Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The hostel manager, or maybe she was just a dormitory attendant in charge of forking out the bed linen in exchange for my passport, turned out an unmistakable racist and didn’t care about hiding her ugly inclinations. I deducted it when 2 young Vietnamese entered her office (or the stockroom), immediately following me and asked her for an oilcloth to cover the table in their room. Her crisp retort was, "No oidcloth for you! You're an oidcloth yourself! Get out of here!"
They timidly left, sad and puny against the background of that robust Ukrainian racist. I wondered silently if she was able to pronounce "oilcloth" in Vietnamese.
However, jumping to conclusions when unaware of all the concurrent circumstances might result in faulty evaluation. That whole scene could very easily have nothing to do with racism. There was no 100 percent guarantee that them those bitchy Vietnamese were not asking for the fifth oilcloth on the same day, or else that it wasn't the fifth pair of Vietnamese demanding an oilcloth from the overworked Ukrainian woman utterly tired of their looking so much alike…
One of my roommates also was an applicant for the English Department, only he had already served in the army. The next day, we went to the University together to attend a pre-examination lecture where he chattered with the lecturer so fluently that I felt myself like at that Regional Physics Olympiad, where all of them understood each other and only I was cutting an odd dolt around.
After the lecture, I went to the dean's office and took back my matriculation papers. I do not remember what exactly lie I told them because it was not easy to confess that I freaked out and surrendered without even trying. On the way to the hostel to collect my passport, there gushed such a rain that at times the trolley had to swim from one stop to another. The rain to wash away the slightest traces… The four-hour trip by the local train to Konotop was spent in desolate silence… No cute chat-companions for scurvy cowards…
In Konotop, any knotty question gets resolved on the fly. Whereto? Of course, same place with the rest of your gaggle. Join the crowd, mate.
Skully was already a third-year student at the Railway Transportation College, above the Under-Overpass tunnel. Vladya and Chuba had submitted their papers for admittance to the same institution. So the question "whereto?" was solved before me, I could only matriculate to the Konotop Railway Transportation College. Even Anatoly Melai was there embracing some vague position of a laboratory assistant, but with the academic year not started yet he was just walking the corridors in blue overalls engaged in wiring, when not busy singing.
As it turned out, Anatoly was an avid fan of The Pesnyary VIA who had recently performed "The Dark Night" in the Kremlin Hall. Imagine the picture, eh? All the top geezers from the Political Bureau of the Central Committee in the first row – Brezhnev, Suslov…er…who else?…Podgorny…And the dudes spread it out in full with the unleashed guitar reverberation!… Plus the vocals, of course! All their numbers are in no less than four-part harmony:
"The dark night's between
Me and you, my beloved one…"
And Anatoly, throwing up his face in the pockmarks left by gone acne, filled the empty corridor with echoes of one or another from those harmony parts. And why not? It's summer and no classes around, even the admittance exams hadn't started yet and, the main factor, he's in his overalls.
"When I go to date you
My bast-shoes keep creaking!."
He promised to put in a word for The Orpheuses applicants, however, only one-third of us was admitted—Chuba and Vladya fell thru and went to work at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant…
Mid-August we made a proposal to the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, which he could not refuse—we would play dances in the Plant Park. For free.
Each of the three parks in the city of Konotop—the Central, the Loony, and the Plant Park—was furnished with a dance-floor. Those dance-floors presented complete replicas of each other: the spherical concha over the band stage abutted the wide circle of concrete guarded by the two-meter tall grating of iron pipes which enclosure had the narrow entrance gate (diametrically opposite the stage) made of the same pipes. Even the paint coat of the gratings was the same gray silver. The only difference was that the paint on the pipes in the Central Park of Recreation had not peeled off so dismally as by two others.
Mother remembered that as a young girl, she attended the Plant Park dance-floor because in summertime there played a brass band. Later, everything ground to a halt and, in the warm season, the young Konotopers began to walk in circles (instead of waltzing) along the alleys in Peace Square shuffling thru the layers of spat out black seeds husk. A circle after a circle…
But then there came that fateful August Sunday to wake the Plant Park’s dance-floor up from the benumbed dormancy. With a clang, collapsed the fetters secured by the rusty iron padlock, and on we hauled across the concrete circle the rubber-wheeled handcart towards the concha-roofed stage.
