Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
But I remembered that I still had to go to Nezhyn. On the way to the station, I dropped to Igor Recoon on Peace Avenue. His mother was cordiality itself, "O, how so nice to meet you! Please, get seated and have a snack before the journey."
As if I could keep sitting! I was dragged back and forth – from the living room to the balcony, from the balcony to the living room. On the way hither-thither, I asked Igor to find some piece of paper for jotting down the things I would say. Something like:
"The stooping sky beheaded dull jumble of the world…"
and then sort of:
…the shaggy clouds cut thru the Helmet-Skull unable to fend off welter-onset at the brain beseiged…"
In short, complete bullshit with surrealistic stink, or else I would be dragged into them those surreal quicksands and drowned tracelessly for good. So, it's only on the train that I came back, in between the Plisky and Kruty stations.
As for those psychedelic scraps, Zhomnir later placed them in the faculty wall newspaper next to Translator, he liked them way too much.
But all this not about that but about the lecture turned out by Scnar, it’s only that the memories of that grass keep distracting me, kinda like red herring, sort of. That time Rabentus provided me with a pinch for a couple of joints and, fully aware of what kind of thermonuclear dope it was, I did not abuse it anymore but showed moderation…
Well, now, in such a state—from moderate to quite quiet—I slowly floated to the lecture, kinda zeppelin, because making for the hostel seemed awfully long and winding way at the moment. And we then sat down, so as to make room for Scnar to read it from behind the lectern. And I grew more and more admired what a classy thing it was! The plywood all so yellow and well polished, and gleaming pleasantly because of that, you just couldn’t take your eyes off that varnished thing.
But then I suddenly couldn't get it – the peaceful flow clicked out of the groove and very obviously too, replaced with some affronting discrepancy. Scnar switched over to Latin!. I concentrated but – yes! – exactly Latin… And he was jetting it out even more fluentlier, in a way, than Lupus the Latinist, only that he sounded somehow hollow, and kept his eyes directly upward, like, to you I call de Profundis! I cocked up – was that Scnar, or not Scnar after all?
That’s why I started to watch more closely and noticed that above behind the lectern of all the Scnar there remained nothing but a bust. I mean it, atop the yellow box there stood the bust of Scnar even without his arms – just only shoulders. Yet the head continued to speak on all the same. And on his upper lip there notched a tiny cleavage, which began to grow deeper and darker, so as to turn into the toothbrush mustache of Adolf Hitler. Well, go and fuck yourself! In a Soviet institute, Hitler's bust reads a lecture and, on top of all – in Latin! Good fellow Scnar! Not every lecturer would have the nerve to pull such a trick. Without him, I would still think that if there's a lecture it's necessarily bullshit. Them those stereotypes, they are really die-hard customers, you know…
And with Zhomnir I studied at his home… On finishing another of translations, I brought it to his place, we sat at the table pushed to the wall in his living room and he was shredding it in a dragon-like style – here's flat, there's bland…
Yes, I felt it before his picking the holes out, that those were bosh places, but why? And what was the workaround?
"That's your problem. Find it."
"Maybe, then put it just so and so?"
"No! That’d be out of all scotch and notch!"
To please him was simply impossible, he would always find what to find fault with. And because of that, the work with Zhomnir was a good school not to give up…
To come up for air from the clutches of the Ukrainian language, aka mova, I asked Zhora Ilchenko for one of the books he brought from India and started translating it into Russian. Not a too thick book, some two hundred pages, authored by Peter Benchley, a writer in the third generation, that is both his grandpa and his daddy earned their living in the same trade. The book was titled The Jaws, about a shark-cannibal. On the whole, a professionally mixed vinaigrette – a little scrap of everything: bitten-off limbs, a love triangle, a short yet impressive visit by mafia to persuade the sheriff be subtler and show more respect. True, the final scene of the shark's assassination was unscrupulously copied from Moby Dick, but who nowadays reads Melville?
While rendering all that in Russian, I finished off a pack of thick copybooks. The translation was completed in Konotop, in winter. So, it was the night from Saturday to Sunday, or else during the winter vacations… The clock on the kitchen wall was showing some of the small hours. Putting the final period, I draw it as big as half-page – I wanted to finish off the ink in the ball-pen but it never ended. Then I turned off the light and lay on the folding coach-bed in the living room. Behind the 2 windows, there stood a whitish night dimly fluoresced with the snow. And it seemed that the night was leaning heavily against the window panes, just about to break in. I tried to get asleep as soon as I could, for I never liked horror movies.
