Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The technical assistance was applied in a neutral, of course, room and in a distanced, orogenital way. With the business-like warning not to crumple her breasts, where there were no erogenous zones, she flung my jeans open, zapped my cock out and went down on it. The pecker met the attacking force with brave unyielding hardon which attitude was retained thru all of the procedure. Regrettably so…
Time went on, she obviously ran out of her store of tricks in giving head but I still couldn’t cum. The situation more and more acquired the air of monotony and even considering the ringlets of her hair the color of raven's wing, and the glasses which she never took off, was of no help. And when there started to surface superfluous analogies and uncalled-for reminiscences of a dark alley in the park of Stavropol, I beat a retreat which is not an easy maneuver with a stubborn stalwart at presenting arms in the leg of your jeans.
Still and all, what a smart hell of a subtle plan it was! The second to none willingness for genuine self-sacrifice! A knightly deed, if you find a second to consider it with sufficient introspection… Catering a blow job to Spotty, who had no idea of whereabouts of those f-f…er…frigging erogenous zones of hers. A selflessly chivalrous readiness for anything just to please your beloved! If it was not an irrefutable example of devoted love and tender care, I know of nothing else that could be…
Nevertheless, I did not disclose to Eera what namely I had to get thru just to make her feel good. Because I never was keen on flashing my positive aspects and advertising my noble deeds overmuchly… Later on, that New Year night, when Eera and I sat up at the table again, wrapped in bedsheets like Romans in their togas, Spotty walked by the door opened to the corridor. Out there, with gleeful vehemence, those who met the New Year in the hostel congratulated each other.
Spotty politely knocked on the door jamb, was invited to the table, treated to wine and allowed to ask Eera about her life circumstances. Eera started to drive a fool to her, like, she was a married woman but her husband being a geologist seldom came home. Having just recently moved from Kiev to Nezhyn, Spotty believed anything driven to her which made us laugh immoderately.
The haughty, naive Romans in those loose togas, we were making fun of gullible Spotty without realizing that any jest was the truth which just needed some time to mature…
After the winter examination session, Eera and I went to Borzna for the wedding of her course-mate Vera to her solid groom in the rank of Major. Unlike the wedding of my course-mate two years before in the same Borzna town, the celebration was not a khutta affair but took place in the large café-canteen on the main square of that district center, and lasted for two days.
After the first day, Eera and I spent the night in a small khutta among the snow-filled vegetable gardens on the outskirts. The khutta owner, a distant relative of Vera, was told that Eera and I were a married couple, newlywed, and she, after having her fill at the wedding table, went to sleep over at some other relative's, because her place was a single room with a whitewashed oven, a table, a chair, and a bed. The bed stood by the wide windowsill with the sharply outlined black shadow of the lattice, lightened from outside by the full moon, whose beams set a-gleaming the glass walls in the empty three-liter jar left on the same shadow-crossed sill.
I liked everything there, and the crusty earth floor made of firm, washed-down, clay, and the bed with boards in place of the mesh, and the hay-stuffed mattress… It's highly unlikely that the mistress believed in our being a husband and wife because during the wedding feast I a couple of times caught her gaze, both encouraging and gruffly sneering, from behind the table where she sat among the elderly women in their Sunday best black padded jackets, or in black plush coats with thick plaid kerchiefs spread loosely over their shoulders…
We threw our clothes off on the chair and ascended to the matrimonial bed as it was a century and centuries before in those same khuttas lost among those same snowdrifts. The moon reluctantly rose up above the window frame and could no longer follow the merrymaking couple of newlyweds, pressing hay at the alternate ends of the bed rooted in the earth floor of the unchanging khutta…
On the second day, Eera grew silly jealous when I was called out from the wedding hall by a local beauty. I did not really get it what's what as in the din of celebration Vera's brother, Mozart by his handle, shouted into my ear the unintelligible message.
Leaving the café-canteen, I went to the half-dark backyard where a beautiful, in general, girl was staging a pathetic hysteria on the trampled snow, pinioned by two girlfriends, all the trinity in light festive dresses. A group of young spectators, who came out to air themselves, crowded by with exhortations to her and pieces of advice to the girls gripping her arms. Without the slightest participation in the amateur show, I turned to leave and met the unforgiving stare of Eera. Back at the table, I had a hard time convincing her that I had nothing to do with the vagaries of the tipsy mantrap. I was supported by Valentina, a female of the most remarkable physique, who sat next to Eera. Farther on, there was seated an insignificant, on the background of her mighty forms, Armenian.
