Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Frankly, at the moment I am not sure about the presence of pigeons in one or the other enclosure (but were there two of them?) on the day when I ventured to climb up the iron ladder towards something unknown, indistinguishable in the murky square hole of the hatchway above my head. And it is pretty possible that I simply remembered the remark overheard in my parents’ chat, that Stepan’s pigeons also fell victim to his unrestrained booze binges.
On the whole, just one thing stands beyond the shadow of a doubt – the tremulous ecstasy on the doorsill to revelation when, leaving behind my sister’s dismal divination of the pending manslaughter of me by the fatherly hand and, next to her, the silent stare of my brother watching closely each my movement from the landing down there, which diminished at each ladder rung as I climbed into the brave new world that any moment now would unfurl before me beneath the grayish underbelly of the slate roof… A few days later Natasha came running into our room to proudly herald that Sasha had just climbed up to the attic too.
Taking into account all of that, it is quite probable that the pigeons were gone from the attic enclosure, but in the Courtyard, there were hosts of them…
The Courtyard’s layout presented a systematized masterpiece of pure unalloyed geometricity. Inside the big rectangular formed by the 6 two-storied buildings, the ellipse of the road was inscribed and accentuated by the knee-deep drenches along its both sides, bridged by albeit short, yet mighty overpasses minutely opposite each of the 14 entrances to the 6 houses in our Block.
Two narrow concrete walks aligned at right angles to the ellipse’s longitudinal axis cut it into three even chunks, the resultant rectangular in between the walks and the road ditches was further divided into three equal segments by one more couple of concrete walks parallel to the above-mentioned axis to connect the walks also mentioned already.
The intersection points formed four corners of the central segment, from which the rays of 4 additional concrete walks traversed the Courtyard diagonally, each one projected in the direction of the central entrances to the respective corner buildings, the line between adjacent ray-starting points served the chord of a concrete arc-walk described about a round lumber gazebo, 2 of them all in all, so that, on the whole, it presented the model of perfection reminiscent of the Versailles’ design, only of concrete.
(…it is impossible to come across such a purified Bau Stile in nature. No circular circles exist among natural ones, neither absolutely isosceles triangles, nor flawless squares – someplace, somehow, the accomplished evenness would be inevitably ruined by the stubborn awl spiking thru the Mother Nature’s haversack…)
Of course, there were no fancy waterworks in our Courtyard, neither trees nor bushes. Maybe, later they planted something there yet, in my memory, I can find not even a seedling but only grass cut into geometric figures by the walks of concrete and loose pigeon flocks flying from one end of the vast Courtyard to the other when there sounded “…gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil!.” call.
I liked those looking so alike, yet somehow different, birds flocking around you to bang the scattered bread crumbles away from the road on which you’d never see a vehicle except for a slow-go truck carrying, once in a blue moon, the furniture of tenants moving in or out, or a load of firewood for Titan boilers installed in the apartments’ bathrooms.
But even more, I liked feeding pigeons on the tin ledge out the kitchen window. Although it took a long wait before some of the birds would get it where your “gooil-gooil” invitation was coming from and hover with the swish of air-cutting wings in the relentless flapping above the ledge covered by the thick spill of breadcrumbs before landing on it with their raw legs to start the quick tap-tapping at the offer on the hollow-sounding tin.
The pigeons seemed to have an eye on each other or, probably, they had some kind of intercom system because the first bird was very soon followed by others flying in, in twos and threes, and whole flocks, maybe even from the other block. The window ledge submerged into the multi-layer whirlpool of feathered backs and heads ducking to pick the crumbs, pushing each other, fluttering off the edge and squeezing in back again. Then, taking advantage of that pandemonium, you could cautiously put your hand out thru the square leaf up in the kitchen window and touch from above one of their moving backs, but tenderly, so that they wouldn’t dash off with the loud flaps of the wings and flush away all at once…
~ ~ ~
Besides the pigeons, I also liked holidays, especially the New Year. The Christmas tree was set up in the parents’ room in front of the white tulle curtain screening the cold balcony door. The plywood boxes from postal parcels received long ago and presently full of fragile sparkling adoration came from the narrow storeroom: all kinds of fruits, dwarfs, bells, grandfathers frosts, baskets, drill-bit-like purple icicles, balls with inlaid snowflakes on their opposite sides and just balls but also beautiful, stars framed within thin glass tubes, fluffy rain-garlands of golden foil. In addition, we made paper garland-chains as taught by Mom. With different watercolors we painted the paper, it dried overnight and was cut into finger-wide colored strips which we glued with wheatpaste into lots of multicolored links in the growing catenas of our homemade garlands.
