Of course, in more developed states my parental rights would be grossly jeopardized after the child abuse of so violent a nature, still and all, I consider myself right at that particular development because no biological species can ever survive in their own waste… I would savvy, were the kid just spitting on the wall, however, in the house that I built the toilet walls were simply plastered and whitewashed, no spittle would crawl down such a surface. Later, the money for ceramic wall tiles got scraped up too, yet by that time the children were already adults…)
You feel yourself kinda Almighty when reconstructing the world of a half-century ago, adjusting the details to your liking with no one to rub your nose in it even if you muck up.
However, you can fool anyone but yourself, and I am ready to admit that now, from the distance in fifty years, not everything is falling in just nicely. For instance, I am far from certain that the pigeon enclosure in the attic had anything to do with Captain Savkin. The mentioned structure could as easily belong to Stepan Zimin, the father of Lyda and Yura… Or maybe there were two enclosures?
Frankly, at the moment I am not sure about the presence of pigeons in one or the other enclosure (but were there two of them?) on the day when I ventured to climb up the iron ladder towards something unknown, indistinguishable in the murky square hole of the hatchway above my head. And it is pretty possible that I simply remembered the remark overheard in my parents’ chat, that Stepan’s pigeons also fell victim to his unrestrained booze binges.
On the whole, just one thing stands beyond the shadow of a doubt – the tremulous ecstasy on the doorsill to revelation when, leaving behind my sister’s dismal divination of the pending manslaughter of me by the fatherly hand and, next to her, the silent stare of my brother watching closely each my movement from the landing down there, which diminished at each ladder rung as I climbed into the brave new world that any moment now would unfurl before me beneath the grayish underbelly of the slate roof… A few days later Natasha came running into our room to proudly herald that Sasha had just climbed up to the attic too.
Taking into account all of that, it is quite probable that the pigeons were gone from the attic enclosure, but in the Courtyard, there were hosts of them…
The Courtyard’s layout presented a systematized masterpiece of pure unalloyed geometricity. Inside the big rectangular formed by the 6 two-storied buildings, the ellipse of the road was inscribed and accentuated by the knee-deep drenches along its both sides, bridged by albeit short, yet mighty overpasses minutely opposite each of the 14 entrances to the 6 houses in our Block.