Normally, that handcart was used by the projectionists for transportation of the cylindrical tin boxes with film reels from Club to the open-air cinema in the Plant Park. However, on that historic Sunday, it bore the tall pile of the cuboid boxes of amps and loudspeakers, like, angular haystack propped by upholding hands.
We started to install and assemble the equipment, switching on, plugging in, checking the guitars with a bang of a chord or 2, picking popular riff over the strings.
A crisp echo bounced back from the squalid two-story apartment block right outside the meter-tall park fence. Along with the echo, there came racing a brood of local small kids and, not daring enter the open gate, bunched up in the alley beyond the palisade of iron pipes.
Now Skully, pompous and self-important, puts his drum-set "kitchen" up, dubs the kick drum with the pedal beater, chinks the hat, clangs the crash.
The ultimate check of the microphone, "One… One-two… One…"
With the dry clicking of sticks against each other, Skully sets the tempo.
One, two. One-two-three-four! Off we go!!
That's how the change of epochs was coming to pass in a singled-out Konotop park…
With the narrow gate unguarded for so long, the kids began to cautiously penetrate into the concrete circle of the dance-floor, yet keeping, just in case, close to the grating except for a couple of neglected toddlers cut loose to frisk happily hither-thither.
Three girls walked in to get seated in a short line on a backless bench by the fence… A young pair entered slowly, seems, belated to occupy the special bench in the grotto of bushes… Another hesitant couple… Welcome, there are lots of benches here…
The groundbreaking night saw no dancing; we, like, played to please ourselves. Then we shipped the equipment and instruments to the summer cinema ticket office on the first floor in the projectionist's booth.
Everything repeated itself on Wednesday. Yes! On Wednesday! We scheduled dances thrice a week: Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
On Saturday, a half-hour before we started, some unusual stir in the air was felt in the Plant Park alleys suddenly filled by too many people sauntering along, to and fro. We decided to wait no longer and climbed on the stage when Vitya Batrak, handled Slave, entered the wide circle of the dance-floor followed by his retinue from Peace Square guys.
The abundant curls of chestnut color poured over the shoulders of his long-sleeved silk shirt the color of the Jolly Roger. The collar, following the suit of the unbuttoned, loosely sweeping cuffs, disclosed his chest in a generous cleavage down to the solar plexus.
When in the center of the dance-floor, Slave kicked up a picturesque discussion with his followers about the wristwatch he wore. The wide strap of artificial leather got unfastened, the watch tossed up in the air, high and fair, to clatter back against the concrete floor. The disputants encircled and craned over —ticking or what?
Meanwhile, a stream of young people of both sexes began to flow in bypassing the pack of clockwork experts. That's it! The city believed that in the Plant Park they did play dances!
On Sunday everyone danced. In circles, of course. A circle of ten to fifteen dancers sprang up around two or three satchels placed on the concrete floor. Each circle danced in the endemic style of their own… The band stage served a good viewing point. In the circle on the left, they were busily twisting while in the one closer to the concha, the dancers imitated speed skating contest by shuffling their feet in gradual circles over the cemented floor with their hands clasped on their backs. And over there, near the gate, the guys were still happy with the ol’ good "seb’n-forty". At times, from one or another dancing circle there sounded a probing, on-the-sly scream…
Next Saturday, auntie Shura, the Controller in her eternal helmet-kerchief, pops up at the entrance to the dance-floor directing all who approached the gate after tickets, 50 kopecks apiece.
Vladya and I come up to auntie Shura, we burn with rightful rage. What the heck! These dances for free! Free dances!
Auntie Shura remains indifferently calm, she has Director's order.
Vladya, glowing in the twilight with his white short-sleeved turtleneck, yells to the nearing folks not to listen to her and come in because the dances for free! Free dances!
No one listens to him, they sheepishly plod on towards the summer cinema ticket office. Be like everyone else…
If for a couple of decades you keep folks without even a brass band around, they would readily put down 50 kopecks for a slip of blank movie-ticket with the "price 35 kop.” printed black on blue.
After the dances, when we brought the equipment back to the narrow ticket office, the cashier shared that she had sold 500 tickets that night. The following day Pavel Mitrofanovich ordered to remove all the benches from the dance-floor to cram more people inside. The merchant genes in his DNA surpassed all my guesses.
