Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
One day, coming back after the midday break, Vladya and I saw Skully on a bench of the Overseers’ Nest in the company of Borya Sakoon and some stranger in clean clothes.
"Here they're coming," said Overseer, and the man suggested us, including Skully as well, to go along with him. From the flitting farewell grimace on Borya Sakoon’s mug, we could get it that the invitation was issued by a representative of law-enforcement organs, staying in the dark though as to why.
Clad in our faded T-shirts with no spetzovka jackets on because of a sunny, hot, October day, we followed his athletic figure in a tartan shirt walking contrary to the flow of latecomers who leisurely sauntered from the canteen in the square outside the Main Check-Entrance gate. Everything went as usual, and only we were pulled out and estranged from the routine life of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.
"Where to, smarties?" asked Peter Khomenko flashing a broad smile from the counter-directed stream of workmen, yet, at the abrupt turnabout of our escort, his mirth dried up at once and he accelerated his pace towards the Mechanical Shop Floor, not caring to wait for an answer.
"Who's that?" asked our guard-and-guide alertly. I replied that was my tutor, and we left the Plant thru the Main Check-Entrance.
He told us to get into the Volga thru whose windshield shimmering in the sunshine, there peeped Chuba’s face wearing a nervous smile, and they took us to the City Militia Department, which was next to the Passport Bureau.
Behind the gate to the City Militia Department, there was a wide yard-coral bounded by barrack-type one-story buildings. We were separated and led to different rooms in different buildings where different people began to ask us questions and write down our responses.
Of course, not everything in the proceedings got recorded. For instance, the interrogation of Skully started as follows, "Do you know that fucking moron?"
"Which moron?"
"The one who brought you here."
"No, I dunno."
"That was Head of the Criminal Investigation Department."
"No, I dunno."
At that moment I was interrogated by the mentioned f-f…er…well, I mean, Head of the Criminal Investigation Department.
Seated at the large desk, pretty hunky, with his hair sticking closely to the skull, he asked who the day before was present at the rehearsal in the Variety Ensemble room in Club… And who was the last to leave?. Who was approaching the closet where so much expensive German accordion of four registers had been kept?.
He took notes all the time and when the phone on his desk rang, the receiver got picked and pressed to his ear with his shoulder raised to the tilted head, the way Marlon Brando did in the movie where he was the sheriff, while the moron kept writing on…
After interrogating all of us, they told us we were free to go and might be getting back to work… We sauntered up along the street to the Department Store and turned left towards Peace Square. 4 Orpheuses in smeared spetzovka pants and old T-shirts… Along Peace Avenue, we also strolled in no hurry – the working day was ending at five.
In Zelenchuk Area, we had a bit of fun, jumping at each other like Mazandaran tigers and tearing down the worn T-shirts on our bodies. We did not stop the revelry until all the four T-shirts were torn wide open from their collars to the waist. And why not? The day was sunny and pretty warm, so we simply tied the tatters with knots upon our navels and went on, like happy hippies. It was Skully to start the whole horseplay, probably, because he had such a hairy chest…
Next week, coming back to the Plant after the midday break I, as always, dropped into Vladya's khutta to flock and go on together. Vladya shared the news about one of his neighbor's hens who died in the yard that morning and concluded with the suggestion of taking the body over with us to hang it in our locker room, just for fun.
The plan did not inspire me too much but I still lent Vladya a helping hand in smuggling the demised into the Plant because you needed both your hands to climb the wall along Professions Street but if dragging along a newspaper package with a dead hen, you had nothing to grab hold of those holes in the concrete slabs with…
From the locker room ceiling there hung a length of wire for a light bulb, which was missing together with its socket. Vladya took someone's unfinished shabashka from under the window, rested it on a locker in the middle row, climbed upon the work in progress and wrapped the unemployed wire around the hen's neck. She froze up there with her dirty white wings spread loosely above the naked skinny legs.
The midday break was over and the Mechanical Shop Floor machine-tools started their scraping wails when a plump black-haired locksmith from the Repair Unit entered the room. Catching a glimpse of the bird, he did not laugh but left immediately. In a split-second our Overseer, Borya Sakoon, flew in.
