Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The on-duty officer at the commandant office told me to open the "diplomat" whose innards proved instantly that I was nothing but a dembel: pantyhose, a bottle of vodka, and the stolen crimson tablecloth.
"Go," said he. "Come back in the uniform shoes and get your case."
I rushed to the huge ticket-offices hall on the left. There was a long line at the ticket office for the Moscow's direction. In the line, some 30 meters off the ticket office, I made out a soldier in the parade-crap. He was a big man, which meant his feet were not small, and he looked sad because (that's elementary) he was returning after his furlough to serve another year.
"Where are you going?"
"To Moscow."
"Come on."
I led him straight to the window of the ticket office and explained it to the line, which all of a sudden grew so animatedly clamorous, that we had urgent orders to defense their peaceful sleep and safety at the remote border-lines of our Homeland. He bought a ticket to Moscow and I to Konotop.
When we moved away, I described for him the situation about the case. A pheasant cannot say "no" to a dembel. We sat on one of the many benches in the huge waiting hall and exchanged the footwear…
"Where could you manage so fast?" asked the on-duty officer at the commandant office.
"Bought from a gypsy on the platform."
With the case set free, I hurried to where the sad after-furlough buddy was hiding his feet in the statute violating kicks deeper under the bench. I landed down next to him, but we did not have time to change – the loudspeakers announced that the train to Moscow was going to start off the sixth platform, and we ran there so as not to be late… The strings on the borrowed shoes got loose and started lashing the floor on the run, but we boarded in time…
The train knocked hastily over the rails, it was carrying me to Konotop, yet my uptightness did not slack up, I urged the train to go faster and could in no way calm down… Only late at night getting off the train on Platform 4 of the Konotop Station, I believed that that's it.
"After his service done,
Came the soldier home…"
And I again rode the familiar Streetcar 3, but this time to the very terminal. The darkness outside the window made the pane-glass show a vague reflection of the khaki jacket and the forage cap of serviceman parade-crap… At the terminal, I asked where Decemberists Street was, and they told me to go right…
Protracted fences, dark khuttas behind their wickets, rare lampposts made up some unfamiliar outskirts. Having asked someone else along the way, I went out onto Decemberists Street and walked along it until I reached the wicket with the scarcely discernible in the dark plate marked 13.
I entered the yard and knocked on the first door in the khutta. It opened… Was that my father so gray-haired? When?.
In the light falling on his back thru the open door, he looked incredulously at my parade-crap, "Sehrguey?" Then he turned to the inner house, "Galya! Sehrguey has come!"
My mother came out onto the porch and buried her head in the breast of the parade-crap jacket, crying loudly.
Standing one step lower, I confusedly patted her shoulder, "Well, Mom, calm down, I'm back after all." I really did not know what there was to cry about.
(…it's only now I realize that she was crying about herself, about her life flashed by in a flick. Just so recently she was scampering to the ballet school with her girlfriends and—here you are!—a man in the parade-crap in front of her, like, the son came back from the army. When?..)
My mother looked back at the small frightened girl standing by the kitchen table and, finishing the last sob, she said, "What do you fear, silly? It's your dad who's come."
Then she again turned to me, "How that you did not meet Olga? She went to the third shift, working at the brick factory."
…service done…
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ My Universities: Part Two
That was exactly the moment which I never allowed myself to dream of in those 2 years when in the morning I woke up not from the bellow of an on-duty jerk but because of a female embrace, that of Olga. She came home from work, lay atop of me, hugged thru the blanket, and I awakened to answer her kiss. Our talk somehow did not come out well, if an exchange of one-word clues could be called a talk at all. And we looked at each other in such a manner that my mother, who was on her vacation, promptly took our daughter Lenochka and went to Bazaar…
Everything in life is surely repeating itself. What was, will be there again. The difference, if any, is slightly made by circumstantial details… For instance, that my mother returned from Bazaar (and not from a store) without oranges, and that nothing restrained me this time… As for the hieroglyphics left on my wrist by the claws of that hotel sadist, Olga, sure enough, marked them well, studied attentively and read their message, but not out loud. Actually, I did not insist on her sharing the obtained information.
