Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
On the winter vacations, I learned that the boys from both blocks on the Gorka often visited the Regiment Club for watching movies there. (The Regiment was where the soldiers carried on their army service after graduating from the Recruit Depot Barracks.) Going there for the first time was a bit scary because of the vague rumors among children about some soldier strangling some girl in the forest. No one could explain how and why, but that bad soldier must have been a “blackstrapper” while in the Regiment all the soldiers wore red shoulder straps.
The way to the Regiment was not short, two times as long as to school which you bypassed on the right and the trail became wider and straighter, bound by the walls of tall Fir-trees until you went out onto the tarmac road which ended by the gate guarded by sentries, however, they did not stop boys and you could go on to the building with the signboard Regiment Club.
Inside, you got into a wide long corridor with 3 double doors in its blind wall. The other wall had windows in it and between them, as well as between the double doors, there hung a row of same-sized pictures portraying different soldiers and officers with brief descriptions of their selfless deeds and heroic deaths defending our Soviet Homeland.
The wide double doors opened to a huge hall without windows and full of plywood seats arranged in rows facing the wide stage with crimson velvet curtains. Those were partly drawn to both sides so as to open the wide white screen for movies. From the stage to the back wall—which had a pair of square black holes high up, near the ceiling, for movie projection—stretched the long passage splitting the hall into two equal halves…
The soldiers entered in groups, speaking loudly, stomping their boots against the boards in the paint-coated floor and, gradually, they filled the seats with their uniformed mass and the whole of the hall with the thick indistinct hum of their talking to each other. Time dragged awfully slowly. There were no pictures on the whitewashed walls and I re-read, over and over again, the two inscriptions on the red-clothed frames that screened the speaker boxes on both sides of the stage.
A portrait of a cut-out bearded head with the thick turf of hair was mounted onto the left frame and followed by the lines: “In science, there is no wide highway, and only they who fear no fatigue but keep climbing its stony footpaths will reach its shiny peaks.” The concluding line underneath explained whose head and words they were: “K. Marx.”
And, next to the velvet folds in the curtain drawn to the right, a head without hair and with a small wedge-like beard made it clear (even before reaching the bottom-most line) that it was Lenin who curtly said, “The cinema is not only an agitator but also a remarkable organizer of the masses.”
As the soldiers filled the entire hall, the schoolboys moved from the front rows over onto the stage and watched the movies from the backside of the taut screen. Not much difference if Amphibian Man dived from the cliff left to right contrary to what saw the watchers in the hall. And the rebel Kotovsky would all the same escape from the courtroom thru the window… Although, some boys stayed in the hall perching on the armrests between the seats because the soldiers did not mind.
At times, in the darkness illuminated by the flicks of the running film, there sounded a yell from one of the 3 double doors, “Lance-corporal Solopov!.” Or else, “The second squad!.” But each yell from any of the doors ended the same way, “To the exit!”
If the movie suddenly broke off and the hall sank in complete darkness, there arose a deafening wall of whistles and rambling boot-stomp at the floor and yells “shoemaker!!.” from all the sides…
After the movies at the Regiment Club, we walked home thru the night forest retelling each other the episodes of what we had just watched together, “Now! I say! The way he punched him!” “Hey! Hey! I say! The guy never knew what hit him!”
Of course, the Regiment Club was not the only place for movie-going. There always remained the House of Officers but there you had to buy a ticket and, therefore, come with your parents, yet they never had time for movies. True, on Sundays, there was demonstrated a free film for schoolchildren: black-and-white fairy tales or a color film about the young partisan pioneer Volodya Dubinin…
~ ~ ~
One Sunday morning, I told Mom that I was going out to play.
“Think before you speak up! Who plays outside in such weather? Look!”
The scudding shoots of rime snow scratch-and-scraped the murky dusk outside the panes in the kitchen window.
“See this mayhem?”
But I croaked and grumbled and never got off her back until Mom grew angry and told me to go wherever I wished.
