Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
To Leningrad, we went thru Moscow. Besides me and Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna, School 13 was represented in the excursion group by 2 more girls from my class – Tanya and Larissa, as well as by 2 students from the parallel, 7 “A” grade – Vera Litvinova, and Tolik Sudak, the rest of the group were students from other city schools herded by a couple of their teachers.
The train arrived in Moscow in the morning, and we spent there one day which time was enough for me to make 3 major discoveries. The first one was the discovery of the existence of foreshadowing dreams. It was proved undeniably when we rode an excursion bus on our tour in the city—look to the left! look to the right!—until at some place, they asked us to leave the bus for a close look at something from anear.
Our group tagged along with the guide, I also followed straggling at some distance, when, all of a sudden, the surroundings looked so much familiar to me—both that bridge above no river, and the far-off tower of the Moscow State University, and even the locked stall on the pavement I walked by.
Someone from our group turned back and called me, “Don’t lag or we will leave without you!”, to which I answered, “When you turn back, I’ll be the first!” And exactly that moment I felt having seen already that view in all its details and pronounced those very words because all of that was in a dream dreamed by me a week before. I felt freaked out and even stopped, but not for long – the excursion group was indeed returning to the bus.
(…in my subsequent life, time and again I had the like instances of getting back to once-seen dreams. Some of such dream recollections could precede for a split-second the actual development happening live, in real, so that I knew who and what would say a second later, and by what gesture they would accentuate their words because the going on scene was just an echo of what had been already seen by me in some earlier dream. Duration of such presaging dreams is not exceedingly long, and at times it can take years before their echoing in my wake hours.
I never discussed my discovery with anyone and much later, with a mixture of relief and disappointment, I learned that such things happen not only to me, and that folks in Scotland even have a special term for the phenomenon – “second sighting”…)
After the second revelation, we went to the All-Union Exhibition of the Achievements of National Economy, aka Veh-Deh-eN-Kha. There we were taken to the Astronautics Pavilion, with the gigantic white needle of “Vostok” spaceship put in front of its facade, one from the series by which Gagarin orbited the Earth. Inside the spacious pavilion, several excursions were wandering at once among the stands, and mock-ups and mannequins donned in red spacesuits and bulky helmets.
I did not know what the other guides were sharing to their groups, but ours ruminated things known by anyone from the times immemorial, so I kept lagging, or running ahead, and at some point sneaked off into a wide side door. Stone steps led upward following the arrowed inscription “The Optics Pavilion”. I reached the landing where the steps U-turned going up to the pavilion itself. But I didn’t follow them any farther immobilized and fascinated by the extravaganza of colorful airiness unfolded on the landing. A whopping cube of space was filled with a motionless, as if frozen, family of soap bubbles of all sizes radiating silently diverse hues of the rainbow colors. What a delight!.
My deviation from the programmed rout was noted by someone in the group and they called me from down there, “Come back! We're leaving!” After a parting look at the unreachable pavilion entrance on the upper landing, I joined the excursion.
(…what was behind that door I do not know and the discovery itself is as follows: sometimes a single step away from the trodden rut opens new shining worlds, but, as runs a popular folk adage in the country that was the first to undertake creation of a Socialist society, “A step aside is vied as an escape attempt to be shot at to kill without warning”…)
The final, third, discovery of that day awaited me in the State Universal Shop, aka GUM, on the Red Square, where we arrived without any guide already. There, I learned that dreams do come true, you only need to be ready for their realization…
At the entrance to GUM, we were told to gather in the same spot after a half-hour and were dismissed to scatter in search for goods. From inside, GUM looked like sectioned wells of space within an ocean bulk-carrier enclosed by multi-story transitions up the hull sides.
In one of the compartments on the third floor, they were selling the billiards of my dream whose price was exactly ten rubles. O, how I did curse my gluttony! From the sum given by Mother, I had already paid for 2 ice-cream – one in the morning at the station, and the other at the V eh-Deh-eN-KHa. There remained nothing I could do but say goodbye to my dream so, to mitigate the grief, I ate one more ice-cream right in the GUM.
