Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Friendship is power. When the 3 of us were together, even Sasha Dryga refrained from bullying… Friendship is knowledge. I shared the pieces of poetry never included in school curriculum but firmly memorized by all the boys at the Object, such as “To get insured from the cold…”, and “The light was burning in the pub…”, and “Vaniyka-Halooy went to the fair…” as well as other short but flowery instances of rhymed folklore. And in the context of cultural and philological exchange, my friends explained to me the meaning of popular Konotopian expressions like “Have you fled from Romny?” or “It’s time to pack you off to Romny.” As it turned out, the town of Romny, about seventy kilometers from Konotop, was the seat of Regional Psychiatric Hospital for nuts…
~ ~ ~
That morning the gambling bouts at Bitok ran low behind the gym. On that clear April morning, the lads stood arguing and waiting for the confirmation of so welcome rumors that the Central TV news program “Time” was grossly mistaken the previous night. Because some guy heard from guys from School 10 that last night some man landed by parachute in the Sarnavsky forest near the Konotop outskirts. And now Sasha Rodionenko would arrive from City, his family had recently moved over there but he still attended our school, just let's wait him come, he should know for sure, he would confirm…
I remembered the flight of Gagarin and as soon after him Guerman Titov was orbiting all day long to say in the evening, “Bye, for now, I’m going to bed.” And Dad chuckled with delight and replied to the radio on the wall, “That’s a good one!”
Our cosmonauts were always the first and we, elementary school pupils, were arguing who of us was the first to hear the radio announcement about the flight of Popovich or Nikolayev, or the first cosmonautess Tereshkova…
Sasha Rodionenko came but he didn’t confirm anything. So the Central TV news program “Time” was not mistaken. And the sun faded in grief…
Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov…In the landing module…
Entering the dense layers of the earth’s atmosphere…
Perished…
Then Father came and he was followed a week later by the railway container with our things from the Object that arrived at the Freight Station and moved from there on a platform truck to 19 Nezhyn Street, both the wardrobe with the mirror on its door and the folding couch-bed, and the two armchairs with wooden armrests, and the TV set, and all the other implement-utensils. Even the old-fashioned leatherette sofa arrived for which there was no room in the khutta.
(…now I can feel nothing but horror at the thought: how could 10 people—2 families and their mutual Grandma Katya—to fit into and live in 1 room and 1 kitchen?
But at that time I didn’t think of such things at all because since it was our home and we lived there the way we lived, then it couldn’t be somehow different, everything was as it should be and I just lived on along and that’s it..)
For the night, Sasha and I readied the folding couch-bed and shared it with Natasha, who lay across at our feet with a chair put next to the couch for her legs. My brother and I had to keep our feet pulled up to the middle of our bed, otherwise, Natasha would grumble and complain to the parents on their bed by the opposite wall, and tell on me and Sasha for kick-fighting. Nice news, eh?! She could stretch her legs out as far as she wanted, and rebuffed my offers to swap our places… The family of Arkhipenkos and Grandma Katya slept in the kitchen.
Parallel to Nezhyn Street, about three hundred meters off, there ran Professions Street one side of which was just one endless wall of tall concrete slabs fencing the Konotop Steam-Engine and Railroad-Car Repair Plant, which name was commonly eschewed and substituted by the short and nice KahPehVehRrZeh. Because of that plant, the part of Konotop outside the Under-Overpass was named the KahPehVehRrZeh Settlement, or just the Settlement.
On the Plant’s opposite side, the same slab-wall split it from the multitude of railway tracks in the Konotop Passenger Station and the adjacent Freight Station, where long freight trains were waiting for their turn to start off to their different destinations because Konotop was a big railway junction. The marshaling yard of the Freight Station with freight cars running down the hump, both as loners or in small groups into the sorting lines, sent forth the shrieking screech of wheel chocks, bangs of cars against each other, indistinct screams of loudspeakers with reports about that or another train on that or another sorting line. However, in the daytime the marshaling yard symphony was not too overbearing, its racket whooped it up against the background of night quietude after the noises of day-life subsided…
Regardless of any time of day, whenever it breezed from the nearby village of Popovka, the distillery there permeated the air by its unmistakable stink, which atmospheric phenomenon the Settlement folks christened “From Popovka with Love”. Not that the reek was totally lethal, yet you were better off if shunned to sniff at it attentively, anyway, to have a running nose on such days was kinda blessing…
Nezhyn Street connected to Professions Street by lots of frequent lanes. The first of those side streets (counting from School 13) was called Foundry Street because it led to where the former foundry was located inside the Plant and now not seen because of the concrete wall.
