Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
(…looking back brings not too much fun because of frequent temptation to spit in your own face. However, the truth remains true only when it's unvarnished, and all that shit is also me…)
~ ~ ~
Since I earned some kopecks at the student construction platoon, I bought a doll for Lenochka. Of course, I wouldn't be smart enough to do it, but the All-Union radio station "Mayak" for at least thrice a day aired the most popular hit of season:
"Daddy, present me,
Daddy, present me,
Daddy, present me
With a doll!."
And during a day that hit would get you someplace or another and start to spin on and on in your brains even without the radio around until—click!—hey, that's an idea! So I went to the Department Store after a doll, but there were no dolls.
It wouldn't be right to always blame the era of shortages. It's no era's fault if good ideas pop up in the mind of a certain dolt when it's too late already… So I had no other choice but to buy a dog of the biggest available size with the price answering the proportions. The brute was no less than a meter tall, rigged out in trousers and a shirt. The same, practically, doll, only with a canine head…
Lenochka grew a healthy child, and she attended the big kindergarten "Sunny" not too far from home, in the apple orchard alongside May Day Street. All September, I was taking her to "Sunny" and coming after her at the end of the day, because those who worked at the student construction platoon were exempt from the patronage assistance to collective farms.
My beard was shaved off but I kept the hair long. Once I and my brother went to dances together. Sasha Basha had already replaced The Spitzes at the Loony dance-floor.
My brother had served his two-year hitch at the Baikonur cosmodrome and because of that he lost any chance of going out of the country for 20 years. Even visiting the resorts of socialist Bulgaria was out of the question to make sure he wouldn't blurb out to a chance CIA spy sunbathing on a beach that at the Baikonur, besides the astronauts, all kinds of test ballistic missiles were launched every week unnoticeable to all those spy satellites orbiting above us in 3 layers already…
Starting off to the Loony, I put my "Mona-Lisa" sunglasses on. You’d hardly need to wear sunglasses in the evening, but the "Mona-Lisa" in its thin golden rim was commonly viewed as the swanky symbol of a dandy dude of fashion as well as the jeans losing their blue dye with wear. Such jeans were pushed over for 120-150 rubles, which was more than an average workman salary. The mainstream trafficking of jeans to Konotop was operated by well-tanned Algerians who studied at the Engineering Technical School on Peace Avenue.
By the by, those Algerians were so naive. "He said-a come-a go out and talk-a. I come-a out, he kick-a me a kick. Why-a?" But for all their naivety, they never scaled the jeans price down.
And my jeans were bought for just 30 rubles and that what they looked, some Brazilian crap never fading with washing, nothing like Lyalka's "Levi's". Therefore, although it's hard to see thru sunglasses in the evening, they justified themselves on the dance-floor, veiling the misery in jeans…
To the dance-floor, my brother and I arrived after the break when the crowd crammed the place to the utmost. Sasha went around looking for his girlfriend, and I pulled up nigh the stage and remained there listening; Basha's guitarist, Marik, was good at solo riffs.
Then some salabon buster came up and gazed at me. Well, quite understandable too, got impressed with such a hippy-long hair, the "Mona-Lisa", and my metropolitan air in general. So, he stared for a while and got lost in the crowd.
I stood where I was and in a couple of minutes—good evening to your khutta!—the same buster popped up but already with his buddy. They approached me and, synchronously so, swayed back and—whoosh!—two fists were flying at me. I parried them with my shoulder but the collective impact of the double blow slammed me off and I, like, flew into some parallel space.
I mean it – it was a completely different dimension, as if under the sea. The sound of the dances instantly turned off and I was gliding or, rather, spinning along the concrete floor. From all the sides in that mute space around, lots of legs rushed towards me, each one all too eager to kick. And those legs were somehow not complete but, sort of, cutouts, from feet and up to knees, no higher. So they whooshed by from here and there, only soundlessly, missing to inflict bodily harm.
I yanked me up and jumped onto the bench by the circular grating and pressed my back to its pipes. That’s when the sound came back, the shrieks of girls and Basha's preaching on the microphone, "Friends, please, observe…" And round the bench, a pack of guys stood facing me and one of them, such a hefty slob, yelled, "Who're you? Who're you? Take off your glasses!."