In the evening tired but wholly satisfied (if counting out the misfire about the billiards) we left Moscow for Leningrad…
In the city on the Neva river, we were billeted in a school on Vasilevsky Island, not far from the Zoo. At the school, we were allotted half of the gym, since the other half was occupied already by an excursion group from the Poltava city. We did not cause them any inconvenience—the gym was pretty spacious—and only moved several black sports mats they were not using into another corner. Additionally to the mats, we were given cloth blankets getting accommodated for sleep with much more comfort than the royal court of France, when fled from the rioting Paris in Twenty Years Later by Alexandre Dumas where poor aristocrats were provided for the purpose with just raw straw and no linen…
For 3 meals a day, we walked up a couple of blocks to a canteen next to a humpbacked bridge above the Moika river. A very quiet place it was, with hardly any traffic at all. There, our heads paid in advance with paper coupons and the girls from the excursion group laid the food on the square tables before inviting the rest of us to come in from the sidewalk. Sometimes we had to wait because apart from the Poltava’s and ours there were other groups as well – not from our gym though. In such a case we stood waiting on the nearby bridge over the narrow river with its indiscernible flow between the upright stone-lined banks.
p>“ On the Moika bank,
we ate garbage skank”
So ran the epigram composed by someone from our group.
(…the rhyme, of course, is flawless, but I personally had no complaints about the food there – everything was as it always was in any canteen I dropped in along my life path…)
We were a little late for the white nights but everything else was in place – both Nevsky Avenue, and the Palace Bridge, and trotting thru the halls of the Hermitage with the immense Pompeii demolition in the picture by Karl Bryullov, and luxurious, yet small-sized, oil paintings by Dutch masters…
In St. Isaac Cathedral they launched for us the Foucault’s Pendulum hanging all the way down from inside the main dome. It swung for some time swishing between the disgruntled, icon decorated, walls and then pegged down one of the sizable wooden pins lined on the polished floor.
“See?!” exclaimed the enthusiastic Cathedral guide.”The Earth is turning, after all. Foucault’s Pendulum has just proved this scientifically.”
The revolutionary battleship Aurora denied us admittance for some reason, but we listened to the Admiralty’s Cannon fired each day to mark the noon, and visited The Piskaryovskoye Cemetery with green lawns over the mass graves of people starved in the years of fascist Blockade and the pool by the dark wall for the visitors to drop their coins in.
The day when we went to Peterhof was cloudy, and crossing the Finnish Gulf we could not see the sea but only fog above the circle of yellowish water with shallow waves around the boat, like on a lake with a sandy bottom. It was boring and dank, and when I got out of the passenger hall and climbed down the short ladder to the low stern with the churned up mass of foam behind it, the boat boy came up to tell that passengers were not allowed there. I climbed back, and he hung a chain across the ladder and started to wash the stern deck with a mop.
But the Peterhof fountains jetted pillars of surprisingly white water along the channel banks below the hillock with the palace on its top closed for restoration…
Everything in Leningrad turned out to be as beautiful as one would expect of the Cradle of Revolution. The weather got nice again, and on the first floor in the Naval Museum there stood the boat of Peter the Great, almost the size of a brigantine, and all the walls on the second floor were decorated with the paintings depicting glorious sea battles of the Russian fleet, starting with the battle in the Sinop Bay.
On the first floor of the Zoological Museum, a skeleton of whale bones towered high, while the central attraction on the second floor was the composition of life in Antarctica, behind the glazed partition. The white snowfield was painted in the back, and behind the glass there stood a few adult penguins with their beaks up in the air. They were surrounded by a kindergarten of penguin chicks of different ages to show how they change when growing.
At first, I liked them dearly – those lovely fluffy cutie pies, but soon the nagging thought that all of them were stuffed animals abated my delight. 3 dozen living birds were killed for the exposition. I did not want to look further and climbed down to the gnawed whale skeleton and out of the Museum.
In a glazed stall by the Zoological Museum, I bought a ballpoint pen—they did not sell such in Konotop yet—and two spare ampoules to it, folks said just one of them would do for a month of scribbling…
That day I was the first to finish the midday meal at the canteen and went out to the bridge over the Moika to wait for the rest of our group. Between the high walls of the river banks, a small white cutter cautiously made its way, splitting the black water into two long bumpy waves.