By spring, my sister Natasha read those notebooks, and then leased them to someone else and they dissolved, leaving no trace, in nowhere…
Well, all that's fine; but when about the most important?
Eera…
~ ~ ~
My relationship with her at the reunion stage can be characterized with just a single word – "torture". Trying real hard, one might extend it – "torturing torture". Firstly, taking our relationship up again in Nezhyn ran into a number of stumbling blocks.
Why resume? But I was in love, damn it! It was love at first sight on that tread thru the wet stalks of corn. And it should be kept in mind that, by my nature, whenever I fall in love it is forever. I mean, falling in love, then falling out for just to fall in again, and out… no, such bouncing is not for me. Yes, my father was right applying to me his winged byword about my Laziness-Mommy being born a moment before me. Besides, the return to Nezhyn fully confirmed the accuracy of my choice – with all the multifacedness, multinosedness, multileggedness, multibreastedness of the assortment, Eera was the second to none. Starting with the clothes: in the era of totalitarian shortages, she managed to look dressed in a soigne European way, as in the movies of Italo-Franco-German production. Turning to the undergarments: yes, unprecedented lacy slips under – I've never seen so delicately feminine lingerie in my life. Getting over to the item of most vital importance, the body itself: such bodies as hers, I saw only in the bathroom at the Object, when sitting next to the fire burning in Titan and considering the Goddesses, the Dryads, and the Nymphs of Hellas in the black-and-white illustrations interspersing The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece.
However, her gait was quite modern – the German-like resolute pacing coupled with the sway of her right hand. She had a round face with high cheekbones and a nose with a weeny hump, wide, yet not turned out, lips. The light brown hair of the ideal length, in my favorite hairstyle. I liked to watch her, approaching along the street that lead up to the Old Building, and to follow how in the distant circle of her face the fuzzy, as in the full moon, lines began to merge into my Eera's features. But all that came about not immediately…
At the beginning, Eera trusted in the sinister prognosis by Olya. And even Vera, who had so sympathetically been preparing the bed in Bolshevik for 2 of us to bathe in the fiery stream of lascivious carnal pleasures, dubiously shrugged and hesitated – O, my, they tell so heinous things about him! That's why our initial encounters in Nezhyn didn't look encouraging at all. I even started to suspect that all that happened between us in Bolshevik was just a "collective-farm affair" of a teacher's daughter that used me. So, I pissed off.
After some time, a group-mate of Eera, Anna, came to the Hosty with the errand from Eera who waited for me in the room of their Department hostel by the main square. I followed the messenger cursing on the way my shameful lack of the most elementary male pride…
Eera was lying on one of the beds, for some reason without a sweatshirt, wearing only her skirt and beautiful, as always, lady's undergarment. The girls whose room it was tactfully left us alone. I sat down on the bed next to her, doing my best to conceal how captivated I was by the beauty of her torso and the strangely pale face.
She said that she had had a pregnancy, and a young surgeon-gynecologist made the abortion at his home, under anesthesia. Is abortion done under anesthesia? At home? Young?
(…certain thoughts are better never being thought at all…)
Feelings of guilt and compassion only added to my love. I couldn't help it, I put my arms around her shoulders and, lifting her from the pillow, pressed to my chest. "I love you, Eera. You always know that I love you."
(…and again I run into my being born at the wrong time. I behave like an ancient Greek from the times when the birth control was females' responsibility – certain herbs, special amulets, you know.