What did we play? Basically, instrumental pieces like in that LP disc by The Singing Guitars plus the songs we had prepared for the contest, however, without my third already.
At times, at the insistent request of the public, Quak would come up to the microphone to break all hell loose by "Shyzgara". He looked great with that long blonde hair of his and small mustache of albino color. It’s only that he made people wheedle him for so long, but then: "Shyzgara!"
And the bursting, eager response, the wild wail from several hundred throats:
"Vaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!"
(…you should have heard this song. Yes, you had, and more than once for sure, only without the lyrics. The TV folks like to use it as background soundtrack when advertising all kinds of female lingerie and stuff.
And at that time a rock-group from Holland, The Shocking Blue, toured the globe with practically just that one song of theirs – "Venus" which made them “the group of the year”, surprising all the music critics as well as the band themselves.
And their vocalist, of course, sang:
" She's a goddess!”
Yet, Quak's "oidclothy" interpretation did not prevent anybody from being carried away and shrieking at the top of their lungs:
"Vaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!"
I mean to say that true, sublime, work of art finds its way to the masses and ignites sincere response in spite of any accent.
Shyzgara!!!..)
And the masses grew more and more dense. When in the middle of the dances we announced a short break, it took a while to push thru the crowd and get out to a side alley towards the long booth of whitewashed planks, marked with "M" and "F" at its ends.
There was no time to idle because back on the stage Chuba was already dubbing random riffs by his bass guitar to set a-quaking the front of the huge loudspeaker borrowed from the summer cinema. Skully's current girlfriends with the girlfriends of theirs used the nook behind that loudspeaker for stacking their shoulder bags.
Yes, it was Skully who had the most frantic success among the girls in The Orpheuses bohemian milieu. (It's inappropriate to use 'groupies' when talking of VIA’s, right?)
What do girls find in all those drummers, eh? I, for example, had only one time seen home a certain blonde Irina. It's hard to say who of us cooled down quicker – she, having to wait after the dances while The Orpheuses were hauling all the equipment to the summer cinema ticket office, or I because of the alarming fact that she lived in the dangerous neighborhood of Zagrebelya.
Later on, she was picked up by Anatoly Melai who was smart enough to escort her by a taxi. Getting out of a car pulled up by her gate, Anatoly would ask the driver, "Chief, when the meter ticks up to one ruble, gimme a honk, eh?"
I know not if the driver, after the stipulated honk, got amused watching the Melai’s trot while fumbling with his fly or Anatoly accurately set his temporal limits. Anyway, Zagrebelya still remained dire straits for those in love.
In another development, I was approached by Kolya Pevriy. When at school, he kept bully-ragging me so that I even started to figure out for how long I still had to suffer before he'd leave after the eighth grade and enroll the Seminary. And now he came up with full respect and asked to step out from the dance-floor to his classmate Valya, who also was a year older than me. She was going somewhere to be operated from an inborn heart defect and wanted to talk to me.
I went out at the half-time break, stopped by her side in the dark alley. We both were silent, she kept sighing, and then the break was over. Some romantic date…
How did we play? That question I can answer with just one word:
LOUD!
Oh, hapless tenants of the two-story apartment block right over the Plant Park fence!.
(…in the beginning of the third millennium, the King of Spain asked Jews to forgive that 500 years ago the great-grandpas of their great-grandpas of their great-grandpas were deported from the land of Spain. Better late than never…
Forgive us, O, woeful-tenants, for making you deaf three times a week!
Never again we’ll be so inhumanely beastly!.)
~ ~ ~
However, the Club life didn’t get fixed to the dance-floor alone. The Head of Variety Ensemble, fair-haired saxophonist Aksyonov, popped up again and integrated us into his band to accompany their vocalist Zhanna Parasyuk at concerts by the Plant Amateur Activities.
One of the rehearsals was held on the stage of open-air cinema in the Park with the white screen pulled aside because the season of summertime cinema was at its end. We worked before the empty benches in the auditorium enclosure performing another number in the inescapable A-minor:
"Icy ceiling, creaky door –
In the Winter-Mommy's hut…"
The dusk was thickening outside and in the auditorium, when thru the tunnel of entrance under the projectionists' booth there appeared a couple of girls escorted by a guy, too young though to be a boyfriend.
