Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
However, even with so limited number of songs, he always had an audience; the guitar strumming attracted guys from the nearby tents and the girls from their bedrooms in the long building.
I asked him to teach me guitar playing and he showed me the 2 chords he knew and how to beat out the rhythm of „eight“. Deep furrows from the guitar strings disfigured my left-hand finger pads. It hurt, but I still wanted to learn it so much…
In the CJR game against the team from the Sumy group we lost, but not in the contest of greetings for which I didn’t plagiarize a single line from anywhere. We acted aliens who had lost their way.
“It was Mars we were going to!
Yeah-yeah!
It is you we’ve come to!
Yeah-yeah!..”
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ The Youth
After that summer many of my classmates were not around anymore, they moved or went to different technical and vocational schools. Kuba entered the Odessa Sea School, Volodya Sherudillo became a student at the Konotop Vocational School 4, aka GPTU-4, which institution among Konotopers bore the unofficial name of "Seminary" turning its disciples into "the seminarians". Skully endeavored to enter some Mining School in Donetsk but eventually landed in the Konotop Railway Transportation College.
The parallel class also suffered heavy losses and, even though one of their girls bore a baby at the vacations, leftovers of 8 “A” and 8 “B” were, nonetheless, unified into the single ninth grade…
On the first school day, after the ceremonial line-up concluded by the traditionally endless bell signaling the start of the first lesson in the academic year, our classroom was entered by Valera Parasyuk, handled Quak. He was a blonde tenth-grader running after some girl from the former parallel and popped up on the pretext of a casual visit just, like, to hello the guys.
The Ukrainian Language teacher, Fedosya Yakovlevna, handled Feska, with the straight parting in her colorless hair braided into a pitiful crown, came the second having ceded Quak about half-minute. Yet, full of sporting spirit, she indicated the door and ordered him to leave the classroom. Without much a-do Quak satisfied her demand, yet chose another, his own, way; he climbed onto the windowsill and departed in a jump off into the schoolyard. His black, well-polished, shoes flashed in the flight, a kinda bright goodbye.
Not for nothing the Chemistry teacher, Tatyana Fyodorovna, handled Hexabenzyl, was in the habit of bringing those his shoes to our attention, "If a guy's shoes shine that means he's looking after himself. Follow the example of Parasyuk whose shoes are always polished!"
So, Fedosya Yakovlevna, aka Feska, closed the window left open by Valera Parasyuk, aka Quak, and called the class to pay no attention to his antics because he didn't belong here anymore but transferred already to School 14 (which was the other of two schools in the Settlement) as long as he dwelt next to the mentioned school location and from now on he was the resident headache for teachers over there…
The best way to learn the worth of new acquaintances and getting rubbed along with each other is doing some mutual job… After a week of classes, the senior grades at our school were instructed to report present in the schoolyard on Sunday morning equipped with buckets because we were going to help the kolkhoz in the Podlipnoye village with harvesting their crop.
The day was glorious – a warm September day enjoying the bright sun in the blue sky. The clamorous column of students reached the edge of a cornfield and we were tutored on the technique of harvesting at hand. Tear the ear off the stem, shuck and drop it in your bucket. When the bucket’s filled up, take it to the common cob of ears and pour your share into it. The entirety of so simple actions becomes the process of "patronage assistance to a collective farm".
Each patronizer was put before a row of corn stalks to go along and harvest the ears on their way to the other end of the field. And off we went in one united push, mingling the ear dubs at tin buckets' bottoms with yells of cheerful juvenile, and the sagacious admonitions by caring teachers, and tangent yet loud bangs of thunderflashes thrown high in the cloudless sky…
It did not take long before I noticed my lagging behind the general progress. So, hauling another filled bucket to the cob, I paid attention that not all the cornrows were fully clear of corn ears. It seemed, the instructors failed to be explicit enough and emphasize that our objective was not collecting all ears in the field, but to select best of the best, the most gorgeous cream of ears, so to say.
Correcting my working practices accordingly, in no time I caught up with the main body of the patronizers, then got ahead, and overtook the avaunt-garde party which now grew to 4 advanced shock-workers.
