Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Ostrolootsky opened a box door and unloaded a piece of butter onto the huge frying pan, "Oh, and here some nice onions too, excellent!." He frisked thru the boxes with such elegant ease that I did not immediately realize that we were robbing the provision, aka "torbas", of the girls from our Department. All went so deftly and smoothly, the tongue wouldn't turn to call it looting.
(…well, while Sasha might be justified by his half-starved childhood in an orphanage, what about me? How would I look into Robin Hood's noble eyes after that wicked depredation?
And yet (with all the remorse in its place) I haven't ever eaten anything as delicious as that potatoes fried on pillaged butter…
However, Calvados turned out to be a lousy swill. And even quenching the hangover by it was disgusting…)
Zhora Ilchenko came back from India after working at the Soviet embassy there for a year or so. One should be a hard-working student to grasp enough of English for the job in just one academic year at the English Department of NGPI, or there cropped up some other reasons which I did not care to consider. Anyway, Zhora Ilchenko came back to finish the studies and get his diploma together with the rest of the students who he had started his learning with.
I did not know Zhora and only saw him from afar in the Old Building corridors. He had a crisp, rapidly thinning black hair and a mustache emphasizing the red of his lips.
Needless to say, that I envied him – one whole year in India!. From his detour, he brought some books in English and those commenced circulating among the students at our Department and when my course-mate Igor Recoon made friends with Zhora, I borrowed from Igor a book which he borrowed from Zhora. It was a volume of short stories by William Somersault Maugham published at the Penguin Publishing House. The book was difficult to read because of lots of nebulous and tricky words. I had to borrow The Large English-Russian Dictionary from Natasha Zhaba, my group-mate…
Reading the book borrowed from Igor, borrowed from Zhora, I came across a really short story (some two-and-a-half pages) named The Man with a Scar, and its size tempted me to try my hand at translating the story into Russian. Moreover, there was a place for publishing – on the third floor of the Old Building next to the Language Laboratory, there hung the wall newspaper Translator, a sheet of Whatman with neatly glue-mounted rows of typewritten pages of translations made by the students of the English Department, alongside with the Classes Time-Table for all the four courses…
Besides being so conveniently short, the story highlighted the very essence of all those Latin American revolutionaries. The to-do list for such a revolutionary was not too complicated – to adorn oneself with the rank of Colonel or General, rally a gang, and start a war for liberation under the slogan "Liberty or Death!" until he became the dictator.
However, the would-be dictator from the story ran out of ammunition and got captured before he reached his goal. At the dawn on his execution day, he for a moment stepped aside from his gang lined up against the wall for the pending procedure and hugged his beloved who came running up to him to say goodbye, get a soul kiss, and be stabbed to death. Because they loved each other so much. Alma de mi corazon!
The current dictator, present at the execution, was impressed by such a poignant passion, ordered to single his rival out and after the firing squad did their job on the rest of the gang, they deported the man to a nearby Latin American State where his following career was that of a drunkard jackalling at bars under the pretext of selling lottery tickets… Once a bottle of beer burst in his hands and a glass splinter nicked his face, that's how he became the man with a scar.
Just so simple a story without superfluous frills. However, Maugham knows the way to present concise but tangible details in his stories. He is some real writer that son of.. er.. the foggy Albion.
(…the words in English are short, except for those borrowed from other languages, and a sentence made of them looks like a handful of scattered rice, yet sometimes it might contain a whale of meanings, enough to fill a whole sack.
In Russian, on the contrary, the words, because of their suffixes and prefixes, are long like spaghetti, or cobweb threads of which you have to weave what, actually, you were about…)
The wall newspaper Translator was supervised and edited by the teacher of theoretical grammar or something like that, studied at the senior courses of the English Department. Alexander Vasilyevich Zhomnir. A capital man.
(…nowadays such an individual would be referred to as a regular screwball, but then it meant a dissident they hadn't run down yet…)
Outwardly, he sooner had looks of a Ukrainian nationalist than of a dissident, but also too cunning to be caught, otherwise, they’d never allow him to teach at an institute. His long gray hair he combed back for it to immediately return to bangs over his broad forehead and touch his gray bushy brows. The shoulders were somewhat arched as if prepared to receive a weighty sack upon them, and in his movements there was the touch of clumsiness which takes decades of cultivation. Just a villager beekeeper for you or, say, a miller who had bored all the way up into professorate of linguistic neurosurgery… To the institute, he was coming by his bicycle, like a mujik, yet intellectually buckled it down with a padlock threaded thru the spokes when leaving his means of transportation leaned against a Birch tree.