I pulled the "Mona-Lisa" off and someone shouted, "From The Orpheuses!" They obviously were Settlement guys although I did not even know them.
So, they yanked me off the bench into their tight circle and warped out of the dance-floor, and they at once went back to the general sorting out in progress. On that day the blades from Depot Street attempted at staking off the Loony as their sovereign turf.
At the park exit, I met my brother with his brow broken. We had to go to the Station for him to wash the blood off under the tap in the men's room…
To mark the most obvious things is the hardest of tricks. I had been raiding weed plantations as far as the Kandeebynno itself, while in the neighbor's garden, right over the fence splitting our plots, there grew a dense coppice of cannabis. That's what a limited outlook means. I was looking into the distance and couldn't see under my very nose. The situation called for the restoration of historical justice which I did at night and, to cover the tracks, heaved the weed looted from the neighbor's garden over his fence to the next lane, and from there back, round the corner, to our wicket and up to the attic in the shed… The quality of tested samples was simply excellent. I shared some part of the booty with Lyalka for him to get on high, and feel that not for nothing he was warming me up in those two years…
You strike a lode and there comes another. In Nezhyn, in the plot by an inconspicuous khutta in the Count's Park, right across the road from the Leninist Komsomol cinema, there stood 5 ample bushes of weed without any fencing whatsoever. No saint would pass by and withstand the temptation…
But then there arose a serious problem: how to store the abundant harvest? To keep it under the bed in the Hosty?. Very funny, indeed.
I walked around all of the hostel looking for a suitable nook but in vain. And then in the washroom on the fourth floor, I saw a desk with a drawer. I did not know how came it was there, or for how long it would tarry in the washroom, but being desperately pressed for finding any storage place (I couldn't just leave the weed in the park with the rains setting in, couldn't I?) I just dumped it in the drawer. As a precaution measure, I turned the desk and pushed it with its drawer close to the wall, so that no one would horse around. Then, as necessary, I was visiting the washroom to pinch off a few heads for the current consumption…
From the patronized collective farm, my course-mates returned in a state of complete shock, dumbfounded, all lost in the deep contemplation about life's purpose, meaning, and requirements. That is, was or was not their former understanding of and approach to those concepts correct? As it turned out, during their patronage assistance 2 of local guys there had a knife fight. Because of whom? Because of Tanya who was studying at my group.
A year before, those ruthless bitches of my course-mates asked me to pretend I fell in love with her. Just for fun, because she was most inarticulate and unattractive. And I—the stupid moose—was quick to execute what asked. "Tanya! I love you with all of the depth! And what is your shared feeling?" For 2 days I pestered her at the breaks until she asked to leave her alone. It looked like she was going to cry, I got ashamed and shut up.
Well, now, how do you like it, ladies? Who was chosen by the guys as the prize for their berserk passion? That's why the girls were now following her with furtive looks of envy and respect. And she walked the corridors with pensive pride as if she got it something about herself which she had never expected. And her glances at me became not as negating as they used to be. What if I had not been just sporting last year? Thank you, dagger guys, for the alibi…
But I still was worried about the cannabis stored in so inappropriate manner. A desk drawer in the washroom was anything but the right place for it. Any block with elementary literacy level on the subject would inevitably get attracted by its poignantly alluring fragrance and deduct the source of the whiff because the desk somehow did not belong among the tiled bare walls and sinks of the washroom. Besides, the Phys-Math students might start to ask themselves unnecessary questions as to why I started to frequent the washroom on their floor.
So with the first snow in November, I took weed out for relocation to another place of storage. My plan was to hide it in the dormer on the Old Building roof because I noted a mighty welded ladder leading up there from behind the building…
Late in the evening, Slavic, Twoic, and Eera accompanied me to the Old Building backyard, like, the state commission at the launch of a manned spaceship from the Baikonur site.
I passed my overcoat and hat to Eera, thrust the package with weed under my shirt and started off… At the initial after-launch stages all went on in a standard mode. The ladder vibrations stayed within the safety gauge, it’s only that the iron rungs were icy cold making the lift endless. In the times of Gogol, they built the floors two-three times taller than presently.
