At home, Mom yelled at me for going around so dirty, and no washing machine would do to keep my shirts clean. I felt unjustly hurt but suffered silently…
On summer evenings, the children of Block and mothers of those kids, who as of yet were to be looked after, went out of the Courtyard onto the surrounding road of concrete. Everyone was waiting for the platoon from the Recruit Depot Barracks to come up to the road for their usual drilling promenade.
Reaching the concrete surface of the road, the soldiers started to march in parade step. As if in a magic transformation, they seemed to merge into a tight-knit united critter—a closed squad—that had one mutual leg comprising the entire length of the marching flank, the leg fused of dozens of black boots that simultaneously broke away from the road and fell down one step farther, advancing the whole formation for that one step. It looked so fascinating a creature!
Then the sergeant-major tagging with by the squad’s side abruptly shouted, “Sing off!” And from the midst of the compact mass, throbbing in time to the mutual “plonk!” of the boot soles against the concrete, a young vibrating tenor rose solo to be followed a few steps farther by the thunder of the supporting chorus:
“…we are the paratroopers,
the wide sky is all for us…
The squad went on and on to the corner of the next block with its inhabitants waiting for it to march by them too, and some children from ours followed it as a running tail, while the young mothers looked in the wake of the soldiers marching to the sun half-sunk in the woods, pervading with its parting rays the evening wrapped into the calm, all-embracing serenity because we were the strongest, and so safely protected by our paratroopers against all the NATO spies in the anteroom to the Detachment’s Library…
~ ~ ~
They brought long iron pipes into the Courtyard. When you hit such a pipe with a stick, it rang loudly and longly… Much longer, actually, than needed and for all my effort I could never play the drum roll with which the Whites marched to their “psychic” attack against Anka and her machine gun in the movie “Chapaev”. Day after day, coming from school, I tried, again and again, filling the whole Courtyard with ding and dong, yet in vain, it sounded nothing like that roll.
The pipes were buried all too soon and my musical self-education interrupted, but the blocks on the Gorka got furnished with gas. They installed the gas stove in the kitchen and hung the white box in the wall above the sink to light the gas on when heating water to wash up or take a bath. Titan the Boiler disappeared from the bathroom, and firewood was needed no more, our basement section with Dad’s workshop became roomier…