I thought that, seeing empty benches all around, they’d turn about and leave at once but, no, they slowly proceeded and got seated somewhere in the fifth row. Well, the audience of 3 is also an audience. One of the girls had long dark hair, but she was fat. The other was what you’d need for a girlfriend in her mini-skirt and checkered waistcoat. Her hair, even though short, was wavy and yellow, so you at a glance could see it's dyed.
And then, quite so composedly, without a slightest attempt at concealing, she took a cigarette pack from out her waistcoat and lit one up. Skully's girlfriends, before smoking, always looked back and all around to check that no one would sight them smoking.
Anyway, they were sitting down there and we starting another take, when the girl with the cigarette turned to her fat girlfriend and spoke up. Of course, I couldn't hear that it was me she pointed out to her chum, "This one will be mine. Wanna bet?"
With the rehearsal over, the youngster approached me on the stage, "That girl over there wanna have a word with you."
In a minute I was by their side in the fifth row. Olga, Sveta – oh, how mighty nice! And in a half-hour, I was escorting both girls home. Not far at all, some two hundred meters from the Plant Park, the third back-alley in Budyonny Street when going towards the Swamp.
In fact, I wasn’t the only escort because Skully and Quak also plodded along, which was not quite fitting into the picture – she got only one girlfriend about her which those 2 obviously outnumbered. Who's escorting whom?
After the turn into the back-alley, Sveta giggled her parting "bye!" and slipped away into her khutta's yard. Olga and I went on to the wicket of the next one, where she said she lived. But Skully and Quak stuck fast and tagged on along, inserting their silly cues in our conversation. And only when I and Olga started kissing, they realized there was no making-hay for them at all. So, they crossed to the opposite fence in the alley, urinated on it under the lamppost (some bohemian milieu, dammit!) and left with a flea in their ear. As if they couldn't keep in check their nature call until back on Budyonny Street. How come Quak was at the rehearsal? Very simple, the vocalist Zhanna Parasyuk was his one and only sister…
The Amateur Activity concerts were staged not only in Club. Sometimes, they were taken to different villages in the Konotop District traveling there by a small bus of PAZ make. It was for one of such concerts that we rehearsed that icy ceiling with the creaking door in A-minor.
Since the PAZ bus was not of rubber, you couldn't take along any amplifying equipment, neither was there any room for the young snowflakes in their tutus bred by the Ballet Studio. Just one Ukrainian Hopuck and one Moldovan Jock danced to the button-accordion of Ayeeda were quite enough for such a touring concert. Then she handed the instrument over to Chuba for playing his part in the Variety Ensemble band.
My role in the Ensemble was that of a rhythm guitarist with a common acoustic guitar. Vladya remained outside Variety Ensemble because Aksyonov, with his saxophone, felt no need for assimilating a solo-guitar. As for Skully, he was irreplaceable, only his "kitchen" got minimized to the skeleton composition of the snare-and-hat to pat his sticks upon.
The universally recognized cream of the concert program was, certainly, Murashkovsky singing songs and telling humoreskas. Those rhymed stories about "me and my koom", were his specialty. About how “I”, together with the koom, aka a sister-in-law's husband, smashed the football goal clean away with koom's head or, riding a motorcycle, collided with a kolkhoz bull who threw us over an Oak-tree just for free… Simple rhyme, solid wit. The audience liked it – they laughed and clapped.
And then on the stage again appeared Zhanna the Singer and we – her band. Skully sat the tempo, we started and I suddenly felt that the guitar strings under my fingers were loosened to the utmost. Aksyonov had tempered with them, no doubt, during a humoreska or, maybe, while they danced Hopuck, to have a hearty laugh. Some stupid thick-cheeked joker.
Well, so Chuba and Skully were making up for chords and rhythm and I, like scenery alive, was striking chords careful not to let them sound – as if I was playing an odd klepka…
In the end of the concert, Murashkovsky traditionally burst out his main "bomb" – the humoreska about Adoptee and his Mother-in-Law.
(…in those days the word "mother-in-law", aka "teshcha", was the most magical incantation among stand-up comedians. It was enough for a man on the stage to pronounce "teshcha!" and the audience laughed and laughed.
