The rasping shrieks somehow reminded me of Masha’s screeching, when they came to slaughter her at Grandma Katya’s in Konotop.
The woman never slowed down only time and again looked back to lash with a thin rod the girl’s outstretched hand. The kid would respond with a somewhat louder shriek but neither withdraw her hand nor stop crying, “Mom, gimme your hand!”
They crossed the yard and went into their staircase-entrance leaving me harrowed by the unanswerable question – where could such fascist mothers be in our country from?.
~ ~ ~
Between the left wing of the school building and the tall openwork fence of timber that separated the school grounds from the surrounding forest, there were a couple or 3 beds passing for the school agronomy lot.
It’s highly unlikely that the mixture of loam and withered Pine needles from several trees left within the school territory, could yield a crop of any sort. However, when our class was told come to school on Sunday for turning dirt in the agronomy lot, I dutifully showed up at the appointed hour.
The morning was overcast, so Mom even tried to talk me into staying home. Indeed, everything turned out just as she had predicted – not a single soul around. But maybe they would come yet?
I hung about the locked school for a while, then bypassed the dismal agronomy lot and went down to the one-story building of our class plus the workshop in the lower part of the school grounds.
Opposite the building, there was a squat brick warehouse with two iron gates locked as anything else in the empty school grounds whose silent stillness could even be felt as some tangible substance. However, no lock could impede climbing up to the roof of the warehouse from the steep hillock behind which made it not a big deal.
The slight slant of the lean-to roof was covered with black roofing felt. I walked around the roof square to each of its corners, then looked back at the mum school building. Still nobody. Okay, five minutes more and I’d breeze off.
At that moment the sun peeped out thru the clouds making the wait not so gloomy because I marked light, transparent, wisps of steam rising from the black roof here and there. “Aha, the sun heats it!” guessed I.
What’s more, while drying up, the black felt began to develop streaks of dark-gray color, which widened, expanded, joined together and kept me enthralled with watching that gradual expansion of the solar possessions. I knew perfectly well already that no one would show up and I might just as well go home, yet let that stretch of wet roofing felt would also turn dry-gray making the Isle of Dry expand to the corner edge of the roof.