(…there’s no substance more flexible than time. The current year lasts elastically and shows no wish for termination, while a year lived thru shrinks into a mere point of time.
A point has no length whatsoever, it ends at its own start. So, tell me any good reason to consider shorter stretches than a year as having even a point's worth. Really, what can you say about the last month? That it had several Fridays and there was thirteenth among its dates. Right. And about the last hour? Oh, yes! It had sixty minutes… Empty term-juggling, jejune re-shuffle of numbers.
A decade, when lived thru, turns into a same-size point. After that point idled at school, a person begins to grow bristles. Another such point spent at Zona brings about aching joints (especially in the right shoulder), yet it still is just a point…)
A week after the demobilization, the two-year eternity at the construction battalion becomes tattered scraps of memories pinned onto a point in the past. The flow of ever-moving life carries all those points off, to hell or whatever other destination, and it does not matter where exactly, because you don't have time to ponder on such matters but have a more urgent task – to get along the streaming flow of life….
When bathing, there are two ways of entering the water. Following the first, you go into it step by step, your shoulders pulled up, rising on the tiptoes as the bottom grows deeper. The other way is to enter until the water is knee-deep and with a shriek (the element’s not vital and might be left out) plunge headlong forward… It was time for me to dip into civilian life…
Overseer Borya Sakoon died neglecting his promise to retire in 4 years.
The Arkhipenkos moved to the Kamchatka Peninsular, which, reportedly, was Fishermen Paradise where fish jumps into your skiff of their free will.
My brother and sister graduated the Railway Transportation School and were sent to work off for their diplomas by exploration and construction of railways somewhere in the Urals between Ufa and Orenburg.
Vladya and Chuba returned from the army half-year before me and had time enough to acquire streamlined conformity to the concurrent life-flow. Skully had developed a solid bold patch over his head and looked for becoming 27, which age ended draft liability of a USSR citizen. He was exempted from the army as the only breadwinner for his single mother with her single mother, God save them both until his coming of the right age!
I was not much amused at my re-appearance in the Konotop polite society. We gathered at the Vadya's, I stuffed a joint, yet my friends did but a couple of drags each, just for civility's sake… From Vadya's khutta we ventured to the Loony park where The Spitzes were playing dances. When passing Deli 6, Vladya farted at a lighted match held by Skully close to his ass. The emitted ammonia flared up in a blue bunch of flame. It did not delight me though, having seen all sorts of suchlike tricks in the construction battalion, I did not care for the commemorative improvising.
In general, my way of getting on high wasn't fine with them, and theirs didn't turn me on. We remained friends but in the course of our subsequent lives, we flowed, basically, in separate parts of the stream…
I borrowed The Adventures of Captain Blood from the Club library but couldn't read even a half of the rubbish which once upon a time was my regular thrill…
"What do you keep in the newspaper atop the wardrobe?" asked Olga.
"A spike condom. Wanna try?"
"Nah!"
I was sure though she had checked it before asking, or did I overestimate her?.
At our having a walk, she introduced me to an unknown squirt in the running by civvy commonality—her co-worker from the brick factory who we met near Deli 1. A mujik over 30 said his name, I answered with mine, and we immediately forgot the just heard sounds. I did not like his smile that bared the over-worn gums receding to the teeth roots. Besides, some uneasiness about him made it clear that the meeting and new acquaintance was no good news to him, I regretted we had come up to him at all…
And on the other side of the Under-Overpass, near Deli 5, it was already we to be approached by a half-acquaintance Halimonenko, handled Halimon, who demanded of Olga a private talk. She asked me to wait and walked with him 4 meters aside on the same two-step porch in front of Deli 5. Some scraps of words in their conference: "militia", "get not a little" were reaching me. It was unpleasant to stand pushed aside that way, but so I’d been asked.
(…another of my pesky traits is doing what they've asked me without giving it a thought and starting to think when it's too late…)
Their conversation ended and she returned to me followed by his owner-like "I told you!". Olga explained that someone attempted at stealing Halimon's motorcycle from his khutta's shed and he mistakenly concluded she had anything to do with all that.
(…myths are different. There are useful ones, like the myths of ancient Greece, and useless as, for instance, that the army turns young men into manly men.
