Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
~ ~ ~ The Genesis
More likely than not, your ken of your own lineage on the paternal side feels kinda rickety, right? In the same breath, I feel comfortably confident in your Mom’s family tree being properly watered and presented to you in detailed feeds by your grandmother. About 2-3 generations, if not deeper.
The reasonable belief that my pedigree was a taboo subject when you were around took a firm root after a surprise letter from your mother breaking the sudden news of my death. Not too sharp though, the impact was softened by a kind roundabout introduction: you were told that your Dad was dead and I should prevent exposure of the child’s fragile psyche to any chance running into the revenant ghost of her drifter parent…
As a spook of quality, I politely kept to my grave ever since. Yet, when in a pub a fella next to me got in the mood for bending my ear with a plaintive tale of his being nobody these days while in his prime he walked the bridge of a nuke submarine as her Chief Mate, I felt a solid right and no scruples to cut his lamentation and drive it back that I used to be a famous pilot tragically killed at the shakedown flights of a jet fighter starting the newest, highly secret, brand… For which unparalleled achievement I was honored, by the way, with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Gold Star medal. Posthumously, of course, and that’s a sad pity the decoration didn’t find the hero because those lazy sons of bitches never search in earnest…
The bullshit, to be honest, was not an instance of my snappy creativity but a commonplace mass-product because in that romantic epoch, when a single-mothered kid exacted the reasons for the incomplete composition of their family, Mom dished out the traditional stopgap, “Your father was a pilot and he crashed.”
The brute facts of life were saved for her bosom lady-friends, “He was a junior bookkeeper, guys, and spread me on his office desk, O, my! Never will I forget that fucking abacus trundling back and forth under my ass…”
Nonetheless, don’t expect of me a fine-grained presentation of your roots because my knowledge of the matter is way too shallow and fuzzy because the interest in eugenics was truly frowned at then in no less degree than now…
The name of your father’s mother’s mother was Katerinna Poyonk and she was brought from Poland by your great-grandfather, Joseph Vakimov, a commissar in the 1-st Cavalry Army of Semyon Budyonny, as a trophy, or maybe a keepsake of that period in the Civil War when the Budyonny’s cavalry all but turned Warsaw their spoils.
Their relationship was legalized by the then Civil Registry Office, aka ZAGS, and eight years later my mother, Galina, was born to be followed by her brother, Vadim, and their sister, Lyoudmilla. In recollections of those three, Joseph was very clever. He knew Jewish as well as German languages and was embracing the position of a Regional Trade Auditor in Ukraine. During that period Katerinna had a separate pair of shoes for each of her frocks.
Seven more years passed and, in the late thirties, Joseph got arrested. However, they did not put him before a firing squad to purge away like millions of other “enemies to the Soviet people”, supposedly, some clever way was found to buy his life back. He was only deported to a very northern, but still European part of Russia. The family joined him in exile and in the early forties, they all returned to Ukraine to settle in the city of Konotop which soon afterward was captured by the German Wehrmacht.
After two years of the Nazi occupation, when German troops retreated driven westward by the Red Army blows, my grandfather disappeared from home one day before the liberation, together with his bicycle—rather a valuable item in those times.
The next morning, heavy bombardment made Katerinna and her three children flee as far as the suburban village of Podlipnoye, where a shell fragment cut an apple tree branch right above my mother’s head (a telling detail, if not for the odd inches I wouldn’t now be composing this letter to you). By noon, the advancing troops of the Red Army liberated both the village and the city. Katerinna came back to Konotop where she brought up, as a single mother, her children – Galina, Vadim, and Lyoudmilla…
Another ten years passed and Galina, the eldest of the three, thru a postal acquaintance met Nikolai Ogoltsoff, a petty officer in the Order of Combat Red Banner Black Sea Fleet. “Postal acquaintance” meant the postman delivering a letter which starts, “Hello, unknown Galina…”, and concluded by, ”…Send me your photo, please!”
