Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
A woman in a dark dress, with glasses and permanent curls in her bob-cut hair, read to Olga and me the rights and responsibilities of a young family, which was a cell in our Soviet society. We signed the form, Lekha and Sveta seconded.
"That is all,
Say "bye!" to dreams…"
The trash playing band broke out with Mendelssohn's march, and a photographer from the photo studio across the road shot us with his camera on the tripod. In the picture ready a week later, there was a hairy yobbo with a not too happy smile and the guiltily scrunched collar of the jacket from the last year's graduation suit. But Olga turned out nicely, only somewhat sad in her face. Probably, she did not want to get tied up at her sweet sixteen…
The music at the wedding party was played by The Orpheuses, for free, sure thing, it was not a playing trash occasion. A couple of boards sealed Zhoolka up in his kennel so that in the circle of ground cleared of grass with the chain he dragged after him throughout his dog's life, they'd put the instruments and the equipment.
Between the stack of brittle bricks and the sectioned shed, there was set up a long table, parallel to both, in the shade of the two age-old American Maples.
Olga and I sat with our backs to the fence of the Turkovs' yard. Two kitchen chairs under us were coupled into one seat by spreading over them the Father's turned inside-out sheepskin coat with long wisps of fleece, not overly golden but black and maroon anyway.
Around the table there sat the Arkhipenkos, Uncle Vadya with his wife whose Adoptee he was, Olga's mother, Maria, who arrived from the Crimea with her eldest daughter, Vita, Aunt Nina and Uncle Kolya, some nondescript relatives of Solodovnikovs, the immediate and more distant neighbors from Nezhyn Street, the Kreepaks, the Plaksins, the Kozhevnikovs, Vladya's mother Galina Petrovna, and all sorts of close friends either to the newly-weds or to the musicians, as well as flying parties of the Settlement bros, always ready to drink for free…
The wedding party rambled on till late at night, under the light of a couple of bulbs fixed up in the Maples.
They chanted "Bitter! Bitter!" for me and Olga to stand up and kiss each other while they would count loudly how long we kept the kiss.
Father, together with Olga's mother, was put into a handcart and shoot in it along the street (Maria was not quite happy with that ancient beautiful folk custom).
Quak bared himself to the waist and danced holding aloft the large ax which he grabbed from the lean-to, but Uncle Kolya started to clap in time as if he also was a rocker and, seizing a moment, took the ax from the merry Viking. The Settlement bros dragged Quak to his khutta because he was all mops and brooms already, while Skully kept copulating with Glushcha's sister in the most primeval posture, under the gloomy Elm in the back garden.
In short, quite a normal wedding it was, in style to the classic canons and traditions of the Settlement…
Already after the midnight, Olga and I retired to our lean-to conjugal bedchamber… To commence the nuptials, I first had to tidy the place scraping Quak's vomit by the door with a shovel and sweeping out the cigarette butts left by Olga's girlfriends smocking in privacy. If I imagined beforehand that friendly openness might run into so a callous inconsideration I’d better hang a padlock on the door.
Even the tape in the tape-recorder was obviously played, wound and rewound from the particular place with the erotic French song, which I was fixin' to switch on as the background for Consummation of Marriage. Hopeless to find it in a snap, and in a way of ad-hoc solution to regain so meticulously arranged but sabotaged first-wedding-night musical back-drop, I just switched the tape on from the very beginning—the song eventually would get played anyway—but as we finished the mentioned consummation it turned out that the brown mass of the tight wound tape had collected on the right reel and ticked its empty flips by, next to the stilled reel on the left… I somehow missed enjoying those erotic grunts by Brigitte Bardot.
Then over the tin roof of the lean-to, a heavy shower clattered pouring down on it and onto the long leaves of corn crowding in its plot up to the glazed frame wide open into the night garden outside, and we just lay clasped in a tight embrace and it was good…
Our honeymoon coincided with my vacation from Plant. The first squabble happened on the third day of our married life. I was sitting in the yard deciphering sheet-music of some Spanish guitar piece. Olga walked past from the khutta to the lean-to and called me along.
I still picked strings for a minute or two, no more, before coming. She was on the bed shedding tears because I did not need her nor paid any attention: was that the right way to treat wives?
So I had to iron out my wrong-doing in the most effective, as far as I know, way, though I still couldn’t get it what was my guilt.
(…and only by now I have figured it out that so works the female instinct for self-preservation, "If you have already got me, then who do you keep practicing that fucking guitar for?"