Bullshit! Were it so, I'd say to Halimon, "This is my woman, talk to me!" It's not that I was afraid of him, it simply never occurred to me to say so. The army hadn't made a man of me…)
Olga suggested going to the Plant Park on Saturday, where the dances were played by The Pesnedary, a group from Bakhmuch. Their native town was the fourth stop of a local train in the Konotop-Kiev route, so it took just a half-hour ride to get there. What kind of group could be from such a backwater? Yet, Olga said they still played well, besides, at the dances, she'd introduce me to Valentin Batrak, handled Lyalka, the brother of Vitya Batrak, handled Slave.
The lahboohs from Bakhmuch sounded very good thanks to their keyboard player – a long guy sporting the hairstyle of Angela Davis. They quite decently performed "Smoke on the Water" of The Deep Purple, as well as "Mexico" of The Chicago band. Then we were approached by Lyalka and Olga introduced us to each other.
Tall and skinny, with the long fair hair slightly cocked up at his pate, he had a same-colored nail-beard à la Cardinal Richelieu. A single look at each other's enlightened eyes prompted us that we needed a more secluded place than the dance-floor. Such a place was found and there we exchanged the credentials and reached consensus in the estimation of the sampled weed's quality, which contributed to establishing relations of friendly cooperation in the years to come…
~ ~ ~
My father disclosed his strategic plans how to implement the skills acquired by me in the army. His project called for adding one more room as well as the veranda to the recently bought half-khutta, and also paneling its walls from outside with brick and, since we're at it, construction of a brick shed in the yard, of two sections, one to keep firewood and coal for winter, and the other residential, kinda summer room.
I felt reluctant to clarify that all the training got at the military service made me a qualified trencher well versed in application of shovel and breaker, without further building skills. Not that I was ashamed of the fact, but because he was so happy at the prospect of realization of his fondly mapped designs. I couldn't tell him that "bricklayer" standing in my military ID was a standard bullshit. So I said, yes, of course, no problems…
A truckload of bricks was bought at the brick factory, followed by a truckload of sand, a half-ton of cement and – off went the construction works of the century! The water source, regrettably, was farther away from the khutta than once in Nezhyn Street, besides, the running water system hadn't reached the outskirts of the Settlement and you had to turn the crank, round and round, above a hell-deep well, spooling the multi-meter iron chain onto the windlass barrel to bring to the daylight a pailful of water.
That summer was really hot, both in weather and zest of the labor efforts that turned my father's plans into the tangible reality. As for the quality…Well, the seams in the masonry were thicker than ideal, but the plumb-line test of jambs and corners won’t make me blush till now….
On his arrival home, a dembel had to report to the Military Commissariat and get registered there, spiffed for the occasion in his parade-crap. After those proceedings, I sent the parcel with the uniform to its owner at the military detachment 41769, after thrusting a three-ruble banknote into the jacket's inner pocket. Had the money reached the buddy? My mother told me she also had been putting a three-ruble bill along with each of her letters to me. Stuff it! Why did she never mention it at least a single time?! I would forbid so senseless practices because all that reached me were just vanilla letters. Well, they also were my relief, of course…
Soon after, I received a letter from Stavropol sent by the soldier-clerk at the Staff barrack of the VSO-11. He did not write a single line but, as arranged between us, enclosed a blank sheet of paper stamped with the Construction Battalion seal. It only remained to fill the page with the testimonial for admission to an institute.
I banged out a text to stuff the page up to an appropriate measure depicting myself rather positively, as a determined soldier at both military and political training, an eager participant in the amateur art activities of the battalion, a reliable comrade, an experienced warrior of the Soviet armed forces in general and the military construction troops in particular… Because not only zampolits could do the job, after all.
Then I asked my father to re-write the composition into the sheet with the stamp since his handwriting looked more like that of an inveterate army officer. He copied the list of my virtues, but somewhat hesitated when it came to signing the testimonial, "What if they catch you?"