Then there came Smithy Street offering the view of the tall brick smokestack by the Plant’s smithy behind that same wall.
The next (past our house at number 19) was Gogol Street, neglecting the fact that there was no Gogol, or any other writer for that matter, in front or behind the Plant wall.
The mentioned three streets were more or less straight but those following them before and after the Nezhyn Store tangled in the warren of differently directed lanes which, in the end, also led to the Plant wall if you knew how to navigate them…
The Nezhyn Store gained that name because it stood in Nezhyn Street and it was the largest of all the 3 stores in the Settlement. The smaller ones were named by their numbers.
The premises of Nezhyn Store occupied a separate one-story brick building and a backyard. It comprised 4 departments entered separately and marked by the time-worn tin frames over their doors: “Bread”, “Industrial Goods”, “Grocery”, and “Fish and Vegetables”.
The “Bread” opened in the morning to work until all of the “white” loaves and darker “brick”-bread there got sold out and they could safely lock the emptied department. In the afternoon, with the arrival of the food truck delivering another bunch of “bricks” and loaves from the Konotop Bread Factory, it opened again.
The next, and also the biggest, department—“Industrial Goods”—had two shop windows adorned by dust-smeared miniaturized boxes of security signalization pressed to their panes from inside, on both sides of its mighty door. The store-soiled goods in the glazed showcase-counters were looked after by 3 dead bored saleswomen because they hardly saw a couple of customers a day. The Settlement population, when in need of such goods, preferred to travel to shops in City.
But the 2 saleswomen in the “Grocery” department had their hands full all day long. At times, there even formed a queue, especially on the days when the butter was brought to the department and they cut its huge yellow cube, put next to the scales, with their enormously big knife and wrapped your 2 or 3 hundred grams into the friable blue paper.
And when the “Grocery” was entered by a workman from the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, he was served without standing in the queue because in his palm there was a thoroughly counted and readied amount of kopecks for his vodka, which saved the trouble of counting the change. Besides, he was to come back to his workplace as soon as possible for which end he arrived without changing from his boiler suites, aka spetzovka.
The choice of vodkas in the department was fairly extensive, of different colors and names— “Zubrovka”, “Erofeich”, “ Let’s Have One More…”, but people bought only “Moscow Vodka” with its green and white sticker.
The concluding “Fish and Vegetables” department was mostly locked not to disturb its empty dormant shelves and the dried-earth smell left by potatoes sold out last year…
And after the Nezhyn Store, there were Locksmith Street, Wheels Street and in the unexplored as yet depths of the Settlement other streets and lanes and blind alleys…
~ ~ ~
The very first Sunday after our arrival, Aunt Lyouda led me and my sister-'n'-brother to Professions Street that was the only asphalted street in the Settlement. We went along it in the direction of Bazaar and in 5 minutes reached the Plant Club for the 3 o’clock movie show for children.
The Plant Club was a mighty two-story building but as tall as a four-storied one. The masonry in its walls and windows had lots of arches, ledges, and columns, like, a lace-work of smoky bricks. The concrete wall of the Plant enclosure did not miss to surround the backside of the Club as well. In the small square in front of it, there was the Plant Main Check-Entrance built in the same ornate ante-revolution style of masonry, opposed by the modernist structure of the two-story-as-two-story murkily-glazed cube of the Plant Canteen.
We entered the lofty lobby in the Plant Club full of diverse-aged but equally shrill children lining to the small window in the tin-clad door of the ticket office. One boy, a second-grader by his looks, started leaching Aunt Lyouda for ten kopecks to buy himself a ticket, but she snapped at him and he shut up. She seemed to enjoy visiting the Plant Club for an afternoon show for children…
So I learned the route to the Club where, among other things, there also was the Plant Library of two huge halls. The desks in the first one bore the layers of newspapers’ filings, wide and thick. Behind the glazed doors in the tall cabinets lined by the walls, there stood familiar rows of never-asked-for works by Lenin, and Marx, and Engels and other similarly popular multi-volume collections.