Being ahead of the common mass of laborers has a number of advantages. First and foremost, you don't need to go back to the common cobs of the harvested corn ears. As soon as your bucket gets filled, you just pour the ears on the ground, becoming the founder of a new cob for pending contribution by those coming later.
A couple of guys from the avaunt-garde party chose the path of least resistance, throwing the ears from their rows in all directions, so as not to bother with shucking them. I did not follow their best practices though because the field edge could already be seen in the distance.
We went out to a fallow field, and for another half-an-hour lay prostrate in the grass, more fatigued by waiting for the general mass to join us than by our super-productive efforts…
In September, the Arkhipenkos moved to Ryaboshapka Street near the RepBase who allotted to a turner of theirs, Uncle Tolik, together with his family an apartment in a five-story block. The mode of life in our khutta turned more convenient because our parents went over to sleep in the kitchen…
Soon after, there appeared a new tenant in the khutta, Grigory Pilluta who had served his ten years for murder, and came back to his home sweet home. The slick forelock of dark hair screened his forehead and shaded the eyes in their steady stare down or aside. Silent and sullen, passed he the khutta’s yard from the wicket to his porch way.
His return from jail did not put end to the Pillutikha's concerts thru the wall. Although one day, passing under their kitchen window, I heard his rude attempt at shutting up her stream of execrations pored against the whitewashed kitchen wall….
In the dead of night, I was wakened by Father looming above me in the scarce light of the desk lamp. Mother stood in the doorway from the kitchen, and Sasha and Natasha looked sleepily out from under their blankets.
Father told me that Pilluta was breaking our entrance door armed with a knife, and I had to climb down out of the room window and bring 2 axes from the workshop in the lean-to. There was no time for dressing up – thru the blackness-filled kitchen there came sounds of heavy blows at the door on the porch, and thick drunken cries addressed to Mother, "Open it, bitch! I'll get your guts out!"
I quickly brought the required tools and together with Father went to guard the door quaking under the blows accompanied by the animal howl of Grigory Pilluta. How long would the rim lock last?
We stood at the ready in our underpants and tank-shirts holding the axes in our hands. "Sehryozha," said Father in a keyed-up voice, "when he breaks in do not hit with the blade, use the butt!" Though scared, I at the same time wanted Pilluta to break in, the sooner the better.
He never did it. In the dark yard sounded Pillutikha's wails and assuaging male voice. It was Yura Plaksin, Grigory Pilluta's childhood chum from the khutta in Gogol Street, opposite the water pump. He led the drunk away with him… We left the axes by the door and went to sleep on.
In the morning, I observed the deep scratches left by knife stabs in the gray paint-coat in the entrance door. Good news it did not happen in winter, with the additional window frames inserted for warmth, those had no hinges and just sealed the whole of the window from inside, so how would I get out to the lean-to, eh? Then Yura Plaksin came on an early visit pleading not to inform the precinct militiaman about the incident…
One of the axes stayed in the veranda for a long time, until Grigory Pilluta moved somewhere in the city from his mother's khutta so as to keep clear from the harm. Stupid indeed of his mother to wind him up, and then run after Yura Plaksin’s assistance, to save the obedient sonny from getting locked up again. Maybe, Grigory’s departure had other reasons as well, how could I know? Another guy's life is a dark abyss for those outside. Later, I sometimes met him in the city but never more in the yard of our khutta…
With the Pillutikha's death, the population in the whole khutta grew drastically because Grigory sold his parental home to some newcomers from Siberia.
That fact did not mean at all that they were Siberians themselves. You could go there from any Republic, just get recruited for work and – full ahead. The so-called "chasing the long ruble" was mainly steered in that direction because salaries in the uninhabited Taiga places were much higher. Folks were coming back with their suitcases packed with money to the gills, so were the rumors. If they could manage it, of course, I mean to return at all. "The longer the ruble, the shorter the life-span" became a popular byword and not for nothing, you know.