I had to assure him that our Battalion Commander had no chances to disown his signature which he had to re-invent for every paper to be signed because of his chronic memory leakage. Grateful for my valiant labor that summer, my father scribbled a signature (any colonel would be proud of such a one) next to the seal stamp of the military detachment 41769…
I did not go to Kiev but, on the advice of my mother, I took my papers to the Nezhyn State Pedagogical Institute which also had the English Language Department. It took only a 2-hour ride by a local train to get to Nezhyn, twice shorter than to Kiev, and I did not care for the institution’s pedagogical quirk, most importantly, I would be able to read in English…
For the period of the entrance examinations I, as an applicant, was allocated a bed in the hostel by the main square of the Nezhyn city, opposite the Lenin statue and the massive building of the City Party Committee and District Party Committee (2 in 1) behind his white back. It took a bus ride for just one stop to get from the square to the institute, yet on foot you got there much sooner.
The English Department was located on the third floor of the Old Building, erected in the times of Decemberists by Count Razumovsky, and in those times of yore, it served already as the educational institution for nondescript students along with Gogol, the great Russian writer. For that fact, the institution had nailed down to its denomination the name of N. V. Gogol and planted 3 monuments of him around the edifice.
I liked the black-and-white alley of giant Birch-trees by the foot of the steep porch in the Old Building, and the white unembraceable columns carrying the classical pediment, and the Firs tall enough to peek even into the echoing corridors in the third floor paved with parquet, and the high-ceiling auditorium rooms.
And I liked Dean of the English Department, named Antonyouk. The sympathy was based on his not picking holes in my lame knowledge of English. I do not think though that he would be as lenient if knowing that my grandfather's name was Joseph, and my father-in-law was Abram. Dean Antonyouk belonged to the militant anti-Semite type. In the gloom of late evenings, Antonyouk sneaked to the time-table of the English Department to cross with his wrathful pencil the names of Jewish teachers out, and in the same manner, purged he the faculty wall-newspaper hanging by. Like a youth from an underground resistance cell struggling gegen Befehle issued by the occupant authorities of the Third Reich. However, Alexander Bliznuke, one of those Jewish instructors, as alert as Gestapo, tracked Antonyouk down and caught him red-handed for which the latter lost his position. Yet, all that happened later…
At the written examination on Russian, I turned out a composition, graded 4, which, actually, was an untraceable plagiarism – an adaptation of the memorable message-statement that Zoya Ilynichna, the teacher of Russian language and literature at the Konotop School 13, rolled out in red ink under my subversive babbling about meditations by the window. And at the oral examination, I was in luck to pull the ticket asking to describe the character of Prince Andrey from the War and Peace by Tolstoy. However, the bitchy examiner still tried to set me back by an additional question, "Could you recite some poem of a Soviet poet, anyone of your choice?"
That was, as you call it, a question below the belt, but I recollected that Yesenin also lived some time under the Soviet regime, and started pouring out with a restaurant drawl to it:
"Oh, my leafless Maple,
Ice-coated Maple…"
Before my getting into the second verse, the examiner surrendered and yielded a passing score…
In the interim between the exams, I bought a couple of balloons for Lenochka. In the trade network of Konotop, such goods were seldom on sale and I did not like that her staple plaything remained the old suitcase preferred by her to a couple of worn-out dolls. She used to drag the scratched suitcase out of the bedroom and drop it in the middle of the kitchen to announce, "Cry, Grandma! Grandpa, cry! Lenochka is leaving for the BAM!"
It was about a year already that the Central TV news program "Time" was night after night presenting reports of labor achievements at the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway track, aka BAM.
>"Come to me at the BAM
I am not a stuck-up Ma'm
On the rails, we'll have a sex…
I did not like that the child was growing so over-politicized, and I had warm recollections of how at the Object we loved to play balloons.
And so, one evening stretched out on the hostel bed, I watched the smoke from my cigarette swimming up to the ceiling which view suggested an idle idea of staging an experiment in Physics because there was nothing else to busy myself with… By its behavior, the smoke very clearly indicated its being lighter than the air. Now, if we had a balloon filled with it then the balloon should soar up! It only remained to solve the purely technical problem of stuffing the smoke inside a balloon.
The solution was prompted by my life experience. More than once I watched a couple of stoners assisting brotherly each other to get a swift lift, high as a kite, by the trick code-named "locomotive". One of the bros would put a sparked joint into his mouth reversely, the burning end first, observing, sure thing, precautions to avoid inner burns, and then the benefactor blew. As a result, a squirt of thick smoke was pouring from the tube-mouthpiece of the Belomor-Canal cigarette to be immediately consumed by the relief target.
