Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The dream lasted for two weeks, and then it began to wither. Problems of growing magnitude cropped up in the way of bringing it to life. Well, suppose we’d made a deal with the watchman in the Pine forest on the Seim river. Then how to move a heavy log from the forest to the river? Dragging it for half-kilometer? But when constructing a raft, you needed more than a log or two. Eventually, I ran into a thought which shattered the dream irreparably, into fine useless shreds. Because I remembered that on the Dnieper, following the Lenin’s GOERLO plan, they had built several hydro-electric power stations whose dams across the river put raft navigation out of question. Dismantle the raft and drag it, log by log, to bypass each dam? Damn!. I did not tell my friends about the incompatibility of the advanced electrification with our beautiful dream and simply stopped discussing it with them…
Volodya Gourevitch made another fiery speech and declared it was time to annul the hegemony of School 11 at the city Ballroom Dancing Competitions. At the first training of the group of ballroom dances, there were formed five pairs of willing dancers from both eighth grades. Volodya Gourevitch demonstrated us waltzing in the ballroom style, after which he played his button-accordion for us to dance.
Skully dropped out at once without any explanation except for he just did not want to. Kuba and I lasted longer, but very soon the group of prospective hegemony-busters disintegrated. And really what’s the point in going on, if my partner, Natasha Grigorenko, after finishing the eighth grade was moving to School 12 whose Math and Physics specialization boosted the chances of its students for entering some Institute on graduating?.
End May, Kuba and I had a bike ride to the Bay Beach on the Seim river to open the swimming season. It turned out that twelve kilometers of riding a bike by the even path alongside the railway embankment, was not an overly exhausting exercise…
On the beach, there was not a single soul except for us and our bikes dropped on the sand. And the water was still too chilly, but we took a swim all the same. Then from the nearby bushes there droned the buzzing swarms of mosquitoes who hungrily stung us from all the sides and very badly too. Probably, we had just fallen out of the habit during the winter. To get rid of the blood-suckers, we tried burying ourselves in the sand, but the sand was also too cold and didn’t protect from the bites of those flying cannibals. Our crazy cries echoed in the empty beach, and then we had another swim and rode back to Konotop. We didn’t know yet that life, actually, is a series of losses, but felt that from that beach our ways parted…
~ ~ ~
Yes, that year School 13 was hegemonic in everything except for the ballroom dancing. We even won the city competition at the concluding stage of the All-Union Game 'Zarnitsa'.
On a Sunday, the teams from city schools, six people each, under the supervision of their PE teachers, went on a one day hike to the forest near the Seim. There were all sorts of competitions: for the transportation of an “injured” without a stretcher, for putting up a two-man tent, for skillful bandaging…
My part in the competitions was measuring distances by eye. The umpire asked how many meters were to the tree over there, and then silently recorded the participants’ estimations. I was following changes in his facial expression.
Someone said the distance was 20 meters. The umpire lifted his right eyebrow, the guess seemed an overshoot. To the estimation in 14 meters, the umpire’s mouth dropped its left corner—not enough. So I called out the average—17 meters. After everyone got thru their attempts, the umpire checked his records and announced that the most accurate was my guess – I didn’t need a tape-meter…
However, everything was to be decided in the concluding contest of boiling water on the fire in a ten-liter tin bucket. No favoritism would help out, neither reading of facial expressions.
The start given, the matches stroke matchboxes by the brushwood mounds readied for bonfires. Dense white smoke gave way to crackling flames—it’s time to hang the bucket over the fire and feed the firewood to it; the drier, the better.
The red tongues of fire fluttered unsteadily under the bucket, licking its tin, painting it black with soot. The bastard of a wind! So much of flames driven away from under the bucket… The team of School 12, trying to control the situation, held a blanket in their hands, sort of a screen to block the wind, prevent its playing with the fire. But we? Our PE teacher Ivan Ivanovich, a wartime soldier and an experienced fisherman, scornfully waved aside their smartness. That’s all bullshit! Get more brushwood, the drier and smaller, the better. Put it over that side!
No textbook presented me with a clearer and more memorable idea of water-boiling stages. Heating; light steam over the water; formation of tiny bubbles on the vessel walls; the bubbles float up forming agitated foam and, at last, the water in the bucket starts to roll, jump and splash, it gushes the white steam up.