Nowadays, the population grew much more sophisticated, spoiled by the elaborate cultivated humor so that an actor in the comic genre must inhale deeply and screech at the top of their lungs into the microphone – "shit!" for the audience to get it that it’s time to laugh…
Okay, we'd better get back to the concert at a village club in the early seventies of the XX-th century…)
Issuing torrid screams, Murashkovsky dashed from the entrance thru the entire small hall towards the stage. The case of button-accordion in his hands served a make-believe suitcase with personal belongings. After climbing the stage, he started the first-person humoreska on bitter miseries in the life of Adoptee.
His wife together with her Mom, his teshcha, had turned him in for the militia to prevent his going on a binge. While locked up, he dedicated all of the standard 15-day stretch in the custody to working out a careful plan for revenge and now, on his return from behind the bars to the place of residence, he casually broke the news about the barrel with pickled cucumbers in the earth cellar-pit going to pieces…
(The audience enliven and start to giggle.)
The worried wife and teshcha race down the ladder into the earth-cellar and Adoptee from above the ladder top recites the biblical principle of "eye for an eye", announces his verdict for their wrong-doings—fifteen days of incarceration—and slams the cellar-pit lid shut.
(The hall drowns in the jubilant glee.)
Every other day Adoptee drops to the captives packages on a string, like humanitarian relief with certain food items, as a dietary addition to the vegetables stored down there.
(Decibels of the thundering guffaw reach the neighboring villages. The spectators with a particularly vivid imagination can't laugh anymore – they simply jerk their heads with their mouths convulsively open, their squinted eyes drip tears which they have nothing to wipe with because their hands, balled into fists, keep knocking against the back of the seat in the row in front of them.)
Four days later, the militia, called by some of the neighbor-villagers, come to set the captives free, and Adoptee gets another stretch of 15 days in confinement.
("Boo-ha-ha" in the audience acquire resemblance to a collective fit.)
Murashkovsky throws at them the concluding lines, like a bullfighter dealing the final stab to the animal.
"Okay, I'm leaving.
You'll never find another one like me.
I won't even burn your khutta down, which I could do!"
Normally, to these words, the audience reacted with a farewell burst of laughter capable of blowing the doors and windows out together with their frames. Murashkovsky prepared for a parting bow to the general ovation and – Dead silence. Not a sound.
All froze like exhibits in the Madam Tussaud's Theater of Wax Figures. Only from somewhere in the seventeenth row there comes a tiny plop of a tear giggled out just a moment before… Then the seat backs begin to creak uneasily. The village council chairman cautiously steps up onto the stage with a crumpled word of gratitude for the concert. The audience disperse in mute despondency. Behind the scenes Aksyonov and Skully pinion Murashkovsky gone to pieces in a heavy fit of hysterics, no one knows how to appease him…
In record time, the instruments and costumes are shoved into the bus. All got seated in the Club Manager office for the traditional treat of gratitude to the touring actors: bread, lard, cucumbers, hooch. After the first glass, the village council chairman brings an awkward apology to Murashkovsky, "Well, here… er…in our village three khuttas were burnt down…in just a month…they still can’t find who…"
The Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, blushing more and more in his plump face, keeps vigilant control over the bus driver and after the man gulps his third glass—“to smooth the road”—we are good to start into the night.
At that stage in my life the taste of hooch was still making me wince, so a couple of gulps, snacked with bread and lard, got worn away quickly. I watched the impenetrable night rushing by behind the window glass.
The driver applied his whole soul to press the gas pedal right into the floor. We flew; we shot along the soft dirt roads of the district. The headlights snatched from the dense darkness occasional trunks and branches of the roadside trees. At times a small village khuttas scudded by… A guy and a girl standing by a khutta fence… seeing her home…
They looked back at the flying bus. Perhaps they thought, "The folks manage to enjoy their lives, they live in the city". They envied me.
Strange as it was, but I envy them… seeing her home… I also want that… in the warmly dark Ukrainian night…
But I have Olga, and in the back-alley where she lives, it’s the same night, yet I still envy that guy… dreadfully odd…
~ ~ ~
Olga was superbly good at kissing and liked it too, not for nothing she had so sensual lips. The bitter taste of burnt tobacco on her breath did not distract me overly much. Besides, standing by her khutta’s wicket, the very next time I saw her home, she shared a cigarette to me. I tried with cautious apprehension, yet it brought no bummer and I began to smoke even without Olga around.