However, quite possibly, that even now I don't understand them right…)
~ ~ ~
Lekha Kuzko brought the blissful news – we were to play dances at the KEMZ Plant Palace of Culture, he had arranged it.
I was delighted because there's no life without playing dances. Besides, when Olga and I were coming to dances at Loony and they kicked up a fight on the dance-floor there, I feared of accidental harm to her belly, although it was not noticeable yet.
The dances at KEMZ were attended by a crowd from neighborhoods too distant from Loony. Although The Spitzes played better music than we, yet long waiting for a streetcar after their dances would cure any melomania. And even some bros from the Settlement began to show up at the KEMZ Palace of Culture. People like to join familiar crowds…
Vladya and Chuba were drafted into the army. Sur, a neighbor of Chuba's, being still a tenth-grader, stepped into his shoes as the bass guitarist.
A guy from Zagrebelya, handled Fofik, started to sing with us. He sported long curly hair and showed slight vestiges of speech problems in his childhood which, probably, accounted for his babyish handle. Fofic’s crowning number was the song by Makarevitch from “Time machine” group.
"I drink to those who're at the sea now…"
Nothing of a lisp or stutter here. And another one, about an American pilot, shot down in the sky over Vietnam.
"My F-4 as fast as a bullet…"
(…only recently I found out that was a Russian adaptation of the "Secret Service Man" of Mel Tormé which he sang back in the '50s.
In music, they always were ahead of us…)
One night Olga got with her kisses to my dick, and I yawped, "No need for a wafflister wife!"
She shrunk back, and I immediately regretted my idiocy. Moron! Why? It was so good!. And what hurts most of all, the words were out before I even knew they were there, that sudden yell surprised me too, not allowed any stretch for thinking over… but fixed me into the crowd of stupid seminarians
When it became too cold in the lean-to, we moved into the khutta, on the couch in the kitchen. Each night, I tightly closed the double-leaf door between the kitchen and the room where slept my parents, and my brother and sister. Not because we were having sex every night, but so that they did not guess on what night we were at it…
At the dances in KEMZ Olga seldom danced, the belly became too big but the rock’n’rollers jumped around without ever heeding where to. And her light brown mini coat became too small for fastening any lower than by the two upper buttons.
Once she began to cry at night that I completely fell out of love with her. But that was not true, I felt sorry for her and wanted to protect from everything. Olga cried and cried until she made me make love to her. And it was good, only I tried to be very careful so as not to hurt the belly in any way. Four days later Olga gave birth to my first daughter, Lenochka…
Children are the flowers of life until they wake up.
"All the day you cried and cried
With your mouth open wide,
No more crying by my side
Or I'll throw you outside!"
Although hardly blessed with a stupefying volume, Olga’s tits kept turning out milk in more than enough quantities. The surplus outpour, not consumed by the baby, had to be milked off into a glazed cup. And, of course, she didn’t get off my back until I agreed to try the product. Well, tastes differ and stuff, there’s no use to argue, but what the heck do them those silly babies find in it? Pasteurized milk is much better…
Aunt Nina said that the child must be baptized and we took Lenochka to a khutta nearby School 12, at the address given by Olga's aunt. There were many people crowding in the yard. On the whole, it was a church though without the cross on its roof, sort of an underground temple. But inside it was a commonplace khutta only without a single piece of furniture. The baby was taken out of the envelope, sprinkled hastily so as to make her howl in protestation, and presented with a small cross on a string.
I forgot even to think about the holy event, yet at the end of January Lyonya, Manager of the Experimental Unit and also the Komsomol Head of the Repair Shop Floor called all the younger locksmiths up to the Management Office after work for a Komsomol meeting.
There he announced that he was informed by the City Komsomol Committee that I had been to church and baptized my child for which breach of Komsomol ethics the present meeting should pronounce a reprimand to me, as a renegade member.
Everyone voted "pro" at once to cut the meeting short and go home but, leaving hurriedly, expressed their condolence to me for not getting expelled from the organization completely, which lucky outcome would cancel another ten years of their keeping Komsomol contributions from my wages.
As I learned later, the priest baptizer each month was handing in the list of visitors to his crossless church-khutta. That's some underground clergyman for you… But then, so, probably, were their conditions for letting him function at all.
