And when at school they handed us the yellow sheets of report cards with our grades, the summer holidays began bringing about the everyday games of Hide-and-seek, Classlets, and Knifelets.

For the game of Knifelets, you need to choose a level area and draw a wide circle on the ground. The circle is divided into as many sectors as the number of participants who, standing upright, throw a knife, in turn, into the ground which belongs to some of their opponents.

If the hurled knife sticks in, the sector gets split up with the line drawn in the direction determined by the stuck knife’s blade sides. The owner of the divided sector has to decide which part of it he wants to keep while the other slice becomes a part of the successful knife-thrower’s domain.

A player stays in the game until they retain a patch of ground big enough to accommodate for their standing upon at least one foot, but with no space even for that, the game is over for them and the remaining players go on until there stays just 1. You win!

(…quoting Alexander Pushkin:

 
" Tale is a lie, yet holds some hint and even a lesson to learn…”
 

When playing knifelets, all I felt was an overwhelming yen to win. And presently, I can’t help feeling stunned by how readily the whole world’s history gets covered by a simplistic game for kids…)

And we also played matches, which is a game just for 2. Each player sticks their thumb off their fist, inserts a match, a kinda spacer, between their thumb pad and the middle joint of the index finger, and holds it tight. The matches are slowly pressed against each other, the pressure grows and the player whose match withstands it without breaking up becomes the winner. The same idea as in tapping Easter eggs against each other, only you don’t have to wait a whole year for the game which wasted more than one matchbox nicked from the kitchen at home.

Or we just ran hither-thither playing War-Mommy, yelling, “Hurray!”, or “Ta-ta-ta!”

– Bang! Bang! I’ve shot and killed you!

– Yeah! Okay! I’m just on the doorsill to Death!

And long after the nominally dead warrior would keep a-trotting about that doorsill firing his farewell rounds and only, maybe, hooraying less zealously, if it’s a boy possessing some sense of decency, before to slam, at last, that door behind himself and topple with undeniable theatrical gusto in a grass patch of softer looks.

For taking part in War-Mommy you needed a machine-gun sawed from a plank piece. Yet, some boys played automatic weapons of tin, a black-paint-coated acquisition from a store.

Such machine-guns had to be loaded with special ammunition – rolls of narrow paper strips with tiny sulfur blobs planted in them. When struck by the spring trigger hummer, such a blob gave a loud report and the paper strip got automatically pulled on bringing the next blob in the strip in place of the fired… Mom bought me a tin pistol and a box of pistons—small paper circles with the same sulfur blobs which had to be inserted manually for each separate shot. After the bang, a tiny wisp of sore smelling smoke rose from under the trigger.

One day when I was playing the pistol in the sand pile by the garbage enclosure, a boy from the corner building asked me to present the handgun to him and I readily gave it away. Being a son of an officer, he, of course, needed and had more rights to it than me… But Mom refused to believe that anyone would give his gun away to another boy just so casually. She demanded of me to confess the genuine truth about losing Mom’s present, yet I stuck to my truth so stubbornly, that she even had to lead me to the apartment of that boy in the corner building. The officer started to chastise his son, yet Mom said she was so sorry and asked to excuse her because she only wanted to make sure I did not lie.

~ ~ ~

That summer the boys from our Block began to play with yellowish cartridges of real firearms which they were hunting at the shooting range in the forest. I wanted so badly to see what shooting range might look like, yet bigger boys explained that you could visit it only on special days when there was no shooting because on any other day they’d shoo you off.

It took a long wait for a special day, but after all, it came and we went thru the forest… The shooting range was a vast opening about a huge rectangular excavation with a steep cave-in in one of the corners to get down there. The opposite wall of the pit was screened by a tall log barrier, all bullet-poked, keeping a couple shredded left-overs of gravely riddled paper sheets with the head-and-shoulders outline.

