Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
However, Robert Zakarian got a warm applause for his number (sort of a lyrical one). He performed the adaptation of the French song, the air of which was year after year used by the Central Television News Program "Time" when announcing the weather forecast.
"Yes, I can forgive you all
And let to the sky like a bird free of thrall…"
The servicemen of Caucasian nationalities (mostly from Separate Company) enthusiastically met the song "Eminnah" performed by Vladimir Rassolov (sort of an Eastern-comical one).
"Under the burka of your girlfriend
There's no girlfriend but your Granddaddy.
Uh, Eminnah!.."
And the song "The Rains" from the repertoire of Fofik (The Orpheuses at DK KEMZ, Konotop) was awarded a unanimous ovation (sort of the hit of season).
However, in the oral review delivered by Battalion Zampolit, aka the Political Deputy Commander of VSO-11, after the concert in the close circle of the musicians, the final song received the lowest rating. "Roodko, those fucking "Rains" of yours have already drenched everyone fucking thru and thru."
He made a sugary-nasal voice meaning everyday start-up pop stars, "Rains again… but you wait for me… no, I won't wait… fuck off, you stupid fucker…"
We couldn’t help laughing. That particular song was heard by Zampolit for the first time in his life but he accurately grasped the essence of lyrics in the musical mass production of that sort.
"I'll pass thru any rains
Because I'm loving you! Uh-uh!.."
~ ~ ~
And again our team-squad saw the rotation of commander. Prostomolotov got transferred back to his previous squad without demotion from the Lance-Corporal rank though because he wasn't caught at anything. His clash of personalities with the Ensign, the platoon commander, became the reason for the shuffle. He, most likely, at some point, was not careful enough to keep back his intellectual superiority over the Ensign. "Thief-swaggering" was the conbat term to denote that kind of behavior of the sort.
Alik Aliyev, an Azerbaijani in the slinky pants of pheasantly upgraded outfit, came in his place. He was a slim tall guy with a beautiful round face in which a thin clean skin tightly fitted his high cheekbones and the well-developed jaw.
A week later he was promoted to the rank of Lance-Corporal. For that ceremonial occasion, Alik Aliyev ordered our squad-team to fall in, clapped his hands (the right fist into the opposite palm) and announced, full of bubbling delight, "I would-a fuckan!"
But he somewhat hurry-scurried in his predictions and joyful expectations. There were no less tall but more emotionally reserved privates in our squad, who quietly shared with the Lance-Corporal their concepts (which he understood and accepted) that if people who got to the construction battalion after doing their times in Zona still did not thief-swagger, then for him, who was honored to become a conbatist simply on the grounds of insufficient fluency in Russian, moderation and modesty were the ticket to not dented survival.
And about me personally, he never meant to be mean. While still a private man, he accidentally witnessed a situation in the Leninist Room of our Company when 2 senior servicemen from The Orion interpreted to Prostomolotov, the then commander of my squad-team, the postulate of the musicians being above the vanilla army relations as presented by the Statute of the Internal Military Service…
So we just did our job at work—digging, dragging, laying, hoisting—and after it, we got rest within the built-in limitations of construction battalion life.
Of course, we were not qualified to lie down on our beds in the koobriks before the lights-out (that was the privilege of grandpas) but then there were stools along the aisle, as well as in the Leninist Room, so one could sit down and have a rest, because it was already too cold for sitting in the gazebo next to the entrance vestibule…
Then the winter began. We were given warm hats and scarcely padded khaki jackets. They pulled canvas tops over the truck beds by which we were taken to work, and also installed plank benches—from side to side—and now we rode not seated on our haunches…
In the blue darkness of starting night, our squad-team gathered after work at the foot of the nine-story building, but our truck was late. We even walked a little off to meet it on the other side of the windbreak belt remainder, and then some 100 meters more, to the sidewalk stretching towards the distant blocks of five-story buildings, with no passers-by at such an hour. There we formed a wide circle on the trampled snow, tap-taping one freezing boot against the other… Jokes, laughter, friendly jabs and claps on the shoulders – usual vivacity at the end of a usual working day before leaving for the usual havvage at the conbat Canteen.
I felt too bored by listening to the jokes heard before lots of times and walked back to the speck of light from a distant electric bulb on the butt wall of the nine-story building.