When in the wide corridor by the Language Laboratory, I handed Zhomnir a thin copybook with my translation of the Maugham's story, he flipped thru it and with overly exact articulation of Russian words, stated that he did not work with texts in Russian, for which reason Translator presented students’ works in only Ukrainian except for the translations of poetic pieces…
Right, in my school certificate the Ukrainian Language and Literature were marked with "n/c" – "not certified", thanks to arriving to Konotop past half of my school-time which legally allowed ditching Ukrainian Language classes while the younger came too early to also evade it. Nonetheless, in a fortnight after moving to Konotop I was reading books in Ukrainian as well, so in two weeks I surprised Zhomnir with a Ukrainian version of that same man with a scar.
He bucked up and, with a glint of satisfaction in his eyes, smashed and crushed my labors to the finest dust.
I hated being flogged like that, yet I couldn't but see that he was right. Nonetheless, to simply ditch the whole venture was out of the question, not only because of wounded pride but also of getting hooked by wrestling obstinate Slavonic words and making them express what I was able to grasp from among the rolling beads of Maugham's language. The struggle was so exciting that I took the guitar back to Konotop…
~ ~ ~
The rumors I became aware of one year later, that arriving in Konotop on Saturdays I dropped my black plastic "diplomat" in the hallway and started off to whores, without ever caring a fig that, while I was away, my wife got laid promiscuously, readily and regularly, was a gross exaggeration. My relations with Olga remained steady, passionate and invariably brought a feeling of deep satisfaction. Except for that occasion when I staged timing…
My roommate Marc Novoselytsky, for no obvious reason, asked me about the duration of my having a sex with my wife. Caught unawares, I made a wild guess at modest ten to fifteen minutes, no longer. He mocked so tall a tale exceeding any limits of the humanly possible and we bet…
Olga did not get it when I put onto the bedroom windowsill the alarm clock normally stationed in the kitchen, and I did care to clarify the news… With the clock’s clacking on my brain, the shown results were a total debacle…
On Sunday night arriving back to the Hosty, I honestly admitted it had taken a niggardly five minutes, which report turned Marc’s usual smirk into a happy smile… But all of the other times it was all right and time did lose all meaning whatsoever.
Before it, we were visiting Loony and danced slow dances there with a sincere feeling, and we gave free rein to our vigor in the fast ones. She was good at it, in any style. In the meantime, we watched a couple of fights on the floor, which Lyalka dubbed ‘gladiatorial bull-battles’ or took a respite out of the hall, in the unlit corridor of the library wing.
There, leaning our backs against the windowsill beneath the silent dark-black panes, Lyalka and I shared a joint immersing into more and more deep comprehension of the aquarium essence of the interior around, while Olga was smoking her orange-filtered cigarettes. Everything turned nyshtyak and the thoughts about my being a KGB rat in Nezhyn sank to the very bottom of the aquarium…
My matrimonial duties I performed rather accurately, so when Olga said she was pregnant and the abortion regulations called for the husband to donor one glass of his blood in the hospital, I went there without much ado, though I had, like, always tried to keep protective at having it.
In the room for blood transfusions, I was shod in white shoe covers and laid on the table topped with a chilly oilcloth. There were two nurses in the room, and I was stunned by the expression about their eyes, or rather struck by the absence of any. Their eyes seemed being blanked with filmy blinds, like to the stilled gaze of dead fish.
