I was pulled out, helped to squeeze the water out of my clothes, and directed to a wide trail bypassing the whole stadium so as not to run into the School Pioneer Leader and peachy girls collecting fallen leaves for their autumn herbaria…
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In a bird’s-eye view, the school building, supposedly, looked like a wide angular “U” with the entrance in the center of the underbelly. The tiled with brown ceramic lobby split into 2 corridors of parquet flooring of slippery glint which led to the opposite wings in the building, to those horns of the “U” from the bird’s viewpoint.
Along one wall in each of the corridors, there ran a row of wide windows looking into the wild-never-trodden space in between the horns, filled by a jumbled thicket of young Pines with thin sloughing off bark. The wall opposite the windows had only doors set far apart from each other, marked by numbers and letters of the grades studying behind them.
The same layout continued after the turn into the left wing, yet in the right one, there was the school gymnasium taking up the whole width and height of the two-story building. The huge hall was equipped with a vault followed by the thick cable of spirally twined strands hanging from the hook in the ceiling and the parallel bars next to the pile of black mats by the distant blind wall. And near the entrance, there was a small stage hiding behind its dark-blue curtain an upright piano and a stock of triple seats stacked up there until needed for the gym transformation into the assembly hall.
The upper floor was climbed up the stair-flights starting at the turn of the left corridor into the horn-wing, and the layout up there replicated that of the first floor, except for the lobby, of course, with its nickel-plated stand-hangers for school kids’ hats and coats behind low barriers, each with its own wicket, on both sides from the entrance door. That’s why the second-floor corridors ran straight and smooth between the wide windows in one wall and the doors of classrooms in the other.
Attending school in felt boots, you could take a spurt of run and skid along the slick parquet flooring, if only there were not black rubber galoshes on your boots neither a teacher in the corridor. My felt boots, at first, savagely chafed my legs behind the knees, then Dad slashed them a little with his shoemaker’s knife. He knew how to do anything.
In winter you came to school still in the dark. Sometimes I wandered around empty classrooms. In the seventh grade’s room, I peeked inside the small white bust of Comrade Kirov on the windowsill. It looked much like the insides of the porcelain puppy statuette in the parents’ room, only dustier.