With his eyebrows shot up and the lips pouched to farm the small letter "o", motionlessly stood he for one entire moment staring at the listless animal above his uplifted face. Then he turned over to us, "Hairy-yobbos! You did it, bitches!"
For some unadvertised reason, Borya was in the habit of calling The Orpheuses working at the Experimental Unit "the hairy-yobbos"…
We, certainly, denied the allegation but Vladya took the dead bird off, wrapped it back into the same newspaper and dropped somewhere outside the Repair Shop Floor. In the final analysis, Borya was right – with merely two eyewitnesses, by the end of that working day the entire Repair Shop Floor knew that the hairy-yobbos (the workingmen masses slavishly aped the Overseer’s example in calling us that name) fixed a chick in the locker room. And if the thing remained there for at least half-hour it would inevitably kick off grim rumors circulating Konotop about someone got hanged at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant…
~ ~ ~
Olga and I ceased dating at the gate of her aunt's khutta because we found a more suitable place, or rather she showed it to me.
A little farther along Budyonny Street, there was a short dead-end to the left, leading up to the closed iron gate of the oil storage base. Near that gate, by the garden fence on the roadside, there stood a park bench. Who and when schlepped it so far from the Park I couldn't say but, strategically, it was positioned in an impeccably correct spot wrapped in the shadow out of reach of the feeble light from the bulb above the closed base gate. On that bench, I got acquainted in absentia with Olga's Konotop relatives…
Her mother's sister, Nina, immediately after the war served as a telephone net switcher at the headquarters of a Soviet Army division stationed in Poland. On her demobilization, Nina didn't return to the Soviet Union because she had married a Pole and they had a child already, so Nina stayed to live in her husband’s land.
4 years later, she arrived in Konotop to attend the funeral of one of her parents and that was a mistake. They never let her go back despite the fact that her young daughter remained in Poland, and the country itself was a member of the Socialist Camp Community. She never found out what happened to her daughter or her husband nor did she know anything about their current situation, because none of her letters was answered.
After 15 more years, Aunt Nina registered her marriage to Uncle Kolya who did not drink and had a good job in the forestry, only he often needed to go somewhere by his motorcycle with a sidecar. Yet, he had built a really good khutta of three rooms and a kitchen. They had no children and adopted a baby girl, named her Olya and were very fond of her. Not long ago they bought a piano for Olya although it's, probably, too late to start playing it at eleven.
Aunt Nina worked at the Meat-Packing Plant in three shifts. To reach her workplace she had to walk two kilometers along the railway track on the city outskirts. But on the other hand, her family didn't need buying meat at Bazaar because even though the bags of workers after their shifts were looked thru at the Meat-Packing Plant check-entrance, they never frisked the panties of exiting women…
And on that same bench, we talked about Art. For example, there we discussed the "Romeo and Juliet" after watching the movie together in the basement cinema at Loony.
"They talked and talked and I could not make a damn thing out what all their talks were about, yet tears were dripping from my eyes all the same just like by some fool…”
(…which was a very well-defined assessment, by the by, because the rhymed and metered speech makes words you know seem unknown obscuring even so simple a fact that more than one of noble ladies in Verona, way younger than you, had babies at your age…)
It was also there (I'm still about the bench) that Olga harpooned me up, hard and securely. She uttered just one phrase but if you're a born patsy of graphomaniac you're in a deep trap.
"Yesterday I entered in my diary: ‘…when he kissed me goodbye I was devastatingly happy.’”
Dammit! You're done for! And there is no way out! Firstly, in many tons of the read and re-read literary output, I had never come across such an expression " devastatingly happy". Secondly, she kept a diary! Thirdly, but not lastly, I was there in that journal!.
After the dances, we sometimes saw her girlfriend Sveta to the porch of Sveta's khutta. At so late a time the Konotopers who dwelt in khuttas did not venture into their yards, more so Sveta's Granny and Grandpa. After giggling by our side for the stretch of a smoke, Sveta went in to bed, and the porch with the narrow plank bench was left at our disposal.
On one of such evenings, Olga told me to wait on that porch while she'd be gone to her khutta because Aunt Nina had the third shift that day and Uncle Kolya left by his motorcycle for someplace in the district.