One guy from the Settlement recruited to a mine beyond the Urals and in just 6 months they sent him back. There, in that mine, he was in charge of the machinery and equipment repair. Something stopped working, they switched the faulty contraption off and he crawled in to see what's up. At that moment the switch was turned on (they had forgotten he was inside or something) and that machinery chopped him so finely they had to sent his tenderized leftovers back home in a zinc box, kinda here you are, receive your canned sonny, please
In the Ballet Studio by Nina Alexandrovna, he was a leading dancer, such a tall brunette. When performing the Moldovan Jock he jumped higher than others with his legs wide apart in the air to spank the ballet boots by his palms. And the Moldovan waistcoat of black silk with sparkling sequins suited so well his crispy dancing hair…
The newcomers who bought Pilluta's half-khutta had been recruited to Siberia neither from Konotop nor even from Ukraine. They spoke Russian and did not understand many local words. There were 4 of them, 2 childless couples, who split the half-khutta in further even halves. The somewhat older pair dwelt in the khutta next to ours, and the younger ones got the part with 2 additional windows looking into the street. Maybe, that's why they were a little more cheerful than the older pair. Although, in contrast to demised Pillutikha, the elders looked quite friendly too.
Our immediate neighbor, the husband in the senior couple, began to overhaul the brick stove in their kitchen and found a treasure hidden in the chimney. To Sasha and Natasha, as well as to the children from the neighboring khutta of the Turkovs, he distributed the bills of banknotes from his find. Those amazed me by their unheard-of face value. Earlier, the 25-ruble note, with the gypsum bust of Lenin turned in profile, was, in my opinion, the biggest piece of money imaginable, but no! The Turkovs kids played with one-hundred and even five-hundred-ruble banknotes, the size of a handkerchief each, illustrated with antique sculptures and royal portraits in oval frames plus the vignette-like signature of the Finance Minister of the Russian Empire. The currency issued by the Ukrainian Central Rada in the Civil War times was also played, not as picturesque though, but the curls in the signature of Lebid-Yurchik were not inferior to those by the Czarist minister.
By the way, there was a guy in my class whose last name was also Yurchik and by his first one – Sehrguey, like me, only he was taller and when our class lined-up for a PE lesson he stood the second in the rank. Yet, he hardly could be Minister Yurchik’s relative because he lived in Podlipnoye, most likely they were just namesakes…
When Father came from work, the neighbor called him over to demonstrate the box which he found the treasure in, as well as the hollow place inside the chimney where it was hidden. Then Father returned home and standing in the middle of the kitchen mused, "Seems, it was not only funny money there." He once again observed the stack of banknotes on the table and started recollections about his village relative on the maternal side.
Living under the Czarist regime, that fella mastered the skill of printing paper money for which purpose he had a special machine-tool. Life smiled on him until his business failed because of thoughtless impatience. It happened when entertaining his brother on a visit from the city, he bought vodka from their village store. The salesman noticed that the five-ruble note he got for the commodity was leaving blue marks on his fingers – the brothers were so eagerly impatient to celebrate their meeting that the money paint was not allowed to dry up properly.
In short, the printer man got exiled to Siberia and all his property confiscated. And his wife followed him, like those wives to revolutionary Decemberists doing their terms over there.
"That's what love is" said Mother in an attempt at sprinkling a pinch of sentimental spice into the all too earthy story.
"Bullshit!" burst Father. "The smart bitch got it that by the side of so qualified a diddler she even in Siberia would be much better off than home."
He gave out a content chuckle, and I also felt pleased that in my family tree there someplace was sitting a cunning counterfeiter. The fact of all that taking place long ago did not really tell on the satisfaction even though anything from before the Revolution seemed as distant as the harsh old times of epic heroes. But, of course, in the days of Gorynich the Dragon they did not print paper money.
A week later, Father's assumption got confirmed in a roundabout way by the husband in the younger couple (not as cheerful already as before). He shared the news that his friend disappeared in an unknown direction. After quietly quitting the job (his spouse followed the pattern), the older pair left without a goodbye to their neighbor-friends. Friendship is a smashing good thing, but hands off my tobacco, partner!
Soon the younger, noticeably depressed, couple left too. The Pilluta's part of the khutta emptied again and for long…
(…those acquainted with the Soviet legislation wouldn't judge the runaways too harshly, any treasure found in the USSR became the state property minus 25% of its value to the lucky finder. No John Silver would sail near such a close-shaving wind…)
~ ~ ~
Because of getting trained at the regional camp for Komsomol activists, I was elected Head of Komsomol Committee, aka Komsorg, of School 13 and for several days next week I was free from classes. In the commission of 5 other Komsorgs, I had to attend the reporting sessions of Komsomol Committees in the city schools, under the supervision of the Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee. Besides me, among the commission members, there were 2 more trainees from the Sumy camp: the guitar player and one of the girls.