I went out into the boundless Courtyard. No one at all, the desolate space around looked so too gloomy to stay in. Turning my face away from the snappy slaps from the wild snow torrents, I bypassed the house corner and crossed the road to the field next to the nailed up garbage enclosure. There also was nobody except for me, but I couldn’t see myself. All I could see was the outright turmoil full of violent blizzard lashing the dull gray world by the serpent-like belt of prickly snow. I felt lonely and wished I were back home. But Mom would say, “So I told you!”, and the younger would start giggling.
Then from the far edge of the field where long-long ago they played volleyball and gorodki in summer, there came a voice of the aluminum loudspeaker on top of a wooden post not seen thru so hurly-burly weather, “Dear children! Today we’ll learn the song about Merry Drummer. Listen to it first.” And a well-trained quire of children's voices began to sing of a clear morning at the gate, and the maple drumsticks in the hands of Merry Drummer.
The song was over and the announcer commenced to dictate the lyrics so that the listeners by their radios would write it down word for word, “Get up ear-ly, get up ear-ly, get up ear-ly, with the first light of the mor-ning by the gate…”
And I already was not alone in the grim world getting belted. I waded thru the snowdrifts but the snow could not get to me because of my thick pants pulled tightly over my felt boots. The announcer finished dictating the first verse, and let me listen to it sung by the quire. Then he dictated the second, also with the subsequent singing thru it, and the third.
“Now, listen to the whole song, please.”
And there gathered quite a lot of us—both Merry Drummer, and the children with their merry voices, and even the blizzard turned into one of us and wandered by my side across the field, hither and thither. Only that I kept falling thru the crust into the sifted powder snow under it, and the blizzard danced above, scattering its prickly pellets.
When I got home Mom asked, “Well, seen anyone there?”
I said “no” but no one laughed.
~ ~ ~
The solitary walk in the big company, under the dictation about Merry Drummer, laid me up in bed with the temperature. It was strangely quiet all around with everyone gone to work and to school.
Because the books from the Detachment’s Library finished and there was no one to go and exchange them for me, I had to pick one from our home library that filled a shelf in the closet of the cupboard in the parents’ room. After a certain hesitation, I chose the one that for a long time had been attracting me by its title, but whose thickness shooed off, the four-volume War and Peace by Tolstoy.
The opening chapter confirmed my fears by its text in French running page after page, however, it eased off when I noticed that it was translated in the footnotes… Because of that novel, I did not notice my illness but hastily swallowed the medicines and hurried back to Pierre, Andrey, Petya, Natasha… at times forgetting to take thermometer from out of my armpit….
I read all the volumes and the epilogue, yet the concluding part—the discourse on predestination, I couldn’t overcome. Its endless sentences turned into a bluff of glass where, climbing up for a tad bit, I invariably slipped back to its foot. The insurmountable glass-wall stretched in both directions, and there was no way to figure out where I got to that point from. The last volume was closed without reading it up to the very end.
(…a couple of years ago I re-read the novel, from cover to cover, and said that if a person was capable of writing like Tolstoy in that concluding part of War and Peace then why bothering themselves with all that prelude fiction, including the epilogue?
Probably, I kinda showed off, in part, but only just in part…)
And while I was lying on my folding bed amid the battlefield of Austerlitz, life was not standing still. My sister-’n’-brother kept bringing news that the garbage enclosure had been pulled down and replaced by a shed. And the field between the shed and the Bugorok-Knoll turned into a skating rink! As big as all that field leveled by the solitary bulldozer back in autumn. Yes, there arrived a fire-engine, they dropped the hoses on the ground and leaked tons of water. It’s a real skating-rink now! And they were lending out skates at the shed! You could come and borrow skates or, optionally, bring your own and go skating!
I did not want to lag behind life, and promptly recovered. Still, I was late. They were no longer lending skates at the shed, and you had to bring some with you. The benches in the shed were still in place, so you could sit down and put on the skates you brought, leaving your felt boots under the bench or in a locker if there remained any vacant one, and go skating.
As it turned out, there were 2 sheds, cheek by jowl, and 2 doors upon a high wooden porch. The door on the right led to the locker-room, and the other one to the warm-up room equipped with the electric skate grinder and a stove made of a wide iron barrel. The hot fire crackled in the stove to warm your frozen hands or dry up your mittens. You had to look out though to take your mittens off the stove in time or they'd stink with singed wool they're knitted of. Yehk!