It took a long wait before from the neighboring yard came the tinkle of the handle-latch in the wicket closed by departing Aunt Nina. A few minutes later, Olga appeared at the porch and mutely beckoned me to follow. We went out into the back-alley and noiselessly entered the yard of her khutta.
The door from the veranda opened to a large kitchen succeeded by an even larger living-room to the right, and a bedroom to the left, both separated from the kitchen by cloth curtains in the doorways. After the living-room, there was another bedroom for Olga and small Olya. We did not go there but turned into the owners' bedroom to the left.
Olga switched on the feeble night-light lamp and went out to the bedroom behind the living room. I was left alone facing the large double bed of a ceremonial aspect dimly glinting its nickel-plated siderails, and a smaller, more casual, bed next to the curtains in the doorway to the kitchen. Tight grip of unrelenting tension overwhelmed me.
She returned in a dressing gown whose unbuttoned sides were kept in place by her arms folded on its front. Not uttering a word, we both looked at the smaller bed and Olga put out the light. Under the gown, she had only panties on. I hastened to follow the suit reserving just my underpants. Then, in the bed, there followed a long wordless wrestling match for each of her dressing gown sleeves. Finally, I threw the whole item on a chair by the wall, the score of the clothes we had on became even – 1:1.
When I turned over to her, she lay on her back under the cover pulled up to her chest shielded by her tightly crossed arms. I felt it was chilly in the room and got under the cover too. The scramble to peel her small panties off took no less efforts than that about the large dressing gown. At last, there we were both stark naked, next to the cover shoved aside because it got darn hot under it. And then…
Then she writhed and dodged furiously from under me, pushing my hands away. I managed only to rub my cock between her thighs and against the tiny turf of hair without knowing what was what but feeling just a little more and…Now, almost…about there…Damn, she turned off again!.
(…I would do the deed, I swear I would, if only I had time enough… That night the cuckoo in the kitchen clock went crazy and jumped out with her shrill "coo! coo!" every other couple of minutes and now it was already croaking six and soon Olya was gonna be up for her breakfast, school so I had to put things on, quick, and get away before Aunt Nina were back from her work…)
Of course, that night we allowed ourselves too much and got way too far for any fail-safe. Hugs and kisses by the khutta wicket or on Sveta's porch were not enough anymore, and wouldn't do.
But where? And when? On November 7, said Olga, after young Olya would have passed in the holiday demonstration column of her school and be taken by Uncle Kolya and Aunt Nina on a visit to his village.
And that time no tricks would help Olga to wriggle away, the cuckoo's cries would mean nothing with the whole night being our own…
On the morning of the Great October Revolution Day, I came after Olga because we also were going out in the festive city. She was retouching with a pencil her trimmed, thread-thin, brows, and marking the corners of her eyes, spiffing up, in short.
There was no one but us, yet to my hug, she didn't respond with her body and said, "Why hurry? The khutta is ours today. It’s only…You know, there's something…"
(I froze in mortification, could it be she's going to announce she had her time of the month?)
Well, in general, if I wanted it… well, I knew what… to come to pass, then I had to agree to one condition…
"What?! Speak out!"
Now, before going out to the city she would make up my eyes.
What the fuck?!. Though, if you come to think about it, that was better than her being on the rag… Hercules would understand me. After the victorious fights against the Nemean Lion, the Lernean Hydra, the Cretan Bull, and other monsters, he was made (by a chick named Omphal) wear a female dress and spin the yarn in a gynoecium, with her high heel crushing his male’s dignity's throat. At least in some way, I'd equal that inhumanly hunky demigod… And I agreed…
Blueish eye shadows tinted my eyelids, black eyeliner accentuated the lashes… And out we went to the city…
(…at present, in the aftermath of all those "blue" and "pink" revolutions, after Elton John was knighted, after the charming cutie pirate Jack Sparrow, etc., etc., people became more intelligently aware.
In those pre-enlightment days folks needed more than a glance to get it what the heck was there with my visage. Then some shrugged, others giggled…)
Borya Sakoon, who came out of his five-story block in Zelenchuk Area greeted me cheerfully but, after a more focused look, suddenly changed in his face. Genuine fright distorted the worn-out facial features of Overseer, the unfinished "hairy yob…" stuck in his throat and he fled back to the block of his residence.
(…and that was the man who survived the rampant banditry and all kinds of "black cat" gangs in the post-war Konotop!