Lastly, after decorating the tree with toys and sweetmeat—because a candy with a thread thru its bright wrapper is both nice and eatable decoration which you can cut off and enjoy at Xmas tide—a snowdrift of white cotton wool was put under the tree over the plywood footing of one-foot-tall Grandfather Frost in his red broadcloth coat, one of his mitten-clad hands in firm clasp at his tall staff and the other clutching the mouth of the sack over his shoulder tied with a red ribbon which hid the seam too sturdy to allow actual investigation of the bumps bulging from inside through the sackcloth.
Oh! How could I forget the multicolored twinkling of tiny bulbs from their long thin wires?!. They came into the Christmas tree before anything else, and those wires were connected to the heavy electric transformer also hidden under the wool snowdrifts, Dad made it himself. And the mask of Bear for the matinée in kindergarten was also his production. Mom explained him how to do it and Dad brought some special clay from his work and then on a sheet of plywood he modeled the bear’s face with its stuck-up nose. When the clay got stone-hard, Dad and Mom covered it with layers of gauze and water-soaked shreds of newspaper. It took two days for the muzzle to dry and harden, then the clay was thrown away and—wow!—there was a mask made of papier-mâché. The mask was colored with brown watercolor, and Mom sewed the Bear costume of brown satin, it was a one-piece affair so you could get into the trousers only thru the jacket. That’s why at the matinée I did not envy the woodcutters with the cardboard axes over their shoulders.
(…and until now the watercolors smell to me of the New Year, or maybe vice verse, it’s hard to decide, I’m not too good at moot points…)
If the big bed in the parents’ room was taken apart and brought to our room, it meant that later in the evening they would haul tables from the neighboring apartments and set them in the freed bedroom for guests to sit around. The neighbors’ children would gather in our room to play.
When it got very late and all the visiting children gone back to their apartments, I would venture to the parents’ room filled with the smarting mist of thinly bluish tobacco smoke and the noise of loud voices each of which trying to speak louder than anyone’s else. Old Morozov would announce that being a young man he once oared no less than 17 kilometers to a date, and the man by his side would eagerly confirm that proves it was worth it and all the people would rejoice at the good news and laugh happily and they would grab each other and start dancing and fill all of the room with their giant figures, up to the ceiling, and circle along with the disc on the gramophone brought by someone of the guests.
Then they again would just speak but not listen who says what, and Mom, sitting at the table, would start singing about the lights on the streets of the Saratov City full of unmarried young men, and her eyelids would drop and shut half of her eyes. Mortified by shame at that view, I would get onto her lap and say, “Mom, don’t sing, please, don’t!” And she would laugh, and push the glass back, and say she did not drink anymore and go on singing all the same. In the end the guests would go to their apartments taking out the tables with them and still talking without listening. I would be sent to our room where Sasha already sleeps on the big sofa but Natasha alertly bobbing from her pillow. In the kitchen, there would sound the tinkle of the dishes being washed by Grandma and Mom, and then the light in our room would be briefly turned on for the parent bed parts to be taken back…
Besides her work, Mom was also taking part in the Artistic Amateur Activities at the House of Officers which was very far to go and I knew it because at times the parents took me to the cinema there and made the twins envy so dearly. All the movies started by loud music and the big round clock on the Kremlin tower opening a newer newsreel “The News of the Day” about black-faced miners in helmets walking from their mines, and lonely weaver-women in white head-clothes pacing along the rows of shaking machine tools, and giant halls full of bareheaded clapping people. But then one of the news frightened me to tears when showed jerky bulldozers in fascist concentration camps whose blades were pushing heaps of naked corpses to fill deep trenches and press them down by their caterpillar tracks. Mom told me to shut my eyes and not watch and, after that, they didn’t take me to the cinema anymore.