So, on his next year furlough Nikolai, instead of customary visiting his native Ryazan Region in Russia, arrived in the Ukrainian city of Konotop where the width of both his bottom-bell Navy pants and his chest in the deep V-cut demonstrating the striped vest, and the golden-lettered legend “The Black Sea Fleet” above his forehead in the ribbon around his marine uniform visor-less cap whose 2 black tails ended with imprints (also golden) of anchors (one per a tail) hanging loosely from the back of his head, and one more shining anchor (this time of brass) in his polished belt plate impressed the quiet lanes in the town outskirts where he’d been sending his letters in envelopes embellished on behind with the line of his own design, “Fly with my greetings, come back with the promise of meetings!.”
And three days later my parents, forgetful in the rush to notify my grandmother, registered their marriage in the Konotop ZAGS…
(…did Regional Trade Auditor Vakimov set up innocent people after his arrest?
Affirmative. The show had to go on. So you signed anything they put before you of your good will or you signed it as a cripple if not killed by the tortures and beating under the name of interrogation.
Did he collaborate with the Nazi occupants?
Knowledge of the language would give him such an opportunity but then you should suppose he did it gratis, without bettering his housing conditions or procuring a new pair of shoes for his wife. The bicycle also a telling clue—Germans, still having more than a year of war on their hands, could find room for an able-bodied collaborationist in the bed of a truck heading westward… Seems like he was dead scared at the prospect of another round of interrogations when riding his bike—trying to cross in a bath-tub the wuthering ocean of War.
Was my missing grandpa Joseph a Jew?.
Being a commissar in the years of the Civil War, proficiency with the language in question, why, the name itself might serve a bunch of circumstantial evidence for the assumption. However, the high percentage of the chosen people’s offspring among the revolutionary leaders of the period does not remove the possibility of exceptions. The language could have been picked up while being an errand-boy and/or shop assistant at a store of some Jew merchant. As for the name, let's not forget that even such a hardened anti-Semite as Comrade Stalin was his namesake… Still and all, my mother, when introducing herself, preferred to change her patronymic, taking root from an Old Testament handsome character, into its Russianized rustic form: “Osipovna”…)
Her dark mellow eyes Galina inherited from Katerinna Ivanovna (or Katarzyna Janovna?) whose affinity with the tribes of Israel seems doubtful enough.
Firstly, in the red corner of her kitchen there hung a dark lacquered board with some glum-bearded saint (I can’t say of which religion or nationality, could be a Catholic as well). Besides, she fattened a pig in her shed, Masha was her name, for slaughter.
But, again, the icon might have taken root as a camouflaging part of the interior in the time of Nazi occupation, while the restrictions of kosher diet can be overruled with the common Ukrainian proverb – “Need teaches eating cakes with lard”.
Of course, all these unanswerable questions will arise after the return of your ancestors from their marriage registration at Konotop ZAGS, but we are not to tag on them all that way, we are taking a U-turn so as to trace the line of your grandfather’s father’s origin.
~ ~ ~
That line is simple, straight, and down-to-earth. In a word, Mikhail Ogoltsoff was a peasant.
In the depths of the Ryazan land, there is the district center of Sapozhok and at nine or eleven kilometers from it (the distance depends on who you ask the question), lies the village of Kanino. My father liked to brag that in its fat days the village had about four hundred households.
The shallow ravine with a sluggish soundless brook rolling along its bottom splits the village into two halves. Back in the blessed days of yore, the stream banks served the grounds for the long-standing folk amusement “Battling Walls”, aka collective fist-fight. The men from one half of the village devotedly punched the other-half dwellers, smashing their teeth out to mark some of church holidays or celebrate a mild-weathered Sunday. Yeah, once upon a time folks knew a thing or two about stimulating entertainment…
And so it went on for centuries before sinking into oblivion. Only vague memories remained of Alesha the Saddler, the legendary fighter and obedient son. But his Dad was a truly uptight geezer! “Where to?” would yell he at the scion. “Too filthy rich you are, eh? Back to work and no nonsense!”
And the mighty three-and-thirty-year-old son would stoop his hefty shoulders over the unfinished horse-collar poking it with his awl while all of him was out there, at the lists by the stream, from where little boys ran panting in with the updates, “Oy, Alesha! They are pressing indeed! Ours give in already!”
Yet, the warning snort from his father would keep Alesha silent and concentrated on his toil until many “a-heck!” and “plunks!” of a dogged retreat in the street reached the hut. At that point, Dad would no longer keep his temper down. Springing up to his feet, he would run to Alesha and deal him a huge box on the ear and yell, “Fuck it! Ours bite the dust but this dickhead still sits home!”