Or maybe because of that? To grab the old Walther gun from the down-most drawer in his chiffonier?..)
"You are nuts on the run from their having your head checked," concluded my younger sister Natasha flatly, when she met us on the sidewalk of Peace Avenue.
" …but I don't care
'cause of this hardon…"
In the Central Park of Recreation, Olga took out her cosmetic bag and washed out my War Paint, so much for faking a Hercules. Then Skully's girlfriend Nina with her girlfriend Ira came up to us, and the 3 girls walked off looking for a place to have a smoke.
A pack of Settlement bros approached me, they were celebrating it in full swing already. They felt elated, they wanted that an Orpheus from the Settlement was also nyshtyak. They tore off the lid from an intact bottle and handed it to me… Everything in this life is to be paid for, even your popularity. I raised the bottle up, threw back my head, cast the parting look at the sun, and started drinking from the bottle’s neck.
Then the bottle went from hands to hands around the circle warm and emotional.
Then we went to a deli for more wine.
Then I felt sick and reeled off home…
I woke up in the lean-to on the iron bed which inherited the space from the "Jawa" bike when the Arkhipenkos moved to their apartment. My "dacha" season had already been over, but the bed still tarried in the lean-to and, as it happened, that was the rightest place for it.
I woke up with my raincoat and shoes on, but the bare spring mesh of the bed didn't mind. The main thing was that I hadn't overslept the farewell dances that we were playing in Park that night. Only I still had to trudge all the way there being so stiff and with that oily smack in my dried up mouth and—ouch!—with that pain in the nape…
I finally came there when everyone was already schlepping the equipment to the dance-floor stage. Lyokha fussed that I was shirking, and Olga too began to lay into, "Where did you get lost?"
I hardly could explain that I was very so very much sick, and Lyokha said all that I needed was a hearty swig to get back to life. I shuddered at the very thought of it, but Lyokha and Olga started to laugh at me.
Yurko, the young guy whom Olga used as her errand-boy, ran to a nearby deli and brought wine. I forced myself to take a few gulps and—lo!—the remedy brought me back to life…
After the dances were over and the equipment dragged back to the ticket office, Olga and I left the Plant Park and in 2 minutes of suspensive walking reached her back-alley.
The first khutta, then the Sveta's one, the third was for us. I assuredly walked Olga to the wicket, opened it and… all of a sudden, she recoiled!.
By age, I was two years older than Olga, yet always felt, like, it was another way around. She knew more than I learned from all the stuff in all the books I read.
Besides, she enjoyed respect and authority. Whenever any of the girlfriend in our bohemian milieu had problems with outsiders, she turned to Olga for help. Olga walked out with the brazen and put the stupid cow in her proper place…
It was a rare evening when the dances went off without a fight… A multi-voiced discordant squeal broke suddenly from the dance-floor, yet not at all in time with the number played at the moment. In the dense mass of the youth gathered for collective recreation, a circle of vacant space formed in no time, filled with the blur of rapid gusts of fists milling the air. The vortex swept, tornado-like, across the dance-floor, thru piercing shrieks of girls giving way.
Abruptly yet asynchronously, we cut playing and encouraged dear friends to keep order, please. The defeated side, alone or in a ring of his bros, was pushing thru the crowd to the exit. To remove the low depressing hum, Skully set the tempo with dry snaps of sticks against each other and we started the next number…
Girls though did not make a show of their dissent and for their cat-fights invited each other to go out. Olga went out just a couple of times and gained respect and authority because in Theodosia she started attending dance-floors at the age of thirteen and, without wasting time on verbal preliminaries, decked them bang off. As a result, if some frostbitten bitch hurt feelings of a girl from the bohemian circle, then mentioning Olga’s name was quite enough to make her realize the blunder and shut up.
Another reason why Olga seemed maturer than me was the attentive attitude towards her from mujiks.
Once after the dances, when we were collecting cables and stuff from upon the stage, a frightened dude raced into the dance-floor, crossed it and jumped over the fence into the darkness of the Plant Park. At the last moment his chaser, a hairy-ass mujik over thirty, managed to deal a glancing strike and the fugitive sprawled into the bushes, but bounced up at once and ran away.