Then an elderly man came up to me over the bridge and warned that my pants were stained on behind. I knew about it, two days earlier I had sat down on a bench somewhere and it left a whitish splotch in the seat of my pants as if of Pine resin. It was unpleasant to be marked on behind in that way but the stain proved ungetriddable by simply rubbing-scratching so I tried just not to think of it.
He asked where I was from.
“We’ve come on an excursion. From Ukraine.”
The friendliness in his face faded. “Ukraine,” he said. “In the war years, they burned my side with the blowtorch there.”
I recollected Masha’s screech on the day they were slaughtering her, the buzz of a blue flame bursting from the nozzle of the blowtorch and the cracks in blackened skin of carcass. He grew silent and so was I, feeling somehow guilty for coming from the place where he had been tortured. It was a relief when our group, at last, came out of the canteen.
The Poltava excursion group left two days earlier than ours. On the last evening in Leningrad, we went to the circus tent. Our seats were at the very top, under the quaking canvas roof.
It was a united performance of circus actors from the fraternal socialist countries. A pair of Mongolian acrobats synchronously jumped onto the end of a see-saw to toss up the third one, standing on the other end. The tossed man somersaulted in the air and landed on the shoulders of the strongman in the arena. The pushers launched another one and one more – three people were placed upon the man below, like after the Battle at the Kalka River.
The gymnasts from the GDR worked on four high bars put to form a square for them to fly from one bar to another. Then the Czech trainers brought out a group of monkeys who started to spin and circle on the bars left after the Germans, only much funnier.
The next day we left without visiting the canteen, probably, because of having run out of the coupons. There was a very convenient train, with no train changes, on the route thru Orsha and Konotop. Only it started off in the evening and after all the ice-cream eaten during the excursion, and paying for the ticket to the circus tent, plus the purchase of a ball pen, there remained just 20 kopecks of all the 10 rubles given by Mother.
I had a pair of piroshki for the midday meal, but at about five o’clock, when we were already sitting in the waiting room at the station, Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna noticed my despondency and asked about the reason. I confessed that I was hungry and had no money, she lent me one ruble. In a deli near the station, I bought bread and a big fish in oily brown skin and thin strings tied all around it. Clutching the paper-wrapped prey, I returned to the station with our train at the platform already.
On boarding the car, I immediately sat down at the table under the window and began to eat. Very tasty fish it was, easily crumbling but slightly drier than expected considering its oily skin. I ate one half, wrapped the rest back and put it on the third level bunk, which was not for sleeping anyway but to put your luggage there.
Some single fellow-traveler, a couple of years older than me, got seated at the opposite side of the table, took out a deck of cards and offered to play Throw-in Fool with him. I won a couple of times and, when he was once again shuffling the cards, I flashed a commonplace Kandeebynno wit for the like cases, “A dinghead’s hands have no rest.”
With a sidelong glance at a couple of girls from our excursion, who sat by the window across the aisle, he dryly retorted, “The less one yaks, the longer lives.” I marked the look of genuine rage in his eyes and, after winning another game, refused to play on, he seemed glad to stop it too…
We arrived in Konotop in the morning after unusually heavy rain… During that night on the train, something happened to my shoes and they became too small size. I hardly forced them on, yet not completely, and my heels were partly hanging outside.
Hobbling painfully, I got off the car onto the platform and waited for our excursion to disappear into the underground passage to the Station. Then I took my shoes off and, in the socks only, went along the wet Platform 4 to the familiar breach in the fence at the very end of it.
Across the road from the breach, there stood the Railway Transportation School, I passed it by and very soon entered Bazaar. No one was ogling at me walking in the drenched socks, a disfigured shoe in each of my hands, because there were neither passers-by nor traffic around but boundless puddles everywhere.
After Bazaar the ground disappeared altogether under the even water surface. I splashed on following the streetcar track, kinda a tightrope walker along the railhead which stuck a tad bit from out the water, and on reaching Nezhyn Street I just waded ahead indiscriminately – the khutta was not far off already…
Later, Mother laughed, sharing with the neighbors that from both capitals I brought only a pair of shoes one centimeter too short for my feet. I hadn’t ever heard or read anywhere that it’s possible to grow your feet one centimeter in just one night…
On the first of September, Mother gave me one ruble to repay the debt. However, at the ceremonial line-up in the schoolyard, Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna was nowhere to be seen, and in the Teachers’ Room they told me she was ill and explained how to find her apartment in the two-story block by Bazaar, so I went there.