But Alesha didn’t hear the whole oration, he's out already, bypassing the battling “Walls” thru the village backyard kitchen gardens because the rules forbid attacking the opposite team from behind, a good game deserves fair play.
“Alesha’s out!” And “the ours” get a second breath right away while the opposite “Wall” show streaks of wavering. Some weaklings start falling down in advance—the rules do not allow to beat a fighter lying on the ground. And Alesha, deeply concentrated, knocks the standing fighters out one after another; and, mark you, without a single f-f..er..foul word… Yep, the village was in the pink then…
The Rural Collectivization in the USSR finished off that innocent merry-making and the well-orchestrated Great Hunger, called to solidify the revolutionary changes in the Russian rustic life, knocked Alesha off, and his father, sure enough, also starved to death…
My father’s mother, Martha, remembered the life under the Czar because at the break of the Great October Revolution she was a girl of about thirteen. Ten years later she was already married to Mikhail Ogoltsoff to bring forth three children: Kolya, Sehrguey, and Alexandra (respectively).
Mikhail lived thru the collectivization phase but the Great Hunger made him pass on and Martha remained a single mother. She cooked soup of saltbush and less edible herbs. Both she and her children were swelling up from starvation but survived.
Then there arrived the era of hard labor at the collective farm, aka kolkhoz, with its miserly paid workdays. Life kept spinning around those “workdays” paid in kind with the same products the villagers produced slaving in the kolkhoz fields, and the collective recreation at the kolkhoz club where twice a month they brought Soviet movies "Lenin in October", "Pigwoman and Shepherd" and other suchlike stuff. To make movie-watching possible, the village lads had to hand-pedal the crank of electricity-producing dynamo machine brought for the show together with the projector and cans of film spools.
In the summer of 1941, Comrade Joseph Stalin surprised everybody calling them in his address over the radio “dear brothers and sisters”. Then he announced the treacherous invasion of the fascist Germany into the Soviet Union, and the village mujiks were driven away to the war.
Germans never reached Kanino though the thunder of the front-line cannonade was rolling in from the horizon. Then in the village came detachments of the Red Army reserve, the mujiks from Siberia with their amazing custom to sit after taking a steam bath in the frosty winter night outside and have a thoughtful smoke in just their pants and undershirts on.
The Siberians left in the direction of the cannonade and soon afterward it ceased to be heard. In the village, pervaded by thick silence, there stayed only women, girls and boys too young to be drafted. And—yes!—the collective farm chairman, a one-armed cripple in the military outfit.
And so it went on and on, not for days or weeks but for months, from year to year. Under the circumstances, there sprang up a veritable sexual quirk permeating the womenfolk. They would gather in one or another hut with a view to inspect one or another cunt from theirs, exchange comments and judgments, evaluate the appeal…
Getting on the scent of this Sapphism Renaissance, the kolkhoz chairman had a crack at eradication of the collective lesbian kink before the rumors of it reached the authorities in the district center, and he called a general meeting of exclusively women and girls in the kolkhoz club.
The male youths participated also, on the quiet. They penetrated stealthily the projectionist booth in the club and, with their jaws a-hanging, witnessed the chairman to cheer the congregation up with all the mighty curses. Repeatedly knocking his only fist against the rostrum top, he took his most solemn oath to cut out that rotten cunt-watching by use of an incandescent iron pry. (I mitigate, in part, the artless charm spread throughout the bucolic figures of speech in the chairman’s proclamation.)
My father never knew if the cripple did keep his promise because he (my father) was drafted into the Red Army. Or rather, in his case, it was the Navy but Red all the same…
~ ~ ~
The WWII was burning out but pigged up the cannon fodder as voraciously as always. Kolya, a youth from a Ryazan village, and lots of other youths from other places got outfitted in the striped Navy vests, black pants, black shirts under black pea-jackets and for a couple of months kept at a recruit depot to drill them military basics and know “Attention!” from “Dismissed!” They also were taught to tell between the bayonet and trigger before, finally, loaded, in their anti-khaki uniform on high-speed cutters for a landing operation somewhere up the Danube river in Austria.
But, for all the speed of the landing operation cutters, they didn’t get there in time because the fascist Germany had just capitulated and there was no one to attack.