His Armenian identity was revealed when he was giving the 3 of us a ride thru the early night… On the street leading to the Moscow highway, the big Valentina told him to slow down, and left the Zhiguli to yell at Tolik, her fifth-grader son. The boy was replying to his mother in pure Ukrainian, and I felt somehow knocked out of rut by the winter snow all around so sharply discordant to the boy's Negro face.
Later, Eera told me that Valentina had born Tolik after working at a canteen in Kiev, or maybe she found that job after the delivery, I'm not quite sure on that point because it’s where things get always somewhat messy, I mean them those canteens.
Valentina's current life partner of an Armenian was not messing around with the instance of upbringing. We rode along the highway, and after a couple of kilometers stopped on the roadside snow. The driver turned on the tape-recorder and took out a bottle of foil-necked champagne.
(…the beauty of Armenian music does not open to listeners right away. At that time it was still incomprehensible to me but I kept patient – he, who gives a ride, orders the music…)
A patrol car stopped on the road, and two militiamen in greatcoats and, despite the winter, forage caps approached the Zhiguli. The Armenian stepped out to negotiate and make it clear that everything was safely controlled. In the meantime, Valentina started to resent that I and Eera were staying in a so shabby khutta, and undertook to bring her indignation to the bride's parents, who were some kind of her relatives. As a result, the second night we spent in a large, freshly renovated house in the well-to-do part of Borzna.
The moon could not peep into our room there, only a dim reflection of the moonlight made its way to us thru the glazed door of the adjacent veranda. The bed frame was way too creaky, so the mattress had to be thrown on the paint-coated floorboards. Not too bad, in general, but I liked it better in the shabby khutta…
We were taken to Nezhyn by the Armenian… Along the way, I was, for some reason, thinking about Tolik, the Negro boy. Catching sight of him, old women in Borzna dropped their jaws and kept crossing themselves behind his back. How does it feel being not like anyone else?
(…the grandfather of Pushkin was an unalloyed Ethiopian but, at least in his childhood, he saw normal people…)
When we got out his car by the hostel, the Armenian asked me to tarry a second, and after Eera went along, he inquired if I knew the address of the beauty with theatrical traits, he kinda heard she was at some college in Nezhyn. I neither knew nor wanted to know it…
Eera and I went up to a vacant room on the third floor and after half-hour swaying and seesawing the more accustomed bed frame, she said she felt something she never had experienced before.
Well, and thank you! So it was not in vain, exerting myself all that year and a half. Or was it that she just pitied me?.
~ ~ ~
As mentioned already, in February I went to the hospital for more than a week because of my staunch faithfulness to principles. After a week of treatment, my sister Natasha found me there. On the whole of Decemberists Street in Konotop, there was just one phone in the khutta at Number 26. I did not know their phone number and even if knowing it I'd hardly call. One and a half weeks were not two years…
I left the wardroom and at the end of the corridor, we went one flight down the stairs leading to the basement. Natasha took out her filter cigarettes, I stuffed a joint into a Belomor-Canal, and we mixed our smokes.
"Well, and how are you?" asked my sister after I reported about Pill going crazy.
"And I also have Eera," said I, and hurriedly began to convince my sister that Eera was not like everyone else, not in the least.
"Well, well," replied Natasha indefinitely…
When I was discharged, I suddenly felt that the struggle for just cause cost me some real straining. On the way to the hostel, I even had to untie the ear-flaps of my rabbit fur hat and let them loose. Never before, even the most severe frost could make me do so, I only rubbed my ears against the turned-up collar of the sheepskin coat, and demanded from the saleswoman at the stand on the station platform to sell me a bottle of frostbitten beer and, despite her exhortations, drank it in small sips thru the ring of ice growing, thickening, narrowing the orifice in the bottle’s neck… And now? You could hardly put your finger on anything more hazardous to your health than hospitals…
In spring at full swing, I was approached by Vitya from the Music-Pedagogical Department. That same student with the ancient Roman's curls of short blonde hair on his head, to whom in the first year of study I was lending my guitar, and who later gave me the key to the vacant room on the fifth floor. Now he came up with a request on behalf of his friend Volodya.
