty laugh, loud and protracted, after which his lips did not immediately pulled back to the neutral position and he had to assist by pushing his thumb and forefinger at the short saliva threads in the corners of his mouth.

However, Volodya Sherudillo, a firmly built champion at Bitok gambling with the red turf of hair and a thick scatter of freckles in his round face, who studied in my class, in the close circle of us, his classmates, called Volodya Gourevitch – “a khannorik from CEC!”

The Konotop City Komsomol Committee was located on the second floor in the right wing of the City Council building. The building itself, somehow resembling the Smolny Institute from numerous movies about the Great October Revolution, faced Peace Square past the greens and across Peace Avenue. Three short, quiet, flag-stoned, alleys beneath the umbrage of splendid chestnuts in the greens connected the building and Peace Avenue.

None of the guys from our school had any problem whatsoever at the examination on Komsomol Charter, neither had them other students of our age from the rest of the city schools, we got admitted to the Leninist Young Communist League nice and smoothly…

~ ~ ~

In autumn, they started tramway construction in the Settlement. The track ascended from the Underpass tunnel to pass Bazaar and dive under the giant poplars lined along the rough cobbles in the road of Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street. Gray pillars of smooth concrete for supporting the contact wire above the tramway rose at regular intervals between the mighty tree-trunks. By the October holidays, the track had reached our school and even turned into May Day Street, which stretched to the city limit at the end of the Settlement.

Then three small streetcars started running from the terminal on the city-side of the Under-Overpass tunnel to the terminal at the end of May Day Street. Stout female conductors collected the fare in the streetcars selling a three-kopeck ticket per passenger which throwaways they tore off the narrow paper rolls fixed on the canvas strap of their plum duty bags cinched across their trunks to keep jingling change and uphold their mighty busts.

In the large streetcars that ran in the city, the driver had only one cab, in the head of the car, and on reaching a terminal stop the streetcar went around the turning loop to start its route in reverse. The Settlement tracks were not equipped with turning loops because the small streetcars had two cabs, kinda heads of a pushmi-pullyu, and at the loopless terminals, the driver simply swapped the cabs and started back assisted by the conductor, who stood on the step in the back door pulling the robust tarp strap tied to the streetcar arc so as to flip it over because the arc should be in backward position when sliding along the contact wire over the track.

And again, if the doors in the larger streetcars were operated by the driver who slammed them automatically from her cab, then the small streetcars in the Settlement had hinged folding doors of plywood, so on reaching your stop, you pulled the middle handle in the door to fold its leaves, pushed them aside and got off, whereas in the reverse operation you pulled the handle fixed at the edge of the leaf opposite the hinges and pushed the middle handle to unfold and close the door, off we go!. But who cares for all that algorithmic trouble? That’s why the streetcars in the Plant Settlement ran their routes with both doors wide open except for the spells of devastating frost. To make it possible for the streetcars to give way each other, two of the stops in the Settlement had doubled track, one such stop was by School 13 and the other in the middle of May Day Street…

The toilet in the Plant Club was on the first floor – at the far-off end in a very long corridor that started by the library door and went on and on between the blind walls on both sides, you could touch them both at once, beneath the rare bulbs in the ceiling. In the dark green paint on the walls, there occasionally happened closed doors with the glazed frame-legends: “Children Sector”, “Variety Band”, “Dresser Room” and, already nearing the toilet, “Gym”. All the doors were constantly locked and kept staid silence, only from behind the gym door there sometimes came tap-tapping of the ping-pong ball or clangs of metal in barbell plates.

Yet, one day I heard the sounds of piano playing behind the Children Sector door and I knocked on it. From inside, there came a yell to enter, which I did and saw a small swarthy woman with a bob-cut black hair and wide nostrils, who sat at the piano by the wall of large mirror squares. Opposite the door there were three windows high above the floor and, beneath them, ballet rails ran over the ribbed heating pipe along the whole wall. The left part of the room was hidden behind a tall screen for puppet shows preceded by an unusually long and narrow, kinda refectory, table of taut thick lino in its top.

And then I said that I’d like to enroll Children Sector.

“Very well, let’s get acquainted – I’m Raissa Grigoryevna, so who are you and where from?”

She told me that the former actors grew too adult or moved away to other cities, and for the Children Sector revival I needed to bring along my schoolmates. I started a canvassing campaign in my class. Skully and Kuba felt doubtful about the idea of joining the Children Sector, yet they were won over when saw the point that the long table in that room could easily be used for ping-pong playing. And a couple of girls came too out of curiosity. Raissa Grigoryevna received the newcomers with delighted welcome, and we began to rehearse a puppet show “Kolobok” based on the same-named fairy tale.

Our mentor taught us the art of controlling common hand puppets, not letting them duck below the screen, out of the onlookers’ sight. We gathered at Children Sector twice a week, but sometimes Raissa missed the rehearsals or was late and on such occasions the key was to be found on the windowsill in the room of the movies list painters whose door was never locked but kept wide open for often visits of fans of their talent and art-lovers in general… So we opened Children Sector and played ping-pong for hours, albeit with a tennis ball, across that long table. Neither had we bats, effectively replacing them with the thinner of school textbooks in hard covers and the net between the players’ sectors was also made of the slightly open textbooks lined spines up, and though hard hits of tennis ball knocked them down but then restoring the net didn’t take long either…

Rough and exhausting is a puppeteer’s job: both mentally—you need to copy your character’s clues and learn them by heart, and physically—you shouldn’t ever low down your arm stretched out and aloft with the hand doll donned on your 3 fingers. During rehearsals, the acting arm grew numb because of the strenuous exertion, and even propping it with the remaining hand didn’t really work. Besides, there appeared that pesky nagging crick in the neck because your head was constantly tilted upward to check the actions of the doll. But, on the other hand, after the on-stage performance, you would step out from behind the screen and come in front of it, keeping your hand inside the doll lifted up to your shoulder, and Raissa Grigoryevna would announce that it was you who acted Hare. And, following the theatrical nod of your head, Hare next to your shoulder would also give a nice bow provoking the eager laughter and applause among the audience. O, thorns! O, sweetness of the glory!.