With a needle on the end of a thin elastic tubing, they approached me and tried to stick it into the vein inside my arm to make the blood flow thru the hose. Yet, at all of their 3 attempts at piercing the vein, it stubbornly rolled away from the needle stubbed deep under the skin. Their bewilderment turned the dead-eyed nurses astoundingly merciful and they gave the needed confirmation ref that I had undergone the procedure as stipulated by the respective HealthCare regulations. Streamlined, out-worldly, as any other piece of paper from any other state affiliated institution or boghole…
(…tell you what, guys? Them those organs feeding them those officials since long invented their special dialect to pump snooty mist in the simplest things while all that’s needed, “unattended fucking, fine—250 ml of blood”. Period. And all those mildewed vampires wilt and wither from black envy in their frowzy twilights…)
The surrender was unthinkable and simply impossible. So, I had to learn one more writing—similar to Arabic lettering only with a wider sweep—the hand of Zhomnir with which he scribbled his notes over and between the lines of the manuscripts I kept handing to him. At last, he raised a bushy brow and said that it seemed somewhat like that already, and my translation would go for the next issue of Translator.
Then there came the day when Yasha and Fyodor, standing in front of the typewritten pages pasted in the Whatman sheet on the wall, congratulated Zhomnir with the fresh discover of an upstart talent in the field of Ukrainian translations with such an unmistakably Ukrainian ending in his family name – Ogolts-OFF. Zhomnir responded more directly – he was not to blame that so truly-truly Ukrainians as Demyan-KO and Velich-KO had never scratched their ass in all four years of their studying at the English Department….
Spring came hand in hand with the most cloudless and unalloyed love of my life. Everyone both addressed and referred to her as Shvydcha, but I called her by her name – Nadya. It was her to bring about the resurrection of my belief that true female principle was still and all alive in this civilization-jizzed world… We loved each other, love was filling us to brims and trickling over. Love for love’s sake is a lovable love, it’s the purest form of love, if you love it.
Why am I stating for both of us? By what right do I use so unrestrained allegations? The answer is very simple – Nadya was a virgin, innocent and inexperienced, as yet, in faking.
Then, maybe, I once again forgot to warn that I was married? The fact needed no advertising, she was finishing her fourth year at the English Department and lived on the Anglo-Fac floor in the Hosty. Some unique combination: virginity and the fourth course at the Anglo-Fac, eh?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy…"
The fourth-year male students held a banquet in their pencil-box room opposite ours, to which I also was called. Nadya happened to be sitting next to me on the same bed and, when someone turned off the light in the room, I reflexively unzipped her sports jacket. She flicked it back right away and when they turned the light on, everything was the innocence itself and no need to call the police morale. However, Marc had read the zipper sounds in the dark, and he began to chaff. Nadya got hurt and left, and all was over.
The following day she met me in the long murky corridor on our floor, dressed in the same sportswear, spoke up to me, and smiled. Oh, the smile of Nadya was a real thing! Those dimples in the cheeks, those impish sparks in her eyes!
She fitted all the canons of a Ukrainian beauty – glossy stream of black hair down to the middle of her back, round face with velvety black rainbows of eyebrows over the shiny dark-brown eyes, voluminous breasts, rounded shoulders smoothly flowing into the arms and hands set akimbo on her abundant hips above the gorgeous thighs of a trained swimmer. Because she was going in for that sport.
And, with all that, what did she need me for? Well, here a simple answer again – that summer she was going to get married. Not to me, betcha, there was some lieutenant graduating some military school who would marry and take her to the garrison of his appointment.
There was not much time left, and we did not want to squander it away. We loved to love each other and we wanted more and more of it. But that came later because, at first, we had to tackle busting her cherry…
The initial couple of dates we spent in the narrow compartment with one window and one sink, partitioned, for some reason, from the rest of sinks and taps in the washroom. The truly spartan style of the tight interior did not matter much at the introductory stages of acquainting ourselves with each other, especially since the latch-lacking door of it was easy to block.
And then the guys from Room 71 left for a day or two, leaving their key to Zhora Ilchenko. He, actually, rented some place in the city but who would reject the key from a vacant room in the Hosty? They did not pass the key to him from hand to hand though, just hung it on its nail in the plywood shield behind the watchwomen's desk in the lobby. It's hard to trace back in what way that information reached me, but I did not wait for another invitation to such a gift of fate and snatched the key before Zhora.
In the evening, Nadya and I retired to Room 71 and locked the door… When the knocking on the door ceased, and the echoes of Zhora's cries, "Anyone seen Ogoltsoff?!" died away in the long corridor outside, Nadya started to gradually take off the items of her sportswear, accompanying the striptease of the stagnation era with a chant from the pre-war black-and-white movie "The Circus",
"Tiki-tiki-do, ay!