The umpire clicks his stopwatch. Hooray! We are the first!. And School 12 still about their bucket ogling the bubbles on the tin walls…
The competition over, the teams boarded the buses. Except for those who wished to spend the night in two large tents, and in the morning the bus would come to take them back to Konotop…
At twilight, I left the glade with the tents and went deeper into the forest. In general, it was the same as at the Object, only more deciduous than coniferous. Casting an appraising look around, I took a leak. Suddenly, some part of the forest next to me came into motion separating from the picture of stillness in the late evening woods. What’s happening?
The eye, perplexed at the unaccustomed sight reported nothing to the stunned mind until the thing little by little assumed a certain form and consistency… Wow! That’s a moose! What a whopper! And it had been standing so nigh… Looking after the giant disappearing among the trees, I thought it was not in vain that I did stay for the night.
At night I regretted my staying there. Because of inexperience and unbridled individualism, I had lain down by the canvas wall of the tent, becoming the last in the line of guys preparing for the night. The night chillness woke me up an hour later and forced to press my back against the last but one guy in our sleeping group to feel at least a drop of warmth.
In the small hours, chilled down to the point of freezing, I got out of the tent when the night darkness hardly started to turn gray. The ashes of the fire next to the tents were dead, but a couple of youths still sat near it—a girl and a boy. Probably, being foolish like me, they had tried sleeping at the edges and not in the midst of the group in their tent…
No bus came after us. Instead, a “goat”-Willys with a canvas top drove into the glade, and we were told there had happened some pickle. The collapsed tents and four girls filled all the room there was in the vehicle, and the rest had to go to the city on foot, carrying the 2 tent stocks that also needed transportation to the House of Pioneers, yet did not fit into the “goat”.
It turned out that twelve kilometers on foot were a damn long distance, especially when dragging along a wooden tent stock even if not too heavy.
The guys from School 12 soon disappeared from view together with their stock, and we lagged diminishing in numbers because some people went ahead and we never caught up with them, neither saw them that day.
When we reached a streetcar stop in the city outskirts there remained only three of us: I, my classmate Sasha Skosar, and the smooth stock of pinewood coated with green paint.
(…Oboy! We got bone-tired. I remember that stunned by fatigue we were not up to chewing ham when reached the streetcar stop nearby the Tram Depot, which memory leaves me indifferent. Perhaps, any kind of sentiment got dulled by multiple repetitions of that same state in my following life. However, the picture of a moose dissolving in the twilight among the trees, I can vividly see even now and it brings a little smile to my lips – hey, Mr. Whopper, pass my best to Bambi!..)
~ ~ ~
In spring Father switched his workplace. He left his job of a locksmith at Car Repair Shop Floor of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant and moved over to Shop Floor 19 at the Konotop Electro-Mechanical Plant, aka KEMZ, aka the “Red Metallurgist” Plant, to embrace the same position there.
The salary of workers at KEMZ was a trifle higher. The trifle’s exact size though I didn’t know, such matters never interested me because it’s Father and Mother who were in charge of getting money, after all. I had cares of my own being up to my chin in CJR, and Club, and all sorts of Groups, not to mention the books non-stop exchanged at the library. Well, kerosene and water fetching were also my responsibility, but if they needed something from the Nezhyn Store, let them send Natasha or Sasha…
Besides his salary, Father earned some side money by repairing TV sets considered hopeless cases even by the specialists at the TV Repair Atelier. About once a month, coming from work, he would collect his pot-bellied satchel of green leatherette with his multimeter tester, soldering iron, some spare vacuum-tubes, and other necessary things before leaving till late at night. Then he’d come back, sozzled pleasantly, and hand Mother a crushed three rubles of earnings. To parry her loud rhetoric disparaging his shameful alcoholic propensity, he reiterated one and the same, unbeatable clue, “Was my drink on you?” Probably, Mother’s eagerness to upgrade his moral standards took roots in her suspicion of 2 more rubles stashed away by Father, I don't know, I've never been keen on monetary matters…
Sometimes, the procedure lasted for two evenings. If so, on the first one, Father came back home sober with neither money nor his satchel left at the client’s khutta until resolving the complicated case. The most critical ones were delivered to our khutta. Father put the dead box on the desk under the only window in the room, where he freed it of its case transferred then out of way onto the wardrobe, so that the desktop held now just the box’s entrails—the electronic tube within the skeleton of aluminum panels with the thick growth of divers radio vacuum-tubes. He would turn it over and over, checking from all sides, muttering, “Well, so what’s that that you want then? Eh, sweetheart?”