The next hall had the stacks with normal books for reading. Needless to say, I enrolled immediately because the choice of books on the two shelves in our school library was niggardly poor…
On May Day, our school marched out for the all-city demonstration. The school column looked lively and lovely thanks to the young pioneers and their ceremonial uniform—white shirts and red neckties, all washed, ironed, crisp—while the students of senior grades were responsible for weightier decorations, the heads of the current Members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in their portraits on roughly smoothed and painted red stocks in the hands of carriers (one Member per three-four carriers, in turn, rotating each 20-30 min.).
Headed by the group of teachers, we walked the uneven cobbles in Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street to Bazaar where Professions Street shared its asphalt to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street for its dive thru the Under-Overpass. The ascend from the tunnel on its opposite end became an influent to Peace Avenue stretched away to the tall railway embankment in the distance, after which it ran thru the housing area of five-story buildings, named Zelenchuk, followed by the City center – Peace Square. Peace Avenue, tangentially passing Peace Square, separated it from the City Council concealed behind the greens opposite to the granite-rimmed, never working, fountain in the middle of Peace Square concluded by the edifice of Peace Movie Theater.
The middle one of the three alleys in the greens which led directly to the City Council’s entrance porch was blocked, because of the demonstration, with the red platform past which the whole city marched in the holiday demonstrations, except for the tenants of the five-story buildings bounding the square who watched demonstrations from their balconies. I did envy the folks at first, but not for long…
On our way to Peace Square, the column of School 13 had time and again to stop for long waits letting the schools of lower numbers overtake us and go ahead. But the working organizations gave way to us, like the columns of the Locomotive Depot, or the Railway Distance Of the South-West Railroad, as it stood in white bulging letters cut of polystyrol and mounted on the crimson-velvet covering in the shields on wheels at their columns’ heads. Neither streetcars nor vehicles were seen along all of Peace Avenue, only people, lots of people on foot both walking in the wide stream of columns, and standing by, kinda live banks scanning the current, which made May Day so special and unlike other days.
On entering the vast Peace Square, we had to suddenly change our dignified marching step to a frivolous trotting and kinda run to attack, giggling and panting, with the portraits of those Members atilt, to catch up with the previous column of which we, as usual, had fallen too far behind because of bad timing. And since School 13 was the last but one among the city schools, by the moment when we, mixed up with the disordered ranks of School 14, were passing the red platform, the loudspeakers shouted from up there, “The column of the Konotop Railway Technical School is entering Square! Hooray, comrades!”, making us hooray to others and not to ourselves.
After Peace Square the road passed the entrance to the Central Park of Recreation and turned right, descending towards Lenin Street, but we didn’t go down there. In the nearest lane, we piled the Political Bureau Members and red banners on a truck that took them back to our school to sit in the Household Manager’s storeroom till the next demonstration. And we also went back, on foot, giving Peace Square a pretty wide berth because the passages between the buildings around it were blocked by empty buses, face to face, and in the vast of the empty square solitary figures of militiamen were strolling leisurely.
Yet, it still was a holiday, because before we started for the demonstration Mother gave each of us fifty kopecks, of which there even remained, afterward, some change for a bar of Plombir ice-cream in thin paper wrapping cost 18 kopecks and that of Creamy just only 13. The saleswomen in white robes sold ice-cream from their plywood, double-walled, boxes at every crossing along the trafficless Peace Avenue…
When I returned home, the schoolchildren in festive white shirts and red pioneer ties were still walking along Nezhyn Street returning to the Settlement lanes after the demonstration.
And then I committed the first dastardly act in my life. I went out from the wicket of our khutta and wantonly shot with my crook pistol in the guilty of nothing white back of a passer-by boy pioneer. He chased me, but I ran back into the yard up to the kennel of Zhoolka who kept barking and yanking his chain violently, so the boy did not dare come up and only shouted his threats and abuses thru the open wicket…
In summer our parents bought a nanny-goat from Bazaar because when Father received his first payment at the Plant and brought home 74 rubles, Mother, confusedly looking at the money in his hand, asked, “How? Is that all?”