At the point of entering the roof, there cropped up unforeseen problems. The ladder did not reach the roof itself, ending under the eaves. It was necessary to catch hold of the tinplate above the ladder and go over its jutting edge onto the roof. Of that moment I recollect the uncompromisingly dark night, in the surrounding void, there were just 3 of us – the tinplate, the darkness and I…
The roof itself was rather slippery, although not overly steep; I had to plant my steps onto the low ridges of seams between the sheet blocks. Getting to the dormer, I found its window sealed tightly with thick planks nailed from within. Thank you for your visit!.
On the way back, I suddenly slipped, when nearing the place where I had to get over the tinplate at the roof edge, yet I did not fall, but straightened up, gnashed my teeth and, addressing myself, spoke up to the darkness, "Tickling the public’s expectation, eh? You bitch!" Then I went down on all fours, dangled my legs over the roof edge and groped with my feet for the uppermost rung in the ladder.
Halfway down, I was caught up by the mortifying belated thought that the evaded dive from the roof wouldn't be as bad as crash-landing on someone from the commission in the launch-pad.
(…certain thoughts are better never to be thought at all…)
And again I kicked in a door. Remarkably, it was the same one though Ilya Lipes did not live in that room anymore. It was inhabited by the current fourth-year students and among them Vitya Kononevich, who imprudently borrowed from Zhora Ilchenko The Godfather, together with A Learner's Dictionary of Current English by Hornby, both imported from India.
How insignificant and trivial, at first glance, might seem the things eventually leading to a real jolt in the flow of life! Say, you ask Zhora to lend you The Godfather for a couple of weeks, and then you come to the hostel and see the door of your room kicked brutally in… By the way, this time no shaky fingers were observed, the skills of vital importance get formed surprisingly quickly. Probably, the fact that I was working not for Veerich but for myself had also its telling effect.
The Godfather, a novel by Mario Puzo was stolen not out of idle curiosity (would or wouldn't the action set my fingers a-shaking?), neither for upgrading my door-kicking skills, but just to translate it into Russian. The novel, as well as its author, happened to be rather thick, about 400 pages. With regard to the way of its acquisition, Konotop was a more suitable place for plunging into the translation work.
It took several months of intent labor efforts to render the book turned out at the Penguin Publishing House into a weighty pile of numbered thick notebooks filled with my handwriting, in ink of various hues of the blue. The whole bunch comprising The Godfather I passed to Lyalka and his wife Valentina for reading, of the subsequent movements and general fate thereof I am aware no more than of where swam and how fared the cannibal shark from The Jaws, also in my Russian handwriting.
In the course of the second translation, about halfway thru towards the completion, my father cooperated by sharing his critical remarks… It happened when working about the passage that described a party in the Hollywood club designed and equipped for the recreational activities of Hollywood movie stars, I experienced certain problems with the rendering of the American English collocation "blow job" into Russian. The descriptive variants seemed over-lengthy, while the shorter options looked outrageously obscene. When in labor pains, I tore another unsuccessful attempt at translation out from the notebook and shoved it into the kitchen stove to be used for kindling.
On coming from work, my father opened the cast-iron door to fill the stove firebox with wood, picked the crushed sheet of paper, smoothed it out and studied the lines before asking, "What fucking hooey is this?"
I did not object to his instant estimation for 2 reasons. Firstly, I knew that passages perceived in the form of printed text as eroticism did look vulgar porn when presented in handwriting. It suffices to recall the thin notebook with a handwritten story, circulating among the senior students at School 13, which contained a passage running as follows "…she threw her legs in fishnet lace up over his collar-bones…" It’s hard to say why, but those fishnet legs were immediately and inseparably associated by me with the Parisian Eiffel Tower. Some pretty uphill job it would be to have a sex (as well as to defend erotica) with the Eiffel Tower bestriding you. On the other hand, who knows how those same legs would sway me if met in the orderly line of typographic set. Appearances influence our judgments.
Secondly, I always respected the subtle literary instinct of my father. Thus, from the newspaper Trood, he read only the TV program and, with a fleeting glance at the rest of the headlines, announced his exhaustive conclusion, "Neither rhyme nor reason – kiss a flea in the brick." And he never mistook, crisp and to the point. Besides, he possessed some amazing linguistic ingenuity. Perhaps, because of his Ryazan roots; the land of Ryazan always lay at the crossroads of language contacts.
