Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Pants Are To Be Ironed On All Four Sides.
I clearly understood the rule and firmly kept to it all my life, but at that particular moment the unconquered spirit of a young pioneer partisan awoke in me, and I rejected the offer of my the-next-day-to-be mother-in-law. Like, it was not the first time for me to iron trousers thru a piece of moistened gauze… With the ironing accomplished, I hung the trousers over the back of a chair pushed under the table and went to bed.
In the morning I was awakened by Eera's sobs in the adjacent living room. Going out there, I traced back the grim silent glare of Gaina Mikhailovna to see an undeniably hot iron print on one of the trouser-legs hanging accurately from the back of the chair. Poor Eera!
The burnt spot, albeit blurred and lacking the clear-cut outline, discernibly changed the smoky shade of dark gray in the trousers’ fabric to something greenish. I could swear that nothing of the kind was there the night before, but the spot sat on one of the two sides I had applied the iron to. It cost me helluva efforts to persuade Eera not to cancel going to the ZAGS office – we had pulled thru too much of everything to make a U-turn at the last moment. I swore with the most solemn oath to hide the damaged part of my outfit into the folds of her long wedding dress.
Do brides have always to cry on the threshold to their wedding? Poor Eera!
Then there was a very long wait at the registry office, because the witness on the groom side, Slavic, that bitch of my best man, appeared only after my brother Sasha scribbled Slavic's name instead of him. Good news that they did not check witness' passports in ZAGS.
Yes, my brother and sister came from Konotop for the wedding and departed on the same day by the 17.15 local train.
So, at last, in all its glory arrived the dazzle of the breath-taking moment in the nuptials – the happy couple were suggested to exchange the wedding rings in a token of spousal love and loyalty. Softly glided the ring on the Eera's incomparable finger – the yellow of the gold over the alabaster white skin… And now, already not as a bride, but the accomplished wife, picked she my wedding ring from the white saucer to don it on my finger. On slid the ring, in moved my finger…my finger moved in…my f-f…finger moved…
Why that bitch of the ring from Natasha got stuck on my finger joint, I have no idea because at the preliminary tests it, like, was getting over. Under my breath, I promised my young wife that, okay, I'll stick it in later, and balled my hand into a fist to hide the under-donned ring.
"The wedding ring is not a frill… Oh, no!.
Not an empty decoration…"
Poor Eera!.
But what else could she do? The incipient maternal instinct balked at having to bear you without a daddy… The recollections of my meetings with the KGBist in that very ZAGS room as well as the awareness of the iron print on my pants’ leg made me keep my eyes shyly down, however, my brother Sasha on the pictures taken at the registry office looked very well, like a young Sicilian mafioso…
According to the long-established Nezhyn tradition, the newlyweds together with their witnesses (Slavic had already replaced Sasha) took a ride in a taxi. The taxi drove to the station to honk in the square in front of it (the traffic bridge over the railway tracks had been already completed) and proceeded to the city limit by the highway to Pryluky, where a bottle of champagne was burst open, after which we returned to 26, Red Partisans Street, Apartment 11.
The wedding party was a modest one – for the closest family inhabiting the apartment, plus the two best persons. The TV was temporarily exiled into the corner, the table spread out and cluttered with feasting treats and snacks, mostly of salad Olivier which Gaina Mikhailovna had chopped so finely and profusely, filling, in the preparation, half of an enamel washing basin.
And the drinks were fabulous too. Like those from the traditional refrain in the final lines of every other Russian fairy tale, "And I was at that wedding and drank the mead and beer…" subtracting "the mead", of course. Gaina Mikhailovna, like any other properly erudite woman, had since long gained the upper hand over her husband, bent him to her will and twisted around her little finger, using for the purpose the panicky males’ fear of a possible cuckoldry.
(…fall in with what your dear wife tells you, and be happy with two glasses of beer on a celebration day if you wanna miss yet that proud decoration of stags…)
Hence that beer and only beer on the wedding table… Tonya and Ivan took turns looking after their baby daughter in the bedroom, while their three-year-old son Igor was irremovably present at the table.
Then the baby was also brought to the living room, and the newlyweds together with their best persons replaced her in the vacated bedroom which, narrow as it was, still let the 4 of them dance under a cassette tape-recorder borrowed from the hostel…
When Eera and I retired to our bedroom for the nuptial first night, I turned on the transistor radio on the table under the pier mirror. The nocturnal sconce on the whitewashed wall at the foot of the bed created a flickering red twilight, like a feeble torch in the wall of medieval castle… The blanket was too thick and hot, and we threw it back, twining in the already legalized conjugal embraces. We were going on real groovy when the door to the bedroom flung open and my father-in-law stepped in to turn the radio off.
Surprised, I did not hide my nakedness, and only ceased the action. Eera also froze sitting… In the mute twinkling of the torch from the niche formed by the chiffonier in the corner, Ivan Alexeyevich, with his eyes cast down, left the bedroom. The prince of the three-room castle. How could I know it was too loud? He could just call out from their folding coach-bed. Okay, babe, let's have another take…
3 following days all the meals were of salad Olivier, but half of it went stale all the same. And who would doubt? No way to finish off such a heap without drinking.