The reporting sessions were killing by their boredom because at every school the very same things were said the very same way in the very same words. After which the Second Secretary invariably demanded from us, the commission members, to take the floor with our critical remarks… The guitar player was good at those stodgy pieces, being used to strum the only two chords he knew…
"Ever keeping aloft and honored their glorious pioneer traditions, the School 13 Komsomol members did their best to contribute their weighty share in the Annual All-School Collecting of Scrap Metal…"
Each autumn, half of the long rectangular schoolyard was divided into the sectors starting from the two-story "Cherevko's school" at the gate up to the workshop building. The sectors were assigned to different classes so that they knew where to dump the scrap metal collected by them.
The classes competed, the piles of rusty stuff grew, the augmentations checked, weighed and registered until one day the schoolyard was entered by a dump truck to move the collection away, usually in a couple of goes. The class winner was awarded the Honor Certificate handed to them at the nearest ceremonial school line-up.
Of course, we hardly ever cared for those certificates. What attracted us was getting together with all of your class and… well, not exactly all of your class, yet at least those who could or were willing to turn up and… A-and with a pair of handcarts rattling their iron wheels against the ragged cobblestones in Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, or creaking wearily along the rest—dust'n'dirt-paved—streets, we ventured into the Settlement in search of scrap metal. Where exactly were we looking for it? It depended. Sometimes a classmate reported a neighbor willing to get rid of a heap of perennial metal layers in the corner of their yard. “God bless you, kids! Drive your handcart in, take all of that away!”
Yet, rusty basins, folding coach-bed springs, and bent nails were a too lightweight stuff to add much of respectability to your grade's scrap heap. Besides, champions for environmental purity were not an ofttimes species in the neighborhood. “So, what's wrong about that trash behind the shed? Rusty thru and thru? But you never know. One of these days it might come handy. A length of wire would nicely fix a fence plank so rotten that nails crash it to pieces. Get along, kids. Go! Go!”
That’s why the newly amalgamated collective of our ninth grade moved for a free search dollying their handcarts along the Plant wall in Professions Street… Like vultures circling in the westerns to locate a prey… At the far end of Plant, where the tracks of the marshaling yard multiplied innumerably, we wheeled around an obviously no man's wheel pair from a railway car. Yet, you couldn't load the multi-ton wheels on a pair of handcarts, otherwise, we'd win at the scrap metal competition in just one go.
On we soared seeking along the railway tracks, to no avail though. But then the guys peeked into a concrete tube section lost in the tall grass alongside the railway to discover a watermelon and a box of grapes.
"Clear as daylight, the station loaders lifted the fruits from some car in a freight train and stashed away for a while." supposed Volodya Sakoon from the former parallel.
We looked around more attentively at the rows of freight trains stilled silently in their tracks, immersed in the torpor of waiting…
Some dude from our party took out a knife to cut the watermelon from the find. Yet, it did not open even when gashed all the way about its equator because of being too big for the knife length. Only when hit against the concrete tube, the watermelon broke up in two, but its core, the so-called "soul", remained in one of the halves. Moistly red, and sugary, stitched with dark brown seeds… Soul… With swiftness never expected from myself, I dealt the sweeping "falcon strike" and by both hands claw-snatched the watermelon's soul. Stunned by my so completely out of the blue deftness, I magnanimously refrained from partaking in the remaining halves. The guys sliced them into handy pieces, while I enjoyed the rindless juice-dripping ball of watermelon flesh from out of my capped palms.
Even the girls couldn’t say “no” to grapes, yet about half of the box we left for the absent loaders who stole them so that they did not feel offended…
An hour later, following the lead from a stray acquaintance, we stroke it real rich on a scrap metal deposit, although at an entirely different spot… In the fence of iron pipes separating Bazaar from the Seminary, aka Vocational School 4, there was a hole thru which we dragged out lots of iron pipe offcuts, long and numerous enough to make a good load for both handcarts.