However, when the Artistic Amateur Activities performed in their concert at the House of Officers, Dad took me along. Different people from Artistic Amateur Activities came on stage to sing by the accompaniment of one and the same button accordion and the audience clapped so loudly. Then the whole stage was left for just one man who talked for a long time, yet I couldn’t get it what about even though he made his voice louder and louder until they started clapping from all the sides to send him away. And so it went on with singing and talking and clapping in between, but I waited only to see my Mom up there. At last, when a lot of women in the same long skirts came to dance with a lot of men in high boots, Dad said, “Aha! Here is your dear Mommy!” But I could not make her out because the long skirts were all alike and made the women so too similar to each other. Dad had to point again who was my Mom and after that I looked only at her so as not to lose.
If not for that intent attention, I would have, probably, missed the moment which stuck in me for many years like a splinter which you cannot pull out and it’s just better not to press the spot where it sits…The women dancers on the stage were all spinning quicker and quicker and their long skirts also swerved rising to their knees, but my Mom’s skirt splashed suddenly to flash her legs up to the very panties. Unbearable shame flooded me, and for the rest of the concert I kept my head down never looking up from the red-painted boards in the floor beneath my felt boots, no matter how loudly they clapped, and all the long way home I did not want to talk to any of my parents even when asked why I was so pouty.
(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn’t realized yet…)
But, hey! Really, what’s the point in those concerts at all if there was a shiny brown radio box on the wall in our—children’s—room? It could both talk and sing, and play music, we knew it very well that when they broadcast Arkady Raikin you should turn the white knob of the volume control to make it louder, then run and call everyone in the house to haste to our room for laughing all together back to the box on the wall. And we learned to hush the radio or even turn it off when there was a concert for the cello and orchestra, or if someone was telling how good was the news about the victory of Cuban Revolution in Cuba which made him so happy that he turned out 2 daily tasks in just 1 shift for spite of the revenge-seekers and their leader Adenauer…
~ ~ ~
Yet, the May Day celebration was not a home holiday at all.
First, you had to walk a long way by the road going down past the Block’s corner building and there, at the foot of the Gorka upland, to keep walking on and on. Not alone though, there were lots of people going the same way, both adults and children. People greeted each other cheerfully, in their hands they carried bunches of balloons or pliant twigs with handmade leaves of green tissue paper fixed by black threads spun fast and profusely, or long pieces of red cloth with big white letters spanned between 2 poles, and also portraits of different men, both bold and not too much so, set upon stubby separate sticks.
Like almost all the children, I had a short square pennant in my hands, on a thin—like a pencil, only a tad bit longer—rod. In the red pennant, the yellow circle crisscrossed with yellow grid stood for the globe, and a yellow dove soared above it, yet not as high as the capture of yellow letters: “Peace be to the World!” Of course, I couldn’t read at that time but those pennants remained unchangeable year after year for decades, they abode for latecomers and slow learners as well.
And while we all walked on, in the distance ahead of us, there emerged music. The nearer the louder it sounded and made us walk quicker and drop idle talks, and then we passed by 2 rows of soldier-musicians with shining trumpets and booming drum, and past a tall red balcony with people standing still upon it in their forage caps but, strangely, that balcony had no house behind it…
After one of the May Days, I felt like drawing a holiday so Grandma gave me a sheet of ruled paper and a pencil… In the center of the sheet, I drew a large balloon on a string going down to the bottom edge of the sheet. It looked good, so big and festive. However, I wanted more than that, I wanted the holiday be all over the world and, to the right from the balloon, I drew a stretch of blind wood fencing behind which there lived not ours but Germans and other enemies from the newsreels in the House of Officers, only all of them invisible, of course, because of the fencing.
Okay, Germans, let it be a holiday even for you! And I drew another balloon on the string rising from behind the fence. Lastly, to make it clear who is who and who is celebrating where, I added a fat cross in the enemies’ balloon.
The masterpiece accomplished, I briefly admired my work of art and then ran to share it, for a starter, with Grandma… At first, she couldn’t figure out what is what, and I had to explain to her the picture. But when I got to the point that let even Germans have a holiday—we are not meanies, right?—she stopped me sharply and vented severe criticism. I should have learned since long, said she, that because of my those cross-adorned balloons the “black raven” vehicle would stop by our house and take my Dad away arrested, and she asked if that was what I wanted.