But why didn't Volodya speak up to me directly? After all, we were together in the United Mus-Ped and Anglo-Fac CJR team and took the honorable third place from the available 3.
Well, he, like, was shy. In general, his wife got pregnant and now he had to give blood for the abortion, but he himself was still in the middle of the treatment, tripper, see?
Yeah, clear. Of course, I'd do it for him, no problem. It's they who gave the key to my love affair with Nadya… A glass of blood is such a trifle in spring. And Nadya's worthy of much more than that…
Men's toilet on the third floor of the hostel, besides serving its direct purpose, was also forcing the student body to wake up from their amorphous hibernation. Masses interested in leaflets is not supine any longer. Yet, no ardent KGBist, with all his rats could ever gain promotion on the grounds of headlines cut out from the central press and mounted on glue in the toilet for all to see.
In the Hosty’s toilets, like in any, for that matter, other public toilets, cleanly folks never got seated on the seats but got perched instead, sitting on their haunches above the seats too dirty after all the previous squatters. In that bird-like attitude, the visitor inevitably got facing their stall door from within and that’s where those cut-outs were placed keeping to no conceivable order, bearing no insidious comments. Just a kinda haphazard collage, sort of. However, left one-to-one with the stall-caged creature, those headings gradually acquired some bizarre connotations and warped innuendos. The hunkers subjected to idle consideration began to see some hidden frivolous meaning, never intended by the editorial staff of the central periodicals where the chance headlines were cut from. Squatting over the bowl shed some new light at quite trite, everyday:
"Care of Party Has to Be Answered
Chain is Strong by its Links
Same 45 Minutes Over Again
Quality is the Priority
By Accelerated Schedule
No Amnesty to Bunglers
In the Name of Peace and Prosperity"
The force of, so to say, circumstances awoke your alertness. And that toilet humor spilled from the stalls reaching the opposite tiled wall with two urinals in it…
As usual, I sped past the first of them proclaiming:
"Waters of North to Flow South"
and pulled up by the second adorned by two headings from different newspapers:
"Biathlon Sport for Courageous
Our Aim is Communism"
I pissed and with the final quake to dry my dick up, there came a strange burning sensation. Looking down, I watched as a strange roiled drop crept lazily out of the urethra slot. I froze; what!?. No! It cannot be!
But no mute pleading could cancel the fact that 3 days before, because of the stupid confluence of circumstances, the moment they switched off the light in the hostel rooms, there was no one in mine, except for a fourth-year student whom I laid on the nearest bed. It happened so quite mechanically; out of pure reflex. She had never turned me on, and—as said already—all that was just some stupid coincidence. With her, I felt no more than the Lucy Mancini's partners from The Godfather before she got operated on by Dr. Kennedy's surgeon friend. Like in a church bell…
Itching and burning did not cease; all the polygamy had to be canceled for an unspecified period. Twoic advised me to consult Dr. Grisha who ponderously shook his head, and admitted that several cases of gonorrhea infection had already been recorded in the hostel.
What f-f..er..I mean, flicking gonorrhea?
Yes. The symptoms were very similar, but to know for sure there was needed a laboratory analysis of the semen.
What the f-f..I mean, freak! But I did not know how to do it, I had never masturbated in my life.
Dr. Grisha volunteered to help. We locked ourselves in one of the rooms – he, I and Sveta, well, she was just in case, like, sort of auxiliary contingent.
From his large soft briefcase, Grisha angled a cork-sealed glass tube and handed it to me for collecting the material for analysis. I dropped my jeans and underpants knee-deep and sat on a chair for the procedure at hand. Grisha got seated on the bed opposite, Sveta took place next to him.
He began to drive my foreskin back and forth. The three of us tensely stared at the erect cock with Grisha's hand on it, blurred in rapid flicking up and down… After a couple of minutes of the procedure, Grisha began to often swallow saliva and announced in a strung-up voice that the penis was too dry and in need of applying some moisture.
I did appreciate Sveta's presence, a kinda restraint to his eager willingness to help. And I said that it's okay, never mind, now I knew the way and would try it myself, only I had to take the test tube with me, right?
