Страница 71 из 72
Let them capable of reckoning get it…
But again I forked off and the story of my life got entered by strangers I never have met and only recently started to see that they are also a part of me.
So much for bemoaning the belated wisdom, let's get back to the twentieth century, year sixty-eight, when I am in my fourteenth year and…)
…and how not to resent them those Czechs who succumbed to the CIA subversive propaganda and started a counterrevolution in the fraternal camp of the socialist countries! And they so inhumanely lined baby carriages to block the way before our tank bucketing along. Of course, the driver turned abruptly, in case there were babies inside, the tank fell off the bridge and our soldier died. So the Central TV news program “Time”.
Then, of course, the Czech Communist Party restored the order in their country with the assistance of military contingents from the fraternal states, and we again began to live on, the camp of socialism properly united…
By the by, the Konotop of that period outstripped many of the larger cities in the field of television because by us the TV boxes had two working cha
The TV-sets in those years were all black-and-white and color ones you could only see in color films from the Western Europe, for that reason Father installed a sheet of transparent isinglass over the TV screen. The sheets of that kind had certain color tints in some of its areas – the upper part blue for the sky, the lower one green for the grass. They even said that thru that isinglass the a
For switching TV cha
And (returning to the available two cha
Besides, Konotop then was flooded with a wealth of indie radio stations that went on air in the MW range. There was both “The King of the Cemetery” and “Caravel”, and whichever name an independent guy would choose to call his underground station. They all had a common weak point though, which was their irregularity. You had no idea when to switch the receiver on so that to hear, “Hello to all, the radio station "Jolly Stickman” is now on air. Who hears me, confirm…” And he would put on the hoarsely roaring Vysotsky’s songs about the Archer who disgraced the Czar, or how we shoot thru the time in a spaceship, or about a dolphin’s belly ripped open by the boat propeller…
At some point, the radio station “Charming Nina” would cut into the broadcast and begin to point out to "Jolly Stickman” that he had sat on another guy’s wavelength, and that “Charming Nina” had been airing in that particular length for no less than a week. Little by little, they developed a quarrel: “Hey, you! Don’t swell too much! Look out, if I catch you in City you’ll have two blobs in place of your ears!”
“Easy, mini-Willie! Who do you roll a barrel against? Haven’t leaked into your pants wet for a whole week?”
“The more you rant the more you’ll weep!”
“Close it up!”
Yet, they never switched over to four-letter words.
Father claimed that even our radio set could be readily converted into such a station, smooth and easy, if only there was a microphone. However, my and Skully’s wheedling of him the mentioned conversion, and we’d sure get a mike somewhere, met his downright refusal because it was radio hooliganism, and special vehicles were stalking the city to track those hooligans down, and fine them, and confiscate all the radio equipment from their khuttas, down to the TV box. We didn’t want to stay without our TV, didn’t we?
At times, the radio-hooligans instead of wished-for Vysotsky's songs entered into endless negotiations about who had which capacitor and which diodes he’d trade it for. Finally, they agreed to meet in Peace Square.
“How’d I know you?”
“Don’t worry. I know you. I’ll come up.”
And so we fell back to the TV tuning circle and listened, for the hundredth time, the same, yet more reliable, Obodzinsky…
~ ~ ~
Peace Square in front of the same-named movie theater was bounded by long five-story parallelepipeds of apartment blocks. The shallow round pit in its enclosure of gray granite ring located centrally contained the large fountain which was turned on no sooner than once in a couple of years to shoot up a high white jet of water for an hour or two. The asphalt walks, lined with beautiful chestnut trees, rayed off from the wide stone steps of the movie theater porch to the opposite square corners alongside the crosswise road of Peace Avenue. The lawns beneath the chestnuts were improved by a couple of well-trodden short-cuts not provided by the original layout. Each of the tree-shaded ray-alleys was equipped with a couple of lengthy timber benches in the dark green coat of paint and two more of their breed stood openly on the asphalt nearby the fountain.
In the warm evenings, the square turned into the so-called “whore-parade” grounds for dense waves of loungers walking leisurely the alleys, they didn't leave the square and just repeated their promenade circles, again and again, sca
Sometimes after a movie show, I also went along with the lazy stream when making for the streetcar stop around the corner. It happened not too often though because from one sequel of “Fantômas” to another you had to wait for at least six months.
In the daytime, the benches were mostly empty, though Kuba and I once happened to be called from a bench seated by a pair of young grown-up idlers who demanded kopecks. Kuba fired up trustworthy oaths that we had no money whatsoever, but I suggested to the louts, “Catch all that falls out!” With those words, I snatched the left pocket bag of my pants inside-out and expressively dusted it with my palm. I did not bother with the right pocket though, because it held ten kopecks for a streetcar fee.