The khutta, which I escorted her to, was dwelt by Olga’s aunt by whom she stayed that summer on her visit from Theodosia in the Crimea, where also lived her mother and elder sister. As for her father, he died in an accident driving a tractor when she was twelve years old. Olga loved him so much that sometimes she went to the cemetery in the dead of night to cry by the openwork monument welded of rebar rods with the tablet "Abram Kosmenko" fixed to it. Some name, eh? But he wasn't a Jew, just so was his name.
Her mother found a stepfather for her and her sister, no ZAGS registration though. He's a musician, knocking drums. One time, Olga lay on the couch with the temperature watching TV. He got seated next to her feet and covered his lap with the end of her blanket. Her mother saw it and raised some hell of yelling…
Then she went in for athletics, one hundred meter dash. The coach said she had a good physique for that sport. And their group even went for a competition in the regional center, Simferopol City. Before the dash, the coach made everyone eat a whole lemon, not a pinch of sugar to sprinkle it. He said, "It gets straight to the blood!"
Thus, between the kisses, we were getting to know each other more closely…
After that touring concert, Skully, Vladya and I went to the Seim for an overnight stay. By the evening local train, Skully and I got there bringing with us a large vinyl bag which Father had fetched from the RepBase. Such bags came there as wrapping for certain helicopter spare parts. The big translucent bag could easily do for a three-man tent. We also brought a guitar with us and then Vladya arrived by his scooter "Riga-4" loaded with the dinner.
On a sandy spit overgrown with young supple Willows, we put the bag-tent up. It was getting dark and we built a fire to share a bottle of wine by its light and the slathers of grub brought by Vladya, which seemed too much for a snack and was lavishly scattered around, however, no one cared because in the morning Vladya had to ride to Konotop after more chow…
He began to give out guitar riffs from popular hits. Above the placid water, the guitar sounds wafted mighty great, so clear, so full and… nyshtyak, in a word, it sounded out there… One fisherman in his boat anchored in the middle of the river liked it and asked to cut more. But when we roared "Shyzgara!" another night catcher from afar—near the other bank—began to curse us for scaring off his fish.
Skully advised not to mess around with him, the geezer could go and call more mujiks from the huts. The fire burnt out and we crawled under the vinyl roof…
At dawn, I woke up from water dripping into my face. Vinyl is absolutely water- and air-tight. The night-chilled walls kept our breathing inside turning it into water droplets—the condensate, at school they did not teach us of such things. So we met the morning cold and hungry. I hardly managed to wheedle Vladya to give me his "Riga-4" for riding after some eats instead of him…
Yes, motors are the real thing, you don't have to pedal or pull anything, the only effort is twisting the throttle handle and steering… I drove into the city mapping the routes in my mind: first – home, then to the Skully's khutta and to the Vladya's to collect available victuals, and then the ride back to the river.
"Plans on paper looked just fine
Yet, they'd missed out the ravine…"
Entering the left turn between the Station and Loony Park I heard my name called out loud. Over the Station square, Olga was dashing in her red mini-skirt. The coach was right – that's some physique!. I throttled down and let the scooter come to a stop…
She ran up with not a whiff of panting and let me have it – it's three days since I'd disappeared no one knew where and if I did not want going out with her I didn't have to she didn't care because yesterday she got a telegram from her mother inviting for a telephone talk with Theodosia and she said that's enough for staying and she had to go back in two days but I didn't care I rushed to the Seim with my fucking friends who were more dear to me than her and she was just a fool to think she had found someone she could trust and if I needed her the slightest bit I would stay with her right now.
After the cold condensate shower so torrid a squall, and her pending departure and the rise of incipient hope—hey, she might let have it off for a farewell, eh?—had their job done. I only begged for a couple of hours – to take the scooter to Vladya's khutta and go to change before our meeting at the Park…
Sure enough, my friends returned from the Seim by 17.20 local train, after they combed the entire sand spit in search of scraps that they had so improvidently scattered hither-and-thither at the orgy the night before. Who but I could understand them better? Once I also almost fainted from hunger on the Seim.
They stopped talking to me and boycotted for full 3 days. And who but I could understand them better? You couldn't boycott a dude for longer than 3 days if you played dances with him and your only means of communication was thru disgruntled Chuba.