The purchase was meant to make living easier but, in fact, it only complicated life because now I had to walk the white nanny-goat on a rope into Foundry Street or Smithy Street where she grazed the dust-covered grass along the weather-worn fences.
To drink any of the goat milk I refused downright in spite of all Mother's wheedling how hugely beneficial it was for health. After a while, the goat was slaughtered and tenderized into cutlets which I ignored completely…
Sometimes Grandma Katya’s son, Uncle Vadya, came to our khutta in his boiler-oil smeared spetzovka during the midday breaks at the Plant to beg hooch because his colleagues were a-waiting, but his plea seldom succeeded.
Uncle Vadya had a smooth black hair combed back and a toothbrush mustache also black, the skin in his face was of slick olive hue, like that of young Arthur in The Gadfly by Lillian Voynich, and on his right hand he missed the middle finger lost at the beginning of his workingman career.
“I couldn’t get it first. Well, okay, that’s my finger dropped upon the machine tool, but where's the water from that drips on it? A-ha! that’s my tears!” so he recounted the accident. Doctors sewed up the stump very nicely—smooth and no scars at all—so that when he made the fig it came out 2 at once. The double-barreled fig looked very funny and no chance for anyone to ape the trick even remotely.
Uncle Vadya lived in the khutta of his mother-in-law near the Bus Station. There's a special term in Ukrainian for a man living with his in-laws, which is primmuck, aka Adoptee. Bitter is the share of an Adoptee! As reported by Uncle Vadya, a primmuck had to keep quieter than the still water and lower than the grass. His mother-in-law he had to address with “Mommy” and kowtow even to the hens kept by her in the yard, and his duty was washing their legs when they saw it fit to perch for the night…
We all loved Uncle Vadya for he was so funny and kind, and smiling all the time. And he had his special way of greeting, “So, how are you, golden kids?”
At the age of ten, when the German Company Headquarters were just behind the wall—in the Pilluta’s part of the khutta—Vadya Vakimov climbed onto the fence in the backyard and attempted at cutting the cable of the occupants’ telephone connection. The Germans yelled at him but didn’t shoot and kill right on the spot…
When I asked how he dared act in such a heroic way, Uncle Vadya replied that he no longer remembered. However, it’s hardly possible that he wished to become a pioneer partisan posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union, most likely he was allured by the multi-colored wires running inside telephone cables of which you could pleat lots of different ornamental things, even a lush finger-ring…
~ ~ ~
On my way to the Nezhyn Store, I was intercepted by a pair of guys riding one bike. First, they overtook me, then the one sitting on the bike rack jumped off to the ground and smacked me in the face. Of course, it was a revolting dishonor, however, though he was half-head shorter than me, I didn’t fight back in fear of his companion who also got off the bike, some brawny tall oaf.
“I told you’ll catch hell!” said the offender and they left. I realized whose back I had shot at with a crook…
The movie shows at Club started at six and eight in the evening. With the tickets bought in the lobby, the film-goer had to climb the straight flight of wide red-painted thick-board steps to the second floor. The tiled landing up there somehow managed to always have kinda murky air despite the two high windows and three doors.
The door to the right opened a small hall with a switched off TV set in front of a dozen short rows of seats, always vacant, and the handrailed flight of steep openwork iron stairs up to the projectionist booth. On both sides of the dead TV, two more big doors led to the huge gym of the Ballet Studio which is not what you need with the cinema tickets in your pocket. So, back again to the tiled landing with two more still unexplored doors.
The first door on the left was always locked because it led to the balcony in the auditorium. And the next, invitingly open door was controlled by everlastingly grim auntie Shura, who stood by in her helmet-like head kerchief, a kinda somber sentry in charge of tearing off the check part in your ticket before letting you in.
The floor inside the vast auditorium had a slight slant towards the wide white screen behind which there was a big stage with two porches and doors by the side walls. For concerts or performances by puppet theater, the cinema screen was drawn to the left wall disclosing the dark-blue plushy velvet of the stage curtains. The open balconies adorned with alabaster swag ran along the sidewalls, yet stopped before reaching the stage. By the rear wall, the balconies sloped steeply from both sides, so as not to block the loopholes of the projectionist booth from where the flicking widening beam streamed to the screen to deliver a movie.