~ ~ ~
And in February I ran into a huger penalty… Lekha Kuzko was going then to the city of Korosten to bring electric guitars for the KEMZ Palace of Culture, and I wanted to go with him. That morning I climbed up to the Management Office and asked to let me go, but they told me to wait for the CEO of the Repair Shop Floor.
When Lebedev's black greatcoat showed up in the Mechanical Shop Floor aisle, I went out to meet him. However, at so early an hour, his back was not straightened up to the proper degree or else he'd kept it overly upright the day before but all he managed to mumble at the moment was "no".
Then I saw red and just left, because I hadn't changed yet into my spetzovka. Yet, as it turned out, Lekha was already gone to Korosten.
In short, I got "absence from work" for that day and the CEO of the Repair Shop Floor gave out the order about transferring me to a lower-paid position as a workman at the Smithy Shop Floor for the extent of three months.
"You'd better use the wood to make the coffins for yourself
Because the penal battalions are going to attack…"
In the Smithy Shop Floor, instead of the remorseless wail of machine-tools, there thundered hydraulic hammers sending tremor thru the asphalt floor and the everlasting fire roared violently bursting in the furnaces where black iron slugs got heated to the scarlet whiteness. The howling of hefty fans thru the grates of their rounded boxes was also a mighty part in the score.
Such fans had a meter wide sweep of their blades and were it to catch a reckless hand… Well, that's the reason for those muzzle-gratings…
In a word, you couldn't find a better place for improving your vocal skills. Shout at the top of your lungs and no one would ever hear you. Even I couldn't hear myself but still kept yelling:
"Oh, Mommy,
Oh, Mommy-Mommy blues,
Oh, Mommy blues…"
But my yelling exercises went on only while my partner Borya was learning how much we were to load on that day.
Borya was a penal workman, like me, for violation of labor discipline, yet he was native there, a smith from the Smithy Floor. A blonde over thirty years old, he was not very tall or bulky, you'd hardly think he was a smith. And, in his case, the discipline was violated by being in a state of intoxication at his workplace.
Our job was plain and invariable – loading of steel slugs into the furnaces.
Those slugs waited for us in the left wing of the Smithy Shop Floor building. They were sizable pieces of axes from railway car or locomotive wheel pairs cut up by the gas cutters during the day shift.
The ex-axis pieces were, sure enough, too heavy to be hoisted by a couple of workmen, penalized or not, that’s why there was a ground-operated bridge crane in the wing. I grabbed hold of a piece with the grip donned on the winch hook, and Borya hit the buttons in the hand console hanging from the winch in the bridge crane and forwarded the slug to the trolley where I directed and held in place the descending grip until it opened and let the piece go.
That way we stacked several layers of the slugs, depending on the length of the cut pieces (the longer, the heavier) because the following part of our job was to push the trolley along the narrow gauge track of rails.
We pushed it into the main building, onto the turntable there which looked like a sewer hatch but swerving in its place. Applying our bodies to an end of the loaded trolley, we turned it 90 degrees to the left and rolled on further, towards the furnace.
The most demanding point in the process of slugs transportation was to start a still-standing trolley. That's where you had to exert your sinews in earnest, and when the trolley began to slowly roll on then, Ha! bitch, you're, ours!.
The vent of each furnace was furnished with a wide iron shelf outside. Turning his face away from the fiery heat pouring out the vent, Borya tossed a half-meter-wide tube-roller on the shelf. Then we put onto the roller the oblong spade with raised side edges, which prevented the slugs from rolling off the spade.
That spade had an enormous, five-meter-long, handle made not of iron but of steel with the cross-section of six by four centimeters. The handle ended with the crossbeam for two workmen to grab its halves from each side of the handle.
But first, I held the end alone so that Borya could use the nearby jib crane to hoist a slug from the trolley into the spade, shielding his face from the fire in the furnace with his hunched-up shoulder. Then he turned the crane over back to the trolley, came up to me, and each of us grabbed his half of the crossbeam.
"Hup!"
And we, rubbing shoulders, went three-four wide strides, accelerating to jogging, towards the flaming hell in the furnace. The run ended with a synchronous jump up and sharp push of the crossbeam down with the aggregated weight of our bodies so that the springy handle would transmit the impact to the spade and toss the slug up and out.
On landing after the jump, your face would turn, on its own accord, away from the scorching heat of fire raging in the furnace. That's why Borya worked in the smith's protective tarp apron, and I was finishing off my once-beloved red sweater.
With our necks defensively pulled in, we strode back pulling the shovel after us, and Borya went to hoist the next slug onto it.
