(…any rhetoric is lost on those whose Stubbornness-Mommy was born a moment before them!. )
Yet, I not only made speeches but also kept throwing the wood, so that later, at midday meal in the kitchen, Sasha would not make hints that he did more than me. And suddenly he tottered back from the pit, his blood-smeared fingers clutching his face. Natasha rushed home to call Mom, who came running with a damp cloth to wipe the blood off Sasha’s upturned face. Dad also raced from the basement and no one was listening to my defense that all that happened accidentally, not on purpose, when the piece of wood thrown by me scratched the skin on my brother’s nose. Mom yelled at Dad because he allowed all that to happen. Dad also grew angry and told everyone to go home, and he'd finish the work himself.
The scratch healed very soon, although Sasha stubbornly peeled the patch off his nose even before the midday meal.
(…I doubt if my brother would recollect the happening, it’s only me who remembers and feels guilty: yes, it was not deliberate, but instead of futile orations I should have been more watchful tossing them chunks…)
At school, I regularly enrolled in this or that Group, whenever its tutor entered our classroom to recruit volunteers. Group meetings were held in the late afternoon so that participants had time to go home, have their midday meal, and come back to school. After a one-hour session of learning and training at the Group, its members returned home thru the complete night darkness…
One evening after the Group activities were over, a bunch of participants dropped into the school gym where there was an upright piano on the stage behind the closed curtain, and where one boy once showed me that if you hit only the black keys then it sounded like Chinese music. But that evening I forgot all about the music because besides the piano on the stage, there were several boys from senior grades who had a pair of real boxing gloves!
We dared to ask permission to touch the gloves’ shiny leather and try them on. The senior graders kindly allowed us that, and then they had an idea of holding a match between the sprats, a fighter from the Gorka (that is someone from the blocks atop the hill) against someone of Lowlanders who dwelt in the rows of timber houses at the foot of the Gorka upland.
The choice fell on me—O! and I wanted it so dearly!—and so did red-haired fatty Vovka from among the Lowlanders. As the stage was illuminated too poorly for the match, all the present went over to the gym hallway under the bright bulb reflected in the ink-black winter darkness behind the wide window-pane, and they commanded “box!” to me and Vovka.