(…long ago I secretly regretted at this point: eew! they left no time for my Dad to become a hero! Now, on the contrary, I'm glad that he never shot and killed anyone, not even accidentally…
Still, he was considered a vet of the Great Patriotic War and on special anniversaries, like 20 or 25 and so on Jubilees of the Great Victory they always awarded him commemorative medals which he stored in the sideboard drawer but never wore like those vets dangling their collections on their civvy jackets to mark another Victory Day…)
Then his detail were guarding for a couple of months the empty Serpent Island off the coast of Bulgaria, or maybe Romania, from where they transferred him to a minesweeper, a minuscule Naval trawler manned by a tiny crew.
My Dad’s seafaring career began with the passage from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk over the ruff Black Sea; it was not a full-blown storm but the sea was pretty choppy… Riding a swing in the park is fun but if you go on enjoying it for a couple of hours the stomach will throw up anything stuck in it from the day before yesterday’s breakfast. That sea crossing continued much longer…
When Red Navy man Ogoltsoff came ashore at the port of destination, even the land itself kept swaying under his feet. He tried to puke between the tall timber-stacks lined along the pier, but to no avail. The young sailor sat on the ground just where he stood and, watching the towering rows of timber that kept swaying up and down, decided that he'd inescapably die in that naval service…
(…you may easily figure it out that was a wrong assumption as long as he had not yet met your grandmother, nor persuaded her to go with him to ZAGS. And your grandmother hadn’t yet born three children without becoming a single mother, which constitutes an unprecedented instance in this story under way…)
So, seasickness did not kill my father. He learned to endure the pitching and tossing. He tattooed a blue anchor on the back of his left hand, and on his right arm a swift outline of a swallow in the flight—from the elbow to the wrist—pinching in his beak a tiny letter envelope (“fly with greetings…”); and he furrowed on his bitty minesweeper the vast expanses of the Black Sea, clearing it from the minefields which, actually, is what minesweepers are designed for.
The main difference of naval mines with their land counterparts is that the sea species must be tethered or else they would scatter drifting astray to destroy any ship met on the way without checking whether she was “theirs” or “ours”. That’s why a cocked up sea mine is fixed with a steel cable to an anchor that grabs at the seabed. The mines—iron balloons filled with air and TNT—soar up in the water not reaching the surface though restricted by the cable length correlated to the depth on the sea route dealt with. And there the naval mines hover, a couple of meters below the surface, waiting for a passing ship to hit any of its spike-like detonators poked out the mine-shell in different directions like in a babyish sketch of the sun.
Thanks to its shallow immersion, the Navy minesweeper passes over the minefield clear of being caught by detonator spikes. In its wake, the boat drags the long loop of thick steel cable over the bottom so as to cut the mines anchorage at the seabed and destroy the loose mines popping up to the surface. For that end a manned rowboat leaves the minesweeper heading towards the mine. The team's task is to fix a dynamite cartridge with the Bickford fuse onto the huge iron ball of the mine. (Which is performed not in a placid park pond but midst unsteady waves in the open sea with the mine's spherical skull heaving up above the rowboat and then falling under it, striving to ram with the horn of a detonator.)
The final step is done by the boatswain from the stern board, a lit cigarette in the firm bite of his disclosed teeth not as a means to show off his daredevilry, it’s as a tool readied to set the fuse off. Now it’s caught fire and – Hup! Hup! Ho! Everyone pulls on with might and main, no shirkers at the oars. Away as far as possible from the hiss of the fuse dwindling to the final “BOOM!”—the TNT charge in a naval mine is meant to tear up the hulls of line battleships…
When broken down into constituent elements, romantic heroism just melts away and maritime mine clearance starts to resemble the prosaic job of a tractor bumbling in a kolkhoz field. The minesweeper gets to the assigned water area and furrows it all day long, back and forth, with the cable released behind the stern; and on the following day – to the next area. On the whole, the minesweeper crew’s heroism consists in being a good team, and the fact that my father stayed alive resulted from their forthright cooperation.