"I'll catch you, bitch!" cried the triumphant and, turning to Olga who stood by the stage, added, "Ain't it, Red-Haired?"
"You yoursel is the word," Olga answered diplomatically, and the latter swagger out the dance-floor.
That's why I felt to be younger than her. But the moment she flinched at the wicket to the dark khutta that feeling dissolved, and everything fell into place. Next to her fear, I felt older and stronger than her, I felt pity for her and compassion. After all, the younger ones should be cared for and protected. Even from ourselves.
I comforted the frightened girl and left without entering the yard. On my way to Nezhyn Street, I knew that I had done the righteous thing and was pleased with myself, yet all the same, I couldn't but agree with the diagnosis by my sister Natasha – "nuts on the run from their having my head checked "…
~ ~ ~
On November 7, the unusually long Indian summer ended and we moved over to Club to play dances there.
The Ballet Studio Gym opposite the cinema auditorium on the second floor was a tremendous room stretching for about 40 meters from its entrance to the small stage at the far end wall. The stage was intended not for concerts but for Evenings of Recreation and, therefore, was just a low deck with two steps running all its front. That way a recreating participant could easily ascend it when called by the mass-entertainer to take part in some funny competition or another event in the ongoing Evening.
The stage-deck took the central one-third of Ballet Gym's width the rest of which was sealed off with vertical bars of black-paint-coated rebar rods on both sides from the elevation. The light cloth curtains hanging behind the bars formed, like, some backstage.
In the center of Ballet Gym, high overhead, midst the roof bearing structures painted with the black Kuzbass-Lacquer, there was fixed a large white ball encrusted with the scale-like mirror shards all over. Besides, among the joists there was also installed a searchlight focused on the ball and one click of the switch set in motion the ball-rotating electric motor and also hit the ball's rind of mirror-scales with the straight beam from the searchlight to get fractured into innumerable dim specks of light idly floating along over all and everything within the huge Ballet Gym.
The length-side walls consisted mostly of manifold tall windows, below which the handrail for the students of ballet art ran from end to end. The butt wall opposite the stage was paneled, according to the ballet school tradition, with large, tight fitted, squares of mirrors which conferred onto the room its second name – the Mirror Hall…
The Mirror Hall served an ideal place for any get-together, both the New Year matinees for the Settlement kids, and School Graduating Parties, and Evenings of Recreation for the Plant youth, and, last but not least, for dances. And the dances it was to reveal the ideal's weak spot – its floor. In less than a month the treds of a couple of hundred dancers scuffed the red paint coat off the floor and bared its timber planks. Yet, the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, said it did not matter.
Behind the curtains on both sides of the stage, there were installed the huge loudspeakers transported from the summer cinema in the Plant Park, and they produced some really bomb sound, awesome nyshtyak! In the common reflection, blurred by the distance to the far-off wall of the Mirror Hall, our figures with guitars stuck up over the rhythmically swaying whirlpool of dancers' heads in the huge murky void whose only illumination was the floating swarm of soft light specks – round and round, and round – and everything went on nyshtyak thru and thru.
And only Chuba fussed and bitched that the sound of his bass guitar put out by the two portable loudspeakers on the stage was lost completely behind the mighty boxes with the meter-wide speakers. Lyokha usually assuaged him that he knew a guy who had low-frequency bass speakers for sale, we only had to procure material for making a box to install those. And it was also Lyokha to suggest the relevant place where to get the material in question – the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant. After all, we needed just one sheet of thick plywood, all in all, 3 by 2 meters.
We, the Plant affiliated Orpheuses, started to mull over a plan… In the Repair Shop Floor, there was no plywood whatsoever, iron and steel were all we dealt with. The proper place to look for plywood was surely the Car Repairing Shop Floor, where Chuba worked. And he admitted that the plywood could be extracted from the cars brought for repair, but how to get it outta Plant?
He resolutely declined the proposal to cut the plywood into pieces the size of the bass box parts and drop them over the wall in Professions Street because his overseer would fire off uncomfortable questions about the source for such immodest quantities of so expensive material.
Thus, there remained the one and only option – to get a whole, intact, sheet out of Plant thru the Club building, with its never closed side door to the Plant grounds, next to the movie list painters’ room.