Yet, for the outsider of a balloon, a straight cigarette would also do, right? So, I lit it, inserted the mouthpiece into the balloon's neck, and blew from the opposite end a lungful of air. But it should be kept in mind that the "locomotive" smoke is eagerly sucked and kept in by the consumer, whereas the air, when forced into a balloon, tries to escape the rubber body thru its neck. In short, the amount of the smoke-mixed air, which I had blown in, burst back thru the cigarette mouthpiece and knocked the smoldering tobacco out, straight into my throat.
(…"When a dog has nothing to do, he licks his balls." my father used to say.
Sometimes it's better to lick than bungle about the aeronautics…)
Sure enough, I coughed the tobacco out after its smoldering fibers scorched my larynx somewhere behind the glands. That's what happens when a philologist meddles with Physics matters. Firstly, it hurts, and then go to pharmacies in search of Furacilin for treating burns.
(…but what hurts even more, hurts to tears, that no lessons may prevent my future follies. Certain morons are not able to learn from their own experience because it is not possible to foresee which other locomotives with balls, or vice verse, will inspire my inquisitive mind tomorrow…)
I was matriculated at the English Department, but the triumphant departure to Konotop was somewhat clouded by having words with the commandant of the hostel who found a shortage of one pane in the window of my room. The glass had not been in place when I moved in there, but the jackass did not listen to my explanations, demanding retribution in ready money, or finding a workman who would insert the pane. Beside not having the specified amount, I also resented the unjust rip-off. When left alone in the room, I went up to the upper floor and pulled a glass from the window in the toilet. The pane size fitted perfectly, I do love the standardization! The commandant still croaked that the glass had obviously been in use and I proclaimed that it was bought at a chance seller in Bazaar, at which transaction I missed to notice those paint smudges along the edges.
(…our old good world is very repetitive, at any rate, my arguments when dealing with commandants are all alike…)
~ ~ ~
Olga resisted the very idea of my striving for higher education, moreover in the field of pedagogy. As for English, she did not consider it a specialty at all because everyone should know the language nowadays, so she was told by a baby doctor who visited to treat Lenochka's cold. I responded by calling the doctor smart dumb-ass and swore to come to Konotop on every Saturday. Yet, Olga stopped pecking at me only after I agreed that she would dye my hair with hydrogen peroxide. That's why in the all-out picture of the 1975 first-year students at the English Department of the Nezhyn State Pedagogical Institute, aka the NGPI, I had the looks of that fancy ass-hole of a protagonist in The Hero of Our Times by Lermontov—a blond with the dark mustache…
Our course was split into four groups of twelve students each, with only one male per group. The exactly same male-female ratio was maintained at all the other courses of the English Department.
Because of my obviously dyed hair, some local young fairy started trailing and coveting me with signs of care and close attention along with insistent proposals to make friends which solicitations were full of wooing intonations like those by the boy from Nalchik. After a shock sample of construction battalion parlance, he bleated that his life was ruined for he had missed his chance of going to Moscow because of me, and pissed off.
Olga immediately informed me that in Nezhyn I was hanging out with fags. To my demand of specifying the source of the fabrication, a certain Shoorik was indicated as the horse mouth, whose sister studied at the Physics and Mathematics Department of the NGPI.
At my request, Lyalka called Shoorik out of the Loony dance-floor into a dark alley where I allegedly wanted to have a talk with him. I hit the summoned Shoorik on the jaw and he did a runner with all deliberate speed. I didn't pursue though and only roared after him in the best traditions of construction battalion, "Come here, fucker!" Rather an odd if not counterproductive way to lure back an escapee running for their dear life, if you come to think of it….
The classes in the Old Building lasted from nine to almost three and then I went along the wide asphalt walk towards the sandstone-tiled New Building in front of which there stretched a row of thick sprawling Willows screening beneath their canopies straight benches without backrest… In 30 meters from the New Building's left corner, there loomed the red-brick five-story block of the student hostel, aka the Hosty and alongside if, after another 30 meters, there stood the canteen, a tall two-story Mausoleum-like structure styled as a couple of glazed cubes.