In the dead of night, I would be waked by sharp hissing—Father, in the niggardly light from the desk lamp, had brought bouncing white stripes to flick across the tube screen. “So, that’s why you couldn't shoot, girlie! Not loaded you were!”
Then, for a couple of days, we watched the repaired TV because its screen was wider than that of ours until the owner came to take back home the box he’d almost crossed out from his life. So, it’s not in vain that Father made the filings of those The Radio magazines…
Mother also wanted to change her job but couldn’t find any. It was Father who helped her to get a job at KEMZ. He repaired the TV of Personnel Manager there, and when asked about the charge, Father answered he did not want money, let his wife be given a job at the plant. Personnel Manager replied, “No problem, bring her.”
At first, Mother could not believe it, because six months before that same Personal Manager flatly turned her down saying there were no prospects of any jobs there.
When the parents came together, Personal Manager suggested Mother apply for a presser at Pressing Shop Floor. Though they worked in shifts there, the salary depended on the production output, and no one took home less than a hundred rubles. While Mother went to his secretary to fill the application form, Personal Manager laughed and told Father that he remembered her, but the previous time he thought she was pregnant. Women in a family way were not supposed to be given a job, after a month of working they'd get a year of paid maternity leave. Personal Manager wouldn’t be petted for admitting the pregnant but, as it turned out, so was her bodily structure.
That way Mother became a presser at KEMZ. Her job there was filling all kinds of molds with special powders for melting by the heating press to transform them into this or that spare part of plastic. She worked two shifts—a week from eight to five, the following one from five to half to twelve, because of the shortened break for meal.
In summer the press radiated infernal heat, and the molds were awfully heavy all year round, replacing them on the press was a strenuous job. Late at night, the Konotop streetcars ran all too rarely, it took long waits to get from KEMZ to the Under-Overpass after the evening shift. But worse of all was pressing things of the glass wool. The fine glass dust made its way thru the protective robe giving unbearable itch all over the body and even the after-shift shower did not really help.
Yet, as a silver lining to that cloud, both in our khutta and in the yard there appeared a whole bunch of different boxes and thingamabobs made of plastic of different colors because Mother brought home the defectively pressed spare parts or those dented at pulling out from their molds. So what if that one had a chink in the corner? Look, what a classy modern ashtray it makes!. Even Zhoolka got a nice ribbed basin for drinking water… All that because “The Red Metallurgist” production was supposed for all kinds of units and safety systems in the mining industry.
“Mom,” asked I, seemingly under the impression from some of the nihilist-authors, “What’s the meaning in your life? Why do you live at all?”
“Why?” answered Mother, “To see how you grow up and become happy.”
And I shut up because at times I had brains enough not to be too clever…
~ ~ ~
The changes were taking place not only in our part of the khutta. One of the grannies-sisters from the Duzenko’s part returned to her village, and the other moved to her daughter’s, somewhere in the five-story blocks of the Zelenchuk neighborhood, so that they could rent her khutta. A single mother, Anna Sayenko, together with her daughter Valentina moved in as the lodgers.
Valentina was a year older than me but didn’t look that because of being short, red-haired, and skinny. Her nose was pretty long though. In the evenings, she came out to play cards with the 3 of us, the younger and me, on the wide bench under the window overlooking the 2 stairs of their porch way. A very comfortable bench it was, you could safely lean your back against the adobe-plastered wall of the khutta coated with ancient whitewash which left no traces.
During the game, taking advantage of the gathering twilight, I touched Valentina’s shoulder with mine. So soft it was… And everything began to swim… She mostly withdrew, but sometimes not immediately which made my pulse throb quicker, louder, and hotter. But then she stopped coming out for the game. Probably, because of my pressurizing her shoulder too tight…
From the Duzenko’s son-in-law, Father bought the smaller of the 2 sections left by the geezer in the common shed. It was the lean-to on the left, next to the Turkov's fence. Once upon a time, they kept a pig there and, to make it warmer, plastered its outside walls with cob.
