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Still and all, my itch for architecture did not subside, but the following, inimitable, creation I built all by myself. The sheds over the Duzenko’s and our earth-pit cellars stood slightly apart and the half-meter gap between them was boarded up from the yard, yet squeezing behind the sheds, along the neighbor’s fence, you got access to that narrow board-sealed cleft. That was where I built my private study room.

A piece of plywood, fixed horizontally to the aforesaid couple of boards nailed from the yard, became a decent desk squeezed between 2 walls of the blind passage. A length of plank, inserted lower the desk edge, served a stool. Absence of any other item of furniture made the interior truly Spartan, but then the study would attract no intruders, neither my sister-'n'-brother nor the little Arkhipenkos. Okay, let’s imagine someone sneaked in when I was not home and… what then? Of course, Natasha made sure to check it all the same and to wrinkle her nose scoffing at my level best creation—that fairly snug and cozy nook in the inter-shed cleavage space.

On finishing construction works, there again arose the mentioned doggone question: what now, eh? Well… let's say… Aha! the place could be enjoyed for unobserved secluded speculations neither disturbed nor seen by anyone, except for Zhoolka who resented my presence on his turf, even behind the clumsy stop-boarding in the gap. And he never cared to conceal his indignation, but got upon his paws and scornfully retired, the chain rattled in his wake, jerked in over his kennel sill, kinda his slam to the door, whenever I squeezed into my Spartan cleft from behind. Yet, what namely can a person use the nook of solitude they've so cleverly created for?

That’s when I had to give free reign to my next long-standing itch, that for graphomania. I have no idea what specific label from their scientific cant they use for my particular case—expressed or manifest graphomania—yet I always felt a certain longing for clear notebooks, albums, block-notes, and suchlike stationery items. It gave me real thrill to spread them wide open and began to cover their innocent pureness with the jerks and strokes of my crinkly scribbling.

Thus, there remained only a minor drag of finding content for those ripping lines, an easy quiz for an expressed (or manifest?) graphomaniac. I simply grabbed a book about the adventures of a group of circus actors in the turbulent years of the Civil War, added a pen and a thick notebook, not finished off during the last academic year, and dragged them to my study—so to say—room…

(…here’s a queer, yet scientifically noteworthy, fact – the written exercises assigned at school for homework somehow made my graphomania fade into the woodwork…)

There, the book and notebook were placed on the desk of unvarnished plywood piece, and I started to copy the content from the first into the ruled—but otherwise untouched—pages of the latter. And I did not bother to ask myself about the purpose of such an occupation. Would it make any difference? I just enjoyed the process of doing it.

After a week or so, the process neared the middle in the second chapter, when a spell of bad weather made my study room too damp and chilly, and the printed adventure story remained un-hand-copied….

In good weather, I even had a private reading room, not of my personal creation though… The plots, unfurling behind the long sectioned shed and the lean-tos over the earth-pit cellars, were split by narrow treads between the beds of turned soil for kitchen crops. Those beds, however, did not merge into integral landholdings of respective owners because sundry historical processes led to land swapping, as well as using it as a means of paying for goods or services obtained from the adjacent landlords. As a result, the land possessions turned into the streak of complicated patchwork. For instance, our tomato bed was located right behind the common shed and followed by Duzenko’s stretch, which separated it from our cucumber-and-sunflower bed as well as from the booth of our outhouse next to the slop pit. And our potatoes were planted past the Pilluta’s strip, at the very end of the khutta's garden, beneath the old sprawling Apple tree.

After our potatoes bed, there began, or rather ended, the plot belonging to the khutta in Kotsubinsky Street, which ran parallel to Nezhyn Street. So, the vegetable and fruit gardens, embraced by the khuttas of 3 adjacent streets and 1 lane, composed a vast area with vegetable beds and fruit trees of different sorts.

The Apple tree, on whose widely sprawling branches I lounged in clear summer days reading a book under the blue dome of the sky with the remote motionless cumuli, was called Antonovka Apple. Some of its branches were long enough to allow stretching out at full length over them and lightly sway until a gentle breeze would run up to you from the heat-swept expanses of the summer.

