The slob in sunglasses looked around and threatened with a beating, yet he didn’t leave the bench. We took it for being dismissed and went on, while Kuba kept bitterly upbraiding me for such a stupid impudence which could quite easily end in a good scrub for my silly mug, and justly too. Probably, he was right, and I had missed to figure out such an outcome, carried away with the idea of making a fine gesture – to pull an empty pocket out.

What saved me? The rogue might have decided that I was under the protection of some guy with a pull among the thieves, how, otherwise, to explain such reckless arrogance?.

“Enters Sehrguey Ogoltsoff from Konotop!” announced Raissa, when I and Skully appeared in the Children Sector room. Marking that I couldn’t catch up with that particular piece of humor, she handed me The Pioneer magazine opened at a story, under which at the page bottom it stood in black on white: “Sehrguey Ogoltsoff, the city of Konotop”.

I had completely forgotten about those couple sheets from a school notebook reporting on my chat with the dwarf a-straddle a pen on my desk, sent half a year before to the contest of fantasy stories announced by the magazine. The talkative dwarf chattered then of this and that making me more and more sleepy. And now, all of a sudden – wake up!

The sweet whiff of fresh typography print from the magazine pages set my head off in a slow swerve. My legs kinda weakened, and I felt a soft blow at the back of my head, only somehow from inside. Carefully, I lighted upon a seat in the 3-in-1 auditorium set put under the ballet rail beneath the windows and read the publication where there hardly remained a paragraph from what I had sent to the contest. Yes, the dwarf still was there but talked nineteen to the dozen about a certain filmmaker Ptushko I had never heard of in my life. However, neither in Children Sector nor at home had I ever shared to anyone that the story comprised practically nothing by me except for the opening settings because not every day, after all, they print your story in a thick monthly magazine…

In summertime Mother grew fat and Father, with a somewhat uneasy chortle, asked us—their children—what about having one more brother? The babe might be given a good name, like, Alyoshka, huh?

Natasha wrinkled her nose, Sasha kept silent as well, and I responded with a shrug, “What for?”

The suggested increase in the family seemed unnecessary not as a threat of deterioration our living conditions, but because of the awkward crying difference in age between the would-be parents and the suggested baby. So Father effaced his ingratiating smirk, dropped the subject and never picked it up again. A couple of weeks later, I accidentally heard Mother’s casual gossip with Aunt Lyouda, “I used the pill and the same day draft beer casks were brought to the stall, I rolled them in and – that’s it.” That way the proposed quantity changes in our generation of the Konotop Ogoltsoffs were canceled, yet Mother stayed looking fat forever…

Her stall, a round sheet-iron hut under a tin roof, was advantageously located in the main alley of the Central Park of Recreation opposite Peace Square. The heavy padlock from the back door was taken off and brought inside to start trading thru the front window whose square ledge served the counter jutting over the asphalted walk in the shade of mighty poplars.

Besides the draft beer running from the faucet which she connected by a removable hose to the dark wooden casks, in turn, the goods on sale included briquettes of packed cookies, loose candies of a couple of cheap sorts, cigarettes, lemonade and bottled wine – the Ukrainian fruit-and-berry “White Strong”, the dark-red Georgian “Rkatsiteli”, and some wine of uncertain origin named “Riesling” never asked for by anyone. “White Strong” was going out like hotcakes because of its price – one ruble and two kopecks for a half-liter bottle. Cigarettes also did not stick around for long, yet the main trade-pulling engine was draft beer. When there happened a delivery delay and they did not bring beer casks from the trade base of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, Mother began to sigh and complain beforehand that the trade plan for her stall in the current month seemed hardly doable and they again would cut her salary…

My life rollicked on along its tracks which somehow bypassed the Central Park of Recreation, although my sister and brother occasionally boasted of dropping to Mother’s workplace for free lemonade. However, there occurred one day which I spent at the stall from its beginning to end because of the secret service agent Alexander Belov, under the guise of Johann Weiss…

In those abysmally past times, to get subscribed to The Novel-Gazette was next to impossible. The monthly justified its name being turned out on inexpensive newsprint and in two columns per page, yet the thickness of an issue was on a par with The Pionee

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