Father replaced the Ruberoid roofing felt with a tin roof, though not of new tin, of course. Watching how dexterously he knocked his mallet interlocking the panels of tin, I was amazed at how many skills he had, and also tools for each particular job. Take those tin-cutting scissors, for example, nothing of the kind you could find at stores. No wonder that Skully, whenever in need of a tool, popped up in our khutta, “Uncle Kolya, gimme the hand-drill.” “Uncle Kolya, may I borrow a needle file for a while?”
In the wall opposite the entrance to the acquired section, Father inserted a hinged glazed frame like that in the veranda. The electric wiring was run from our part in the shed, which was the section next to it.
Uncle Tolik applied at his workplace for waste crates, in which chopper spare parts were brought to the RepBase. Those crates were remodeled into the flooring shields. Thus, the lean-to became Father’s workshop equipped with a workbench and vice and everything needed. And the space by the wall, where the sloped roof did not allow standing at your full height, became the stable for Uncle Tolik’s “Jawa”.
With the motorbike moved from our old section in the shed, it grew roomier, even though the remaining crate planks were stacked under its gable-roof.
As usual in summertime, the leaves of the door between the kitchen and the room were taken out of the khutta because shutting the door in hot season left there no air for breathing, and those leaves were placed upon the planks beneath the shed roof.
A heap of insignificant, unnecessary details, eh? Yet, all those moves had a tremendous effect because when giving it a proper thought, you’ll find a way for cardinal improvements… And now, with a mattress placed upon the door leaves, the shed section became my summer dacha.
The bed-upon-the-door was about at the same level as the upper sleeping bunk in a train car compartment, yet wider. On the nearby wall, Father fixed a sliding lamp with a tin shade, and I could read at night as long as I chose. Besides, I equipped my dacha with a small radio receiver “Meridian” presented to Father by a customer delighted by the resurrection of his TV. The generous gift, of course, was not working, yet in a couple of weeks, Father found the necessary spare parts and my place became the second to none. You could read whenever you wanted and, for a change, listen to the radio. And, most importantly, no one around to start carping, “When will you turn off this light already?!” or, “Enough of that hurdy-gurdy!”
So, in that elevated position, all alone, was lying I next to the cone of the light shed over the pages in an open book till midnight and past it in the serenity of summer night. The dog barking in the yards of khuttas on the nearby streets did not count because it was just part of it.
One of them would start for another to snap up, and then still another continued the chain reaction of barking that floated far and wide over the Settlement. Only our Zhoolka hardly ever took part in their concerts, having grown too old and lazy. And—just a thought—what if you put together all the dog barking, adding even that beyond your hearing, eh? I mean, now the Settlement dogs had calmed down for a stretch, yet the dogs in Podlipnoye kicked up a fit of barking rising and flowing on the night air and so on and on, over into the next regions, countries, and continents. It turns out then that, as a whole, dog barking would, probably, never subside on the Earth, right?. And that’s what they call the Planet of Humans!.
The best time for turning the receiver on was past midnight. Firstly, it’s when they broadcast “The Concert After Midnight” in which there was not only aria's by Georg Ots but Din Reed's hits too. The concert was followed by another one – “For Those in the Sea”—from 1 till 2 o’clock—meant for the sailors of merchant ships and fishing trawlers. That’s when they put real rock’n’roll on air. This was understandable though because round the clock transmission of Russian songs sung by Lyoudmilla Zykina and Josef Kobson were not enough to make happy the sailors who had seen the life overseas. And from about 4 till almost 6, there was jazz. Just two-three musicians: a piano, a double bass, and a drummer, but what music they made! “And now listen to the number called ‘The Spring Mood’, please…”, and there followed such a number – wow! Best of the best… Well, and 6 o’clock was signaled by the anthem of the Soviet Union after which the everyday “Mayak The All-Union Radio Station” poured out its everyday hurdy-gurdy till next midnight…
Once I did not sleep all night long, because at dawn I had to raid the outskirts by the Swamp foraging for our 2 rabbits and bring as much hay as my bike could carry from those stacks along the Grove edge. The rabbits were given by Skully, who kept a lot of them in 4 or 5 cages, and Father told me to procure food for the presented pair.