(…one of the ways to overcome the drag of time is fiddling about the accessible space…)
So, I padded back to from where we came, knowing that the team would not leave without me, as well as without a couple of grandpa-bricklayers who were still changing into their uniforms in the nine-story building… Boos, yells, and laughter of comrades died down behind… I walked in a measured step thinking of nothing.
(…such reflections are also named "wistful yearnings of a soul", that is when you don't finalize your thoughts about anything specific, but still, for some reason, feel sort of blues…)
On entering the leftovers of the forest belt, I, like, heard a call muffled by the distance between me and the spot in space from where someone called me.
I switched over to here-and-now, and reluctantly looked back over my shoulder just in time to see the rear side of the truck rushing on me. It was too late for a jump aside, though I instinctively bent my legs to hit the road. And that initial tilting in the direction of the intended jump saved me – the bat of the truck rear side completed the started move and threw me away under the tree, instead of toppling onto the road, under the huge wheels of the vehicle…
"We kept shouting to warn you," said Vitya Strelyany, as we rode home. Well, I donno. All I heard was just one call and from really very far… My right shoulder hurt for a couple of days…
~ ~ ~
At the end of December, our squad-team was transferred to the construction site of a multi-apartment building. Or rather to the initialization of that site. There was just a deep pit still empty of any foundation blocks with a short length of tower crane tracks alongside the excavation and the crane itself standing idly over the wide rectangular crater.
Ah, yes, there also was a tin-roofed trailer made of planks with a door and two windows, taken off its wheels and put on the ground by the pit.
We got a clear-cut task – to dig the trench for the sidewall foundation blocks because the wall, as it turned out, should pass two meters closer to the trailer, kinda adding to the project's width. The reason was that at digging out the foundation pit, they omitted to observe that the building would get sitting smack on the pipeline providing running water for a whole city neighborhood and any emergency caused by corrosion would turn the project into a Noah's arc were in made of wood. Now, they woke up and decided to slightly change the project’s location before it was started. And while they were figuring out this and that, winter came, frost struck and no backhoes could widen the foundation pit – the frozen ground was too hard for the excavator buckets, and therefore they brought us, the rescuers at unsolvable situations…
Half of the trailer was packed with brand-new shovels and bayonet spades, we even were given the unheard-of luxury – protective canvas mitts. Of course, the ground was too hard for any kind of spades, breakers were the must there. And they were also brought, a whole truckload of breakers, and dumped with clang-and-ding next to the trailer. Heavy, iron, a meter-and-half long, breakers, and their only weak point was in being self-made. At one of the local factories, they took thick rebar rods, cut them into the pieces of proper length, hammered the rod ends in a smithy to make them pointed, and dumped by the pit.
However, the breaker should be smooth because that's a hand tool. Yet, rebar, which, actually, is intended for making reinforced concrete, bears frequent oblique scars for firmer merging with the cement slurry. Those scars, though rounded, would tear any mitts after a dozen strikes with the rebar-rod breaker against the ground, and then the make-believe handtool would start rubbing off the palm skin, however calloused and hardened it were. But if not we, then who else would defend our beloved Homeland from the plan-drawing ass-holes? Conbat would redress all faults and deal with any situation…
The wind, like a mongrel cut loose off its chain, tumbles in helter-skelter around, snaps at the loosened ear-flaps of our hats, whips their strings against the faces. Yet, the wind’s main job is to drag along in its current the black and gray clouds tumbling and scudding as low as the cabin top of the tower crane. Because of those clouds, all around from morning to night drowns in gloomy twilight. To get warm there's the trailer heated with our breathing.
The mitts had long since got worn to tatters, we grab the frosty rebar-rods with the rags found in the trailer. A strike of the rebar breaker against the frozen ground cleaves off a sliver of it hardly bigger than a walnut; then another splinter, and one more.
With his back to the wind, your partner waits for you to break away a shovelful of chips for him to scrape them off and throw away. Then you change each other… As Vitya Strelyany cared to put it:
"We were brought to Stavropol
To dig and shovel the ground,
But it is so fucking hard,
Harder can't be found."
(…however, I entertain an unshared suspicion that it was an adaptation of a Zona couplet from the period of first five-year plans in the Soviet history, turned out in the mines of Donbas…)
But there's always a nook to feel happy in – oh, how sweet is dozing off when seated on the floor of the trailer with your back leaned against the backs of your comrades!