We looked for the cartridges in the sand underfoot. They were of two types – longish, neck-narrowed, cartridges from the AK assault-rifle, and small even cylinders from the TT pistol. The finds were loudly welcomed and busily exchanged between the boys. I had no luck at all and only envied the luckier seekers whose shrieks sounded flat and suppressed by the eerie silence of the shooting range displeased with our trespassing the forbidden grounds…

Beside the excavated hollow, the glade was cut across by a front-line trench whose sandy walls were kept in place by board shields. A narrow track of iron rails ran from one end of the opening to the other passing, on the way, the trench over. It was the railway for a large mock-up tank of plywood mounted upon its trolley which rumbled along the track when pulled by the cable of a hand-pedaled winch.

The boys started to play with all those things. I also sat in the trench once, while the plywood tank clanged overhead, and then I went to the call from the edge of the field where they needed my help.

We pulled at the steel cable looped thru the horizontal pulley to make it easier for the boys on the other end of the battlefield to turn the crank of the winch which set in motion the trolley with the tank. At some point, I got inattentive and failed to draw my hand off in time, the cable was quick to snatch and drag my pinky finger into the pulley groove. The pain in the squeezed finger made me rend surroundings by a shrill scream mixed with a jet of tears. Hearing my “oy-oy-oy!” as well as the shouts of other boys around me, “Stop! Finger!”, the winch operators managed to stop it when there remained a mere couple of centimeters for my finger to pass the pulley wheel turn and get out. They wound the winch crank in the opposite direction, dragging the poor finger backward all the way to where it was originally swallowed by the device.

The unnaturally flattened, dead pale finger smeared with the blood from the ripped skin, emerged from the pulley jaws and puffed up instantly. The boys wrapped it with my handkerchief and told me to run home. Quick! And I ran thru the forest feeling the painful beat of the pulse in the burning finger…

At home, Mom, without asking anything, at once told me to shove the wounded under the gush of water from the kitchen tap. She bent and straightened it several times and ordered not to bellow like a little cow. Then she bandaged it into a tight white cocoon and promised that by the wedding day it would be like new.

(…and, in the same breathe, childhood is not the nursery of sadomasochism, like, “Whoops, my finger got pinched! Oh, I bumped my head!” It’s just that some jolts leave deeper notches in the memory.

Yet, what a pity that the same memory does not retain the admiring state of ongoing discoveries when a speck of sand stuck to a penknife's blade holds countless galaxies and worlds, when any trifle, a scrap of trash, is the promise and pledge of future wanderings and unbelievable adventures.

We grow up gaining the protective armor necessary in the adult world—the doctor's smock on me, the traffic cop's uniform on you. Each of us becomes a necessary cog within the social machine. All needless things—like gaping at fire extinguishers or scanning the strange faces in the frost gripped windowpane—are chopped off…

Now there is a number of old scars on my fingers. This one from an awkwardly wielded knife, here a deep cut by ax, and only on my pinky fingers I cannot find any trace from that pulley injury. Because "body dissolves"…

But, hey! I know much fresher bywords, like that recent one: “summer is a miniature life”…)

When you are a child not only summer but each and every day is a miniature life. The childhood time is slowed down – it does not fly, it does not flow, it does not even move until you push it on. Poor kids would long since got extinct while crossing that boundless desert of the static time, were they not rescued by playing games.

And in that summer, if I got bored with a game or no one was in the Courtyard to play with, I had already a haven, a kinda “home” square in the game of Classlets. The big sofa it was, where life ran high indeed, the life full of adventures shared by the heroes from books by Gaidar, Belyaev, Jules Verne… And even outside the big sofa, you can always find a place suitable for all kinds of adventures. Like that balcony by the parents’ room, where I once spent a whole summer day reading a book about prehistoric people – Chung and Poma.

There was hair all over their bodies, like by animals, and they lived in the trees. But then a branch accidentally broke off a tree and helped to defend themselves against a saber-tooth tiger, so they started to always carry a stick about them and walk instead of leaping in the trees around. Then there happened a big jungle fire followed by the Ice Age. Their tribe wandered in search of food, learning how to build fire and talk to each other.