And, after the raid, I thought that the day had already begun, and why not to find out for how long I could go without sleep and somewhere around noon, when I was playing chess with Sehryoga Chun on the porch of their khutta, next to the water pump, I felt that the sounds of talking came to me as if from afar or, like thru some woolen wall, and that I couldn’t follow what exactly they were telling me. However, I still managed to somehow find my dacha…compartment up…sleeping bunk in…section the…
When I got up it was daylight around—already or still? I went to the kitchen in our khutta. The cuckoo clock on the wall wagged the pendulum and showed half-past five and in the tear-off calendar was the new day date. So, my sleep lasted longer than 24-hours?!.
Everyone laughed and said, “Phew! That’s a champion sleeper!” Then it turned out that it was Uncle Tolik’s prank to tear off an extra page in the calendar, while I was sleeping… I mean, them those rabbits also did not stay with us for long…
~ ~ ~
On that Sunday, I once again went to the Seim by bike, but already alone. The familiar road shot past much faster under the spokes carrying nothing but my weight because Sasha and Natasha were also coming to the Bay Beach by 2:10 local train, bringing a snack for me.
How could I know that after cycling and swimming the appetite breaks fiercely loose? By noon my stomach fell in, I ground my teeth and looked away from family groups sitting on their blankets around the delicacies they brought along. How long was it to wait yet? And I pricked up my ears when from different parts of the beach different receivers tuned to the one and only “Mayak The All-Union Radio Station” announced what exact time it would be after the sixth sounding of “peee!”
At last, 2:10 to Khutor Mikhaylovsky rumbled over the bridge across the Seim. Some 10 minutes later, the first groups of the arrived folks appeared from the distant Pine grove across the field. However, neither in the first wave of newly arrived nor in the following, my sister-'n'-brother never popped up. What the heck?!. Hadn’t we arranged that I would wait for them on the beach? Oh, I’d wolf a bull down, yes, I would, right away.
Then Sasha Plaksin, who lived in Gogol Street opposite the water pump, came up to me to say that Natasha told him to tell me that they would not come because we were going to the Uncle Vadya’s to celebrate his birthday and I had to come straight there.
“Was that all? Nothing else?”
“No.”
Well, that’s also right – why stuffing up your stomach before a birthday party? And I started back to Konotop with my stomach stuck to my backbone… The familiar road no longer seemed to be short. The pedals grew heavy and I did not sprint anymore but wearily turned them under the cheerless song of robbers in the “Morozko” movie, circling creakily in my mind:
" Oh! How hungry we are!.
Oh! How awfully cold!.”
The forest was over, the path along the railway embankment also ended, and there still remained about half of the way ahead. Never before had I really realized the meaning of “I wanna eat!”.
When the big billboard “Welcome to Konotop!” appeared at the road bend, I felt that I could go no farther and turned into a grassy ditch stretching towards the nearby windbreak belt. And along the whole ditch, there was not a single blade of any edible grass, which ages ago we showed each other at the Object…nothing but sparysh and equally inedible dandelions…and those who-knows-whats, with uselessly dry shoots… I chewed the softer part pulled from inside the shoot. No, that’s not food…okay, just a little bit of rest in the ditch before the final leg to Uncle Vadya’s… I was the very first guest there.
Before that summer day, I always wrinkled my nose at lard, and Mother would usually say, “Maybe, you’d like marzipan on a silver platter, sir?!” And ever after, I knew there’s nothing tastier than a slice of lard on a piece of rye bread.
(…not kosher for someone? Good news! The bigger my share…)
In July, the 3 of us, my sister-'n'-brother and I, went to the military-patriotic camp in the town of Shchors. The cards of admission were offered at our school, almost for free. So I had to put a pioneer necktie on again.
Shchors stood aside from the major railway lines and it took about four hours to get there by a diesel train. There we fell into the rut of usual pioneer camp routine with its “stiff hour” after the midday meal, occasional walks thru the small town for bathing in the narrow river under the railway bridge. Well, at least there was a library there…
Once, there happened an unusual day though. After getting up in the morning, only guys came to the camp canteen, where Senior Pioneer Leader announced that our girls had been kidnapped and, after breakfast, we would go to the rescue.
Wow! The old good game for kids, Cossack-Robbers, revised and bettered pursue following the arrows drawn on the sandy forest paths.