And in the modern enlightened age, the weaker sex has already saddled us and mounted, while still pretending to be weak…)
The start-up misunderstandings (thanks to the kind care of her girlfriends), were further aggravated by unwanted predicaments at establishing normal sexual relations at the first stage of our love affair. Not because of being short of favorable conditions for having sex, on the contrary, when Eera visited Room 72, my freshman-cohabitants, on their own accord, went to the first floor of the hostel to click the TV channels in the hall with the box, or sit over a bottle of lemonade in the refreshment room. The problem had deeper roots…
Not right away, but I noticed that after our having a sex Eera got in a plaintive mood, and on the way from the Hosty to her home she spoke of sad things… How sadly was the wind dragging the autumn leaves across the stadium, visited to say goodbye to track athletics, because of a ligament injury after 2 years of training… How sad it feels, when at a festive table your parents got so absorbed in an agitated discussion of who of them was more right or wrong, that they do not notice you taking already the third plate from the table, and detachedly letting it fall to the floor over the scattered splinters of the first 2 – snap! – before mom and daddy wake up and finally turn to you…
The further, the sadder. The mood changes were replaced by overt sabotage! How else to classify it, if at having a sex your partner wriggles out from under you? It took me a hell of a lot of efforts to elicit the reason for such an unconventional behavior… Well, because she felt something like an urge for uncontrollable urination.
(…long live to our Soviet education system – the best system in the world! It couldn't maim the village schoolkids to such a degree though. They were saved by direct observation of the natural facts of life. A village girl would figure out at a glance what namely you were rolling upon her with. But the luckless city dwellers?.
In one of the color illustrations concluding the school textbook on Anatomy, there was a partial image of penis modestly hidden in between the intestines out-poured from the belly on the general scheme of internal organs. Those appended pictures were studied by the pupils on their own because during the academic year the class managed to reach only the middle of the textbook.
Now, how could the unfortunate daughter of teacher know the difference between orgasm and urination?..)
I'm far from stating that the problem was solved because of my persistent requests to trust her own body, which was wiser than her. In any case, she gave up wriggling out…
All those painful crises in the relationship called for general relaxation, and restoration of the dented self-esteem. These factors led to the emergence of Sveta, who also lived in the Hosty, and Maria, who did not live there but came on occasional visits, and more oftener I went to spend a night at her place…
Despite the fact, that Sveta studied at the Biological Department, she lived on the fifth floor in the Hosty. During one of her visits from up there to the third floor, she got vanquished by my noble continence, like, a knight-errant driven by merciless weather conditions to a roadside brothel…
I had just returned from seeing Eera to the vestibule in her staircase-entrance when they told me there was chicken soup on the table in Room 77. One of the advantages which the student canteen apportions you is that after visiting it you still can find enough room in your system for chicken soup, any time of day. I entered the room and turned on the light.
On one of the four beds, there lay a girl who did not make a secret of the fact that she had nothing on apart from the bedsheet wrapped about her. More importantly, there was a pot on the table and a couple of spoons. Taking the lid off the pot uncovered the presence of the soup, about two servings. I wiped off one spoon, sat on a vacant bed and started eating. The soup was cold, but unmistakably of chicken. The girl protested from inside her bedsheet that she couldn't sleep with the light on. Turning it off, I threw the door open, because eating soup in complete dark is uncomfortable, so I had to finish it off in the dim illumination from the distant corridor lamp. Some delicious soup, I liked it, even though cold. Then I left.
"The less we love a woman,
The more she is turned on…"
Thus, I began to heal the wounds from the torturing love with medicinal visits to the fifth floor in the hostel. Sveta was simply created for that. Not very tall, of a boyish haircut, she had a slender body and generous breasts. She was good at anything, but her special dish was giving a blow job. Besides, Nature-Mommy endowed her with a valueless blissful gift: a mere touch to her nipples did make her go off for fucking crazily, whining, and there went you, in her wake, to boot.
In addition to psychological impediments formed by the Soviet school system, at times I rammed into unbending ideological dissonance with Eera. Like on that occasion when the institute Rectorate ordered a volunteer clean-up in the Count's Park. The girls of my course were raking the fallen leaves in great heaps, and Igor Recoon and I set them on fire.
After translating The Jaws, I knew that burning leaves in the open was a crime against the planet's atmosphere; there was a short passage in the book on that particular point. But could you prove anything to anyone? "Sehrguey, don't put on airs! Everyone does it. We're not in America.”
When in Rome do as Romans do. The Count's Park got drowned in the thick white smoke and we dispersed… Bypassing the Old Building, I saw a girl in sportswear and liked her from afar. I didn't even know why she attracted me so much. Well, the wide white kerchief with big black spots around her neck, that's for one, but certainly not only because of that; and not for the sneakers. I came closer – what the f-f.. damn! – but that's Eera herself!. And, way too deeply moved by the pleasant surprise, I blurted at once about my falling in love with her again a moment before.