After half-day of breaking-scraping, we discovered that at the depth of half-meter-plus the permafrost transformed into the ground of almost equal hardness, yet yielding to the strikes with a bayonet spade. Three days later we developed the trench digging technique. First, you dig a hole meter-by-meter and two meters deep, then with an interval of one meter, you dig another such hole and connect these two by a burrow thru the softer ground at their bottoms under the bridging crust of frozen layer. The bridge is cinched about by the crane slings and you will hollow out two grooves across the edges of the permafrost bridge until the crane power is enough to tear off and hoist the whole block of frozen ground. Ha! Fuck you, bitch!.
Yes, the construction battalion did it!. And although there remained many days of breaking and scraping to the very end of the trench, we won the day. We broke the backbone of the polar night twilight that had descended as far as the city of Stavropol…
Besides the trailer, you also could shelter from the frost in the staircase-entrances of the multi-apartment block on the other bank of the pit. Out of the piercing wind, a cigarette chiseled from a passer-by in a staircase could also warm you up…
While I was basking in the staircase-entrances, Alimosha and Novikov explored the surrounding territories and discovered a dairy factory there, as well a bakery plant. Just a question of climbing a pair of fencing walls. They returned swollen like balloons with cardboard half-liter pyramids of milk, and loaves of hot bread tucked under their padded jackets. Since that day we were sending foragers there. The workers of both enterprises allowed you to lift your loot directly from the production lines…
At times, we went out on the street to beg money from the passers-by. "Bro, 27 kopecks short of a bottle, can you help out?"… "Sister, 11 kopecks for a pack of "Belomor", eh? Two days without a smoke.."
Alimosha explained the nuances to me. Never address the pensioner oldies – no go, and they might even start to yell. Asking for a round sum was also a mistake; instead of 27 he would give you at least 30, and instead of 11 you'd get 15 kopecks.
What the money for? Well, instead of 9-kopeck shag, or bitter "Pamir" for 11 kopecks, you could buy Cuban "Portugas", aka "the thermonuclear", or that same "Prima" again; but not Indian "Red and White" – a sour crap in golden-foil wrappers. And sometimes we drink wine too; to drive away fatigue and flush down the snack from the bakery plant.
Oh, how low I fell! Cadging on the street! Where's my decency, my self-esteem? How could I possibly not die of shame?
(…well, firstly, in our cant there was a more precise term for that activity: we were not cadging, but jackalling.
As for my decency and self-esteem whereabouts, they're always by me only their shape vacillate unlike some rigidly constant values as that of never-ending Pi we were taught at school for I don’t know what purpose.
And in regard to shame, I'm probably a pervert here. I feel more ashamed of robbing that Whatman paper tophat from credulous Valya Pisanko, than of receiving soiled coppers in my capped palm from the passers-by.
And even though I might, at certain points, be a noble man, yet, on the whole, I'm anything but a Spanish grandee, and you can safely take my word for it…)
In February, the bread-and-butter carnival was over; we were transferred to the construction of the Medical Center whose basement was already bridged over with concrete flooring slabs, but not completely. Underneath those slabs, we were hiding from the winter wind around a fire built of any lumber or raw-timber we came across and split with the breakers because there was no trailer to shelter in.
The territory of the future Medical Center were vast indeed, but being on the city outskirts it provided no hunting grounds for jackalling…
The trucks for our transportation to work and back all were from a local motor depot manned by the civvy drivers… Ours was a hairy asshole. He flew into the grounds of the would-be Medical Center on his UAZ-66, hit the brakes and the truck glided over the icy ground, turned around and stopped still – get in, off we go!
During the trick, the badly fixed, tattered, canvas top quacked and bubbled like a parachute in arms of a landed saboteur. The driver grinned his bad-teeth smile from under his thin mustache – he was in high spirits from that sort of gypsy romanticism.
The exhaust pipe of his truck was trained to give out loud bangs but he withheld the fun for riding along the city sidewalks, to rough the passers-by. Bang!!
"Oy, Mommy!"