In the final chapter, the already old Poma could walk no farther and fell behind the tribe. Her faithful Chung stayed by her side to freeze to death together in the snow. But their children could not wait and just went on because they were already grown up and not so hairy as their parents, and they protected themselves from the cold with the skins of other animals…

The book was not especially thick, yet I read it all day long, while the sun, arisen on the left, from behind the forest outside our Block, was crossing in its indiscernible movement the sky over the Courtyard, towards the sunset on the right, behind the second block.

At some point, in a way of respite from the uninterrupted reading, I slipped out between the iron uprights of the handrail that bounded the balcony and started to promenade outside, along the concrete cornice beyond the safety grating, and it was not scary at all because I tightly grasped the bars, just like Chung and Poma when they were still living in the trees. But some unfamiliar unclie was passing down there that yelled at me and told to get back onto the balcony. He even threatened to inform my parents. However, they were not home so he took his complaint to our neighbors on the first floor. In the evening they told on me to Mom, and I had to promise her to never-never do it again…

~ ~ ~

(…every road, when you pass it for the first time, seems endlessly long because you cannot measure yet the past part of it against what is still ahead. When passing the same road again and again, it obviously shortens.

That keeps true with the school academic year as well. But I’d never discover it had I left the race at the beginning of the second year at school…)

It was a clear autumn day and our class left school going on the excursion to collect fallen leaves. Instead of Seraphima Sergeevna, who was absent that day, we were supervised by the School Pioneer Leader.

First, she led us thru the forest, then down the street towards the Detachment Library which we didn’t reach but turned into a short lane between the wooden houses that ended atop a steep slope bridged by two wide flights of timber steps in a pretty long and steep slant down to a real football field encircled by a wide cinder path.

Walking the flights, we descended to the large board-floor landing to both sides from which, there ran half-dozen bleachers made of lumber beams. No bleachers were seen on the field’s opposite side but a lonely white hut and a tall picture-stand of 2 footballers motionless forever at the zenith in their high jump fixed at the moment of strenuous scramble in the air by their feet for the ball.

The girls of our class stayed back collecting the leaves from between the bleachers, but the boys bypassed the football field along the cinder path behind the goal on the right and fled down the dip to the river running nearby. When I reached the riverbank, three or four of the boys with their pants rolled up to the knees were already wading about the stream that noisily rushed thru the gap in the broken dam while the most of classmates stayed on the bank just watching.

Without a moment’s deliberation, I pulled off my boots and socks and rolled the pants up. Entering the water was a little scary, what if it’s too cold? But it turned out quite tolerable. The stream roared angrily and leaned in constant drive on my legs below the knees, yet the river bottom felt pleasantly smooth and even. One of the boys who waded in the striving ripples next to me shouted thru the gurgling growl that it was a slab from the destroyed dam—wow! so classy!.

And so I waded hither-thither, wary of drenching the upturned pants when everything—the splashes of the running river, the eager yells of classmates, and the clear soft day—all at once vanished. Instead, on all sides, there was a completely different, silent, world filled with nothing but oppressive yellowish dusk and trickles of pallid bubbles waltzing up before my eyes. Still not realizing what happened, I waved my hands, or rather they did it on their own accord, and soon I broke free to the surface full of blinding sun glare, and the rumble of rushing water that kept slapping my nose and cheeks with choking splashes, strangely distant cries “drowns!” through the water plugs in my ears. My hands flip-flapped at random in the stream until the fingers grabbed the end of someone’s belt thrown from the edge of the slab so meanly cut-off under the water.

I was pulled out, helped to squeeze the water out of my clothes, and directed to a wide trail bypassing the whole stadium so as not to run into the School Pioneer Leader and peachy girls collecting fallen leaves for their autumn herbaria…

~ ~ ~

In a bird’s-eye view, the school building, supposedly, looked like a wide angular “U” with the entrance in the center of the underbelly. The tiled with brown ceramic lobby split into 2 corridors of parquet flooring of slippery glint which led to the opposite wings in the building, to those horns of the “U” from the bird’s viewpoint.

