One especially long wait happened at the station of Dno whose name I read in the glazed sign on the green timber-wall of its shed. And only after a solitary steam engine puff-puffed past the shed, slowly piercing with its long black body the white curls of its own steam, our train started on.
(…I recollected that station and the black glitter of the engine penetrating the milky mist of the steam when I read that at the station of Dno, Colonel of the Russian Army Nikolay Romanov signed his renunciation of the royal throne… However, by that act, he didn’t save himself nor his wife, nor the children of their royal family all lined up with their backs to the basement wall and shot at and then those not killed by the volley were finished off with the rifle bayonets.
I knew nothing of all that when sitting there in the local train by the shabby shed. Neither was I aware that it does not matter if I knew it or not. Either way, all that is part of me. It’s me at both ends of those Mosin rifles ridiculously long even when with no bayonets…
Still, it’s good that we don’t know all in childhood…)
Most of the houses along Nezhyn Street in the city of Konotop kept slightly off the road, standing behind their respective fences which reflected the owner’s level of prosperity, as well as the mainstream trends, brands, and stages in the evolution of the local fencing technologies. However, the left-side continuity of sundry fencing stretches in the street was briefly interrupted by the wall of Number 19 whitewashed ages ago, having 2 windows in bleached peeling-off paint-coat equipped by 4 hinged deal shutters to seal the windows off for the night.
To enter the house, one should have passed thru the wicket of tall weather-worn boards, side by side with the wider, yet constantly closed gate which separated the yard from the street. The comer should also know which of the 4 entrances they needed. The doors were identically distributed between two windowless verandas abutting the house in between the 4 windows looking in the yard.
The veranda next to the wicket, with both of its doors, as well as the half of the whole house, belonged then to Ignat Pilluta and his wife Pillutikha, therefore the pair of windows overlooking Nezhyn Street were theirs. The timber walls of the second veranda wore a coat of rambling Vine with wide green leaves and pale clusters of dinky, never ripening, berries; the blind partition, also of boards, divided the second veranda’s inside into 2 lengthwise sections, 1 for each of the 2 remaining owners.