"You did not known it was me but fell in love?"
"Yes! Can you imagine?"
"How could you!"
"But it’s you who I loved!"
"You hadn't not known it was me!"
"Hey, think a bit! Since it turned out to be you, then I have no chance to fall in love with anyone else. It's only you that I can love."
"Just a minute ago you loved someone who wasn’t me, and you'll do it again!"
"Who else can I love? Can’t you see it's only you who turns me on?"
"You still can't get it!"
"Okay. So I shouldn't have fallen in love with you?"
"No!"
"Never?"
"No, never!"
A vicious circle – love me but never fall in love with me. But she looked real cool in her sports, and she moved so classy…
(…with all my mug's game to show off as the crossbred of Casanova and a refined aristocrat of spirit, I am a classical example of a natural chump.
Why? Too gullible and too ready to fall for a new bauble…)
It was enough for Ilya Lipes to drop an unfamiliar word "she-oxen" and I followed him like a puppy on the lead. "Come on! Let's visit the she-oxen!" The casually used term triggered an imagination flight picturing a skulk of free of complexes hetaeras, but, in reality, they were the same girls as in the hostel. One she-ox was throwing her birthday party.
And now in that half-dark room in an old private house, we were, like, having fun, like, dancing all-out fast dance. Then I would lie with some of them on one of the beds in the next room, and she would in half-sec get topless while blocking any further movements, like any other oxen-vixen, with their usual obnoxious sermon, "Do not torture yourself, nor me!" As if she was strong-armed or blackmailed to go to bed with me. Why coming, if you’re so stalwart lesbian or in your everlasting times? To get free rape?!. And so I got blues and went out in the corridor to ring Eera for to disclose over again I loved her, an emo chump.
And she got it right away, "What music is there? Where are you?"
Usually, I called her from the booth in the Hosty’s lobby which was almost soundproof, that odd vestibule after the ever-locked door among those 2 entrances, separated from its operational twin by the glass-partition. We would talk for hours until her people at home needed the telephone or some students started to knock at the glass door from the lobby. The talks about absolutely nothing, I just loved to hear her voice. She would say a word over there and I got carried beyond myself wallowing in thrill, in here…
"Just somewhere, I'll explain later. Not a phone talk. I love you. Bye."
(…everyone knew then that the phones were tapped by the organs so the phrase "not a phone talk" precluded any further questions…)
And later, I had to drive a fool about a bro drag dealer arriving in Nezhyn for a visit who asked me to show him the way to a safe house, where the music was played on the account of his arrival, but I did not stay there and left after calling her on the phone… Some stuff that would hardly fit even in both elephant's ears, to believe such a helpless bullshit one had to be very eager to believe. Although, she might have believed after those icons… Ah, yes, the icons…
They told me that Veerich wanted to see me, and I went to his place. On the winter holidays, he was skiing in the Carpathians and broke one of his legs and both skis. So he kept to bed, plastered. He and his student wife rented a flat in the city. When she went out to the kitchen, Veerich started his monologue about the too far-reaching dirty hand of Zionism groping for our cultural heritage and spiritual assets. That all was to the fact, that Ilya Lipes had 3 to 4 Orthodox icons in his briefcase, under his bed in the hostel. Somewhere they had bombed a village church and now Lipes wanted to push the catch off like antique rarities. How to bear a so cocky impropriety? If not for the plaster, Veerich would never allow trampling our holy shrines… In short, could I bomb the icons back and restore historical justice?
(…for me, the inter-confessional contradictions were null and void, so on that point Veerich was just another odd voice in the wilderness. I could still believe in Zeus or, say, Poseidon, but all the gods in vogue at present times do not stir any sympathy in me, and in the same breath (which is characteristic) I don't believe in atheism either.
But the request to bomb was properly addressed. No problems! I'm doing what I'm told to do and thinking after it is done…)
In the morning I waited until the students left the hostel for their respective classes. One kick from the drowsy silence of corridor at the unsuspecting door and the lock jumped out… Everything as described – the briefcase under the bed, the icons in the briefcase. Them those Serbs have a good nose for such things, even in the third generation. The icons looked like the one Grandma Katya had in her khutta, only on bigger boards.
