They did not have classes at school. There were platoons and companies. When it came time to join the Komsomol, Rebecca was accepted in the first stream and was immediately elected a Komsomol and a platoon commander. So they studied: first, regular classes, and then military classes, where the “Gazes!” Team sounded, where the soldiers made of them – assembling and disassembling a Kalashnikov assault rifle, shooting from a standing position, from a lying position – climbing a rope, through a fence, through the fire, climbing stairs: legs, arms on speed – throwing a grenade.
– soldier Zaplatinskaya, how do you throw a grenade?! You will undermine yourself on it, not the enemy!
“Comrade Lieutenant, I’ll wait for the enemy to come closer, and kill all at once!”
– Soldier Zaplatinskaya!
– Yes, Sir!
– To the blackboard!
– Yes, Sir!
– Tell us the device of the Modernized Combat Vehicle.
So her childhood and youth passed.
Generation of Mammoths
Our generation is a generation of mammoths. We will die out soon. And there will not be those who grew up and raised in the Soviet Union, a country that is no longer on the map. Lev Nikolayevich Kassil has such a novel, “three countries that are not on the map,” you know? No, the modern generation no longer knows. They did not read Cassil; they do not even know whether he was a writer or a poet. They would not give Gogol’s first name or patronymic, they would not remember a single Ukrainian poet, and if they remember, by chance, Taras Shevchenko, they will undoubtedly google in search of his middle name. His middle name was Grigoryevich. Eh, what will you do if Google is turned off? It is not as if they read little; they do not read at all, in our understanding.
But we read. Oh, how we read! We were the most readable nation in the world! We knew all the classical literature of Russia, England, France, Germany and America, better than all these nations combined. A person who did not read Dickens was not considered an intellectual among us.
We did not have Internet; there were no mobile phones, TV only showed congresses of the CPSU, harvesting, and smelting steel. Therefore, to know the world, we read. We read passionately, recklessly, binge, forgetting about food and sleep, and even forgive me such a gastronomic detail, enduring to the last to tear away from the book and go out of need. I am afraid that the current generation will not even understand what I mean.
Kindergarten, we are five years old, we still do not know how to read, so the teacher arranges the chairs in a circle, in the centre herself, reads to us Agnia Barto, about the bear, who was dropped to the floor, and her paw was torn off. Now he has cotton sticking out of a hole, and he is unattractive. The teacher read about the horse, who combed the hair smoothly, about Tanya the muddler, who dropped the ball into the river. Oh, probably the ball was beautiful, yellow, with blue stripes. Slumber you, Tanya! I would not lose such a ball. Now here you are, standing still and roaring like a fool, instead of running, grabbing a stick and get a ball from the river! And the teacher continues to read about the unfortunate bunny, his painful fate and the evil owner; about a fat bull, who only knows that he is puffing and sighing, he broke all the boards and now he is going to fall somewhere.
But most of all I liked Gianni Rodari’s poems “What the handicrafts smell like” – the whole book is one odorous sweet roll, then the brain was already disconnected and thought only about the roll. Maybe, with raisins. Or with poppy seeds. Or with jam.
Still terribly liked Berestov’s poems, isn’t it magical:
“How we study the life of sharks?
Their nature, customs and habits?
And here is how – we cry out “guards!”
And run away as little rabbits.”
You run, yell, the shark is on its tail is jumping after you – an intrigue, not a verse.
Or here:
“if you take all these puddles
and combine it into one,
it turns out that the puddles
Almost like the ocean.”
Imagine what a turn of events, however! Everyone wants to go to the Black sea, they wait a whole year, they save up money, and it is not always possible, but you do not need to go anywhere, you need to collect all the puddles after the rain and, voila, the black sea under the windows!
Then, we learned to read ourselves. And there was a mysterious poet ASPUSHKIN and the moon. Now I do not remember what was before – ASPUSHKIN or the moon. But then it was just some kind of magic spell:
“Through the wavy mists
the moon is sneaking.
To the sad glades
sadly, it pours light.”
And I read this spell to the moon, in winter, standing on the summer terrace, on the cold floor, barefoot, sticking my nose to the window and standing on tiptoe to be closer to the moon. I read it every night, before going to bed, so that the moon was not so lonely there, in a black sky. And I learned all the available verses of ASPUSHKIN and howled at the TV, in romances, I was grateful to him for the fact that he also loved the moon and did not leave it alone. True, ASPUSHKIN then turned out to be A.S. Pushkin, but that was no longer important.
He also liked to drink tea in the winter with his old nanny, when “the storm covers the sky with darkness, twirling snow whirls”. Even all the time, he asked: “where is the mug? The heart will be more cheerful.” Our winters, too, always “howled and cried from the storm”. And I also liked to drink tea from a large mug at such moments. From this, indeed, the heart became more cheerful, especially if tea is with raspberry or currant jams.
I loved to read fairy tales to my little sister. She was only three years old, and she could not read yet, but she liked the large varnished books, with colourful pictures. Very remarkable people wrote tales. One of them, for sure, had a big hat with a huge ball-point pen, with which he wrote his fairy tales. His name was Charles Pierrot. Or something like that. The other two were jolly brothers, laughing all the time, making faces, they were Brothers Grimm.
Then it became more serious. After reading my entire library, my curious nose was stuffed into my mother’s closet. And what am I discovering there? Shocking names! “Woe from the Wit,” “Going through the agony,” “How the steel was tempered.” My curiosity knew no bounds: how there can be woe from the mind? How can metal be tempered? People run barefoot and dousing themselves with water. Why should iron be attributed to human qualities? And who went through the agony and why?
No matter how I tried, I still could not understand who went trough agony and torture. I just liked that there were two beautiful women in the book, with completely