I felt sorry for Dad and terrified by the prospect to stay without him. Bursting in sobs, I crushed the ill-fated drawing and ran to the bathroom to thrust the crumpled paper ball behind the pig-iron door of the water boiler Titan where they lighted fire when heating water for bathing…
~ ~ ~
The hardest thing in the morning is getting out of bed. It seems you'd give anything at all for another couple of minutes lying undisturbed by their yells it’s time to go to kindergarten.
On one of such mornings, the pillow under my head felt softer than a fleecy white cloud in the sky, and in the mattress yielding under me there developed such an exact mold absorbing my body in its gentle embrace that a mere thought of tearing myself away from that pleasure and warmth accumulated overnight under the blanket was simply unthinkable. So I went on lying until there popped up the frightening knowledge – if I would not shed off that blissful boggy drowsiness right away, then never would I come to kindergarten that morning, and never ever come to anywhere else because it would be a languor death in sleep.
Of course, so macabre words were beyond my ken then, I didn’t need them though nor other whimsy turns of phrase of that kind because my thoughts were coming mostly in the form of feeling, so I just felt freaked out, got up into the chilly room and started to dress. On Sundays, it was possible to lie as long as you wanted but never again the bed acquired such a pleasing shape…
One Sunday I woke up alone in the room and heard Sasha-’n’-Natasha’s merry screams from somewhere outside. I donned and hurried out into the corridor. They were not there nor in the kitchen, where only Grandma was clinking the pots’ lids. Aha! In the parents’ room! I ran in there at the height of fun – my brother-’n’-sister, and Mom was laughing together at a white shapeless lump standing in the corner on their bare feet. Of course, it’s Dad! He’s thrown over himself the thick blanket from the parents’ bed and now looms there bulkily next to the wardrobe.
And all at once those legs started to jump jointly under the fat fluttering folds. The horrible white bare-legged creature blocked the way towards the corridor herding Mom and all three of us to the balcony door. Oh, how we laughed! And clung to Mom more and more convulsively.
Then one of us began to cry and Mom said, “There-there, this is Dad, silly!” But Sasha did not stop (or, maybe, Natasha but not me though my laughter sounded more and more hysterical) and Mom said, “Well, enough, Kolya!” And the blanket straightened up and fell off revealing laughing face of Dad in his underpants and tank top, and we all together started to comfort Sasha sitting high in Mom’s arms and incredulously trying to laugh thru tears.
(…laughter and fear go hand in hand and there is nothing more frightening than something you can’t make out what…)
And on Monday morning I went to the parents’ room to admit that at night I again peed in bed. They were already dressed, and Dad said, “Gak! Such a big boy!” And Mom ordered me to peel off my underpants and get into their bed. From a shelf in the wardrobe, she fetched dry underpants for me and followed Dad into the kitchen.
I was lying under the blanket still warm with their warmth. Even the sheet was so soft, caressing. Full of pleasure I stretched out as much as I could, both legs and arms. My right hand got under the pillow and pulled out an ungraspable coarsened rag. I could not guess its purpose in their bed but I felt that I had touched something shameful and shouldn’t ask anyone about it…
~ ~ ~
It’s hard to say what was more delicious: Mom’s pastry or Grandma’s buns both baked for holidays in the blue electric oven “Kharkov”.
Grandma Martha spent her days in the kitchen cooking and washing up, and in the children’s room sitting on her bed not to be in the way of our playing.
In the evenings, she read us The Russian Epic Tales, a book about hero warriors who fought countless hordes of invaders or the Dragon Gorynich, and for the rest and recreation after the battles, they visited Prince Vladimir the Red Sun in the city of Kiev. That’s when the iron bed had to bear the additional weight of the three of us seated around Grandma Martha to listen about the exploits of Alesha Popovich or Dobrinya Nikitich.
When the heroes had their moments of sadness, they remembered their mothers, each one his own, but to their different, absent, mothers they all addressed one and the same reproach: why those mothers weren’t smart enough to wrap the future heroes into a piece of white cloth while they were still just silly babies and drop them into the fast running River-Mommy?
