foreplay, kinda introductory knock up? What if not for presence of my brother, sniffling in peaceful innocence next to me on the folding couch-bed, I’d go astray, swap my wallowing in erotic speculations and no-touch hardon for the conventional friction toil and join the ranks of 95 percent of all male mankind with Leo Tolstoy and choryphaei of Italian cinematography in the head of the procession?.)
Once in the schoolyard, Kuba asked keenly, “Did you know, that wanking causes hair-growth on your palms?”
Skully and I simultaneously looked in our hands, to the Kuba’s happy guffaw. I knew that my palms were sinless, but I looked all the same, out of pure instinct… So, as it turns out, those folds, flicking this way and that way in front of me, were not a negligible trifle. Maybe at some future session of my contactless masturbation, the green coat would open and a tender voice call softly, “Are you also cold? Come closer. Let’s warm each other…” And I… What?!.
In the evening the mentor brought the same volumes again and persistently suggested to pay attention to exercises of such and such numbers. The winners gave them short shrift, and I only looked silently over their shoulders keeping the countenance of an inveterate problem cracker…
The Regional Olympiad took place at some institute for higher education. In the auditorium for eighth-graders, each competitor was given a thin copybook stamped on every other page. In the first one, you had to write your name and where you were from. The following two were for rewriting the problems from the blackboard, six of them, all in all. Gee! Three of the problems turned the very same which our mentor was solving the previous night in the hotel room with the wise guys. Yet, the morning had not made me any wiser, the problems seemed as unapproachable as they were the night before.
It was boring to sit idly there, yet to get up and leave at once, disrupting the tense silence of concentrated brain work that reigned around, seemed not too polite. So I opened the last page in the copybook and started a pencil sketch of a pirate. His face I could imagine vividly enough, both the broad mustache and the plum-like eyes staring from under the turban on his head in a half-turn over his shoulder. Yet, on the paper, everything went wrong. Even the blunderbuss pistol, like by those robbers in “The Snow Queen”, did not better the picture.
Hmm… Not only I did not live up to be a new Sir Isaac Newton, but also turned out a too lousy painter for a Repin… I recollected Father’s ass that pulled him out of the Party Studies School, in my case, it was walking out on foot. I took the copybook to the inspectors’ desk and left…
Of course, the fiasco in such essential fields as Physics and Painting dealt me a moral shock. To deaden the stingy feeling of defeat or, in a nutshell, to mitigate the grief, I bought a pack of cigarettes with filters. “Orbit” it was, for thirty kopecks. However, the orbital test was delayed until my return to Konotop, where I waited two more days before a suitable moment to retire with the tantalizing pack to the outhouse in the snow-clad garden.
One drag… Another… A fit of coughing… Transparent, greenish bagels floated before the eyes. Nausea. All the symptoms described by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer’s case. O, yes, respect and trust to the classic would spare throwing a barely started pack of “Orbit” thru the dark hole in the outhouse floor…
~ ~ ~
Opposite Railway Station Square, across the streetcar track and the asphalt road, there was the park named after Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Minister of Education, a wide area with alleys of tall trees connected by low curtains of trimmed bushes.
On entering the park, you were met by a white monument to Lenin who stood on its tall gray pedestal in a pensive deliberation of the Railway Station. Clutching the jacket lapel with his left hand, he lowered his right one at full arm’s length, and slightly withdrew it back in a both political and poetic attitude, like a harvester driver petting with his palm the ears of wheat: got ready to be cut down?.
Thru the trees lined-up behind the monument, there peeped the massive cube of the three-storied Culture Palace also named after Lunacharsky, but in the Konotop parlance shortened to just ‘Loony’ (not Minister of Education, of course, but the Culture Palace) and because of the name duplication you had at times to ask for clarification: Loony Park or Loony Palace?.
The building bore no architectural excesses—even walls, square windows, rectangular entrance. Contrary to the outside appearance, Loony had four floors, the hidden one, comprising the auditorium for film shows, sat deep in the basement. However, since the same films were run at Club just one week later and for free, thanks to check-passes from the Club Director, Loony remained out the scope of our interests.
The excitement about the Loony Culture Palace was breaking out in the second half of the academic year, when there started the season of games at Club of Jolly and Resourceful, aka CJR, in the competition between city school teams. That's when everyone wanted to get on the second floor of Loony, into the auditorium filled with blue-velvet-covered seats lined in too close rows over the smooth parquet floor.
They didn’t sell tickets to CJR games and to get there I had to beg it from our School Pioneer Leader, and Volodya Gourevitch would answer that the ticket distribution was controlled by the City Komsomol Committee, and the quota they allotted for School 13 was way too wee, which got further decimated by his senior colleagues in the Teachers’ Room ripping off their lion’s share and that was not his fault, right? Those tickets were always blank, marking neither seats nor rows, so it was only wise to come upfront and occupy a seat so as