Next day the House Manager of the Seminary came to our school, identified their pipes in the scrap metal heap collected by our grade, and took them away by a dump truck. He asserted they served as the material for training seminarians in the turners group. However, our Principal, Pyotr Ivanovich, did not even scold us. But then what for? How could you guess the purpose of material dumped into the thicket of nettle? Nonetheless, when giving it a careful thought, you'd always find a good underlying reason for anything. And only my violently swift seizure of the watermelon's soul remained completely inexplicable for me… but it was groovy.
(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys, ups, and downs, all my silly mistakes, and breathtaking insights sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)
~ ~ ~
Unpredictable is the inception of friendship. You go home after school, and there Vitya Cherevko, your new classmate from the former parallel, also walks along Nezhyn Street.
"Oh! How come you're here?"
"Just goin' to Vladya's. He lives in Forge Street."
"Hmm. I'm with you."
Since that day I had two classmate-friends: Chuba, aka Vitya Cherevko, and Vladya, aka Volodya Sakoon…
Vladya hid his acned forehead under the long forelock of brown greasy hair that streamed down from the parting above his right ear. 2 or 3 half-ripe pimples on his cheeks were absolved by the beauty of his gorgeous large eyes sufficient to give heartburn to any cutie.
Chuba's black crispy hair had no parting, and his eyes were pale blue. He had a healthy blush in his cheeks and a finicky sprinkle of freckles over his neat nose.
For hanging out, we gathered on the porch way to Vladya's khutta where he lived with his mother, Galina Petrovna. In fact, it was half-of-khutta comprising a room and a kitchen. A box-table, an iron bed, and the brick stove filled the kitchen to the utmost, nothing else could ever be squeezed in, except for the hooks on the wall by the door to hang coats. In the equally narrow room there stood a wardrobe, a bit wider bed, a table with three chairs pushed under it (otherwise you couldn't pass by) and an up-stand shelf topped with a TV. Both the kitchen and the room had a window in ages long need of paint. The blind wall opposite the windows separated their home from the neighbors' half-khutta.
Galina Petrovna had the job of a nurse at the Plant Kindergarten concealed in the bush between the Plant Park and the road diving into the tunnel of the Under-Overpass. At times, she was paid visits by her cousin. She called him Pencil or Pencilletto, depending on her current mood which, in its turn, depended on whether or not the cousin popped up with a bottle of wine on him. The honorific ‘Pencil’ was saved for officially dry visitations. I wouldn’t hastily rule out his kinship because Vladya’s and his eyes had something common in their look. Vladya's two elder brothers, who looked different from each other, and from Vladya as well, were separately traveling about the Soviet Union in their chase after the long ruble…
Among the guys from both Forge and Smithy Streets Vladya enjoyed well-deserved popularity. And it was not merely for the fact that his two elder brothers had managed to gain proper respect and unquestionable recognition in the eyes of the entire Settlement before they launched on their ‘chase’, and even though certain gleam of their reputation touched Vladya, yet, apart from all that, he had merits of his own. He could drive a fool like no other guy in the neighborhood.
In the Settlement parlance "fool driver" was someone up to fool you by their jive for one or another private purpose, yet mostly for mirthful entertainment. The subjects for such recreational fool-driving could vary widely. Here, for instance, he drove a fool about blocks in Scotland throwing logs in competition, which he told on behalf one of those kilted sportsmen:
"Well, that guy did not get it that I had already made my throw and he caught it square on the pate. That’s when he kicked the bucket. What else would you do under such a predicament, eh?" And Vladya closed one eye while drowsily rolling the other one up under the still half-open eyelid.
Or he shared local news how Kolyan Pevriy, thoroughly well-oiled, took a lamppost for a passer-by. He bullied it for a starter, then went over to extorting a cigarette, but since the held-up lamppost neither talked nor showed proper respect, Kolyan began to kick the shit outta him in earnest…couldn't fell, though…
And one evening, our company on the porch was joined by a guitar borrowed from Vasya Markov, and Vladya sang the song about Count and his daughter Valentina, who fell in love with the page playing the violin so well. That's when and where I got into servile bondage and begged Vladya to teach me too. He replied that he also was learning from Quak to who I'd better turn directly, yet what the use when I did not have a guitar, and he couldn't give me the one he played because it was Vasya's who did not allow to farm it out or let be strummed by anyone except for Vladya…
If you dearly want something, the dream would come true in seconds, plus or minus a day or 2. There appeared a guitar! Vadik Glushchenko, handled Glushcha, from that same Forge Street, sold me his. And with no ripping off at the transaction, down the soundhole, you could read in the sticker inside: "7 rubles 50 kopecks. The Leningrad Factory of Musical Instruments."