Only Ilya of Murom and Warrior Svyatogor, who grew so mighty that even the Earth Mother could bear him no more and only mountain rocks still somehow withstood his movements, they never raised that mutual lamentation, not even when having the bluest blues…
At times one or another of the hero warriors had a fight with one or another beauty disguised in armor. Those fights ended differently but the defeated would invariably say, “Do not kill me but treat instead to good food and drink and kiss on my mouth as sweet as sugar.” With all of those epic tales heard more than once, I knew by heart when such combats with gastronomic outcome were near at hand and eagerly anticipated them in advance…
Grandma Martha named the bathroom “the bathhouse”, and after her weekly bath, she was returning to our room steam-heated to red glow and half undressed—in just a tank top for menswear and one of her long skirts. Then she sat down on her iron bed to cool off while combing and braiding her gray hair into a pigtail. On her left forearm, there was a large mole in the form of a female nipple, the so-called “bitch’s udder”.
In course of one of her after-bath proceedings when she seemed to notice nothing but the curved plastic comb running thru the damp strands of her hair, I took advantage of my brother-’n’-sister’s distraction by agitated playing on the big sofa and sneaked under the springy mesh in the Grandma’s bed well sagged under her weight. There I cautiously turned over to my back and looked up – under the skirt between her straddled legs wide and firmly planted in the floor. Why? I did not know. Neither was there anything to make out in the dusk within the dark dome of the skirt. And I crawled away, as carefully as I could, feeling belated shame, regret, and a strong suspicion that she was aware of my hushed maneuvers…
Sasha was a reliable younger brother, credulous and taciturn. He was born after the brisk Natasha, and his complexion startled all by purple-blueish tinge because of the umbilical cord had almost strangled him, yet he was born in a shirt, which was taken off him in the maternity hospital and Mom explained later that from newborns’ shirts they produced some special medicine.
And Natasha turned out a really shrewd weasel. She was the first to know all the news: that the following day Grandma was to bake buns, that new tenants were to move into the flat on the first floor, that on Saturday the parents would go to a party at some people’s place, and that you should never-never kill a frog or it would rain cats and dogs.
At the sides of the back of her head, there started two pigtails split by ribbons before reaching her shoulders to fix each braid with a lovely bow-knot at its end. Yet, neither of those bows survived for long before falling apart into a tight knot with a pair of narrow ribbon tails. Probably, because of zealous spinning her head on all the quarters to find out: what-where-when?.
The two-year difference in age gave me a tangible degree of authority in the eyes of the younger. However, when Sasha taciturnly reran my climbing to the attic, then by that feat he, like, overtook me for two years. Of course, neither he, nor I, nor Natasha was capable at that time to put into words such a finicky deduction. We stayed at the level of emotional sensations expressed by interjections like, “Wow, boy!..” or, “Oh-oh, boy!..”
The unexpressed desire to reinforce my faltering authority and self-esteem or, maybe, some other inexpressible, or already forgotten, reasons led me to being nasty. One evening, with the light in the room already turned off, yet my brother-’n’-sister, laid to sleep with their heads on the opposite armrests in the huge leatherette sofa, still a-giggling and kicking each other under their common blanket because Grandma Martha couldn’t upbraid them while standing by her bed and whispering into the upper corner, I suddenly spoke up from my folding bed, “Tell you what, Grandma? God is a jerk!”
After a moment of complete silence, she erupted in threats of hell and its laborer devils and their pending job to make me lick a red-hot frying pan in future, yet I only laughed in response and, spurred by the reverent lull upon the sofa, showed no esteem for the awaiting tortures, “Whatever! Your God’s a jerk all the same!”
The following morning Grandma Martha did not talk to me. On my return from kindergarten, Natasha briefed me that in the morning, as Dad came home after his night shift, Grandma told him everything and wept in the kitchen and the parents were presently gone to a party at someone’s but I’d be let have it, and that’s for sure!
To all of my goody-goody attempts at starting a dialogue, Grandma Martha kept aloof and silent and soon left for the kitchen… A couple of hours sweating it, then the front door slammed, the parents’ voices sounded in the hallway. They moved to the kitchen where the talk became quicker and hotter. The door in our room prevented making out the subject of the heated discussion.