The buddies tried to explain me about those engine backfire bangs and the carburetor, but such things always were above my head…
On one of the first days in the new place, I went to the wooden toilet on the frontier of the site territory. When urged to take a leak we loosened bowls at any nearby nook, so I wouldn't go that far for such a trifle. Yet, because of the frost using the detachment sorteer harbored not a little risk. The whole floor there became one solid yellow skating rink too slippery for walking and even when a-squatting over an ochco your high boots’ treds slid slowly apart on the smooth ice…
While defecating at that faraway ruin of a toilet, I felt like having some odd auditory sensations. I kinda heard…well, not quite voices…rather, echoes of voices. A distant, cohesive buzz of voices, some low even hum with no splashes nor distinct words.
Then I took a letter from the inside pocket of my outfit jacket, which I never re-read but kept on me. Without looking who the letter was from, I used it as toilet paper, stood up, buttoned my pants and suddenly saw the source of that noise.
The shabby walls and stall partitions were scratched in toto with inscriptions. Names, dates, settlement names were written and snicked, with pencils and ball pens. Some climbed on top of others because there was left no spare space around… The territory had obviously been used as the Stavropol Collection and Distribution Point of Draftees, betcha, and they, already fallen thru into the two-year-long eternity, smitten, swept, engulfed by it, were hurriedly leaving on the deals in rotten whitewash their parting scratches:
"Sakha, from the village…"
"Athos, from the settlement…"
"Drun, from the city…"
They were already there—swallowed up—because their voices were not heard, but turned into some mutual wordless hum, yet the hands were still finishing their farewell to themselves:
"Andron, from…"
(…in the construction battalion, the universal urge to leave a meme of oneself does not disappear, but becomes anonymous. You would not see there the classical "Vasya was here", they used one, common, mark for all at once:
"Orel, DMB-73".
Read it as, "Drafted from the Orel-City (or region) demobilized in 1973".
With graphite, chalk, paint on walls, on pipes, on the tin, on anything. In every construction site or building erected by the Stavropol Construction Battalion about a year or two before 1973, there was such a mark.
Then there came Tula, DMB-74 .
The time would come for Sumy, DMB-75 , and Dnepr, DMB-75 but it still was so far away…)
~ ~ ~
The Orion took part in the city musical contest. We performed 2 numbers there without securing any place. As it seemed, the whole affair was started for the sake of a local singer. A young guy could sing without a microphone filling the whole auditorium with his voice. That's some singer!
(…I have never heard him any more neither on TV nor over the radio, they had no vacancies there, muslim magomaevs and iosif kobsons kept their positions for decades…)
The second of our numbers at the contest was "The Indian's Song" from the repertoire of Tom Jones. No one knew what about he sang in it, but in the Soviet adaptation the song bemoaned the bitter fate of American Redskins (as it turned out later, Tom had nothing to do with the song sung by Raiders):
"They took the whole Cherokee nation,
Put us on this reservation…"
At the contest, the Orion’s "brass" group comprised already two horn players. Ensign Jafar Jafarov had been transferred to our battalion I can't say where from or what for, because I didn't care. He came to the Club and announced that he was playing a horn…
Jafarov’s eastern appearance imparted a pleasant impression of softness. A rounded face with the soft swarthy skin, the soft glint in his black, olive-like, eyes, his soft smile when he uttered his, "I swear to you by my Mom!" And he really played the horn which he was bringing to the Club for the rehearsals and carrying away in an unexpectedly hard case… Kolya Commissar started to blow his horn much better with Jafar around…
Gray, the tamer of Karlookha, became a frequent visitor to the Club too, not as a musician though, just because it was a secluded spot in the everyday conbat life. At work, he fucked it all from the very beginning of his service and was just doing another two-year time at the construction battalion. As if it was much fucking different from a penitentiary colony… just that conditions were a bit easier and the spetzovka in khaki color instead of indigo.
Brought in the morning to a construction site, he ventured to the city and returned only for the evening truck home. At times, he was locked up in the clink, but even Battalion Commander, notwithstanding his chronic brain leakage, clearly realized that suchlike correctional efforts would be lost on that well-developed, stiff-lipped jail-bird. The bald patch of a scar in his left eyebrow somehow humanized the crisp face thrust in wolfy way forward from his broad shoulders… In his life, Gray was treading along the guilelessly straight, unpretentious, path of a hereditary thief.