I zipped my jeans up and, for a goodbye, Grisha gave me a patent medication, some Rifadin in capsules…
Mindful of Maria's promise to cure me in the case of S.T.D., I called her and she told me to come that evening. When I explained to her that I had gonorrhea and needed to extract the semen for analysis, she opened the bed and started to undress. I had to once again explain that I had gonorrhea, but she said it did not matter.
Then I also began to doff but warned that I'd collect the semen into the test tube. She agreed. Probably, that her contraceptive coil protected not only from pregnancy but from gonorrhea as well. So I put the test tube on the nightstand by the radio, and we started off…
Thais of Athens treated Alexander the Great to some medicine so that they could have sex all night long. I cannot state that all that night with Maria I had an incessant erection. After another and another of her regular "More! A! Mo-re!" we caught a breath before to proceed anew because I couldn't cum until the grayish dawn twilight behind the window curtains got drowned in the broad morning light. (Was that delay effectuated by the presence of the test tube waiting a-gape on the nightstand? I don’t know, I am not an expert.)
At long last, I backed her passionate "More! I want it! A!" with my atonal grunts, and snatched out.
"No! No!" screamed she. "Into me!"
But it was too late, the attained-by-perserverence moment of concluding convulsions the dickhead shared to the rigid glass orifice in the open test tube. With the feel of duty done, I cum into and slammed it shut. Maria obviously did not like such a final, but so was the arrangement…
Perfectly happy with the accomplishment, I hurried to Dr. Grisha and proudly presented the moisture impounded (with so much a-do) within the tight glass walls.
He took off his doctor’s white smock, grabbed his large soft briefcase, and we left his office… On that day, his briefcase could be observed in different and wide apart points in the Nezhyn city, accompanied by the sensual roll of Dr. Grisha's buttocks on one side, and my gait of morose moose on the other. The test tube made the constant fourth to the company, keeping the still unchecked semen out of sight in the hip pocket of my jeans. It seemed that Grisha wanted to help in earnest. Only the day turned out to be such that venereal dispensary did not work, in some laboratory someone left for somewhere else, in another they had run out of something and so on.
About 2 in the afternoon, our harmonious foursome (Grisha, the briefcase, I and the tube) appeared for some reason at the station where we decided that it was enough because the symptoms matched all the same, without any needless checking.
I dropped the test tube into the gray tubular garbage urn located by the large white bust of Lenin nearby the payphone booth in its thick red-and-yellow paint coat, halfway between the station and the high platform for the local trains of Kiev destination.
Dumping the thing was kinda pity, like, we were not complete strangers anymore after going together thru all we had to since our first meeting, however, there was no good reason to keep it on any further…
I went to the Hosty and then returned to the station because the week was over and I needed to show up in Konotop so that my parents would not worry. There were still 10 minutes before the local train to Konotop and, all of a sudden, I was simply pulled to pay a visit to the bust of Lenin.
What I saw there literally dumbfounded me. From the wide circular orifice of the gray urn, a thick bunch of green pliant shoots was vigorously sticking up. I did not immediately get it that while I was away, they trimmed the bushes around the pedestal upholding the bust.
The local train pulled by and, crossing over the platform to the car, I gave the urn one last and proud glance – bushes or no bushes but that f-f..er..I mean, frivolous semen was full of real pep, by Jove! Of course, when abstracting from certain minor details…
Except for imparting a very vivid color to my urine, the Rifadin from Grisha had no other straight or side effects. Thanks to the capsules, I pissed with gleeful scarlet and, overcoming itching and burning, cursed my stupid rakishness with Lucy Mancini.
Maria treacherously washed her hands of me, like, being offended that I preferred some glass tube to her natural vase…
I got cured by Eera. She simply led me to an elderly woman in the barrack-like children hospital. The woman in white took me behind a screen in the corridor to hide from the looks of the queue. I downed my pants a little bit, stooped, got the bite of a shot in my buttock, and… And that's all! Nothing more was required. That’s how the summer came…
~ ~ ~
How did I spend the summer? Like any other decent, diligent, hardworking lad… First of all, I became a plant breeder. Among the beds of turned soil at the end of the garden at 13 Decemberists, there began to rise and boost the crisp growth of cannabis whose seeds provided the last year's loot from the neighbor. The term "bushes" did not seem right for the plants. They looked more like sprouting seedlings of young trees. And those trees were growing like one united family, rushing upwards, turning into a dense thicket, which, of course, called for thinning out by the selection culling.