However, the planned mission had a certain slippery point – the Car Repair Shop Floor and Club were located at the opposite ends of Plant. Dragging the whole sheet thru all of the Plant territory? Chuba refused to take such a risk, neither Skully showed any whiff of enthusiasm. As usual, the hardest part in undertaking rested entirely on my and Vladya's shoulders…
Still and all, Chuba partially collaborated and ripped the plywood sheet loose in a car waiting for repair on a sideway outta his shop floor. Besides, leaving the car, he somehow forgot to lock its door as required by the regulations… Thru the above-mentioned door, I and Vladya penetrated the car to find, in the indicated place, the coveted treasure – a standard sheet of thirty-millimeter-thick plywood blotted in a couple of spots but, on the whole, it did not matter.
We dragged the plywood out of the car, grabbed at the edges, and carried on over the crunching gravel of the track ballast shoulder, then along the even and not so noisy asphalt paths between the Plant shop floors. On the way, we kept persuading each other that the sheet was not particularly heavy and that there was nothing special if two workmen carried it bypassing the shop floors within Plant. Although we, personally, had never observed such a picture because dollies were a usual means of transportation for the purpose.
When to Club there remained the smaller leg – to pass by the Smithy Shop Floor, the All-Plant Bath House, the Fire Brigade building, the Oxygen Tank Filling Station and the Medical Center, Skully raced up from the Mechanical Shop Floor to inform that Borya Sakoon sent after us and if we didn't show up we'd be fired.
That was some news, our Overseer at the Experimental Unit never came up with so fiery threats. Could it happen the Head of the Criminal Investigation Department came on another visit?
So we rested the sheet against the smoky wall of the Smithy Shop Floor under the marble tablet screwed to the bricks to announce that in 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Power, there was embedded a message to the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant workers who would work there in the year of the centennial anniversary of the Great October Revolution. Making sure that our sheet did not interfere with the traffic, we went to the Repair Shop Floor.
Borya was raging way more furiously than Fantômas himself – where the heck we two been paddling when the whole Experimental Unit was sent to Harvesting?.
Yes, Harvesting was not a thing to shrug away. It was like parading the entire workforce of the Experimental Unit. That was the moment when everyone was engaged in earnest, to the utmost.
All the locksmiths from the Experimental Unit, in full collection, with the paper slip of order listing the required materials and quantities, were making for the Central Warehouse. There, behind the All-Plant Bath House, heaps of rebar rods of divers diameter, by heaps of metal fittings of powerful profiles, by heaps of pipes with the cross-section of no less than 10 centimeters were piled crisscross by the railway track.
Soon after, the workmen were joined by a dolly-car, and then along the tracks about the Central Warehouse, a stocky railway crane would roll to their group and hover the dangling steel cables of its beam over the tangled heaps and hills of all those piles of metal.
Two of the most experienced workers, equipped with steely breakers, would noose the pipes, rebars or channels named in the paper slip. The rest of the congregation, keeping a reasonably safe distance, would profusely share their sage advice and agitated comments. At last, the crane would strenuously yank the snapped bunch of metal, pull it up and, with scraping screech, tear out from the heap of iron jumbled with all the previous Harvestings by representatives of different shop floors.
The catch would then be lowered onto the waiting dolly-car. The Ware House employee would compare the approximate amount of the cargo with the figures scribbled in the order and give his "go ahead". Returning from a safe distance, the dolly-car driver would drive it to the Repair Shop Floor, scraping, on the way, the asphalt of the paths with dangling ends of rebars, or pipes or whatever else was there in the paper slip. The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit would start back to the Repair Shop Floor in one, cheerful, monolithic mass, proud of the fulfilled duty…
And now the coming back harvesters appeared from the Mechanical Shop Floor aisle, yet we were not among them. We failed to attend the holy rite of Harvesting. Fortunately, our Overseer had a kinda soft sport for Vladya because of having the mutual last name, even though without being relatives, and we again slipped from the Experimental Unit directly to our sheet under the memorial tablet.
The Manager of the Repair Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, Mozgovoy, stood next to it eyeing the plywood avidly and swallowing his managerial saliva. Of course, such a material would whet anyone's appetite. We clawed our prey like two winning vultures.
"Where to?" asked, in pain, Mozgovoy in his plaintive falsetto.