No words could ever describe my desire to become a skater. How deliciously crunched the ice under the skates! And you didn’t run, but flew like a winged swift shooting ahead of the crispy crunch of your steely blades!.
I started learning with double-bladed skates, which had strings to tie them to boots, and I was laughed at for using such kindergarten playthings. “Snegoorki” came in their place, the round-nosed skates of one blade each, but also with the strings for tying. And nothing came out with them either, no flight, no joy, just some odd iron pieces on my felt boots. Finally, Mom brought from someplace real “half-Canadians” riveted to the shoes of their own.
With those real skates hung over my shoulder, I hurried to the locker room at the skating rink. I put them on and went out on ice. All I could get there was an awkward hobbling back and forth. The skates did not want to stand evenly, they kept falling in or out, giving painful twists to my feet. I had to return back to the locker-room walking the snowdrifts around the skating rink, where dense snow kept the skate blades upright which prevented them from breaking my tortured ankles out.
The final attempt occurred in the evening after Dad came home from work and had his supper. At my request, he tightly laced the “half-Canadians” making them one with my legs. I went out the door and clattered down the flights leaning onto the handrail. From where the railing ended I walked to the entrance door with my hand to the wall. The outer wall of the house supported me on my way around the building. Farther on, there were auxiliary snowdrifts, but the road I had to cross fluttering my hands like a tightrope walker.
At last, I got to the skating rink to see that the uptight lacing brought no improvement, the skates again were breaking my feet in and out even though cinched by Dad… I stood there for some time, in pain and envy to the crowd of wing-footed ones happily rushing around me, before to start the endless hurtful way back.
(…and never more in my life tried I to skate.
“ He cannot fly who’s born to crawl.”…)
~ ~ ~
On a clear day-off our landing neighbor, Stepan Zimin, suggested I join a ski walk he and his son Yura were taking in the forest, for which occasion Dad went down to our basement section and brought the skies. The leather loop in the middle of each ski allowed slipping your felt boot's nose into it. 2 pieces of white rubber band, like that in underpants, each tied to another leather loop, served elastic nooses about the felt boot heels not to let the skis slide off.
Both Yura and I had a pair of ski poles each but Stepan went out with just skies on his feet but—whew! —he moved so nimbly without any poles! He glided down the Gorka and we followed, falling and getting up to glide farther on.
Then we turned into the forest to the left from the Recruit Depot Barracks and walked thru the almost impenetrable thicket of the half-dried Pine trees. We came across a couple of square holes in the deep snow there. Stepan explained they were dugouts during the war for the soldiers to live in. It was hard to believe because the war ended before my birth, which meant ages and ages ago, and in the course of so long a period all the trenches, and dugouts, and bomb-holes should have completely got leveled up and effaced from the earth….
Never again Stepan went out for a ski walk, but I liked skiing and started to glide down the hillocks and knolls nearest to the road surrounding the two blocks. And, of course, I volunteered to participate in the ski competition held at school, for which occasion, on the eve of the cross-country race, I asked Dad to change the worn-out rubber bands on the leather loops in my skies. He casually dismissed the problem saying they’re sturdy enough to hold on, and there’s nothing to bother about.
The start was given from the glade where in autumn they pulled down the barrack on the Sunday of Collective Free Work. From the start point the ski track went into the forest and after zigzagging there for a couple of kilometers returned back, start and finish at the same point: 2 in 1.
Our group of fourth-and-fifth-graders was flagged off all at once, with a senior schoolboy running ahead of us so that we wouldn’t go astray among other ski tracks there. I was getting overtaken, and I was overtaking others yelling at them eagerly, “The track! The track!”, so that they would give way along the two narrow unbroken ski prints in the snow. And when they shouted “The track!” behind my back, I reluctantly stepped aside into the untrodden sticky snow, because that’s the rule.
We ran, and we glided, and we ran again. Down one especially steep slope, we piled in over each other. I got from the pile one of the first and frantically rushed ahead, but some two hundred meters before the finish that meanie rubber band burst up and the ski slid off from my felt boot. Keeping back scorching tears, I reached the finish in only left ski, driving the right one with kicks along its part in the ski track. The refs liked it, they laughed, but I, on coming home, burst into tears, “I knew it! I warned! I asked!”
