The boys armed with such weapons do not run about yelling “ta-ta-ta!” as in War-Mommy. They leave those naive games for kindergarten kids and go down into basements and start hunting each other in the dark. Metallic “dzink!” of a crook against the cemented floor, or the wooden walls, hints that the enemy is near and opened fire at you. But securing the position in the pit above the floor at the end of the corridor, you are as safe as in an impregnable bunker. You have to just sit tight up there and send crooks to the sound of stealthy steps, and if you hear “ouch!” from the dark, then you have targeted him okay…

In autumn, they finished construction of the five-story apartment block across the road surrounding Block. The happy tenants were moving into their flats while deep down, in the endless basement corridors of so big a building (the first of that height and size at the Object), there unfolded unprecedented combat actions with the employment of crook weapons of all types.

Initially, the huge underground basement was illuminated with electric bulbs placed rarely but evenly, they lived but a short life: long-range crook shots burst them up, one by one, into fine splinters. Perhaps, the only drawback of the crook weapons was their almost complete noiselessness. For real self-assertion, you need your arms to do some major bangs…

(…life just cannot stand still, it has to flow. Where to? The direction conforms to the dearest dreams of those swimming in the flow, sort of…)

More and more often, the evening quietude in the Courtyard got disrupted by sharp snaps alike to gun reports because the boys had armed themselves with peelikkalkas but I, as usual, straggled behind the advanced trends in the flow of social life, which made me beg for instructions to manufacture a peelikkalka.

Take 15 cm. length of a narrow section (0.5 cm.) copper tube and bend till it resembles letter L. The foot of the resulting L is flattened with a hammer. Thru the remaining orifice, pore a small amount of molten lead into the tube to form a smooth leaden bottom by the angle to L’s foot.

Find a thick long nail reaching the leaden bottom and still sticking out from the tube for at least 5 cm. and bend the nail at 4 cm. from its head (you’ve got another L now).

Insert the nail into the tube (the contraption resembles the left bracket “[”, or right bracket “]”, depending on your point of view) and as a result, you have a working piston-cylinder shebang.

Connect the bent nail head and the flattened tube foot using a common rubber band, like that used in underpants, now the whole construction looks like a small bow and your peelikkalka is ready.

Pull the nail halfway out from the tube, the tension of the band forces the nail rest against the copper wall of the tube at the point to which you pulled the nail out.

Squeeze the peelikkalka in your palm, the band pressed to the tube makes the nail slide inside and sharply hit the leaden bottom. So much for a trial blank shot.

Now, it remains only to load the firearms, for which purpose the nail is fully taken out and the tube loaded with scrapings of sulfur from a couple of match heads.

Insert the nail back, cock it up with the band and “Hello, world!” with a live shot from your weapon. Bang!…

In the evening dark, the splash of flame shooting out from the tube orifice looks quite impressive. On the whole, it’s the same principle as in toy pistols with paper pistons, yet distinctly enhanced in decibels…

On learning the theory, I wanted to manufacture a peelikkalka of my own, but Dad did not have a copper tube of the right size at his work.

Still and all, I had it. Probably, one of the boys gave me an odd one of his.

You can't deny that in an extra-curricular way, a schoolboy gets better training for real life…

(…never heard the “peelikkalka” word, eh?. me neither—well, outside the Object—yet the name ain’t a jot less luring than that of “derringer”…)

~ ~ ~

As concerned mainstream schooling, our class was moved to the one-story building in the lower part of the school grounds, about a hundred meters from the principal building. Apart from our classroom, the building comprised a couple of workshop rooms for Handicraft classes equipped with vices and even a lathe in one of them. Because the school curriculum had more important subjects, that room was rarely open, two or three days a week to accommodate the grades visiting our territory.

Studying in the outskirts of school grounds has lots of advantages. During the breaks, you can have crazy races in the corridor free of the risk to stumble into some patrolling teacher as is their custom in the main building.

Besides, the teachers entered our class no sooner than some self-appointed sentinel or two of ours, playing outside, would race in with the announcement which subject was heading to us from up there. And an outdoors lookout was simply the must not to be caught at bullying a socket in the classroom wall into whose holes with 220 V we stuck the legs of radio-electronic resistances. In the resulting short circuit, the resistance would burst and spew around indignant sparks of blinding flame.

(…presently I’m just bewildered why none of us had ever got electroshocked. It seems, the mains sockets in that room were too human…)

Life was changing in our house too. The Zimins family left when Stepan was made redundant because Nikita Khrushchev, when in the position of the USSR’s Ruler, gave the West a promise of drastic cuts in the contingent of the Soviet Army reducing it to the meager twenty millions of servicemen. Soon after that, he was made to retire, yet the new leadership kept the promise true and the reduction policies affected even our Object.

Besides the Zimins, the tenants from the apartment beneath us left also. Their grown-up daughter Julia presented us, 3 children from the upper floor, with her album of matchbox stickers collection.

At those times matchboxes were made not of cardboard with printed pictures on it, but of very thin, one-layer, plywood blanketed by taut blue tissue upon which there was mounted one or another sticker portraying the famous ballet dancer Ulanova or some sea animal, or a hero astronaut in it. People collected matchbox stickers just like the post-stamp hobbyists only, first, you had to peel them off a box soaked in water and then, of course, to dry up.

Julia’s collection was split into different sections: sports, aviation, Hero Cities, and so on. Surely, all 3 of us were delighted with so generous a gift and we stepped in her shoes at keeping the picturesque hobbyhorse…

In place of Yura Zimin, another Yura became my friend who had a different family name, yet, like the previous Yura, Yura Nikolayenko was also a neighbor, more distant though, who lived not on the same landing but in the same Block.

As the snow filled the forest, we ventured out there in search of foxholes or, at least, to catch an odd hare. We had pretty good chances of success because we were joined by a Lowlander-boy who brought a dog living in the yard of their wooden house. Only he was too greedy to share the linen rope tied to the dog’s collar and yanked at it himself. In the forest though, the dog began to drag him forward and backward over the snowdrifts with lots of hare footprints. Yura and I were running behind not to miss out on the moment of catching a hare.

Then we noticed that the dog was paying no attention to the hare footprints but constantly sniffing for something else. Finally, he started to excitedly dig into a tall snowdrift. Anticipating that the dog would dig out a fox burrow whose scent he nosed thru the snow, we armed ourselves with sticks to meet the beast. However, from under the snow, the dog pulled out a big old bone, and we stopped hunting…

~ ~ ~

On the winter vacations, many children of my age were invited to a neighboring corner house in the Courtyard, where some newly arrived tenants celebrated the birthday of their daughter, my future classmate. She looked like Malvina from The Golden Key tale, only her hair was neither blue nor curly, but straight.