Whenever my sides felt sore from so hard a hammock, I’d climb down and go on a stealthy visit to the raspberry plot somewhere between Numbers 15 and 13. In the gardens, you might occasionally come across a short span of a fencing fragment that served a landmark splitting the possessions, but not a barrier to a sneaky raid…

From among those environs I was carried away with The Interstellar Diaries of Jona Calm and The Return From a Space Mission by Stanislaw Lem, Khoja Nasreddin by Vladimir Solovyov, The Odyssey of Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, among other pulp fictions for unsystematic reading by the younger generations.

But then, for no obvious reason, I suddenly decided to meet the requirements of the school curriculum and started to learn by heart the novel-poem Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, although at school your home assignment would be to memorize not more than the opening stanza from the poem. In breach of the modest requirement in school curriculum, after solidifying the first stanza, I went on to the following ones and murmured, day after day, to the Antonovka Apple tree about the constant alertness of the Breguet watch, and the profitable merchandise enriching scrupulous London, and the pitiful lack of a couple or two of slender female legs about all of Russia…

When the number of memorized stanzas grew over twenty, I began to lose my way in the countless threads of lines at recital them all at once until Mother helped me out. Returning from a Sunday visit to Bazaar, she mentioned meeting there Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna, a teacher of the Russian Language and Literature from our school, who asked if I would like to go to Leningrad with an excursion of schoolchildren at a modest price.

You bet I would! But where could I get the money from? Mother paid, and she also gave me an incredible sum of 10 rubles for the journey. I made a firm decision to spend that money on a miniature billiards, like the one we were playing at Children Section using steel balls from crushed bearings.

(…yet now, not as a consistent narrator, but as a layman archaeologist wrapped up in my sleeping bag in this tent surrounded by the eerie symphony of the wild forest nightlife – would I be able to unearth the root reason for the strenuous memorization of the Pushkin’s masterpiece?

It seems, that only now and just from here, I would.

To begin with, the scheme “I decided and started to…” does not apply to me. Developing a use case is quite okay, especially if an accurate and reasonable one, but my way of doing things is exactly opposite. I act first, and only then start looking for a suitable reason to justify my action and give it some resemblance of logicality. That is, instead of being motivated by well-defined decisions, I do things on the spur of the moment.

But what or who is prodding me to act then?! Which are the secret springs and goads? The answer is simple: It’s because of my credulous and all-too-ready submissiveness to the impact of the printed word. Yes, the stuff read by me determines my subsequent actions.

The episode, when the Soviet secret agent, Alexander Belov, forces the fascist intelligence officer Dietrich to flip thru a folder with top-confidential documentation before his eyes, so that later, in a safe house, to dictate to his helper-asset hundreds of addresses, names, and figures from his memory, becomes the hidden underlying reason for my endeavor at memorizing the rhymed lines by Alexander Pushkin.

No, I did not want to compete or check my abilities, the root stimulus is the plain fact of my reading The Novel-Gazette filled with the work by Kozhevnikov which, frankly speaking, does not deserve the name of a novel.

Or let's take another case, when, impressed by the book The Baron in the Tree, about an aristocrat who refused to walk upon the ground anymore, and moved to live in the trees, I mounted the heap of bricks stacked under the too thick trunk of the American Maple and, from that elevation, climbed the less impregnable part of the tree. And from there I went on getting higher and higher, to the very clouds that floated quite low on that day, almost brushing the crown.

Viewed from the upper branches, distant khuttas far down under the tree decreased to the size of matchboxes. Taming fear and dizziness, I observed the bird-eye view of Bazaar, and the Plant, no more hidden behind the tall wall along Professions Street, and of the Station on the other side of the Plant.

The magic power of the printed word by Italo Calvino made me compliant like melted wax, turned into a docile slave, who was alighted atop of the American Maple tree…

Of course, the secret springs slip at times – how on earth could I possibly compete with D’Artagnan and ride twenty leagues in one day running down three horses which I did not have? Keep your legs to the length of the blanket, they say.

That’s why I like this sleeping bag so much – it fits any leg size…)

the most final
concluding work

:from the personal
site
of
a graphomaniac

~ ~ ~