In the apartment, she kept repeating there's no need for such haste, it even somehow seemed to me she was not very happy that I returned that debt at all. And then her father entered the room and I was surprised to see it was Konstantin Borisovich, the projectionist at Club. The world was really a small place.
(…and were I asked now of the vividest impression from the visit to the Cultural Capital of Russia, my immediate response delayed by no hesitation would be—it is the luminous twilight in the sidewalk bounded by the stone parapet that opens to a few granite steps down to the immensely wide flow of the Neva River by the Palace Bridge when a random wave splash against the lower step sends up high spatter and the shrill screech of the girls from our excursion group standing on the first step from the stream…)
~ ~ ~
Still and all, Lenin was quite right marking the force of habit as a tremendously mighty force. Take, for example, the albums of young ladies from beau monde, where Eugene Onegin, with a reckless stroke of the quill, sketched out his author’s whiskered profile on the page following the autograph by a certain Lieutenant Rzhevsky. Such an album was the must for any young lady of quality to outpour her personal feelings and amass creative scribblings of her guests and visitors.
Of course, no album of that kind had ever come near my hands, yet after a whole lot of wars, three revolutions, and radical changes in the way of life, the albums for the sentimental exercises of sensitive girlish souls were still there because those albums had too much of a hard-die habit to simply disappear.
The struggle for life taught them to cunningly disguise—no silk bow-ties on the cover, neither creamy pages anymore—a general-purpose ruled-paper notebook in brown leatherette covers for thirty-eight kopecks, such was the common aspect of a girl’s album in our class. In place of long-nosed self-portraits of aristocratic rascallions there came cutouts from the color illustrations in Ogonyok magazine, securely mounted on glue… However, poems managed to survive:
Why? O, I don’t know why
A streetcar needs rails to go far or nigh
Why? O, I don’t know why
Why do parrots scream and cry?
I do not know why…
A-and fancifully adorned inscriptions to relate profound maxims and winged expressions of all sorts also proved immortal:
The one who loves will forgive anything”
Cheating kills love”
When such an album, accidentally forgotten on a desk, fell in a guy’s hands, he, having turned a couple of pages, would slap it back on the desk—some “girlish nonsense”.
Yet to me, for some odd reason, those albums were interesting and I dutifully scrutinized them. As a result, I got an offensive handle of “lady-bug” among the schoolmates. Nobody ever called me that to my face, even though when our class lined-up at a PE lesson I was only the fourth in the line, and the shortest guy, Vitya Malenko, could beat me up in a wrestling match under the scornful giggling of the girls. No, I have never heard that handle, but if your sister and brother attend the same school, there is no secret for you about you that you don’t know…
The school principal, Pyotr Ivanovich Bykovsky, unlike his nickname, Bykovsky the Cosmonaut, had a Herculean physique. When all the classes were lined-up in the long—from the Teachers’ Room and all the way to the gym—corridor, the sizable floorboards, paint-coated in red, creaked pitifully under his measured steps alongside the ranks of students.
His mighty skull’s dome with trailing locks across the wide bold, towered half-head above the tallest, graduating, class. When the drowsy look of his big eyes sent a-coasting from under his jutting jumbo eyelids over your face, your innards involuntary contracted, even though you knew perfectly well that the mail received from the Children Room of Militia had nothing to do with you, and the principal would call another guy to get out of the ranks and face the lined-up schoolmates.
So, no surprise that when our Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, told me to stay after classes and go to the Principal’s Office, my heart sank… In that sustained state—the heart sunk and the spleen contracted—I gave the high door of his office a meek knock, and stepped in followed by partly puzzled, yet mostly farewell, glances from Kuba and Skully… Bad luck about your karma, pal, see you in some thereafter life, maybe…
In the long and narrow office room of one window at its far end, Pyotr Ivanovich sat at his desk put in profile to the door and hardly reaching up to his waist. Slight motion of his chin sent me to get seated on one of the chairs lined-up alongside the wall opposite his desk.