From the street, that coppice was not visible, screened by the fruit trees, but nothing could evade the attentive neighbors. The neighbor on the right asked my mother about the purpose of the cultivated crop.
My mother replied, that hemp produced a lot of seeds (such small, round, oily looking, beads, you know) and at Bazaar the canary keepers were simply scrambling to get that perfect food for their feathered singers…
Oh, the ingenuity of maternal love! I'd hardly drive a fool of so subtle nature! Most likely, I'd give out some stuff about compresses and foot baths from varicose veins aggravated by salts deposition. And that would be a dangerous mistake because canary keeping was a rare sport in the Settlement when compared to the plenty of labor veterans with deteriorated health. Is it too hard to imagine an honored vet with a loving teenager relative, who’s ready to sacrifice half of his night repose and bring home a remedy to his Grandpa's ailing from a not too faraway plantation?. Okay, let's drop spooking ourselves with nightmares… Anyway, excessive advertising sometimes might damage the growth of business.
And, by the by, the question was asked by the wife of the robbed neighbor who, in addition to his pension, had also the job of a watchman in the nearby Track Machine Station, aka PMS.
(…and it's not my unseemliness that the organization's name in Russian, when abbreviated, coincides with that of Premenstrual Syndrome…)
I did not have much scruples about expropriating his cannabis because after the raid there was left enough to keep him up till the following season.
(…it's only now, in retrospect, I think of a possibility that he might have had his clients with canaries…)
By that time, it was several years since my mother left the KEMZ Plant and got a job in the RepBase pre-assembly unit. I gather it, they were checking the availability of helicopter spare parts there. Physically, her job was not exhausting and returning home after a day's work, she often shared news about what was going on in the collective comprising only females, except for the unit chief and his deputy.
At her workplace, her main function was that of a conflict-extinguisher, sort of, while at the periods of lull she played compliments. That is, after telling someone another of her pleasantries she scored herself a point.
(…it calls for a good self-schooling and close self-control not to get stuck in the repetition of what had been already used to please…)
Sometimes the chief of their unit would shake his head and say, "That's a cunning she-Jew for you! Found again how to lick!"
And my mother would joyously laugh in response, and she laughed at home retelling the compliment which brought her one more point…
My brother Sasha worked at the PMS in a team of repairers. They were in charge of replacing the ties in the railway tracks and ramming the gravel under them with a massive dildo-type hand-vibrator.
Our sister Natasha, while out of work, was taking my daughter Lenochka to the kindergarten and back…
To the request of my father, the personnel department at the RepBase let me have a temporary job, till end summer, at the construction shop floor there. With three permanent workmen, I was demolishing and building some walls within the RepBase grounds. The most straining part in the job was long waits before they brought mortar for us to start our work. There I earned a fig plus another fig and one more fig, but then the work was just to get seated and sit tight, or stand up and stand patiently. Anyway, the RepBase was fully satisfied with my masonry skills.
Having nothing better to do, I again grew a beard and the RepBase workforce handled me "Fidel Castro". My father liked it, maybe because he and Fidel were born in the same year. When run out of the smoke, I went to beg from my father. He was a locksmith at the shop floor with strict regulations about smoking, which only was allowed in specially designated places, like an open gazebo in the yard…
My father was respected on the shop floor for his golden hands and readiness to share the know-how… When coming across a bungler wasting both himself and the stuff to turn out a pitiful throwaway, you can quietly scoff to yourself and go away minding your business. Not so was my father’s ways, because of his intolerance to illiteracy.
With a painful wince in his face, he would stand by, as if made to watch some vulgar act of dicking around, then he'd come up, take the instrument from the dilettante’s hands and show how to go about that particular task, "See? It’s just a lead-pipe cinch, easier than boiling turnips!" That's why he was respected, and they did not take offense at his grumpy mutter, "Really have to do it askew? So they taught you, eh?"
