By the organization regulations, an Account Meeting should elect its Chairman and Secretary. The Meeting Chairman’s job consisted of announcements whose turn it was to account while Secretary would take notes of how much waste paper and scrap metal was collected by the pioneers of the reporting Chairman’s school during the specified period, which cultural events were organized, and what places were taken by their pioneers in the city-wide contests and competitions.

The Senior Pioneer Leader of our school had supplied me with a sheet of paper to be read at the Account Meeting but, in the House of Pioneers, they charged me with the additional responsibility of the appointed Chairman of the Meeting. I was assured that presiding an Account Meeting was as easy as pie. All you had to do was to declare, “And now the floor for the account report is given to Chairman of the Pioneer Company Council from School number such-and-such!” after which the such-and-such Chairman would march to the rostrum on stage with their sheet of report. The paper read up, the accounting Chairman leaves the sheet to Secretary of the Meeting, because what’s the point in sticking all those figures down on the fly if they are written already, right?.

At first, everything went without a hitch. I and Secretary of Account Meeting, a girl in her ceremonial white shirt and the scarlet pioneer necktie, as anyone else around, were sitting next to each other behind the small desk under a dark red cloth on a small stage in a small hall, where Chairmen of the City Pioneer Companies were seated in rows waiting for their turn to read their accounts. Back in the last row, Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee—responsible for the work with the pioneers—sat in her red pioneer necktie.

The Chairmen in a well-oiled manner followed each other, read from their sheets, piled them by Secretary of Account Meeting, and returned to the audience. I also did my part as instructed but after the fourth announcement, something suddenly came over me or rather flooded over me. My mouth got full of overflowing saliva, I barely had time to gulp it before the salivary glands fountained out a new excessive portion to fill me with shame before Secretary of Account Meeting seated near me who had to surely be perplexed by my obvious hurried gulping. A spell of ease came when she went to account for School 10, yet, with her return, the disgraceful torture went on. What’s wrong with me, after all?!.

Then came my turn. Walking back those 4 steps from the rostrum, I swallowed 3 times, which did not help though. Okay, let School 14 finish and…Oh, no! Second Secretary too, with her concluding speech!.

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn’t realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)

In October, the seventh-graders started their preparation for getting admitted to the ranks of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, aka ALYCL, aka Komsomol. The membership in Komsomol organization was not a cheap giveaway passed out indiscriminately to lined-up squads or companies. Not in the least! You had to prove that you deserved that high honor at the special admittance sitting of the City Komsomol Committee whose Members would ask you questions as in a real examination because on entering this youth organization you became an ally to the Party and a would-be communist.

For a preparatory reading up, the Senior Pioneer Leader of our school, Volodya Gourevitch—a pretty young man with black hair and bluish-skinned cheek-and-jowls because of the thick but always close shaved bristle—distributed among the would-be members the Charter of ALYCL printed in the smallest typeface so as to pack all of its sections into a small accordion-folding leaflet. He also warned that at the Admittance Sitting the City Komsomol Committee Members were especially keen about the Charter Section on the rights and duties of the Komsomol members.

Volodya Gourevitch graduated from the prestigious School 11, between the Station and the Under-Overpass, as well as the class of playing button-accordion at the Konotop Music School. He dwelt in City, rather far from the Settlement, in a compact block of five-story buildings between Peace Square and Square of the Konotop Divisions, which area among the local folks was, for some reason, referred to as Palestine.

On his arrival to school from Palestine, he donned mixed paraphernalia of a very clean and well-ironed pioneer necktie and the golden profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s bald head and resolutely pointed wedge beard in the red enamel banner of the small badge of a Komsomol member pinned in the breast of his jacket. At shop-talks within the close circle of pioneer activists, Volodya Gourevitch liked to frequently announce, emphasizing his and the Leader of the Revolution coincidence in both name and patronymic, “Call me simply – Ilyich.” Following these words sounded his hearty laugh, loud and protracted, after which his lips did not immediately pulled back to the neutral position and he had to assist by pushing his thumb and forefinger at the short saliva threads in the corners of his mouth.

However, Volodya Sherudillo, a firmly built champion at Bitok gambling with the red turf of hair and a thick scatter of freckles in his round face, who studied in my class, in the close circle of us, his classmates, called Volodya Gourevitch – “a khannorik from CEC!”

(…at the shake-down period of the Soviet regime, before enslaving villagers into collective farms, the Communist leadership experimented about organizing rural population into fellowships of Collective Earth Cultivation, acronymically “CEC”

However, the meaning of “khannorik” is not recorded even in the multi-volume The Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great-Russian Language by Vladimir Dahl, probably, because the prominent linguist never visited the village of Podlipnoye.

Who remembers CEC’s nowadays? Yet, the collective memory of village folks still keeps them dearly and transfers from generation to generation.

“Forgotten is the reason, yet feeling is still there…”…)

The Konotop City Komsomol Committee was located on the second floor in the right wing of the City Council building. The building itself, somehow resembling the Smolny Institute from numerous movies about the Great October Revolution, faced Peace Square past the greens and across Peace Avenue. Three short, quiet, flag-stoned, alleys beneath the umbrage of splendid chestnuts in the greens connected the building and Peace Avenue.

None of the guys from our school had any problem whatsoever at the examination on Komsomol Charter, neither had them other students of our age from the rest of the city schools, we got admitted to the Leninist Young Communist League nice and smoothly…

~ ~ ~

In autumn, they started tramway construction in the Settlement. The track ascended from the Underpass tunnel to pass Bazaar and dive under the giant poplars lined along the rough cobbles in the road of Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street. Gray pillars of smooth concrete for supporting the contact wire above the tramway rose at regular intervals between the mighty tree-trunks. By the October holidays, the track had reached our school and even turned into May Day Street, which stretched to the city limit at the end of the Settlement.

Then three small streetcars started running from the terminal on the city-side of the Under-Overpass tunnel to the terminal at the end of May Day Street. Stout female conductors collected the fare in the streetcars selling a three-kopeck ticket per passenger which throwaways they tore off the narrow paper rolls fixed on the canvas strap of their plum duty bags cinched across their trunks to keep jingling change and uphold their mighty busts.