The voices' volume kept growing steadily on until the door flew open by Dad’s hand. “What? Scoffing at elders, eh? I’ll show you ‘a jerk’!” His hands yanked the narrow black belt from the waist of his pants. A black snake with the square chrome-flashing head flushed up above his head. His arm swayed and a never experienced pain scorched me. Once more. And more.
Wailing and wriggling, I rolled under Grandma’s bed to escape the belt. Dad grabbed the back of the bed and by one mighty jerk threw it over to the middle of the room. The mattress and all dropped down alongside the wall. I scrambled after the bed to shelter beneath the shield of its springy mesh. Dad was yanking the bed back and forth whipping on its both sides but I, with inexplicable speed, ran on all fours under the mesh jumping overhead, and mingled my howling and wailing, “Daddy! Dear! My! Don’t beat me! I won’t! Never again!” into his, “Snooty snot!”
Mom and Grandma came running from the kitchen. Mom screamed, “Kolya! Don’t!” and stretched out her arm to catch the hissing impact of the belt. Grandma also kvetched loudly, and they took Dad out of the room.
Crestfallen, with shallow whimpers, I rubbed the welts left by the belt looking away from the younger who huddled, in petrified silence, against the back of the big sofa…
~ ~ ~
In the Courtyard, we played Classlets.
First, you need a chalk to draw a big rectangular in the concrete walk and split it into five pairs of squares, like, a two-column table of 5 rows. Then get the bitka—a can from used shoe polish filled with sand whose enclosed mass conveys your bitka the required gravity, turns it a kinda tiny discus.
Now, standing out the bottom line of the first column, you throw your bitka into one of 10 classlet-squares and then go after it hopping on one leg (up the first column and down the second, 1 leap per square) to pick it up and proceed thru the rest of the table, also in one-legged hops, to leave the table of classlets by the final bound from the bottom classlet in the second column. A parabola-shaped mission trip is over.
(While going thru the table, take care your sandal never lands near any of the chalked lines or else the other players, closely watching your progress, would raise a hell of jeering shouts insisting that you stomped on it.)
Now, safely out of the Classlets table, you have the right to throw your bitka targeting the next square in the parabola and repeat your hopping trip to carry it out. After your bitka visited, in turn, all of the classlets, you mark one of them as your “house” and further on in the game you may feel in it at home—put your other foot down and relax. Yet, if your bitka missed the proper square or landed on a line, or if you touched a line when hopping, another player starts their tries and you become a watcher…
There were ball games as well. For instance, hitting a ball non-stop against the ground, you had to accompany each strike with a separate word, “I! – know! – five! – girls’! – names!” At each subsequent hit at the ball, you called out one of 5 random names, no repetitions allowed. Then followed 5 boy’s names, 5 flowers, 5 animals, etc., etc., until the ball bounced out of reach or the player got lost in their enumerations…
Another ball game was not as intellectual. You just hit the ball against the faded-pinkish-washed plaster on the house wall (closer to the corner, safely away from the window on the first floor). Guessing the landing spot of the re-bounced ball, you jumped over it with your legs wide apart before it hit the ground.
The player behind you caught the ball to throw it back against the wall—this time for them to jump for you to catch. There could be more players in the game though, so you had to wait for your turn in the line of jumpers. I was enchanted by the game’s infinity. It was like those endless pictures on the red side of Fire Extinguisher…
We played outside the Courtyard as well, across the ever-empty road surrounding the twin blocks.
Atop the tilt towards the Recruit Depot Barracks, a tall board-fencing enclosed large garbage containers for all of our Block. Next to the fence, there stretched a level area grown with green grass except for a lonely sagging pile of sand by the enclosure, probably, a leftover from the construction times and later used like any sand by any children in any sandbox. Apart from all those uses, we played a special sand game though, which had no name.
You just scooped a handful of sand and tossed it up, trying to catch the returning sand into your palm, as much as you could. The catch was held in the outstretched hand and you pronounced the ritual formula, “So much—for Lenin!”
Then the sand in the palm was thrown up again and caught back once again. Over the second catch, the words in the formula changed the proposed addressee, “So much—for Stalin!”
