The soldiers entered in groups, speaking loudly, stomping their boots against the boards in the paint-coated floor and, gradually, they filled the seats with their uniformed mass and the whole of the hall with the thick indistinct hum of their talking to each other. Time dragged awfully slowly. There were no pictures on the whitewashed walls and I re-read, over and over again, the two inscriptions on the red-clothed frames that screened the speaker boxes on both sides of the stage.
A portrait of a cut-out bearded head with the thick turf of hair was mounted onto the left frame and followed by the lines: “In science, there is no wide highway, and only they who fear no fatigue but keep climbing its stony footpaths will reach its shiny peaks.” The concluding line underneath explained whose head and words they were: “K. Marx.”
And, next to the velvet folds in the curtain drawn to the right, a head without hair and with a small wedge-like beard made it clear (even before reaching the bottom-most line) that it was Lenin who curtly said, “The cinema is not only an agitator but also a remarkable organizer of the masses.”
As the soldiers filled the entire hall, the schoolboys moved from the front rows over onto the stage and watched the movies from the backside of the taut screen. Not much difference if Amphibian Man dived from the cliff left to right contrary to what saw the watchers in the hall. And the rebel Kotovsky would all the same escape from the courtroom thru the window… Although, some boys stayed in the hall perching on the armrests between the seats because the soldiers did not mind.
At times, in the darkness illuminated by the flicks of the running film, there sounded a yell from one of the 3 double doors, “Lance-corporal Solopov!.” Or else, “The second squad!.” But each yell from any of the doors ended the same way, “To the exit!”
If the movie suddenly broke off and the hall sank in complete darkness, there arose a deafening wall of whistles and rambling boot-stomp at the floor and yells “shoemaker!!.” from all the sides…
After the movies at the Regiment Club, we walked home thru the night forest retelling each other the episodes of what we had just watched together, “Now! I say! The way he punched him!” “Hey! Hey! I say! The guy never knew what hit him!”
Of course, the Regiment Club was not the only place for movie-going. There always remained the House of Officers but there you had to buy a ticket and, therefore, come with your parents, yet they never had time for movies. True, on Sundays, there was demonstrated a free film for schoolchildren: black-and-white fairy tales or a color film about the young partisan pioneer Volodya Dubinin…