Uneasily, I obeyed and he picked up a thin copybook from his desk, opened it and froze in a suspensive silence boring the pages with his fixed look. Occasionally, an irate twitch wrung his thick, clear-cut, lips.
“It is your essay on Russian literature,” announced he at last, “And you’re writing here that in summertime the sky is not as blue, as in fall.”
He consulted the copybook and read the line up, “In summer it looks as if sprinkled with dust at the edges… Hmm… Where could you have ever seen such a sky?”
I recognized the incomplete quotation from the opening sentence in my essay on free subject 'I am sitting by the window and thinking…' which was our home assignment the week before.
“In Nezhyn Street,” answered I.
He began to drive it home to me, that it absolutely didn’t matter – be it Nezhyn Street, or Professions Street, or Depot Street, but the sky always remained the same, both in the center and along its edges. And the blue was always blue, it stayed as blue in summer as it did in fall because blue was always blue.
At my timorous attempt to maintain a slightly different view on the sky blueness, he once again rolled out his weighty arguments and I surrendered.
“Yes, the same,” said I.
“That’s good. Now, we've agreed that this here sentence of yours is wrong.”
And in the same unalterable manner, we proceeded to agree about the wrongness of my views. With stolid ponderosity, he shattered each and every sentence in my essay to pieces, one by one, and, after a short, forlorn, resistance, I gave in and surrendered them, one after another.
From the left bottom corner in the window, thin iron bars fanned up diagonally, the walls squeezed the high ceiling of the corridor-like office to narrow its span, the heavy desk towered over the disciplined row of the lined-up chairs, the bulging sphere of Principal’s skull hovered over the desk with his crosswise hair wisps unable to hide the bald and only clinging to it like the cobweb over a still globe in the locked storeroom of School House Manager…
And I recanted, line by line, from the beginning to the essay’s end, each and every word that seemed so true and right to me when writing them. Yes, Pyotr Ivanovich, you’re right, I was completely wrong…
I was wrong refusing to use the template suggested by the teacher to start the essay smoothly: “Walking down the street, I heard schoolchildren arguing about Tatyana Larina from the immortal poem by Pushkin and, when already home, I got seated by the window and started to think once again about Tatyana, analyzing her social background and her love to Russian nature…”
Yes, it’s a completely wrong statement that schoolchildren would rather discuss motorcycles, karate, and fishing but not Tatyana Larina’s characteristic features. That’s absolutely thoughtless and erroneous…
When I agreed with him on all the points, he handed me the copybook and said that I could go, yet I should think it over again.
I went out to the empty school. From the entrance door came clangs of tin pails against the iron sinks and the swish of water from the taps filling the pails—the janitors had already started washing the floors. I numbly went by those 5 taps without looking at my reflection passing thru 5 mirrors above the sinks.
From the tall brick porch, I descended with a dizzy feeling that I was not myself, and not sure of now what, and how, and whereto. Probably, Galileo had the same odd feeling right after betrayal of his discovery.
At the gate, I stopped and opened my copybook. Underneath the essay there was put a fractional mark, the denominator (content evaluation) was blank, and the divisor (grammar evaluation) – 4. Below the incomplete mark, in the same red ink, Zoya Ilyinichna turned out, in that diligently pretty handwriting of hers, four pages of her own essay that I was wrong and belied the Soviet youth. I should have recollected the winged words from the novel How the Steel was Tempered, as well as the heroes of Krasnodon underground resistance, and the heroes of the Red Army…
(…from that time on, I wrote following the templates, the “berserk” blogger of XIX century Belinsky didn’t become out of me, nipped in the bud.
How to explain so close attention of the teaching stuff at School 13 to my incipient quill check?
Well, their generation grew up under the puttering of “black raven” vehicles’ engines awaiting in the dark for another bunch of arrested “people’s enemies” so they chose to preemptively react, just in case…)
~ ~ ~
Not every Konotop school could boast of a room so properly equipped for the classes in Physics as that at School 13. The blue blinds hung from the iron rings running along the string-cables fixed over the windows. They were pulled together before demonstrating educational films on this or that subject in the curriculum. But there was no screen – the films were projected onto the large square of frosted glass frame in the wall above the blackboard, like, a 2 m x 2 m TV for you.