I'm leaving from the cannon to the sky!."
Although she was noticeably ill at ease… We lay down on the bed by the window. On the other side of the double partition made of gypsum slabs was my Room 72. By the window, there stood Fyodor's bed under the wall socket which was not properly fixed in its place and kept falling out when disturbed by the plug of a cassette tape-recorder.
Nadya's scream from the socket attracted Fyodor's attention. He took it out altogether and till late at night was listening to the moans that followed. We were not aware of being tapped, though even knowing it wouldn’t tell on our enthusiasm…
The following day, the guys from Room 71 returned and wanted the key back… On Monday, at the date in the washroom, Nadya was gloomy, silent, yet I managed to bring the reason out: Marc Novoselytsky was spilling dirty gossip among the fourth-year students that Ogoltsoff had had Shvydcha in the washroom from the back… I always sensed he was not indifferent to her, otherwise, why should he be so attentive to the zipper zips at that birthday? O, you'll catch it, Jewish bastard!.
On Tuesday, he returned from the shower, his hair freshly moist, the towel hanging over his shoulder, to find only me in Room 72. I locked the door, let the key slide into my hip-pocket, and announced, "Take off your glasses, Marc. I'll beat you up." He did not remove the glasses though but instead began to run around the brown table with the chairs placed deeply under it. I had to push the table to the window exterminating space for him to go on orbiting that weary piece of furniture.
In the nook between the windowsill, the bed, and the table, he stood with his head bowed like Andriy, the son of Taras Bulba – a lamb resigned himself to being sacrificed. I hit him on the chin so as not to damage the glasses, and in a pitched-up tone of voice promised that if he, fucking motherfucker, would ever squeal a single word about Shvydcha… When I finished my Sermon on the Mount, he set his glasses aright and said with a toady smile, "You so fucking well kicked up my fucking ass, right?"
(…the wisdom of ages imbibed with the mother's milk.
And—what is characteristic—he on the fly picked up my sermon phraseology. Affinity with languages resides in their blood…)
On Thursday, at the end of our date in the compartment, she pensively observed, "Yet, he was right after all…" It stunned me that I was like fulfilling the plans laid down by Marc Novoselytsky. Some fucking Nathan the Prophet… But where was the way out?.
The manna from heaven came in the form of a first-year student at the Mus-Ped. In his angel-like curls, golden gloss in his glasses' rim, he descended from above—the firmament of the fifth floor—to our sinful third floor and handed me the key to a vacant room in the corridor up there. Hallelujah!
But why? After all, I did not ask him nor anyone else, and I did not even suspect that room existed. How could he possibly know?!. Yes, a couple of times I gave him my guitar last autumn, but since then we had not even met…
(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my…
– COULD YOU FUCKING SHUT UP IN THAT YOUR FUCKING SLEEPING BAG?!.)
And that was it. The key in hand switched me and Nadya to the nocturnal way of life, we were ascending to the fifth floor when the student life gradually subsided in the Hosty’s benighted corridors and we were coming down back in the mum gray of the pre-dawn dusk.
She once again became a freshman student, sort of. When our course was on the training excursion to Kiev, where we rode a bus for foreign tourists, she also joined in. The young guide on that bus spoke only English, "Look to your left!. Look to your right!." Concluding the tour, he asked if we had any questions.
By that time, I got so used to being a foreign tourist that also asked in English, "Are you a Communist, Mr. Guide?"
Taken aback by so out-of-the-blue question from a local student, he still managed to answer, "I am a Candidate for the Communist Party Membership."
"Okay, I see, Comrade Guide."
Then Nadya and I were sitting on a bench in a green patch of one of those steep lanes descending to Khreshchatyk Street. The sun was shining from the sky with fluffy clouds floating around it without screening the tender warmth. Nadya and I were kissing long kisses. Next to me there sat Igor Recoon and gravely scattered bits of cookies to the pigeon flock of a different feather, noisily crowding on the asphalt about our feet. Hopefully, Kiev felt on that day that it was another—albeit small—Paris…
~ ~ ~
(…why was it so irksome to be a secsot? I did not tell on anybody, making the KGB man shake his head at my reports empty of useful information. Still, the feeling of being hooked and squeezed with the ratchet from which there was no way out, and the constant fear that my finking would get exposed, remained the source of ever-present internal torment – an unwilling rat is still a rat.