The needed sum was almost immediately procured by Mother. True enough, the plastic handle on the third-string peghead was missing, but later Father took off the tuning machine, smuggled it to his work and welded a neat iron rivet in place of the lost one.
Quak gave me a crumpled sheet from a copybook with the invaluable, exhaustive, list and tablature of all the guitar chords in existence: "the small starlet", "the big starlet", "the poker", and "the barre". Just a little more and I would start singing about the Count’s beloved daughter!. But no, I was not allowed that tiny stretch of time. Vladya's brother, Yura, on his way from Syktywkar to Zabaykalsk (or maybe vice versa), brought him a brand new six-string guitar, and I again remained hopelessly behind because on the six-stringed, aka Spanish, guitar there were neither "pokers" nor "starlets". And so I had to cut notches in the nut of my guitar for the six-stringed layout instead of the seven-stringed, aka Russian, one.
Mid-October, the weather was still soft and Galina Petrovna arranged Vladya's birthday party in their khutta’s yard for her son to invite and entertain his classmates in the open air.
The table from the room was taken out into the front garden strip and, with the protective oilcloth stripped off, it turned to be a varnished sliding table long enough to span the stretch between the khutta and the wooden shed with latticed, veranda-like, panes, which in summertime served both a kitchenette and a bedroom.
It was at that celebration table that for the first time in my life I drank wine. What a stunner feeling! The world around got wrapped within the thinnest lacework of translucent—like dragonfly wings—pattern of floral petals passed thru with sheer tiny veins… Beautiful friends sat around me—the best of the best in the worlds—we were engaged in the wittiest conversation and Vladya's mother’s laughter ringed so melodiously while the soft shadow beneath the bush of red currant grew darker, blurrier, and deeper…
With the onset of winter, another of my classmates, Lyouba Serduke, also had a birthday, and those who handed in two rubles to our Class Monitor, Tanya Krasnozhon, came to the khutta of the birthday girl.
Until then, all kinds of bigger parties were arranged exclusively at school, under the supervision of Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna. We gathered there in the evening, drank lemonade brought to the classroom by a couple of mothers, then they left and all the desks were moved into one corner to make room for playing Brook, and the guys from higher grades opened the door and peeped in, but Albina would drive them away with her pedagogic yells.
(…it's a nice feel to hold a girl's hand in yours and pull her along thru the Brook tunnel of paired arms arched above the two of you, unless, of course, the hand you tow behind you is not moist with sweat otherwise, after you two become the concluding part to the tunnel, you’d have to wait until Vera Litviniva free you by pulling in her wake.
Vera’s flat nose is far from being lovely, still, her palms are always dry. She's a nice girl, in general, but Sasha Uniat from the tenth grade is after her in earnest. He's a good calm guy, yet you never can tell because at times even the calmest might turn jealous.
On the whole, it’s better not to look for trouble, especially since Vera’s lips are way too thin…)
In the large living-room of Lyouba's khutta on the floor in the fresh paint-coat of red, there stood a long table under a spiffy white tablecloth cluttered with all kinds of salads, pork jelly, sweetmeat, and lemonade.
When all participants to the celebration gathered, Tanya the Monitor handed the birthday girl the present bought for the collected rubles, Lyouba' parents put their coats on and went to some neighbors to let us have unrestrained fun.
The dudes began iterating to the wide veranda with the glazed lattice to sip on sly the hooch smuggled in by someone of them.
In a small bedroom next to the living room, a cozy disco was started up where the dimly lighted panel of the record player twirling the LP disk of instrumental numbers by The Singing Guitars served the only illumination for the whole room, if not to count the sliver of light that made its way from the corridor thru the gap between the curtains in the doorway pulled closely together.