Mom went on at Dad, who wanted to talk back but couldn’t find what to say. The next day he brought from his work and fixed to the ski leather loops some elastic band of ivory color, as thick as a pinky finger.
(…that fixture never failed, and even twenty-two years later the band served as it should.
Skies, on the whole, are doggedly long-liver creatures…)
With so reliable fasteners, on Sundays I was taking to the woods all day long. The endless well-trodden ski track stretched from beyond anything to out of everything. At times, the ski track branched off and two tracks ran along, side by side.
I liked the snappy claps of skies against the ski track behind my back. On the way, I sometimes met single soldier-skiers enjoying their Sundays with their greatcoats left at the Regiment, flapping the loosened uniform shirts not girded by the army belt.
The unbending ski track led to my favorite gliding grounds—a deep combe where the speed gained by the onrush down one slope took you up about one-third of the opposite one. I was delighted and proud that I could plunge like those solitary soldiers, although at times I had mind-blowing falls, especially at the jump ramp they built of snow for their jumps…
One day I noticed a secluded ski track forking from the mainline which—as I gradually figured it out—was running along the former controlling clearing of the Mailbox-Zona-Object-Detachment before its expansion.
The fugitive ski track led me to an astounding ski-plunge slope in the depth of the thicket. Though the slope was grown with perennial Fir-giants dictating an abrupt turn at its foot, yet, if you did not fall at that point, the plunge took you amazingly far with the speed squeezing tears from your eyes and making repeat the drive over and over again…
Following Sunday I almost did not fall at that tricky turn and rode the slope till very late, when the deep violet shadows began to trickle down from the dense branches of Fir-trees laden with the thick snow layer.
Then all of a sudden, there came a strange feeling that I was not alone, that someone else was watching me from behind the backs of the mighty Firs. At first, it was scary but giving heed to the benevolent silence of the trees around, I realized that it was him, the forest, friendly spying on me because we were one—me and the forest… The twilight deepened and I remembered that Block was more than two kilometers away.
(…of course, I got home in the dark and bore the brunt of Mom’s displeasure, yet until now when recollecting that winter purplish twilight and the good-willed quietude of the forest, I know that I lived not just so…
The same feel of dissolving and turning into a part of everything else around when you cannot say where your “I” ends and turns this or that “not-me”, I've lived thru once again and much later, in Karabakh already. Only that time it was I who watched, and it happened in summer instead of winter.
Even though telling this story disrupts the linear flow of narrative, in full violation of the classical time-place-action-unity canon yet, after all, it is my letter and it’s my life, and why not to take turns to my liking?
So…)
~ ~ ~
In Stepanakert, I am not to be seen a day or two before my birthday and about as long after it because for that period I enjoy the freedom of hiking.
(…dig it? Summertime is the most advantageous season to be born into not only because fish are jumping and your daddy is rich…)
My local relatives have already given up to be surprised or get angry. They concluded that it’s an old, odd but firmly established, Ukrainian tradition—to go away for your birthday and just walk following a random look of your eyes. And so it was in August (I don’t remember the exact year) end nineties’. Yes, no later, because of this here tent was bought in the last year of the last millennium.
That August I went north thru the woods over toombs where there were no villages but the views of enthralling beauty. Exactly as in the age-old warning by Mom, “You’ll be there alone.”
After a day-long climbing up to ascend a toomb-ridge where the woods got replaced by the alpine meadows, I came across some soot-black pieces of slate and a bunch of charred poles. Apparently, before the war shepherds were coming there with their flocks, and they brought the construction materials to build a hovel. And who burned it? Well, you never know… why always to find fault with humans? could be a random lightning after all… Anyway, nothing of my business.
So, I passed and went on, higher, and in a saddle bridging two toombs I discovered an ancient toomb. How did I guess at its antiquity? An easy question… It was excavated, unearthed by scavengers greedy for a buried treasure who left a hole in the ground and 4 to 5 roughly-hewn stone slabs, half-ton each. People weren’t buried that way under socialism, nor in the capitalist epoch. The nearby ridges were not rocky so the slabs had to be transported from afar. But what for?