For example, at the end of a typical working day, Nikolai Ogoltsoff watched over the stern winch when he noticed a mine approaching the boat because its anchorage line got entangled with the minesweeper’s loop cable when it crawled over the sea bottom. Now it was being reeled back to the windlass drum. Too late to switch off the winch which would spin on by inertia for a short, yet sufficient, time to drag and slap the mine against the boat. Dad’s shirt stood off away from his body like the hide of a beast at the moment of utmost danger, and his roar, “Full Ahead!”, was full of such animal force that Captain on the bridge lightning-haste duplicated his order on E. O. T. sending the bell signal to the engine room, the mechanic, Dad’s shift-man, did his job promptly, the boat propeller churned up the wave whose pressure pushed the nearing mine off. So the team saved each other…
Five years later there remained no unswept areas in the sea routes and my father was transferred from the minesweeper to a coastguard ship, again in charge of the diesel engine. The following year saw the end of his second term in the Navy service (because of the heavy losses in WWII, before new generations of draftees cropped up, the service term in the Soviet Army was doubled: 6 years in the Army, 8 in the Navy—yes, 2 years more and the only consolation that no other servicemen sport so spiffy breathtaking uniform, golden anchors and stuff) and they offered my father a job in a “mailbox”.
~ ~ ~
At those times the USSR had lots of secret institutions, secret factories, and even secret cities, none of which had an ordinary postal address so as to fool enemy spies and leave them clueless about all those secret objects location. As a result, the addressee stopped living in any street or city, he lived in no region neither district and he was referred to in a pretty short way: “N. Ogoltsoff, Mail Box №***.”
Since on his last furlough before the demobilization Red Navy man Ogoltsoff N. M. registered his marriage with Citizen Vakimova G. J., she landed up at the same “mailbox” in the Carpathian mountains.
The “box” was not fixed up with a maternity hospital and for bringing me forth my mother had to visit the town of Nadveerna, thirty kilometers from the regional center, the city of Stanislavl (later renamed into Ivano-Frankivsk after the end-of-the-century Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko). Going out the "box" gave her the frightful jitters because vehicles on the roads were often shot at by the Bandera men.
(…for a long time I considered the Bandera men bloody bandits and Nazi accomplices. What else to think of them if a full-scale military division named “Galichina” was manned by Western Ukrainians to fight against the Red Army? Then, gradually, it dawned on me that two years before the German invasion it was the Red Army who occupied Western Ukraine and assisted the Soviet secret police, aka NKVD, in executions and deportation of potential opponents to the Soviet system. Killed just in case, as a preventive measure, in thousands.
Besides, what is a division when compared to an army? Among the German Wehrmacht’s comrades-in-arms, there also was the Russian Liberation Army (RLA) of almost one million servicemen fighting against the USSR.
And last but not least, the rank-and-file Red Army men, participants in the events of that period, let me know that the Bandera men fought fiercely against both Soviet and German troops. They were Carpathian guerrillas defending their land against successive liberators, aka enslavers.
Still, my parents all their life long considered the Bandera men savage bandits…)
And even two years later, when my mother again was in need of the help by maternity hospital, the dogged machine-gun rounds still rumbled on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, but she could not hear them anymore because her husband had been transferred from one “mailbox” to another and left the Transcarpathia for the Valdai Upland…
The change in the life circumstances of my parents resulted from a snitch-on letter sent to the Special Division of the previous “mailbox” from Konotop. It was composed by the people living in the same house with Galina Vakimova before her marriage.
The house (in Konotop parlance “khutta”) of 12 by 12 meters was a divided property, half of which belonged to citizen Ignat Pilluta. The other half was equally divided between citizen Katerinna Vakimova with her children and citizens Duzenko with their daughter, so each of the two mentioned families owned an entrance hall, a kitchen, and a room.
The daughter of citizens Duzenko married citizen Starikov who moved into her father’s part of the khutta. Seems, one kitchen and one room were not enough for all: both the young family and the in-laws. In order to increase their living space, Duzenko and Starikov learned the number of the mailbox where the demobilized Mariner took their former neighbor to and they composed their snitch-on letter for the box’s Special Division, whose foremost duty was catching spies, to inform SD that the father of Galina Vakimova (presently Ogoltsova) was arrested by the NKVD as people’s enemy but just before the war he somehow managed to return to Ukraine. Besides, during the years of German occupation, his house served the headquarters of the German troops. (Which was true in part, a Wehrmacht company headquarters was stationed in the Pilluta’s half of the khutta.) And with the approach of the Soviet Army, Joseph Vakimov fled together with the retreating fascists.
