At times there happened exclusively family games at home, with no neighbors taking part…

Merry laughter of several voices was heard from the parents' room, I put the book aside got up from the big sofa and trotted over there.

"What’s the fuss?" asked I envious of the mutual mirth.

"Checking the pots!"

"How’s that?"

"Come on and have a check!"

I was told to sit on Dad's back and grab him by the neck while he was firmly holding my legs. So far, so good, I liked it. But then he turned my back towards Mom and I felt her finger rooting my ass as deep as the pants let go.

"This pot is leaky!" announced Mom.

Everyone laughed and me too, although I felt somehow ashamed…

Another time Dad asks me, "Wanna see Moscow?"

"Wow! Sure!"

Coming from behind, he puts his hands over my ears, tight, and lifts me up above the floor by my head squeezed in between his hands.

"How now? D'you, see Moscow?"

"Yes! Yes!" scream I.

He puts me back where taken and I do my best not to hide the tears from the smarting pain in my ears flattened against the skull.

"Aha! Got fooled! It's so easy to fool you!"

(…much later I figured out that he just was repeating the practical jokes played on him in his childhood…)

In the course of the Hide-and-seek with Sasha’s disappearance, when checking the cloth wardrobe in the hallway, I noticed a bottle of lemonade stuck all by itself in the narrow cleft between the wall and the wicker chest. Lemonade then was something I adored in earnest, that carbonated nectar had only one annoying feature— it disappeared so too fast from my glass. As for the discovered bottle, it obviously was stored for some holiday and then just forgotten about.

I did not care to remind of it to anyone and the following day, or maybe the day after the following day, taking the opportunity of being home alone, I pulled the lemonade from behind the chest and hurried to the kitchen. Still in the corridor, my impatient fingers felt some slackness in the bottle cap, I tore it off and clapped the bottle up to my eager lips… Half-way through the second gulp, I realized that the lemonade was not somehow not quite it, but quite not it at all. Reversing the bottle to the normal position, I saw that after the holiday it was filled with sunflower oil for storage.

It’s good that no one witnessed my attempt at drinking sunflower oil, except for the small white box with a red cross on its door, the hoard of first-aid kits, unknown pills and dark glass phials, fixed up in the wall between the cloth wardrobe and the door to the storeroom, and also the black electric meter just above the entrance door. But they were not to tell anyone…

My next gastronomical misconduct was filching of a bun freshly baked, which Mom took out from the electric oven “Kharkov” together with a bunch of others and spread them on a towel over the kitchen table.

The round brownish backs gleamed so tempting that I violated Mom’s order to let them cool off little bit before the all-out tea party. Sneaking into the empty kitchen, I yanked one of them off, hid behind my back, and smuggled it into the lair on the wicker chest in the ill-illuminated cloth cave.

Probably, that bun was really too hot or else the sense of guilt culled taste sensations but, hastily chomping the forbidden fruit of culinary art, I didn’t feel the customary pleasure and wanted only the unpalatable bun to be over, the sooner the better. When from the kitchen Mom called all to come over and enjoy the tea with buns, I did not feel like that at all…

Yet in general, though a skill-less slow-goer, I was a fairly law-abiding child ever diligent-in-earnest, and if something went wrong it was not on purpose but because it simply turned out that way.

Dad grumbled that my Sloth-Mommy got born a moment before me and all I was good at was basking on the big sofa all day long gripping a book, like, a true copy of Oblomov!. But Mom protested that reading was beneficial and because of it I might become a doctor and look so very elegant in the white smock.

I did not want to become a doctor, I never liked the smell in doctors’ offices…

~ ~ ~

At school, Seraphima Sergeevna showed us a plywood frame 10 cm x 10 cm, like, a prototype of a loom with two rows of small nails on two opposite sides. A thick wool thread, stretched between the nails on different sides, served the warp. Motley other threads interwoven across the warp formed rainbow streaks in a miniature rug. Our home assignment was to make a similar frame and bring it for the next lesson, the parents would certainly help us in manufacturing the tool, the teacher said.