In the lobby on the first floor, next to the windowed door of the ticket office, there hung the list of movies for the current month brush-written in the canvas stretched over a sizable wooden frame. Films changed every day except for Monday when there was no cinema at all. So you could make your choice in advance and know when to ask from Mother twenty kopecks for the show… Summertime annulled the cinema expenses totally because the Plant Park, hidden behind the long dilapidated two-story apartment block that stood above the tilt to the Under-Overpass tunnel, was a great money-saver. In the Park, apart from its three alleys, a locked dance-floor, and the large gazebo of beer pavilion, there also was the open-air cinema behind a pretty tall plank fence with conveniently located gaps and holes in its rear part.
The show began after nine when twilight showed signs of getting denser and, more importantly, if the ticket office on the first floor of the projectionists’ booth managed to sell at least four tickets because the new generation preferred watching films from outside the cinema. However, standing on foot by a hole for an hour and a half, with your nose buried in planks roughed by merciless time and calamitous weather, was not exactly what you’d call a pleasurable recreation. That’s why the film-going guys took advantageous seats in the old apple trees grown by the brick structure of the projectionist booth. If your fork in the tree was too narrow or the bough too bumpy for comfortable sitting, next time you’d be smarter to come earlier and have a better choice from the vacant tree-seats…
The film went on, the warm summer darkness thickened around two or three dim lamps in the Plant Park alleys and the stars peeped from the night sky thru the gaps in the apple tree foliage. On the silver screen, the black-and-white “The Jolly Fellows” with Leonid Utesov kept slapping each other with drums and double basses and at less breathtaking moments you could stretch your hand out and grope among the apple-tree twigs to find, somewhere between the Cassiopeia and Andromeda constellations, a small inedible crab-apple for biting tiny bitter bits off its stone-hard side.
After a good film, like that one starring Rodion Nakhapetov where there were no fights, neither wars, but just scenes about life, about death, and beautiful motorcycle riding thru shallow waters, the spectators walked out of the Park gate and headed to the cobbled Budyonny Street without the usual bandit whistles or cat-yells. The sparse crowd of people became somehow quietened and united, sort of related by the mutually watched film, and kept peaceful walking thru the darkness of a warm night, dwindling at the invisible crossroads, on their way to the lonely lamppost at the junction of Bogdan Khmelnytsky and Professions Streets next to Bazaar….
But the main thing because of which the guys were waiting for the summer was, of course, bathing. The start of the swimming season took place late May at the Kandeebynno and marked the summer’s coming into its own. The Kandeebynno was several lakes used for breeding the mirror carp, and it also was the springhead of the Yezooch river. At times along the lakes-splitting dams, there rode a solitary bicycler-overseer, so that guys wouldn’t poach too cheekily with their fishing poles. Yet, in one of those lakes they didn’t breed the carp, it was left for bathing of beach-goers…
However, to go for a swim at the Kandeebynno, you had to know how to get there. Mother said that although having had visited the spot she couldn’t explain the way and it was better to ask Uncle Tolik, who both to work and back, and, in fact, everywhere went by his motorbike “Jawa”, so he, of course, should know.
The Kandeebynno, according to his instruction, was all too easy to find. When going towards City along Peace Avenue, you pass under the bridge in the railway embankment, so take the first right turn which you couldn't miss because it’s where started the road to Romny, and follow it to the intersection by which take another right turn and go on until you see the railway barrier, cross the railway, turn to the left and—here you are!—that’s the Kandeebynno for you…
The twins, sure enough, pressed for going along with me. We took an old bed cover to spread and lie upon when sunbathing, put it into a mesh-bag, added a bottle of water and went to the Under-Overpass where Peace Avenue started. Up to the railway embankment, the road was familiar after the May Day demonstration. We went under the bridge and saw it at once – the road running to the right along the base of the elevated railway. True enough, it didn’t look a highway because of no asphalt in it, yet being as wide as any other road, it was the first one to the right after the bridge. So, we turned and followed the road along the base of the tall steep embankment.
