At home, there appeared a filmstrip projector – a clumsy device with a set of lenses in its nose tube, as well as a box of small plastic barrels to keep tight dark scrolls of filmstrips. Among the filmstrips, there happened some old acquaintances – the one about the hero of the Civil War, Zhelezniak the Seaman, another about the little daughter of a revolutionary, who smartly dropped the typesetting sorts, brought by her father for printing underground leaflets, into a jug of milk when the police raided their house late at night. They never had brains enough to check under the milk…
Of course, it was I who loaded the filmstrips and then rotated the black scroll-wheel to move the projected frames. And I also read the inscriptions under the pictures, which did not last long though, because my sister-’n’-brother learned them by heart and retold before the whole frame would creakily creep down into the rectangular of light shed onto the wallpaper.
The challenge to my seniority from Natasha did not hurt so bitterly as Sasha’s disobedience. Just so recently as we two pranced, panting, into the kitchen to still our thirst with water from the tap, he readily conceded the white tin mug, adorned with the revolutionary battleship Aurora’s imprint on its side, to me as to the elder, bigger, brother. And emptying half of it, I generously handed the mug back for him to finish off the water, after all, that was the way for strength transmitting. How come that I became so strong? Because, without silly prissiness, I drank a couple of gulps from the bottle of water started by Sasha Nevelsky, the strongest boy in our class.
My younger brother listened with trust to my naive claptrap and dutifully grabbed the outstretched mug… Like me, he was over-credulous and once at midday meal, when Dad took out from his soup plate a cartilage without meat and announced: who’d gnaw it up was to get a prize—one kilo of gingerbread, Sasha volunteered and, after protracted munching, managed to swallow the cartilage but never got the promised sweetmeat, probably Dad forgot his promise…
A parcel arrived from the post-office, or rather Mom dropped in there to pick it on her way home after work, that box of faded plywood secured by a string glued to its sides with brown blobs of stamped sealing wax, with two addresses in block blue letters on its top: to our numbered mailbox from the city of Konotop.
The parcel was set on a stool in the kitchen and all of the family gathered around. The lid with the addresses, nailed firmly and aplenty, had to be removed by application of a big kitchen knife used as a lever, and revealed a sizable lump of lard, and a red hot-water bottle of hooch gurgling in between its rubber sides. The rest of the space within the box was filled to the brims with black sunflower seeds.