"Hither-thither…To and fro…
Ooh!. How good it feels!.."
Then we drove the emptied trolley back to fetch a new batch of slugs… Inside the furnace, they also had to be stacked in layers and rows starting from the deepest, otherwise, they just wouldn't fit in. The more of them loaded inside, the shorter the runs with the shovel…
I didn’t immediately mastered the synchronous jumping, and Borya cursed me with inaudible, behind the rumble and roar, taboo words because the slug wrongly dropped across a layer would fucking fuck your ass when stacking in the following ones from the bunch.
Borya was overly terse. I had more communication with the fan (singing in a duo) than with him. Yet, one time Borya shouted into my ear, "We've done forty tons today!" The red flames from the furnace reflected in the teeth bared in his pleased smile and the whites of his eyes. Some labor victory!.
Empty worthless bullshit. It's just because we did it.
"You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt…"
We worked two shifts – the second and the third, leaving the first one to the gas cutters for cutting axes to pieces.
On the payday I could hardly believe my eyes – I had earned 120 rubles a month!.
"…transfer to a lower-paid position…"
" Ha-ha, Mr. Lebedev!
Ha-ha! Mr. Heath!
'Cause I'm a workman!
Yea! Yea! Yea!.."
And to the smiths, the cashier was forking out two-three unopened packs of money in bank wrapping plus stray notes. Over 300 rubles!
Yes, Borya, you'd better cut out boozing at your workplace.
" Hither-thither…To and fro…
Ooh!… How good it feels!.."
(…I have always been, am, and will be cursing that night when I let out that cry of a stupid seminarian.
Yet, what's said can't be unsaid…)
And Olga again wanted something else… Once, when I was throwing the slugs into her furnace, she started pressing, "Tell it… what!.. you're doing… now…"
"I'm…making!.. love…to you!.."
"No!.. tell it…the other!.. way…"
"Which…wa..way?!.."
"You..ou.. know!.. which…"
And I started to moan it out, "I'm…fuc…king…you!.."
"Ah!"
"You'm…fu… cki…ng…I…"
"Oh, my!.."
The dark kitchen. The baby's asleep. And what could it understand anyway…
Another night she called me from the darkness, "Hit me!"
"You crazy?"
"No, I'm not! Hit me!"
Well, at last, she made me lightly slap her cheek.
"Not just so! Hit hard!"
Knowing she'd not get off my back in any way, I meted out a more sonorous slap. She stretched on her back sobbing.
"O, babe! Did it hurt?"
No answer, just quiet sobs. And I had to comfort her in the most effective, as far as I know, way. And it was good…
Then I was lying on my back thinking. Why would she? And so persistently… A slap in the face as the punishment for misconduct?. Some whoever…before me?..without me?..instead of?.
(…it’s better not to think some thoughts, just leave them alone and, if heedlessly started, they’d better be dropped and not thought down the road to their inevitable conclusions…)
End May the term of my penal exile to the Smithy Shop Floor was over, and that same day I got the draft notice order to report for induction on May 27…
And again there was a feast in our khutta yard because in the Settlement traditions seeing-off to the army was almost as great a regale as a wedding.
They all drank and sang, only without The Orpheuses' accompaniment, and Mother was carrying around the table Lenochka in her arms, wrapped in a swaddle over her loose baby shirt. Clasping her Grandma's gown collar with her tiny fingers, she looked around with her pink lips open in surprise…
The next morning they saw me to the two-story House of the Deaf by the bridge in the railway embankment over Peace Avenue. There were lots of draftees in the caps on their bare-of-hair heads in the thick crowd of seers-off.
Tolik Arkhipenko kept assuring everyone that I would be just fine but nobody listened, my brother smoked in wistful consideration of the skin-headed draftees, Father concentrated on frowning deeply, Mother comforting Olga who sobbed burying her face in my chest…
The draftees were commanded to board two big buses which started to move but, after turning into Peace Avenue, stopped – someone was missing. We went out to the roadside. The crowd of seers-off rushed across Peace Avenue. Olga ran up ahead of all.
She was kissing me with her soft wet lips and pressing to my chest her small soft breasts without a bra under the light summer blouse wet from her tears.
The belated draftee was brought in a car, and we were told to board again. The motor started up. The door slammed and the bus finally, uncompromisingly, and irretrievably moved away carrying us to where the army would make of me a real man and defender of our Soviet Homeland.
~ ~~~ ~