The majority of the RepBase workers came there from the nearby village of Popovka, and too few of then trained in the "seminary". Popovka had integrated with the RepBase so closely that in the village you could come across fencing made of helicopter blades, discarded, of course. But the blade cinched up to the stake with a piece of wire looks ugly, and fixing it by a neat binding as suggested uncle Kolya was completely another kettle of fish…
In the unpaneled half-khutta at Decemberists 13, resided auntie Zeena, a lonely pensioner. She plaited her half-gray hair into stringy maiden braids and tied them together at the back of her head. On the porch at her door, for the most of the year, there also hung a yellow braid of dried onions forming a plaited circle. Auntie Zina did not interfere with the life of the yard and smiled at everyone. Each spring, following the directive of our father, my brother and I turned the dirt in her part of the garden… Once, she was very friendly with Olga, and secretly resented my role in our divorce, but she still kept smiling even at me…
There was enough living space in our brick-paneled half-khutta of three rooms and a kitchen plus veranda, apart from the summer room in the yard under one roof with the shed. Among the inhabitants of all that area, only five-year-old Lenochka was not smoking. The rest of us smoked Belomor-Canal for 22 kopecks, except for Natasha with her filtered Metropolitan for 40 kopecks. She once counted up that the total expenditure for cigarettes by the family was 25 to 30 rubles monthly…
The summer was over and before my first departure for the fourth course at the English Department, my mother asked if I would bring and introduce to her my Eera from Nezhyn. She knew about Eera from Natasha's report and subsequent questioning of me. And she had even seen Eera on the all-out photograph taken at the Borzna wedding. The picture was staged in the photo studio of the district center, where the guests and relatives of the newlyweds were standing in three rows on the long benches of descending height, behind the happy bride and groom in their chairs.
My mother asked me to show who from the multitude was Eera, and I answered, "Find for yourself." In the picture, I stood in the upper row on the right, surrounded by 3 girls, and Eera was in the diagonally opposite corner.
My mother's finger touched her face, "That's her?"
I felt that she, for some reason, would rather be mistaken, but I couldn't lie to my mother. "How d'you guess?"
"I don't know."
(…the first prosaic work in Ukrainian was The Witch of Konotop written by Kvitka-Osnovyanenko in 1833.
Ask whoever you choose, "Why?" and they will answer, "I don't know."…)
Therefore, in September following the serene summer of 1977, the meeting of your mother and grandmother took place at 13, Decemberists Street…
Of course, I had been bringing Eera to Konotop even before that and introduced her to the high life of the polite circle in local society. We visited Loony, where the demonstration gladiatorial performance was staged on the parquet in honor of her visit, I even had, just in case, to block her off with myself nearby the stage. Then Lyalka led us to his sidekick's who, in his treasure box made of a human skull, kept the high-quality Gimp’s weed, named so after its meritorious producer.
The sidekick lived on the fourth floor with his cat, whom he grabbed regularly to hurl against the wall or anything at all. Not everyone brings up their pets by unsystematic fondling. He shared that sometimes at night he got waked up by a gentle touch of her fangs at his Adam's apple. She did not spoil the throat skin though, just held it in a kinda soft reminder who was the midnight commander in the place they shared…
When we were about to leave, Eera discovered the loss of her gloves. The sidekick swore he had not seen any. Burning with shame, I began to speculate about the gloves being forgotten at Loony, yet Lyalka insisted on the search to go on until they were eventually spotted, behind the floor mirror in the hallway. Some cats are more cunning at theft than even such attested pilferers as magpies…
In the staircase, there was, naturally, no light, and I walked first, groping for the steps with my feet, and did not even hold onto the railing, like the brave tin soldier or the one-eyed leader in the gang of the blind from the "Eulenspiegel" movie, because in the pitch dark I had Eera's hand on my shoulder, and Lyalka was holding on hers. So we descended…
At that Eera's visit, we spent the night at Skully's, who had already become an Adoptee and lived in a fairly big khutta where two "Jawa" bikes stood in the garage – one for him and the other for his wife's younger brother.
Eera and I were left in a separate bedroom and, going out, Skully and his wife significantly hung a terry towel on the back of the bed… When we lay down and from the "Spidola" receiver there sounded the introduction to my favorite "Since I'm loving you" by Led Zeppelin, I realized that nothing better could be provided even by Las Vegas…
