Crestfallen, with shallow whimpers, I rubbed the welts left by the belt looking away from the younger who huddled, in petrified silence, against the back of the big sofa…

~ ~ ~

In the Courtyard, we played Classlets.

First, you need a chalk to draw a big rectangular in the concrete walk and split it into five pairs of squares, like, a two-column table of 5 rows. Then get the bitka—a can from used shoe polish filled with sand whose enclosed mass conveys your bitka the required gravity, turns it a kinda tiny discus.

Now, standing out the bottom line of the first column, you throw your bitka into one of 10 classlet-squares and then go after it hopping on one leg (up the first column and down the second, 1 leap per square) to pick it up and proceed thru the rest of the table, also in one-legged hops, to leave the table of classlets by the final bound from the bottom classlet in the second column. A parabola-shaped mission trip is over.

(While going thru the table, take care your sandal never lands near any of the chalked lines or else the other players, closely watching your progress, would raise a hell of jeering shouts insisting that you stomped on it.)

Now, safely out of the Classlets table, you have the right to throw your bitka targeting the next square in the parabola and repeat your hopping trip to carry it out. After your bitka visited, in turn, all of the classlets, you mark one of them as your “house” and further on in the game you may feel in it at home—put your other foot down and relax. Yet, if your bitka missed the proper square or landed on a line, or if you touched a line when hopping, another player starts their tries and you become a watcher…

There were ball games as well. For instance, hitting a ball non-stop against the ground, you had to accompany each strike with a separate word, “I! – know! – five! – girls’! – names!” At each subsequent hit at the ball, you called out one of 5 random names, no repetitions allowed. Then followed 5 boy’s names, 5 flowers, 5 animals, etc., etc., until the ball bounced out of reach or the player got lost in their enumerations…

Another ball game was not as intellectual. You just hit the ball against the faded-pinkish-washed plaster on the house wall (closer to the corner, safely away from the window on the first floor). Guessing the landing spot of the re-bounced ball, you jumped over it with your legs wide apart before it hit the ground.

The player behind you caught the ball to throw it back against the wall—this time for them to jump for you to catch. There could be more players in the game though, so you had to wait for your turn in the line of jumpers. I was enchanted by the game’s infinity. It was like those endless pictures on the red side of Fire Extinguisher…

We played outside the Courtyard as well, across the ever-empty road surrounding the twin blocks.

Atop the tilt towards the Recruit Depot Barracks, a tall board-fencing enclosed large garbage containers for all of our Block. Next to the fence, there stretched a level area grown with green grass except for a lonely sagging pile of sand by the enclosure, probably, a leftover from the construction times and later used like any sand by any children in any sandbox. Apart from all those uses, we played a special sand game though, which had no name.

You just scooped a handful of sand and tossed it up, trying to catch the returning sand into your palm, as much as you could. The catch was held in the outstretched hand and you pronounced the ritual formula, “So much—for Lenin!”

Then the sand in the palm was thrown up again and caught back once again. Over the second catch, the words in the formula changed the proposed addressee, “So much—for Stalin!”

After the third toss, no one cared to catch the sand, on the contrary, they hid their hands behind their backs to avoid the downing sand, and then even clapped to ensure not a random grain had any chance to keep stuck to the palm, “And so much—for Hitler! That’s that!”

Somehow, I felt ill at ease about not fully fair play in the game when you leave the last in the trinity without the tiniest speck of sand. And one day playing at the pile alone, I broke the rules and caught a pinch of sand even for Hitler although I knew he was a very bad one and even had a tail before they caught him…

Besides, we used the sprawling sandpile’s outskirts for constructing of “secrets”—small holes scooped out no deeper than a teacup—whose bottoms we floored with the heads from the flowers picked in the grass. A shard of pane glass put upon the petals of the heads pressed them down and imparted a look of somewhat melancholic beauty. Then the hole was filled up and leveled and we made arrangements over it “to check our secret” the following day, however, either we forgot or it was raining, and later we could not find “the secret”, so just produced another one…

One day the rain caught me in one of the round gazebos in the Courtyard. As a matter of fact, it sooner was crossbred of the outright deluge with a thunderstorm. Black clouds piled up over the entire Courtyard, all around got wrapped in the dark as if sunk a flushing night. The adults and children who happened to be in the gazebo scattered racing along the walks towards their houses. Only I tarried over a forgotten book with the pictures of three hunters roaming thru the mountain woods until the waterfall rushed down from the darkness above. It was unthinkable to run home thru that roaring flood, I had to only wait until it was over.

Thunder pearls erupted madly, the lightning tore the sky over Block crisscross and hither-thither. The gazebo bounced from the deafening rumbling, and the wind-driven sheets of water lashed the inside circle of the cemented floor reaching far over its center. I placed the book on the bench running along the lee side props but some crazy drops got even there. It was so scary and wet, and cold, and never-ending.

When, nonetheless, the storm let up, the clouds of darkness broke asunder revealing the blue of the sky as well as the fact that the day was far from being over yet, and that my sister Natasha was running from our staircase-entrance with the already needless umbrella because Mom sent her to call me home.

“We knew that you were here”, she said panting, “You could be seen at first…”

~ ~ ~

(…it’s not that I have any special knack for nosing out conspiracies, yet the unyielding confluence of chance circumstances would mulishly bring me smack-bang to the scene of some secret scheme a-brewing…

When in kindergarten three boys of the senior group began to exchange clandestine hints, something like:

“So it's today, eh?”

“We’ll definitely go, yes?”

“After kindergarten’s over, right?”

I felt unbearable bitterness that some adventure was obviously underway while I stayed with the usual same plain everyday. That's why I approached the leader in the gang of 3 and asked him directly, “Where are you going to?”

“To steal tomatoes in the Where-Where Mountains.”

“May I go with you?”

“Okay.”

I had already a vague idea that stealing was bad but in my whole life I hadn’t seen yet any mountains, only the low hillock of the overgrown with Fir-trees Bugorok-Knoll whose sandy drop-off side was facing the grassy level grounds by the garbage bins enclosure for our Block. However, first of anything else, I desired the wonderful tomatoes from the Where-Where Mountains. In my mind’s eye, I already could see their round ripe sides gleaming with solid red.

So it was a whole day of waiting for the hour when adults start to come after their children, when I promptly declined going home with someone else’s mother, “No, thank you, I go with the boys to reach Block sooner.”

The 4 of us went out of the gate but we didn’t take the short trail thru the forest. Instead, we turned left to follow the wide dirt road on which there never appeared any vehicle. The road went uphill and then dived with a tilt, and I kept looking out around and asking the same question about when the Where-Where Mountains would stand out. However, as the answers were getting more and more curt and reluctant, I kept down the eager question not to put at risk my taking part in the tomato adventure.