The film projector itself was located in the back room behind the wall with that frame. Besides the aforesaid projector and round tin cans with the films, the room was furnished with lots of shelves to keep all kinds of lenses, tripods, rheostats, weighs and other untold treasures in boxes, caskets, cases to be used for staging various experiments from the textbooks on Physics and Chemistry. And on a separate stool, there also stood the gray trunk-like tape recorder “Saturn” loaded with the tape on two white reels.
The film projectionist and keeper of all the hoard was Teacher of Physics, Emil Grigoryevich Binkin, a calm handsome man of about thirty, with his eyebrows slightly twitched up his straight forehead to meet the curly short wisps of black hair, well matching the swarthy skin in his face. During the breaks, he stacked and reshuffled the things amassed in the treasury, while softly whistling all kinds of melodies, so clearly and subtly, without the slightest clam.
I had a wary attitude towards him. First, for terminating my unauthorized reading at his Physics lessons…
Normally, each day I smuggled to school a book from the Club library and at the lessons the hinged part in the desktop was flipped over to open the book placed upon the inner shelf-receptacle for a schoolbag and – full ahead, Captain Blood! Let’s board the bastards!
Teachers were also happy to have so quiet a boy in the class, no trouble at all. Still, some of them made occasional attempts at breaking the equilibrium of the serene co-existence because I obviously was busy with anything but their lesson.
“Ogoltsoff! What have I just said?”
But even when engulfed by adventures in a different, Antarctic-Tropical-Martian, world, I did not cut the ties with the surrounding school nuts and bolts completely. Some tiny buoy at the edge of my consciousness kept still receiving, in a form of muffled background, the concurrent sounds in the classroom.
“Ogoltsoff!”
Aha, it’s time to come up to the surface… The memory rewinds the recording of background for some half-minute back.
“You, Alla Iosifovna, have just said that ‘read’ is an irregular verb.”
“Get seated!!”
And then at the Class Parents Meeting, she would complain to Mother, “I do see that he’s busy with something miles away from the lesson it’s only that I can’t run him down.”
Binkin had no problems with running me down. He did not demand to repeat anything, he asked questions instead, “So, what conclusion do we come here to? Ogoltsoff?”
And that’s where no mechanical rewind of the previously registered background could come to the rescue. How to present conclusions from you didn’t know what, especially when in sight of the dark ironic eyes above the thin rim of his glasses? He was killing with his rock-solid calmness and seemed to know exactly what page the book for bootleg reading was open at. So I had to sometimes skim the Physics textbook at home and stray-reading at school was rescheduled to fill Chemistry and Algebra classes. No, I couldn’t brush Binkin off.
Only once I did come to grapples with him on a thermodynamics issue when he asked whether the temperature of the boiled potato and the soup around it was the same. I stated that, no, it’s different.
“Alas, but the laws of Physics confirm it’s the same in both.”
“Well, yesterday, I ate soup for the midday meal and it was fine, but then I bit thru a potato in the soup and burned my tongue. As a scorched victim, I plea the Physics to revise their law-enforcement policy among unruly potatoes.”
The supportive solidarity giggles from the classmates mingled with bell in its deafening uproar of a ring for the break…
That is why I was so astounded when our Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, announced that on Sunday, at 11 o’clock, I should be at School 11 for the City Physics Olympiad…
It was a sunny Sunday morning when I went out of Nezhyn Street to the tramway stop by our school to wait for a streetcar because the prestigious School 11 was on the other side of the Under-Overpass, halfway between our tram terminal and the Railway Station.
The Settlement red streetcar with its round, kinda clown’s nose, lamp beneath the driver cab windshield clanged up to the stop. Under the nose-lamp, there was the inventory number of the car – 33.
Fully aware that all that was a pure nonsense and stupid superstition, I, nonetheless, did not feel like letting such an opportunity pass by, to wit, when you happened to come across a double digit, like, 22 or 77 and so forth, in a car license plate, or in the number printed on your movie ticket, or on the ticket handed to you by a streetcar conductor, you were in luck, dead sure. Just don't omit secure it by balling your fist and pronouncing the inaudible incantation, “The luck is mine. Full-stop!” Which I did.
