One day when I was playing the pistol in the sand pile by the garbage enclosure, a boy from the corner building asked me to present the handgun to him and I readily gave it away. Being a son of an officer, he, of course, needed and had more rights to it than me… But Mom refused to believe that anyone would give his gun away to another boy just so casually. She demanded of me to confess the genuine truth about losing Mom’s present, yet I stuck to my truth so stubbornly, that she even had to lead me to the apartment of that boy in the corner building. The officer started to chastise his son, yet Mom said she was so sorry and asked to excuse her because she only wanted to make sure I did not lie.
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That summer the boys from our Block began to play with yellowish cartridges of real firearms which they were hunting at the shooting range in the forest. I wanted so badly to see what shooting range might look like, yet bigger boys explained that you could visit it only on special days when there was no shooting because on any other day they’d shoo you off.
It took a long wait for a special day, but after all, it came and we went thru the forest… The shooting range was a vast opening about a huge rectangular excavation with a steep cave-in in one of the corners to get down there. The opposite wall of the pit was screened by a tall log barrier, all bullet-poked, keeping a couple shredded left-overs of gravely riddled paper sheets with the head-and-shoulders outline.
We looked for the cartridges in the sand underfoot. They were of two types – longish, neck-narrowed, cartridges from the AK assault-rifle, and small even cylinders from the TT pistol. The finds were loudly welcomed and busily exchanged between the boys. I had no luck at all and only envied the luckier seekers whose shrieks sounded flat and suppressed by the eerie silence of the shooting range displeased with our trespassing the forbidden grounds…
Beside the excavated hollow, the glade was cut across by a front-line trench whose sandy walls were kept in place by board shields. A narrow track of iron rails ran from one end of the opening to the other passing, on the way, the trench over. It was the railway for a large mock-up tank of plywood mounted upon its trolley which rumbled along the track when pulled by the cable of a hand-pedaled winch.
The boys started to play with all those things. I also sat in the trench once, while the plywood tank clanged overhead, and then I went to the call from the edge of the field where they needed my help.