Well, for example: seated at the kitchen table, with his gray brows taunted strenuously above the plastic rim of his glasses, he's busy a-tinkering to insert some hooey into another one. I cracked along, between the table and the stove, from the door to the window only to take an abrupt turn back to the door. Without taking his eyes from the hooeys in his hands, the father inquires, "Why tyrtyrting?"
No dictionary would present an entry for the word, yet what a juicy verb it is! Brimming with immensely elastic plasticity! Its sound form alone will let you grasp with utmost precision the action's quintessence, as well as the tense inner state of the poor asshole all in a dither. And—most importantly—the word got born spontaneously, right now, while this fickle hooey doesn't want to enter into the other fucker.
"But could one keep back tyrtyrting when the treppa has pibzed already?!."
Both workpieces drop from his hands onto the table, the father gives me a hard look from over the black plastic rim of the glasses slid halfway down his nose, then he says, "pfui!"
And here lies, by the way, the exhaustive key to the muchly discussed "fathers-and-children" controversy – they reproduce their likes only to pooh-pooh or pfui-pfui when it's too late.
(…coming back to The Godfather…
Unfortunately, there remained no writers in the American literature – Pearson, Salinger, Pynchon and you're plumb at the list bottom. All the rest are scribbling away with their both eyes on selling their production to Hollywood, compilers of cartoon stories and soap opera dialogues.
No! I'm far from blaming them! Not me, not in the least. Basically, we all are like each other and differ in only how deep we manage to keep hidden our hunger to sell us individually. And though being nothing of a Christian, I cannot but admire Mr. J. Christ’s instruction, “Let him who never sinned trigger off the slaughter of the slut,” by which he wholesomely absolved the motley team of the human race for infinite millenniums to come.
Is there any alternative? Absolutely, yes, and it’s all contained in the approbation by which the writer rewards his own efforts in the self-appraisal, “Damn nice artifact! At times, it did amuse me and helped to kill twelve years of my stretch!” which surely won't keep your pot boiling. That’s why I’d better head back from so high a curve and once again pick up the literature for a subject.
Look at the Briton Maugham, the very first paragraph in a story by him is a chord, a fugue tuning up. In his first paragraph, among the surface details, he scatters nodules, which will develop and reach their prime in the following narrative and flow into the denouement containing a flutter of echoes from the first paragraph. That's real craftsmanship. Exactly what the Hollywood jacklegs are lacking. My father would say, "Pfui!"
Puzo is the role model from the same and for the same Hollywood writers. He was the first to get a six-figure sum of dollars for his creation, the accountancy pathfinder, yet his The Godfather suffers from the infirmity common to all the action bestsellers: while the protagonists fight for their survival in the unfavorable environment of hostile mafia clans, you can still read it, but with the start of the prize elephant distribution, that is methodical extermination of bad guys whose only slip was leaving a chance for the equally bad guys to outsmart them because of the author's biased sympathies, the interest dwindles rapidly and evaporates.
The same snafu as in the 19th song of The Odyssey, when the hero returns home from his wanderings and whacks the suitors of his wife, one by one, with aesthetic relishing of the details in what manner the assholes' brains were smashed or guts were ripped out. I couldn't finish reading the song even in a good Ukrainian translation, not because of being too squeamish but simply getting bored…)
~ ~ ~
I marked him a split-second sooner than he saw me. With our stares fused intently, we were nearing each other on the sidewalk by the Railroad Distance Trade-Union building. Both of us knew that only one would survive. Or no one.
With my lateral sight, I detected the rare figures of passers-by, freaked-out, careful to make room for the invisible line between him and me. Steadily, inexorably we kept making that line shorter. Step by step.
The dwindling distance rendered the forthcoming duel inescapably lethal. His hand darted to his right hip, but no sooner his palm touched the handle of his Smith & Wesson than my Colt erupted in a series of shots blended in a thundering staccato… If you are going to survive in Konotop, you have to be the first to draw.
His hands flapped up to clutch his bullet-riddled chest. In unsteady sway, he careened over the spiky line of the ruthlessly short-shorn bushes bordering the lawn upon which he would collapse the very next moment. I thrust my Colt back into the holster, he straightened up, and we embraced.
"Kuba!"
"Gray!"
The passers-by kept bypassing us along the sidewalk… Yes, that's him – Kuba. Grinning with the gold, that had replaced his teeth lost at the bar brawls in faraway ports of the oversea wanderings, but this was him – Kuba.
