And suddenly the drowsiness was cast away by a gentle touch of cautious fingers creeping from my knee up over the thigh. I looked out from under the sheet. Irochka Likhachova was lying on the next cot with her eyes closed tightly but, in between the sheets over our cots, I could clearly make out a length of her outstretched arm. The quiet fingers dived into my underpants to enclose my flesh in a warm soft palm. It felt unspeakably pleasant. But then her touch moved away from my private parts – why? yet more!
Her hand found mine and pulled it under her sheet to put my palm on something soft and yielding that had no name, which it did not need at all because all I needed was that all that just went on and on. However, when I, with my eyes tightly closed, once again brought her hand back under my sheet, she stayed there all too briefly before pulling mine over to hers… At that moment the caretaker announced the end of “quiet hour” and called all to get up. The room filled with the hubbub of dressing children.
“And we don’t forget to make our beds,” the caretaker repeated instructively, walking to and fro along the runner by the row of cots, when all of a sudden Irochka Likhachova shouted, “And Ogoltsoff sneaked into my panties!”
The children lulled in expectation. Sledgehammered with the disgraceful truth, I feel a hot wave of shame rolling up to spill in tears out of my eyes. They mingle with my roar, “It’s you who sneaked! Fool!”, and I and run out of the room to the second-floor landing tiled with alternating squares of yellow and brown.
Stopping there, I decide to never ever any more return to that group and that kindergarten. No, never ever anymore. That is enough of enoughs. But I don’t have time to think about how I will live further on because I get spellbound by the red fire extinguisher on the wall.
In fact, it was not the whole fire extinguisher that mesmerized me but the yellow square on its side framing the picture where a man in a cap on his head held exactly the same fire extinguisher only in action already, upside down, to spurt the widening gush towards a fat bush of flames.
The picture was intended, probably, to serve a kind of visual instruction on how to use this or any other fire extinguisher, for which reason the one in the man’s hands was painted true to life in every detail. Even the yellow square with the instructive picture on its side was scrupulously reproduced, portraying a little man in a tiny cap who fought, standing upside down, the undersized fire with the bushy spurt from his miniature fire extinguisher.
Then and there it dawned on me that in the next, already blurred, picture on that miniature extinguisher the already indiscernible man was back again to his normal position, feet down. Yet in the still next, further reduced, picture he would be on his head once more and—the most breathtaking discovery!—these diminishing men just could not end, they would only grow smaller, receding to the state of unimaginably tiny specks and dwindle on without ever ending their dwarfish tumbles, serving each other a link and a spring-board to ever turning tinier simply because of that Fire Extinguisher who started them off from his nail in the wall on the second floor landing next to the white door to the senior group, opposite the door to the toilet.
The spell was shattered to pieces by the awakening calls for me to immediately come to the dining room where the kindergarten groups were seated already for the after-“quiet-hour” tea. Yet ever since, passing below Fire Extinguisher—the bearer of innumerable worlds—I felt respectful understanding. As for sneaking into someone else’s panties, that one became my only and unique experience. And enlightened by it, at all the “quiet hours” that followed, whenever I had to go, by the undertone permission from the caretaker, out to pee then, passing by, I fully knew the meaning of sheets overlapping the gap between a pair of coupled cots, as well as why so firmly kept Khromov his eyes closed in his cot next to the Sontseva’s…
~ ~ ~
We lived on the second floor and our door was followed by that of the Morozovs, pensioner spouses in a three-room apartment. Opposite to them across the landing, there also was an apartment of 3 rooms, yet only 2 of them were dwelt by the Zimins family, while the third one was populated by single women, now and then replacing one another, at times there happened couples of women, who declared themselves relatives after meaningful smiles at each other.
The dead wall between the doors to the Morozovs’ and to the Zimins’ was outfitted with a vertical iron ladder reaching the ever open hatchway to the attic where the tenants hung their washing under the slate roof, and the father in the Savkins family—whose apartment was smack-bang opposite ours—kept pigeons after he came home and changed into his blue sportswear.
The wooden handrail supported by the iron uprights ran from the Savkins’ door towards ours without crossing the whole landing though, because it turned down to follow the two flights of steps to the first-floor landing and from there four more steps down—to the staircase-entrance vestibule. There you pushed the wide entrance door held closed by a rusty iron spring, big and screechy, and went into the wide expanse of our block Courtyard, leaving behind the vestibule with one more, narrow, door that hid the steep steps into the impenetrable darkness of underground basement.
Deducing from my subsequent life experience, I may safely assume that we lived in Flat 5 though at that time I didn’t know it yet. All I knew was that the most numerous population in a house were its doors. Behind the first door with a large handmade mailbox screwed up to it, there would open the hallway with the narrow door of the tiny storeroom to the right, and the partly glazed door to the parents’ room on the left, where instead of a window was the wide balcony door, also glazed in its upper part, viewing the Courtyard.
Straight ahead from the hallway started the long corridor to the kitchen, past two blind doors on the right, the first, to the bathroom, followed by the toilet door, while in the left wall immediately before the kitchen, there was just one, also blind, door to the children’s room that had two windows, one of which faced the Courtyard and the other presented the view of murky windows in the plastered butt wall of the next, corner, house in the Block. The only window in the kitchen was looking at the same wall in the adjacent corner building, and to the right from the kitchen door, up under the ceiling, the matte glassed square of the quite small toilet window was also filled with the same murky darkness unless the lamp there was on. Neither bathroom nor the storeroom closeted behind its white door in the hallway had any windows at all but, in the ceiling of each of them, there hung an electric bulb—just click the black nose jutting from the round switch by the needed door, and step inside without angst because, as it turned out, all the doors in a house opened inside the rooms they serve…
Entering the toilet, first of anything else I spat on the wall to the left from the throne and only then sat down to go potty and watch the slow progress of spittle crawling down the green coat of paint, very vertically, leaving a moist trail in its wake. If the glob of the snailing saliva lacked sufficient reserves to reach the baseboard, I would assist it by an additional spit in the track, just above the stuck locomotive. At times the trip took from three to four spits and some other times the initial one was enough.
The parents were lost in perplexity as regards the spittle condensing under the toilet wall until the day when Dad entered immediately after me, and at the strict interrogation that followed I admitted doing that yet failed to offer any explanation why. Since then, fearful of punishment, I blotted the traces of the wrong-doing with the pieces of cut-up newspapers from the cloth bag on the opposite wall but the thrill was gone.