At the Club, he shared stories of his recent adventures in the city, or roughed Commissar. That was not right, because both Commissar and he were from the same draft, but for Gray, the Zona Code overweighed that of the construction battalion.
On the eve of becoming a pheasant, Commissar decorated all of the rear of his right hand with a gaudy tattoo depicting a craggy ridge of fuzzy mountains and the sun rising from behind them in a spiky halo of sharp rays, and all that freshly shining world had a firm foundation of instructive inscription running below, "The Northern Caucasus". When on the stage, Commissar assumed such a stance that his tattoo would face the audience and, blowing his horn aloft, he squinted proudly at the sprawling masterpiece of an unknown author.
Probably, it went against Gray's grains that Commissar was swaggering with a more ostentatious splotch than his blueish spider-cross (a Zona sign for the initiated) hardly bigger than a ping-pong ball, which cheeky inequality, even in absence of any Zona regulations as regards geographical tattoos, provoked Gray's picking at the cheerful Hornblower.
(…however, wherever I use the word "probably" you don't have to take all that follows for its face value because there certainly might be other assumptions besides it. There can be a whole lot of variants and interpretations, but that "probably" sweeps them all aside and leaves just one, maybe not the truest to life.
Word requires a cautious approach. At times you blurt something out, like, say, "lahboohs (aka musicians) – are one family! We support each other like a wall!" just to run into nagging qualms: oops! I did it again…
Because all those general statements are good for slogans only, like: "Workers of all the countries – unite!"
Or else: "Bipeds! All you need is love!"
Such spiffy words work only until the common interests coincide with the interests of the given, individually taken, mammal but whenever the interests diverge then at once – you get along and let me alone…)
Let's take, for instance, that same Yura Zameshkevich. After locking up the stoker-house he came to the Club. The place where he would safely keep away from the eyes of Fathers Commanders, where he could strum a guitar, serenely drink a mug of chiffeer concocted in the Canteen kitchen (mix a 250 gr. pack of tea and 250 ml of water, bring to boiling) where he's one of us – a person of a subtle soul constitution, an exquisite connoisseur of the music which is something, a loyal friend, a reliable comrade, and simply a brother – a lahbooh, in a word.
But now his wife has arrived to visit him and waits in the checkpoint guardhouse, while he races around looking for a parade-crap and a greatcoat to go with her to the city. He gives his bristles a hasty shave, and gets the Leave Ticket at the Staff barrack, then for some reason drops to the Club with me sitting peacefully in the back row of the empty hall. He briskly jumps in and out of the musicians' and, leaving the Club, grabs my completely unaware cock and all in his bearish grip and raises me up in the air for a goodbye. Of course, I scream!
Then the pain gradually dissolves leaving behind inescapable puzzlement. What for?
(…I have found no answer in the writings of the naive primitivist Freud and his bro-scholars, neither in all the Upanishads and Bhagavatas, nor in Testaments, both Old and New, nor in Quran. Only in The History of Russia from Ancient Times, a brief passage mentioned the case of Dmitry the Pretender hiding at the back of the palace where a Cossack found him and, grabbing at his "secret knot", dragged the usurper out to the raging mob. But there at least you may trace a certain purpose for the deed, in contrast to Yura's… What was there for him in it?.
Some questions are beyond the power of human comprehension, we only can point at them for the edification of the inquisitive, and, with a sad shrug, spread our hands wide apart – alackaday! ‘tis beyond the human plumbing.
By the by, they have even invented a special scientific term for the like cases. When, say, you are so high and mighty that taking a leak you send forth a squirt powerful enough to bore thru a three-meter-thick layer of glacial ice, yes, quite in a breeze, before there suddenly pops up some crap that even you don't fucking know what the fuck it could possibly be at all. Know then that you’ve come across that very opaque doodad which by scientifically bent fobs is called transcendentalism…)
So, what else did we do in the Club besides solfeggio, rehearsals and surly contemplation of certain transcendental enigmas from all their respective angles?
Fooling around with chiffeer mentioned en passant? Its bitterness was a rare delicacy. And vodka happened hardly oftener…
We used a special code-knock at the door of the musicians' for a smooth admittance. To the right rhythm in your tap-tapping, the door would open, otherwise, go where you had come from, or shout thru the closed door what was your fucking message.