"How d’you?"
It's strange that everybody changes—they grow fat, they grow bald—but for your old friends. Fleeting eye contact works a miracle, you no longer see scars, or false teeth or any other distracting trifles. You see your friend Kuba with whom you have had bike rides to the Kandeebynno or the Seim, attended Children Sector, rode the "sausage" of a streetcar. It's just that now Kuba has what to tell about the life of seamen plowing the World Ocean…
We are sitting at Kuba's. His old folks are at work, but on the table, we have three eggs in the frying pan next to the three-liter glass-walled jar with transparent, lethally powerful, moonshine, in which the lemon peels float not yet below the half-jar. We drink, snack, and listen to the stories of Kuba the Seafarer.
…that time he was late after the vacation, or rather his boat had sailed away sooner than scheduled. So they assigned him to a self-propelled barge for about a month until some other suitable boat would turn up. The crew consisted of him alone, but he strictly kept the maritime regulations on the barge moored at the far wharf by the mouth of the river.
Standing on the bridge he shouted loudly, "Cast off!" And he ran from the bridge to the wharf and removed the lines from the bitts.
Then he jumped back to command "Slow Astern!" and execute it…
“Good fellow, Kuba! Let them know the ours! Down the hatch!”
…and in foreign ports, there are special houses for seamen recreation. Equipped like a luxury hotel, with a restaurant, rooms, a swimming pool. Now, whenever Soviet seamen dive into the pool, the water around their bodies gets spotted with crimson. Abroad, they’ve become way too advanced and add some chemicals to the water which turns crimson when in contact with urine.
Well, and you know how it goes by us, the first thing after you plunged is to take a leak in the water… So, they have to drain the pool and fill it up again, and the Germans have to sit for another hour over their beer on the tables and wait: "Rusishe Schweinen!"
“They themselves are pigs. Half-whacked fascists! Down the hatch-y!”
…in Hong Kong, it was, or maybe Thailand. The ours got moored, visited the city, and were coming back to the pier.
There was a team of dockers, so skinny them all because they live on just rice and seafood. Our boatswain was a hero, two meters tall, he grabbed one of the dockers by his overalls collar and lifted up in the air, like a kitten.
"Yea, bro. Slaving all your life, eh? Bad luck." He put him back and went on.
So that yellow did not understand the brotherly solidarity, and he did not appreciate the Slavonic generous breadth of soul. He runs ahead, jumps up—ya!—and kicks the boatswain into the nose.
Then the ours had a whole hour to water the giant on the pier to bring him back to life.
“And dat's rightee! Here's to Bruce Lee! Down the!”
…Nah! Kuba ain't gonna get married at all. They all are but fucking sluts… A boat in the roadstead ready for sailing off. The captain's wife comes up by a towboat to kiss him goodbye. Happy voyage, dear!. Coming back to the harbor, she's fucking the helmsman and two mechanics, in turn or not quite, in the wheelhouse.
“For freedom! For whores! D’n th’tch!”
…and it's real difficult to smuggle goods from abroad. Any boat zampolit has at least 2 rats among the crew.
"You mean, there are zampolits on boats?!"
"That's the rule."
"I'd better stay a land rat then!"
“T's rightee! For rats! D’nnnnn!”
But I still remembered clearly enough that I was going to the drugstore because my mother asked to fetch her some medication before I went to Nezhyn. Therefore, I most warmly said goodbye to Kuba the Sea Dog, although the lemon peels were not yet scraping the glass of the bottom in the three-liter jar, and in the frying pan there still were glittering, here and there, spots of sunflower oil not fully wiped up with bread.
"No! No! I know! All's gonna be nyshtyak."
After the Under-Overpass, I boarded a streetcar to City. I neatly got off it by the Department Store and went round its corner to the drugstore where, by my mother's lead, they sold the needed medicine. Entering the glazed door, I reached the glass partition and, to the question of the woman in white, inhaled a lungful of the air preparing to answer but suddenly realized that even if I could recollect the medication’s name then pronouncing it, or anything else for that matter, was simply unfeasible. Ruefully, I turned around, exhaled and staggered out.