Along one wall in each of the corridors, there ran a row of wide windows looking into the wild-never-trodden space in between the horns, filled by a jumbled thicket of young Pines with thin sloughing off bark. The wall opposite the windows had only doors set far apart from each other, marked by numbers and letters of the grades studying behind them.

The same layout continued after the turn into the left wing, yet in the right one, there was the school gymnasium taking up the whole width and height of the two-story building. The huge hall was equipped with a vault followed by the thick cable of spirally twined strands hanging from the hook in the ceiling and the parallel bars next to the pile of black mats by the distant blind wall. And near the entrance, there was a small stage hiding behind its dark-blue curtain an upright piano and a stock of triple seats stacked up there until needed for the gym transformation into the assembly hall.

The upper floor was climbed up the stair-flights starting at the turn of the left corridor into the horn-wing, and the layout up there replicated that of the first floor, except for the lobby, of course, with its nickel-plated stand-hangers for school kids’ hats and coats behind low barriers, each with its own wicket, on both sides from the entrance door. That’s why the second-floor corridors ran straight and smooth between the wide windows in one wall and the doors of classrooms in the other.

Attending school in felt boots, you could take a spurt of run and skid along the slick parquet flooring, if only there were not black rubber galoshes on your boots neither a teacher in the corridor. My felt boots, at first, savagely chafed my legs behind the knees, then Dad slashed them a little with his shoemaker’s knife. He knew how to do anything.

In winter you came to school still in the dark. Sometimes I wandered around empty classrooms. In the seventh grade’s room, I peeked inside the small white bust of Comrade Kirov on the windowsill. It looked much like the insides of the porcelain puppy statuette in the parents’ room, only dustier.

Another time, switching on the light in the eighth grade, I saw a wax apple left behind on the teacher’s desk. Of course, I fully realized that it was not natural, yet the fruit looked so inviting, juicy, and as if glowing with some inner light that all that made me bite the hard unyielding wax, leaving dents from my teeth on its tasteless side. Immediately, I felt ashamed of being hooked by a bright fake. Yet, who saw it? Quietly turned I the light off and sneaked out into the corridor.

(…twenty-five years later, in the school of the Karabakh village of Noragyuogh, I saw exactly the same wax imitation, with the imprint of a child’s bite and smiled knowingly – I saw you, kid!..)

Kids of all nations and ages are much alike, take, for instance, their love for Hide-and-seek… That game we played not only in the Courtyard but at home as well, after all, we were a company of 3, at times more numerous, when added by the neighbor children—the Zimins and the Savkins who lived at the same landing.

Our apartment was not abundant in hiding places. Well, firstly, under the parents' bed, or then… behind the cupboard corner… er… O, yes! – the cloth wardrobe in the hallway.

My Dad made it himself. A vertical two-meter-tall bar planted off the hallway corner (and 2 rod-branches from its top reaching the walls) cut out a sizable parallelepiped of space. Now, it just remained to hang a cloth curtain on ringlets running along the horizontal rods and cover the whole contraption with a piece of plywood so that the dust did not collect inside. The do-it-yourself cloakroom at ready! On the paint-coated wall inside the cotton-walled vault, there was fixed a wide board with pegs for hanging coats and other things, the big brown wicker chest stood on the floor beneath the hanger-board, and there still remained a lot of room for the footwear…

Granted, the hiding places were pretty scanty, yet playing the game was interesting all the same. You holed up in one of the enumerated spots and, keeping your breath under a tense control, listened to the “it’s” cautious steps before… off you rushed! to win the run to the big sofa in the children’s room from where the “it” started their search, and assert your being the first by taps on the big sofa’s armrest and your loud yell, “knock-knock! that’s for me!”, so as not to be the “it” in the following round of Hide-and-seek.