One time, after the right code and the click of the lock opening in response, the doorway was filled with the stubby figure of Zampolit, bodyguarded by the Ensign from Fourth Company who had tap-tapped the code, to be sure, the fucking excursion guide.
Our cook-vocalist Volodya Rassolov, handled Pickle, was fast and up to the situation: while the two officers gaped around what's what, he glibly slipped the bottle into the top of a kirza boot from the pair standing by his side. Of course, Zampolit labeled us a gang of drunkards and parasites all the same, but there was no direct evidence already…
But most of all we talked: who was what in his civilian life, what would he do coming back to it (we innocently believed then it was possible to come back anywhere at all in the stream of the flowing, ever changing space) and that Third Company went to kick the shit out of Separate Company, but the black-ass fuckers fought the assault back with their belt-plates, and the pigsty soldier-oversee seemed really be fucking his swine harem…
The champion of talking was, sure enough, Karpesha. In a hushed, brotherly confidential tone of voice, for hours would he spin a yarn about his ten-day furlough when he six times broke up and reconciled with the girl he dated, his former classmate…
Got bored with listening to the same minutiae for the seventh time? Go out into the empty Club hall, get seated next to Robert in the last row of seats, and welcome to the fluctuations of Parisian life. In Paris, everyone knew everything about anyone else. That, for example, Jean Marais was gay. And that's a pity, of course. Although I did not like him starring in "Fantômas", but as D'Artagnan in "The Iron Mask", he was the masculinity itself. That's what that fucking Paris was doing to even manly men…
Gray would share how he used to rough those in love, inadvertently passing along his street. Then he would go out of the wicket, and conversationally ask the guy, “So, what, Romeo? Wanna talk of love?” and cock up the trigger of his dad's shotgun. To which motion the asked, neglecting the chanced discussion, would sprint away, but in fucking zigzags, sort of, while yelling over his shoulder the farewell instructions, "Run! Sveta, run!"
Or, for a change, how he battered his wife for the first time and the following morning she had Chink eyes…
And Jafarov, caressing thoughtfully the soft glitter of his horn, would narrate of when being still just a kid and "playing trash" at some party, he watched thru the key-hole a whore giving some officer a blow job, and then she returned to the hall and danced with someone else suck-kissing him, another officer of a higher rank than the previous one.
"But such a beautiful woman! Upon my word of honor! Fuck it!"
And when he served at the military orchestra, their leader usually walked the city with a tube, which is the biggest trumpet in brass bands. Just donned it and went out hunting for "trash", such a shifty schemer was he, I swear.
He was walking and looking out where they carried funeral wreaths for him to follow. "Would you like a military band at the funeral? Let's talk terms." I swear by my Mom, some foxy wheeler-dealer, but "playing trash" not with the whole orchestra, sure thing. Such kind of "trash" was called "to play a sleeper". Yes.
Now, one time, as usual, we went "to play a sleeper". On the second floor, the door to the landing wide open, all’s socko, good and proper, we marched in.
In the first room, the relatives sitting by the walls, a-crying all, good and proper, as befit the occasion. Only that they were somehow way too much at it, and paying zero attention that the musicians had arrived. So, the leader came up to the one he had made the deal with, "What's the fuss?"
"Oh, we're so distressed! It's a disaster. We may have to cancel the funeral." And she showed us to the next room, also packed with relatives a-crying, but even louder than in the first room.
Now, in the room center, there stood a table with a coffin on it, all’s socko, good and proper. And in the coffin, the dead man a-sitting. Well, upon my word, real sitting, bolt upright.
See, when alive, he was a hunchback and because of so big a hump, they couldn't make him lie down as required. Whoops, that’s how our "playing a sleeper" got fucked…
But the leader was a fucking tough character, he came nearer and pressed at the sleeper's forehead; it went over its hump and lay down in a proper way. Only after the correction its legs stuck up in the air, no way to shut the coffin lid.
"We've already tried that way!" sez she who the deal was made with, and wails loudest in the room.
And ain’t I tell you the leader was a real sport, eh? I swear, some socko, good and proper fucker. "Okay," says he. "I wanna all but the musicians out of the room."
Well, in general, we pulled the sleeper out of the coffin, placed it on the floor, face down, hoisted the coffin over it and – bang! Who would fucking like to lose a "trash", eh?