When the forest was over and replaced by the lined-up rows of a Pine plantation, we came up to a crossroads and split into small search parties, that scattered in different directions.
In the company of 2 guys, I went to the right. The road returned to the forest edge and eventually led to a lonely hut enclosed within a knee-tall palisade. Probably, the Forester’s dwelling.
Not a single breathing creature in the whole yard, not even a dog. Overpowering silence surrounded a readied coffin put on the ground with its lid leaning against the tree by the low plank-fence.
Now, you don’t seem to have much of a choice after Grandma Martha’s regular reading of The Russian Epic Tales to you, right? Of course, I stretched inside the coffin and asked the guys to cover me with the lid, just as hero Svyatogor asked his younger partner, hero Ilya of Murom, and they concurred.
I lay for a while in the narrow darkness not scary at all, filled with the pleasant smell of fresh shavings. Then I wanted to move the lid off, but it did not yield to my pushes, supposedly, fixed by the weight of the guys who sat upon it restraining their happy giggles.
I did not scream nor knocked against the lid. Familiar with the proceedings, I knew that any scream or shriek would only ring the coffin with an additional iron hoop, just like the Ilya’s smiting sword was adding them around the box which trapped Svyatogor. Silently, I waited in the darkness and then without any effort moved the lid aside into the desolate quietude of the deserted yard. No wonder the brace of those nincompoops felt spooky straddling the ominously silent coffin and fled…
When I returned to the crossroads, everyone was already there and the kidnapped girls too, because it was time to go back to the camp for the midday meal…
I did not stay there until the end of camp shift though because Senior Pioneer Leader got a telephone call from the Konotop City Komsomol Committee informing her that I had to go to the Camp for the Komsomol Activists Training in the regional center, the city of Sumy.
On the last night before my departure, some local Shchorsian guys came to the camp to give me a beating. They even showed up in the bedroom ward windows to clarify with their gestures that I was a dead man already. Probably, I had flashed with an arrogant retort to one of them when bathing in the river under the bridge, or else some of the local girls, who also enjoyed the camp shift, had complained to them of my being too snobbish. The guys did not climb in though because of Senior Pioneer Leader’s presence. Later, she escorted me to the barrack of the platoon with my sister and brother to say goodbye before leaving early the next morning…
~ ~ ~
At the training camp for Komsomol activists in Sumy, we, 4 guys from Konotop, lived in a tent with 4 iron beds on the sand floor, and 2 of our compatriot-girls shared one of the bedrooms in the long barrack-like building nearby.
Besides that building, there was also a separate canteen and an open stage in front of rows of benches bounded by immature but already half-dead, cob-webbed Pine trees.
Each morning we sat on those benches, taking notes of the lectures read to us – I am damned if I remember what about. And in the afternoon we idly lay upon the cloth blankets over our beds in the tent, which was just a tent with no shows of the magic shadow theater on any of its walls.
(…we do loose worlds when growing up…)
I was the youngest in the Konotop group and just listened when the elder guys gave out their chin music about in what way the latest make of Volga was better than the out-modish Pobeda, and how to rightly break a motorcycle in, as well as about a guy in their neighborhood who got married at the age of 18. Imagine that moron! Married, when he still should be playing football with the guys in the yard…
Stretched on my bed, I had nothing to add to their confident discussions and just watched the Baturin highway dashing under by my “Jawa” taken there for the maiden ride or saw the grassy field by the garbage enclosure at the Object and us, ball-chasing kids, with our vain shrieks, “Here! Pass to me!” And I inwardly scoffed, recollecting ludicrous childish tales we told, in turn, each other about a hero footballer and the red band on his right knee because he was forbidden to kick the ball with it and umpires followed him closely otherwise goal posts were smashed to splinters by his cannonball hits and goalkeepers taken away on the stretcher.
Nah, sharing such prattle wouldn’t be welcome in the dampish cave of the tent with Komsomol activists dropped around over their beds…
One guy from our tent could play the guitar which he borrowed from somewhere in the long low barrack building. All in all, his repertoire comprised just 2 songs: a ballad about a city the road to which you’d hardly ever find, and people there were straightforward bringing up whatever they had on their minds, and they preferred their lovers’ hugs to the comfort of apartments, followed by a lively rock about skeletons walking in a file after enjoying some good stuff.