However, the farther we went, the narrower the road became transforming into a wide trail, then into a footpath tread which soon just vanished. We had no choice but to climb the steep grass-overgrown embankment, shake the sand out from our sandals and march on stepping on the concrete crossties or along the endless narrow railheads. Natasha was the first to notice the trains catching up from behind, and we stepped down onto the uneven gravel in the ballast shoulder, giving way for the rumbling, wind-whipping cars to shoot past us.
When we reached the next bridge, there was no avenue or a street under it, just other railway tracks. Our embankment turned right and started to gradually go down joining the tracks in their flow towards the distant Railway Station. It became clear, that we were going in the opposite direction and not to any lakes at all.
We did not have time to get disappointed though, because far below we marked a small field at the base of another embankment, beneath the bridge in ours. Two groups of tiny, at that distance, guys in light summer clothes, and with the mesh-bags like ours, walked towards a copse of green trees, and they had even a ball among them. Where else could they go if not to a beach?!.
We climbed down two steep embankments and went along the same path in the field as the previous guys who were gone out of sight long ago. Then we walked thru the Aspen grove along a lonely railway track with soft soil instead of crushed stone ballast between its wooden ties until we reached a highway that crossed the track beneath two raised barriers. We passed over the highway and followed a wide, at times boggy, path among the tall growth of bright green grass. The chest straightened out with cautiously expectant exaltation, “Aha, Kandeebynno! You won’t flee now!”
Groups of people were walking the same path in both directions, but those going there more numerous than back-comers. The path led to a wide canal of dark water between the shore and the opposite dam of the fish lakes and continued along the canal. We followed it on and on, among green trees, under white cumuli in the azure-blue summer sky. The straight rows of fruit-trees in a neglected no man’s orchard went up over the smooth slant to the right of the path. Then the canal on the left widened into a lake with a white sand beach. The expanse of sand was bound by the grass between the tall Currant bushes in the forlorn garden.
We chose a free streak of grass for our bed cover, hastily undressed, and ran over the unbearably heated sand to the water flying from each direction into any other, splashed up and sent over in strangling sprays to faces of dozens of folks eagerly screaming, yelling, and laughing in the water which seethed from their merry frolics.
Summer!. Ah, Summer!.
As it turned out later, Uncle Tolik didn’t even know of that vanishing road along the embankment base, because when his motorbike at a roaring speed shot from under the bridge in Peace Avenue, he in two seconds flat was on the Romny highway, while going on foot you reached it after some generous hundred meters of stomping…
In the list of movies for July, there stood “The Sons of Big Bear”, so Skully and I agreed not to miss it because Goiko Mitich starred in the film as one of her sons. That Yugoslavian actor was mostly engaged as a hero red-skin in this or that of GDR Westerns and, as long as he was in, you could safely expect it'd be a decent movie. Sure enough, the list did not report all those details or anything at all except for the movie's title and the date of show. However, the films arrived to the Plant Club no sooner than a couple of months after their run for a week at the Peace Movie Theater and one more week at the Vorontsov Movie Theater on Square of the Konotop Divisions that’s why, with the little help of our friends, we could always make an informed decision. And we weren't especially keen on watching movies at the mentioned theaters not because of trust in the unmistakable flair of our friends, no, their leads well sucked at times, but for the much simpler motivation – a ticket at the Peace Movie Theater was 50 kopecks, watching the same film a week later at the Vorontsov set you back for five-and-thirty, whereas, after practicing your patience for a month plus, you enjoyed it at Club paying reasonable 20 kopecks…
On that Sunday the 3 of us—Kuba, Skully, and I—went to the Kandeebynno by bikes. We swam and dived, in turn, off the self-made launch-pad when 2 of us, chest-deep in the water, clasped our hands for the third to climb upon and take a dive from. And, of course, we played “spots”, though you couldn’t catch up Kuba underwater.
Then he and Skully got lost somewhere in the bathing crowd. In vain looked I for the friends midst the splashes and squeals, they were nowhere around. Just in case, I even swam to the opposite shore which was the dam of the fish lakes. A couple of guys were fishing there, with their eye alert for an opportunity to angle in the mirror carp paradise over the dam. And I swam back so as not to scare off their fish, which was striking even in the lake for swimmers. Then I once again scanned the crowd in the water, to no avail, and decided it was enough.