The large hall on the second floor contained a crowd of four-sitter square tables wrapped in the hum and babel of students' voices, of water whooshing in the dishwasher’s, snaps of kitchen utensils, clicks of plates with chosen havvage landing on the plastic trays being dragged along narrow railings by the kitchen counter towards the woman in the stiff tube of white cloth upon her head behind the cash register in the end of the multi-rail-path.
With a fleeting glance at the tray’s load, the nun of the order of Starched Cashiers announced the verdict—from 60 kop. to 1 ruble—accepted the payment, gave the change, and her box spat out another paper slip onto the heap of the neglected checks… At times some students, with a quirk for research, took the same set of food while in different points in the moving line – just so, from purely scientific curiosity. The payment for those control sets varied. The cashier created the price on the fly, by the inspiration prompted by the client's looks, the outside weather conditions, and the level of noise in the hall…
After finishing their meal, guests went to the first floor, past the shortest embodiment of human wisdom E = mc2, painted on the wall at the staircase landing. Plagiarizing a Russian byword, an empty stomach makes you a slow learner, while after the meal the theory of relativity and stuff might seem more digestible, you never can tell.
(…by the by, it's a moot point who's wiser – Einstein or the guy who found such a fitting place for the application of the genius’ formula…)
On the first floor, there was the constantly locked hall of celebrations that hosted a couple of weddings per year. Going out onto the high porch you could still turn into a glass door of a small confectionery with 2 saleswomen in nun whites, and the usual assortment of sand cakes for 22 kop., two-day-old donuts, and tobacco products. Cigarettes were not too good, rather on a dampish side, except for "Belomor-Canal" of the most excellent quality – stuffed with dry and finely chopped tobacco, which is very important.
Once, being on high, I demanded from the saleswomen "The Ledger of Complaints and Proposals", which presence was the must in any Soviet store, and scribbled thanks on the Belomor account, concluding it "be blessed, dearest dears!" A graphomaniac would always find a vent for his unpretentious passion…
Now you could return to the five-storied Hosty. 3 columns of wide-section (36 cm) iron pipes, paint-coated in the tonality of medium rust, supported the flat concrete canopy over the wide two-step porch at the entrance. The columns, when knocked at, sounded differently letting play the phrase "do-re-mi-do-re-do!", thanks to precise tone pitch of the iron pipes. Although the institute had, among others, the Department of Music Teachers, yet the honor of that particular music discovery belonged to a student of the English Department who graduated before my enrollment. As for the mentioned music phrase, it was an old-time curse used by the lahboohs. Wherever you played it, any lahbooh, if he happened around, would get at once that old good jive running, "Go and fuck yourself, jerk!" One syllable for each note, exactly…
The glazed door on the porch let you inside the small glass-walled cage of vestibule with another door opening into the lobby in whose right corner there stood a sizable desk with the on-duty watchwoman behind it guarding the square shield of plywood fixed on the wall, with rows of nails for hanging the keys to the rooms in the Hosty. If the nail beneath the ink-written ‘72’ was empty, then one of my roommates had already grabbed the key and passed over to the room. In the long corridor behind the lobby you could take any, either right or left, turn and reach one of the two staircases to the upper floors, yet the left one was the shorter route to Room 72.
Each of the floors belonged to a different department, aka faculty. Thus, the second floor was inhabited by the students of the Biology Department, aka Bio-Fac. The English Department, aka Anglo-Fac, possessed the third floor. Mathematicians from the Phys-Mat lived on the fourth, and the uppermost—fifth floor—was for the Music-Pedagogical Department, aka Mus-Ped…
On any floor, leaving the staircase landing, you entered a long, pretty dark, corridor to which the light was getting only from its opposite ends, thru 2 windows (1 per each end) distended from the floor to the ceiling. The rest of the scenery was made of walls with rows of closed doors above the smoothly ground dark-gray concrete in the floor.
Room 72 followed the washroom of 6 sinks, which was the first from the end window, opposite the door to the men's toilet on the other side of the same window. At the faraway opposite end of the long corridor, everything was exactly the same, only the toilet there was for ladies.