On the other hand, I, sort of, felt guilty before Captain. Especially, after my turning down his request in winter…)
Captain asked me then to sell my sheepskin coat for him to wear when a-hunting. The short coat of shaggy black sheepskin, my father's coat still from the easy times at the Object. The sheepskin which Olga and I were sitting on at our wedding party. It was a part of my image, converging with the plastic black "diplomat" briefcase and my nigh-tabooed warcry whenever having a situation, "Stuff it! We'll prick the hooey!"
To sell that sheepskin coat was kinda selling a part of me. I did not tell Captain all that, I only answered that I couldn't. He didn't insist though; that might have also been a test, sort of, if I was ready to sell myself.
But in May I pleased him in full. At last, he got a fat reward for all my empty reports written under his dictation that nothing worthy of attention had happened or heard about. Yes, twice a month he was dictating for me to write them so that the sheets of paper by my hand, signed "Pavel", accumulated in his safe, to get me ever deeper run thru with their hook…
So, end May, returning from the weekend, Marc entered the room bubbling with delight about a new game he'd just learned in Kiev. "The Game of Parties" was its name and all of us should have a try to see how interesting it was.
Fyodor and I took a break in Throw-in Fool played on Fyodor's bed. Ostrolootsky sat down on his and leaned the back of his head against the soiled spot in the wallpaper, and all of us listened to the rules.
The objective was to re-model the events of history process at our will. Starting from the summer of 1917, the period before the single-party political system got consolidated, when there still were all sorts of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries, Anarchists and so on, each player had to choose a party to their liking and win the other players, move them joining their side. Try and see for yourselves what great fun it is!.
In the Hosty, Room 72 enjoyed no less popularity than a public urinal next to a cheap beer bar and everyone, who happened to drop in on that night, was met with Marc's gleeful giggling and the offer to partake in so breath-taking role-playing game. For the start, he together with Ilya Lipes and Ostrolootsky united into the Bund, on the basis of their shared nationality, but then they split and joined the Mensheviks and the Social Democrats.
Sasha Nesteryouk, on a flying visit thru the room, waved his black scarf playfully and proclaimed anarchy to be the mother of order.
Fyodor and I declared ourselves fighters from the Peasant Army of Nestor Makhno and threatened to fuck up anyone distracting us from playing Throw-in Fool. Yasha, as a resident of Poltava, became a representative of the Ukrainian Central Rada. The horseplay was not too long but as loud as usual…
Next morning, no one remembered the noisy pastime and would forget it altogether were I not so stupid as to mention the jolly game at the meeting with the KGB man. Captain got wired, sat upright and, instead of usual two lines, squeezed out of me a whole page with the names of who was in the room, which party was his choice.
He did not like the conclusion in my report that the game died out because we got bored; I had to re-write all after he edited the page and crossed the statement out… And the hell of a rumpus broke loose.
The KGB started calling the guys from the English Department for interrogations, even those who never popped up in Room 72 that cursed night. They wrote down their testimonies – who entered second? who sat where? why declared himself a Kadet? Some students were summoned more than once. Dudes were coming back to the hostel with drawn faces, retelling the interrogation, anxiously discussing the possible outcome. Under the single-party political system, you could very easily be denied the diploma even after four years of study…
Three weeks later there was a general meeting of the English Department because the Organs detected certain unhealthy tendencies among our students. The KGB captain was introduced to the meeting and read out the list of the participants in the subversive Game of Parties. It eased me up a little when I heard my name mentioned – they wouldn't guess that it was I who finked on guys. Then they began to selectively call the players to the large blackboard in the auditorium.
Lipes said that he dropped in absolutely by chance, seeking a teapot, stayed for just a minute and did not have time enough to get it what game it was at all.
Sehrguey Nesterenko from Kiev, without any preliminaries, banged off a dramatic declamation of the lines in a Shakespeare play:
"Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your ears!.."
He was called to stop the balagan and get back to his place immediately.
As for Yasha Demyanko, he felt obviously happy to lean onto the lectern with his elbows and begin developing logical syllogisms in the most flowery Ukrainian language about the unprecedented precedent at hand.