Special Divisions at “mailboxes” were notoriously vigilant and merciless, so the relatives of Joseph, who disappeared in so treacherous anti-Soviet way, would certainly be arrested and—the informers were quite sure—at least, deported. Too bad, in their logical calculations or, sooner, aping a commonplace trick of the period, they neglected the time factor. By that moment Great Leader and Teacher of Peoples, Comrade Stalin, rested in peace already. The nuts tightened under his rule to the utmost started to gradually let up.
Of course, Nikolai Ogoltsoff was repeatedly called and questioned in SD of the “mailbox”. There took place an exchange of official correspondence between the box’s Special Division and the Division of Interior Affairs of the city of Konotop. However, my father was not repressed thanks to his absolutely peasant origin, as well as to the fact that diesel engines generating electricity in “mailboxes” obeyed him so willingly. Still and all, there was no way to simply blink at the informants' “signal” and, just in case, they transferred my father to another “mailbox”, located far from borders with foreign countries…
The second lying-in of Galina Ogoltsova occurred again outside the new “box”, in the nearest, not secret district center.
(…it seems that the maternity hospital or, rather, its absence was the Achilles’ heel of the then “mailboxes”…)
On arrival to the maternity hospital out there, she was denied admittance because they took her for a Gypsy on account of her black hair and the dressing gown of large printed flowers. Suspiciously flashy, too red. Yet escorting her her husband emphatically condemned so erroneous assumption, his zealous attestation brought about change in the attitude of the segregationist nurses and they let her in for the labors at hand. An hour and a half later my father was told that his wife had born a girl, and five minutes later they heralded arrival of a boy baby. The news triggered a blissful yell by our father, “Switch off the lamp in the deliv'ry room! It’s to the light them babies scramble!.”
~ ~ ~
History, be it of a private person, or a developed nation, boils down to just two parts of which the first comes history immemorial, presented in loose legends, hazy myths, and dubious traditions; the latter, on the contrary, embraces stark facts caught, tagged, logged, and anchored to a certain calendar, preserved in the public chronicles of some kind, or in the personal memory, in case of a separate individual…
All the children of my parents were fascinated when Mom and Dad got into the mood for sharing the family lore about the deeds and adventures of the eager listeners at the times beyond their infant memories.
About how the first-born started toddling, for example, at the railway station on departure from the Carpathians to the Valdai. At the following train stops my father took me out onto the station platforms to consolidate my skills in feeble walking because the wobbly floor of the rolling car did not favor such hoopla…
At the new place, the family was allocated a timber house where they let me go for independent walks in the yard bounded by a fence of slender planks. My mother was greatly perplexed at my looks, mired as a piglet, on my returns from the yard. Where could I possibly find any dirt in so tiny and orderly corral? Changing me into clean once again, she asked my father to crack the enigma. So what he sees keeping the door open for a tiny crack to peek after the mud-lover? No idle roaming nor hesitation, the kid at once takes a beeline route to the fence plank in the corner fixed by just one—upper—nail, pushes the deal aside and off he goes! In the street, the boy busily scrambles atop the hillock of sand dumped for the construction of another house. Up there he plops on his tummy and slides down the sand slant drenched by the recent rains. A merry-go-happy laughter joins the ride. Could you manage washing things for that cheeky villain?.
While my mother was changing me over again, my father took a hammer, stepped out and nailed the dangling plank in place. Then he came back and together with my mother watched: now what?
The kid walked to the usual place and pushed the plank. It didn’t stir. Neither did the planks on both sides from it. The railed in child went along the fence, twice, checking each of the planks then he stood still and burst into tears…. My memory retained neither timber house nor its yard, but at this point in the parents’ narration, I felt the emphatic tears welling up in my eyes. Oboy, poor captive!.
And from another legend, the paw of horror ran up my bristled hair before to pierce the back of my neck by the grasp of its point-sharp talons because my mother grew suddenly anxious that I was nowhere around and for quite a stretch too, so she sent my father to look for me. He went into the yard then in the street—not a sight of me anywhere and no neighbor had seen me at all but it was getting dark already.