Nonetheless, I somehow managed to cross Peace Square before getting aware that I was done in beyond all bounds and switched over to the guidance of my guardian angel. He steered me into the yard of a five-story apartment block, chose the proper staircase-entrance and took care that I did not spill down the dark stairs to an unfamiliar basement. Then he led me along an endless cemented corridor to the place, where the scattered light from the opening to the outside pit outlined a mesh bed frame, leaned against the wall. It remained only to lower it onto the floor, crash down upon it and conk off. The sheepskin coat and the hat substituted for a sleeping bag.
I woke up in a thoroughly stiff state, but still managed to be in time for the last local train to Nezhyn.
The next weekend, I again volunteered to go to the drugstore after the medicine if my mother reminded me of its name, but she said, no, it was not necessary any longer…
~ ~ ~
There was a New Year dancing party held in the foyer of the New Building. Eera and I were dancing there, and some teacher from the Biology Department could not keep back her delight, she gleefully announced to us that we were created for each other. It's nice to be complimented that way, moreover, by a specialist versed in species. But soon after, the zipper in my jeans blasted, and my sweater was not long enough to hide the hole. So I tried to fasten the sweater hem to the jean's fly with the safety pin lent me by Slavic. However, it did not help to resolve the situation, because the pinched down sweater began to look like a leotard on sub-deb gymnastics girls, besides, I did not care to be pricked into one or another of my private parts if the pin burst too. There remained no other option but go to the Hosty and change my jeans. Normally, I didn't keep spare clothes in my room but changed in Konotop at weekends. Yet, that was a special occasion and I had brought my dapper jeans for dancing at the party. The incident made me change back into shabbier, but sturdier ones.
Upon returning to the foyer, I found Eera in eager conversation with some young buster. I did not like him right away, despite the fact that he was introduced as some of her old acquaintances.
Probably, I couldn't hide my dislike towards him and the feeling became reciprocal. The confrontation did not go over to active hostilities, but the voice timbers acquired menacing pitch. At some point, I looked away from the jackass and caught a glimpse of Eera which deeply amazed me. She blossomed, she was happy! Never before I had ever seen so much joy in her eyes…
On the way to her home, Eera kept picking holes in my reaction to an absolutely normal situation, and I half-heartedly defended myself, busy with storing in my head the new discovery.
(…the highest bliss and most eagerly craved for moment in a female life arrives when two stag-males are going to clash their horns for her, the prize bitch.
That's it. You vigorously toil like f-f..er..I mean, flustered Pygmalion absorbed so deeply in turning your piece of art into living flesh, panting, drowning in the perspiration of relentless efforts and to what end all that, eh?!.
O, fool! You’re slavering for an idle jerk popping up down the road to lap up the goodies of creation that cost you so many pains! No, it’s anything but a fair play. Where's the f-f..er..fundamental justice, eh?..)
The New Year Eera met at the Hosty… Before her arrival, I served a romantic table for 2, a bottle of red wine next to an unlit candle and an open can of sprats in oily liquid. There still remained some time and I suddenly decided to prepare a surprise for her, or rather a New Year present…
Since my getting interested in the topic, it was insistently driven in to me that the longer, the better. To wit, the duration of having it indicates the quality of action. The human race invented quite a few tricks for gaining upswing in quality. The simplest one is to kill a glass or 2, I mean the standard Russian glass of 250 ml. However, stepping on that path you need the right snack. Prosper Merimé, for example, was advocating for soup of cock combs for this particular purpose. I did not have even lard.
The austere circumstances called for finding other means or workarounds. My personal experience in the brute facts of life prompted that of two go-rounds the second having a sex was always longer. Thus, I had no other choice but having a proactive sex.
Very conveniently, Spotty was frisking about the hostel corridor, hither and thither, as if so too busy with her New Year Eve cares. Good timing. I skipped discussing the reasons of my unexpected interest in her or clarifying that I needed nothing but mere technical assistance. Not that such frankness would hurt her in any way. The floozy had seen much more than I could imagine in the wildest dreams before she had to transfer to the Nezhyn State Pedagogical Institute to avoid being sent down from the University of Kiev for grossly unleashed fucking and sucking. Possibly, there were other reasons too, because she casually mentioned that her husband did not wear anything under his jeans at all. Well, I dunno, but for me, an innocent lad from the Settlement, the like extravagances seemed way too deep…