In the end, Marc Novoselytsky faced the meeting, as the instigator, and said how sorry he was for not getting it at once how bad that game was, and promised solemnly to never ever play it again. The meeting decided to announce a reprimand to everyone from the Captain's list and called to always guard and uphold the honor of the Soviet youth…
Returning to the hostel from the meeting, everyone seemed to give me sidelong glances and whisper behind my back.
Sasha Ostrolootsky, to relieve the stress from the interrogations in the KGB, drank a bottle of vodka without any snack and had to throw up, however, he managed to run out to the toilet.
Everyone finished the studies and received their diplomas. The KGB Captain failed to bloat the Game of Parties up to the dimensions of the "doctors-poisoners" case about their attempt at assassination of Leader of All Nations, Comrade Stalin, with their medical treatment. However, he certainly proved to his seniors that not for nothing his salary was paid to him…
(…and I am still thinking that it was not for nothing that Gray came to the battalion stoker-house to beat me up for ratting. It’s only that he anticipated the events and came ahead of time…)
The first time that thought came to me at the concluding meeting with Captain in the current academic year. He handed over twenty rubles and told me to sign the receipt that I got the money for secret collaboration. Damn! It was not silver coins and the sum didn't coincide with that paid to Judas, yet the rubles burnt my hands urging to get to Konotop as soon as possible and use up all of it for ganja right away… That failed to restore my peace of mind. I rode the footstep of Streetcar 3, looking at my reflection in the glass of folded door (I always liked the way it reflected me) and hated that face in the glass. Why have I ruined my own life?.
~ ~ ~
Between the New Building and the Hosty, there was a rather wide ditch for draining of excess water from the Count's Park lake into the Oster. We walked together—Nadya, I and Igor Recoon—bypassing, for some reason, the New Building from behind, when I noticed an iron pipe connecting the banks of the ditch. It sagged about a meter above the surface of still water overgrown with duckweed.
"I dare me to go over!" said I.
Nadya screamed, "No! Don't dare!"
And Igor immediately said, “I bet you won't!"
The pipe was not wide (cross-section 10 cm) and, half-way over the ditch, it teetered under my feet. With Nadya's "ah!" and "oh!" behind my back, I regained a feeble balance and, fluttering my arms, advanced for another couple of meters and spurted the final segment.
"Aha!" shouted I and looked back.
Igor waved me from the other bank, "I dare you to return!"
Some viper of a homie, eh? I'm the Ogoltsoff but not just limitless so…
And why did I start all that at all? Because of the darn masculine pride. The day before, our course had a picnic by the Oster, almost outside the city. There Nadya challenged me to compete in swimming, one hundred meters down the river.
She went ahead at once and after another twenty meters, I realized that my Kandeebynno-made freestyle swimming was but a garbage in comparison to her powerful butterfly. What could I do? I climbed onto the bank and was the first to reach the finish line where I met the winner with a bunch of flowers grabbed in the grass along the way, "You're the champion, Nadya!"
When the 3 of us (Fyodor, Yasha and I) came with a load of bottles under the canopy of giant Elms in the Count's Park and lay down in the grass to have a drink accompanied by the rustle in the green sway of foliage overhead, Yasha asked if I really had chosen the career of a circus pipe walker. I was surprised because he had not been there, but Fyodor said that the whole English Department knew already about my crossing the ditch.
We drank and Fyodor began to complain of Pro-Rector Budowski who viciously, on purpose, spoiled Fyodor's entire Grade Book that registered results of credits and examination past in all four years of his study. The grades in there were uniform "threes" but that bitch Budowski put him "four" in spite of Fyodor's earnest plea not to do so.
In this regard, Yasha put his index finger upright to draw a philosophical conclusion, that Fyodor "had swum hell of a way before he drowned nearby the shore".
We drank again and, inspired by the bright warm day, I said that pipe-walking was a baby toy because I could climb even that Elm whose wide trunk was clean of branches to grip at and forked about eight meters above the ground.
Yasha once again set his philosophical finger up and instructively declared the undertaking beyond the humanly possible, yet he was prepared to buy two bottles of wine if he see me waving my hand from the tree crown.