I left the briefcase where it was, and took the icons to the washroom where my black "diplomat" case was already waiting for them under the sink in that singled-out compartment, the loot fitted in perfectly. And that’s when I felt all the truth of the popular saying about stealing chickens. "But your hands do tremble! Been stealing chickens, eh?"
My fingers quivered quite uncontrollably; but not the way they shook after the capsizing in the UAZ-66 truck. That tremor had been a kinda shallow one, while in the washroom, my fingers were, like, knocking against each other. That's what sacrilege brings about… I didn't care for the finger-prints. Ilya would not go to the criminal investigation, "Please, check for the traces on my briefcase where I kept the icons from a robbed temple." However, taking the catch directly to Veerich’s was not correct. So, I asked Eera to keep my briefcase at home for a couple of days, she was on a sick leave at the moment.
Then, like an exemplary student, I attended the classes and, already after the canteen, climbed up to the third floor in the Hosty where I was met by a noisy commotion in the corridor, the Lipes' digs had been broken in!
I approached his room and saw that, yes, the door was indeed in need of repair. Dirty bastards! And what's missing?
Ilya never responded and only kept tut-tutting in bitter frustration…
~ ~ ~
But then I decided to finally break up with Eera because I was fed up with all that heartbreaking harrowing… Moreover, because she absolutely didn't trust me and that’s for sure.
The watchwoman in the Hosty’s lobby passed me a letter:
"Sehrguey,
I have been fascinated by you for so long, but I dared not say it.
Today I'll be waiting for you at 19.00 near the Old Building.
Lyouba"
That evening, as usual, I escorted Eera to the staircase-entrance vestibule in her apartment block, and there she unexpectedly caught some fire of unrestrained passion, “Do not go, hang on a little more, please!" I looked at the watch it was ten to seven, "Well, the guys are waiting at the Hosty. We're fixin' to draw a pool at Pref."
"They can wait. Don't go!"
I hardly managed to leave… When I neared the Old Building it was exactly seven because I had checked the time under a street lamp on the way. And on the square in front of the Old Building, there was no one. But I did not tarry there smoking, waiting, looking around; not at all.
I crossed the empty square without ever stopping; maybe in a bit slower tempo than my usual. But then, after all, I had all the right to admire the nature of the winter night, had I? That Pine tree by the corner looks like a Cedar; could it really be it? In the thicket of close-set branches lives an owl, there, midst them, it's always dark and quiet even at day-time. Look at the snowdrift under the Pine-Cedar, at scattered offals from his feasts, shreds of small rodents; one of the nature sanitizing care-takers…
And, by the by, I didn't lie at all. The moment I entered Room 72, Slavic and Twoic followed me, "Well, will we draw a pool, or will we?"
The letter, as it soon turned out, was written by Eera's girlfriend whose name was not "Lyouba", Eera invented it while dictating to the girl. Everyone may get attracted by the novelty, but it takes a driveling chump to be caught out…
Well, and besides, there appeared Maria, a brunette of the age so ardently canvassed for by the once popular French writer Balzac.
When she smiled at me on the sidewalk, I did not immediately snap in. As it turned out, she happened to drop for a minute to that she-ox's birthday, only I did not notice when. So, in general, she told me what apartment-block she lived in and her apartment number – 42.
Although having a rather busy next day I still slotted a visit to the new acquaintance and also found money for a bottle of vodka which I carried using Alimosha’s trick – in the sleeve; it made for such a hard bicep. So I came to the said address, the fourth floor, the door to the left. She opened.
We had a little snack and landed on the sofa… I do hate coming on entering or almost so which happens at times, the scorch-hot trickle's bored thru, the floodgate burst, your standard pleasure quota past salvage. Fuck!
"Sorry," says I, " In a dreadful hurry. There's a concert at five."
Which concert? Where?. In short, she also came to the Old Building Assembly Hall and was sitting in the second row, when from the stage, and already playing the bass guitar, and already as the leading vocalist, I was screaming,
"Do you remember those two sta-a-rs?!
That disappeared from the sky?!.."
A third-year student, Vitya Kononevich, played the rhythm guitar and sang along, backing with a third; and on the drums some, well, Lyosha, it seems, also from that course, a local guy he was.