Well, one look around would remove the question— What a sweep of incredible beauty! The sky without any limit, the placid wavy chines of toomb-chains all around, the distant ones covered with dark woods, and those nearby with Alpine meadows… Now, bringing the slabs from as far as I could not suppose where would call for a plum sum of money, or real power, or both. Which made more than enough of clues for the unbeatable guess: it was one of the Karabakh melique-princes who one day rode out hunting, reached that place and fell in love with it, and didn’t want to get parted from it even after his demise. The only nagging flaw in his calculations— the greed of ashes desecraters was not taken into account.
See? No historical enigma can escape its ultimate solution when we apply to it our tall tales in the absence of any opponent…
I passed over to the next toomb and, on its summit, got under the rain. Not a big deal though, because for such occasions, I’ve got a thoroughly worked-out and pretty practical technique.
So, as usual, I took off all of my clothes, packed them into a cellophane bag and started dancing in the altogether under the downpour. Those dances, actually, were never meant as some pagan ritual, they're intended to keep me warm, in the mountains up there without the sun and under the rain it’s really chilly, let me assure you. But still some tinge of witching paganism is also there or else where those primeval yells come from to accompany the free nude dances? Anyway, solitude does have certain advantages— you’re not likely to be arrested for violation of public order and morals.
And, after the rain is over, I simply rub-dry myself with the sweater and put on the dry clothes from the bag, ain’t I a smart guy?
But that time after one rain there came another, and my second dancing was not as enthusiastic as the previous. The additional rain also let up after all, and I prepared to stay overnight in a shallow hollow to hide from the cold night wind.
About midnight the drops of one more rain tap-tapped on my sleeping bag and made me realize that I was kaput. A raging stream of rainwater ran down the hollow, I struggled out of the sleeping bag put it on my back and stood with my legs wide apart giving way to the running spate. That’s when I guessed that my sleepover spot was just a gulch, but I could not leave it either because of the squally wind joining the fun. There was nothing to do but wait for the dawn in the posture of the letter Z, clutching my knees with my hands, under the sleeping bag on my back, drenched thru and thru, and the rivulet running between my feet. The uncontrollable inside shudder mingled with the lashing by outside chilly rains, which that night I lost count of…
The morning started thru a thick mist, yet with no rain, except for random drizzling, and the wind also began to abate… Jerking like an epileptic, I squeezed the water out of my clothes and the sleeping bag, as much as my cold-stiffened hands could manage to. I had not the slightest desire to go any farther, hearth and home were all I craved for. So, I went back, yet even walking did not warm me up, I was too busy being trembling all the time.
Normally, going downhill is easier than going uphill, but for me that difference was somehow gone and at times I was sort of floating, while to the hearths of civilization there still remained at least a day of normal walking. That’s when I remembered the slate— it was much closer if only I could find it. It’s somewhere along the edge of the wood. For which reason, down that toomb, I was descending in zigzags so as not miss the slate pieces in the tall grass.
And I did find the place.
Seized by the sticky shivering tremor on one hand and overwhelming stiffness on the other, I started to restore the shed and the work warmed me better than walking… The thing I accomplished looked like a crude tent of fire-smeared slate pieces. Inside, it was tall enough for sitting on the ground and more than enough to stretch for the whole body length.
Then I built a fire at the entrance with the wreckage of poles and deadwood which I dragged from the nearby coppice. I warmed my sides by the fire and began to dry up the sleeping bag. When the color of its fabric turned lighter and stopped issuing any steam, I believed in the probable survival.
All next day the sun was glaring blindingly, but I had a slanted roof of slates over my head supported by the charred poles—used as the promenade by the soundless lizards as lazy as I was, because in all that day I went out just once— to collect an armful of grass and spread it under the sleeping bag on the ground…
And so it went on, day after day, without any changes, if not for the growing company—cautious dormice joined me and the lizards. They did not dare step over the fire ashes, so I left a piece of baked potato outside, but the rest, together with bread and cheese, hung in the haversack up the rafter poles under the slate.
At nights, the full moon rose to fill the world with clear-cut shadows. On one of those well-illuminated nights, I went out to take a leak, and on the way thru the tall grass, from under my feet there burst a brood of quail with the loud flutter of wings and shrill outcry, “Damn sleepwalker! Watch your step! We’re sleeping here!” As if I was not scared stiff by them!
In the light of day, over the wide expanse of the valleys, the vultures glided without ever moving their wings. Watching them from the depths of valleys you turn your face up to see their circling so high above, but now, lying on my sleeping bag, I didn’t even have to stick my head out of the slate tent.
When one of them trespassed the invisible borderline between their hunting grounds, the skylord soared higher and, folding his wings, fell down upon the brazen prowler like a stone. I heard the wheezing sound of the air cut by his dive next to the slate tent entrance. He missed, however, or maybe was not keen on hitting but only wanted to warn and shoo off the sneaking bastard. All of us are blood kin, after all.
And so it went on…
All my business was to roll over from one side to the other, from the belly to the back, having no desires, neither ambitions nor plans. Sometimes, I was falling asleep with no regard to the time of day because it made no difference…
Well, and I also watched, of course. I watched how beautiful and perfect the world is…
Sometimes I think, maybe the purpose of man’s existence is just seeing this beauty and perfection. Man is merely a mirror for the world to look into, otherwise, it would not know its own beauty…
Six days later, I returned to civilization, just for the sake of righteousness.
On coming back, to all the questions I responded in quite a laconic way because my vocal cords, after being idle for so long, became too lazy and I could only speak in a hoarse whisper.
(…all I want to say is that both times—in that winter forest, and among the summer toombs—I had the same feeling that I was not alone and someone else was watching that ski-riding kid and the supine lazybones in the shade of burned slate pieces and, more strangely, I was a part of that someone and watched myself from the twilight of the winter forest and from the tall grass on the toomb slope because we all are involved…
Well, on the whole, some weird stuff, a folly accomplished…)
~ ~ ~
With the spring at hand, we, the fourth-graders, started active preparation for getting enrolled to the ranks of young pioneers to reach which goal we copied and memorized the Solemn Oath of Young Leninists. Then one day after the break, Seraphima Sergeevna entered the classroom with an unknown woman. She introduced her as the new School Pioneer Leader and said that we were going to have a Leninist Lesson and for that purpose we had to go out into the corridor now and keep very quiet there because the other classes were at their regular lessons.
We went out into the long corridor on the second floor, where along its walls with the windows on the left and the rare doors to the classrooms on the right, there hung different pictures with differently-aged Lenin in all of them… The new School Pioneer Leader commenced from the very beginning. Here, he’s quite a young man, a youth, actually, after getting the news about the execution of his elder brother Alexander by the Czarist regime, he consoles his mother with the words “We’ll go another way”, which is the name of this famous picture, by the way.
And our class followed her quietly to the next poster with his photograph in the group of comrades from the underground committee… The working silence reigned in school, we passed by the closed doors of the classrooms with the school children sitting behind them and only we, like secret conspirators, veered from the usual course of the school regime and seemed to have joined the life of underground, following the quiet voice directing us from a picture to a picture…
Then the spring came, and again the thawed patches appeared on the slope between Block and the Recruit Depot Barracks but I wasn’t checking them anymore… One sunny day coming home from school, I took over an unfamiliar girl of my age. Maybe, from the parallel fourth grade. I get ahead of her and looked back at the face full of absolute lack of care about my walking along.
The brag just asked for a small demonstration that I was a boy of consequence in the surrounding whereabouts. And besides, I had a gang of my own, like Robin Hood, the noble robber. Still walking on, I half-turned to the left and told with eloquent gestures to the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the decaying skating rink, “Hey! Don’t be so careless! Duck!! Don’t let them spot you!” So, if the snooty girl looked that way, no one would be seen there…
Another time, with the snow, completely gone, I was going the same route and squinting because if you squint without closing your eyes completely, but only to the point when the eyelashes from your upper and lower eyelids meet and touch each other, you’d see the world as if thru the transparent wings of a dragonfly. That way I was not, actually, walking but flying in a tiny dragonfly-like helicopter and watching thru its Plexiglas roof which I saw in The Funny Pictures because even though I was past the preschool age I still turned pages of that magazine for small kids whenever it came my way.