After the concert, Maria and I had a walk. She led me to a friend of hers. The woman brought a mug of medicinal alcohol out to the staircase landing, and a piece of fish for a snack. It was 96 percent medicinal alcohol because my tongue at once stuck to the palate. But since then our go-rounds with Maria in their duration were not inferior to the acts in Shakespeare’s plays…
She had a son, sixth-grader, who I never met in her one-room apartment. Apart from the sofa, there was a double bed and a radio receiver on the nightstand next to it. All night long it was playing softly to itself in the middle waves ranges, glowing with its small yellow eyelet.
And she cum in really grand style, "More! More! A! I wanna.. Mo-o-ore! A!." Maybe it was her worked out coda, but still a cool one. She didn’t condone the semen smell and asked me to go to the bathroom right away. I did not mind, she was worth it. For my willingness, she rewarded me with a massage, so was her profession. I couldn't get it why they were so crazy about it. Oh, massage!. But I did not contradict even on that point…
Sometimes, even way too late at night, the doorbell rang. She rose from the bed, threw on her long gown and went out to the landing to have a word with the untimely visitor. I was not quibbling, I understood that a nurse, even a masseuse, had somehow to survive in this world. She had a beautiful body, like in black-and-white pics of Soviet amateur pornography against the backdrop of filled up ash-trays and empty bottles on the kitchen windowsill, and she herself was good-looking too, in that Transcarpathian style. But she seldom took off her nightgown in bed, if at all, she said there was a breast problem, mastitis, or something.
And after ramming into way too many "eager-top-unsurrenderable-downs" that felt even refreshing for a change. More so because she knew how to use her lower parts. "And may I do it that way?" And she would get unleashed in such a "way" which I never imagined possible, and had not even dreamed of. Yes, you may and welcome all the way!
When dropping to Room 72, she skillfully used the scanty furniture set there… In between having a sex we were on genuinely friendly terms. She shared her plans for buying me a pair of slippers, and promised to cure would I catch a venereal disease. She told me…
Well, it doesn't matter though, or else I will never finish, like after a mug of medicinal alcohol, sort of. In a word, I wanna say, Balzac was not a fool, albeit a Frenchman…
~ ~ ~
At the May Day demonstration, willing or not, you had to carry the portrait of one or another member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the privilege rooted in your being one of just 4 boys at your course. After airing the member over the main square in the institute's columns, it still had to be taken to the Old Building and handed over to House Manager.
When I was leaving the House Manager storeroom, Slavic warned me that he saw Eera in front of the Old Building, and she asked him where I was. Slavic knew that I had broken up with her for over a month already, that's why he warned.
The separation was painful for me. The evenings stretched endlessly long without her voice over the telephone. And I was missing her German-like gait from afar… Seeing her occasionally in the institute corridors, I got it over and over again that there was no one as beautiful as her, and my heart tightened bitterly. But still and all I had to be firm and put the final period, after all…
So, to avoid an unbearably painful encounter, I decided to sit tight in the Old Building until she left. Moreover, the day before while on a country outing, Maria and I arranged to spend May Day at her place…
For the outing, we went to the station, and, in the bright rays of the sunset, walked along the path by the tracks to the forest on the outskirts. On the way, we met a couple of workmen. One of them started to yap, but I just ignored the bumpkin – anyone would envy when you walk so a juicy beauty to the wood, while the nightingales around tear themselves apart in so vigorous trills that stand upright like one solid wall of sound…
We found a clearing among the trees, and in the gathering darkness, I built a fire. It was very warm, she even took off her cloak. We did not have glasses for the wine brought along… "More! A! More!.."
The bonfire was already burnt out, and screening for a sec the iridescent glow from its coals, some dark shadow rushed across the clearing. A homeless dog. How he scared her!
There is nothing more appealing than a freaked out woman, and you, a kinda epic knight, protectively embrace her shoulders. And your stud feels like a ride… "More! Mo-ore!. A!."
We were returning already in the middle of night and had to wait for long at the stop for the last bus carrying workers from the defense plant Progress after their second shift. Or rather, female workers, there were only women on the bus giving Maria way too hostile looks. Like, we were slaving like damned, while that slut horsed around with her cuntfucker. In spring even females grow intolerant and bitchy…