That's how, in outline, people get united in misalliance marriages…
~~ ~
On the whole, I liked my father-in-law, and I forgave him the absence of a minimal kit of normal tools on the shelves in the boxroom niche, as well as his distrust in my ability to repair the electric iron, relic from the Stalinist epoch. Besides, when the three-year-old world-explorer Igor pulled a handful of cannabis seeds from the hip pocket in my jeans left in the bedroom, and scattered the find on a stool in the kitchen, my father-in-law did not aggravate the exposure with unnecessary questions though, in his position at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant, he understood the varieties of grain…
The son of a Bryansk mujik, he, as an 18-year-old recruit Ivan, got caught into the "Kharkov Meat Grinder", where the German Wehrmacht, waking up after the defeat near Moscow, proved that they knew their business by crushing several Soviet armies… Stunned by the power and shocked with the spectacle of the artillery mass execution, Ivan, in the endless crowds of tens of thousands of other survivors, was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.
At that time there was a tacit, unspoken of, agreement between the warring parties to reimburse each other thru banks in neutral countries for the cost of keeping prisoners of war. And only the Soviet Land remained aloof from that arrangement since every captured Red Army soldier was unquestionably considered a traitor to the Soviet Homeland. Hence the difference in the havvage for POWs of different nations.
To feed the prisoners from the Red Army at least somehow, occasional freight trains brought to the camps agricultural products looted from the occupied Soviet territories. Among other food brought to Ivan's camp by such an echelon, there were several burlap sacks of sunflower seeds. The German guards could not guess at the purpose of the arrived product not described in any of cookbooks. When the prisoners demonstrated how to use those seeds, rational Germans were still unable to understand that the final result (chewing of a scanty grain) was not as important as the process itself – gnawing and secreting the anticipatory saliva.
So those sacks just lay around, irrationally cluttering the storage room, until one of the guards figured out how to use the seeds. He organized a sports event: a 100-meter race for a packet of seeds as the award to the winner. Under the scream-and-shout of the guard-fans, the young and tall, although as skinny as the rest of the prisoners, Ivan ran first and received his prize. In the second race, he again was out of reach, but the guard said that he had enough already, and gave the seeds to the second to come. My father-in-law took offense and ceased to take part in the subsequent competitions, but he told me that those seeds were the most delicious in his life…
Sometimes the prisoners of war ran for 100 meters, sometimes they ran away from the camp. Then they were invariably caught, brought back and executed in front of all the other prisoners, which did not prevent the following escape attempts. Which is quite natural because sometimes there comes the feel that you don't care anymore and fuck it all. When such a moment rolled up to Ivan, he, taking into consideration the experience of previous fugitives, did not go east but turned west and, therefore, got to France.
For about 1 year a French farmer family hid him in a barn from German patrols, and when the coast was clear, he helped with the work at the farm. Once the three-year-old son of the farmer, not speaking yet any language, warned him with his gestures about the unexpected arrival of a patrol…
Then the Americans started up the Western front and liberated him. And they moved farther and farther until they brought freedom to the Ukrainian girl Gaina from her unpaid work for a well-to-do German family… When Stalin demanded from his allies to return all the Soviet citizens freed from German captivity, Americans did not argue.
Ivan and Gaina, among many other sons and daughters of the Soviet land, were brought to a French port city, where, by the way, they met each other, and were taken to Leningrad by a steamboat. The fate favored them because the overwhelming majority of the Soviet war prisoners were taken to the East by trains. On the border with the USSR, where the railway track gauge gets different, they were walked to the awaiting echelons of freight cars and brought, over the vast expanses of our Homeland, to the camps of Gulag in Siberia and the Far North.
What for? Just in case. So that their memories of what they had seen in German captivity would not spoil the picture carefully engineered in the brainwashed minds and collective memory of the Soviet people.
"Nothing is forgotten, nor anyone…"
Provided that the unforgotten matter had undergone retouching corrections by the censorship… Even I, a chump brought up on vivid examples from Soviet literature and cinema masterpieces, lost plenty of stereotypes when I got accidentally exposed to my mother-in-law’s talking on the phone to her friend, who also passed the inferno of the German captivity.
"…and do you remember how on February 23 we bought champagne and went to congratulate our pilots?.."
Ta-dah! It turns out that on the Day of Soviet Army and Navy not only secret agent Stirlitz was using alcohol in the fascist Germany, but the captured Soviet aces as well…
In Leningrad, Ivan and Gaina arranged for their marriage and directly enlisted to work in one of the Soviet Central Asian republics. That was a wise move. The subsequent purges and combing for former prisoners of war, and other citizens who had seen a non-Soviet way of life, did not reach them out there. In the Soviet camps, they would not have to eat sunflower seeds. Our camp system, aka Zona, is the most human in the world and it does not protract your sufferings with humiliating prizes for sports achievements…
After the central press announced the elimination of the consequences of the cult of Stalin's personality, they moved to Ukraine and settled in the countryside, just in case, and from there they rose to Nezhyn.
(…once my father tried to explain to me that the progress of life is going on in a spiral. I did not understand him, even though his index finger drew circles in the air to assist the grasping…
The fate of Ivan Alexeyevich can serve as an argument in favor of that theory. In our life, we walk in a circle of the same events, but they, because of the spiral-like proceeding of life, acquire new aspects and details, so we don't recognize them when they are repeating themselves, we just move by and on, and farther.
I do not know whether my father-in-law had ever been drawing any parallels between the seeds he won in the 100-meter dash and his position at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant. In both cases, it's grain disposal. But then, what would he need such a Geometry for?.)
Before stuffing a joint in front of the pier-mirror loaded upon the table in the bedroom, I, first of all, switched off the radio. The rare seeds dropping on the table top from the dried-up cannabis heads were shoved into the hip-pocket of my jeans. The Ryazan-peasantry layer in my genes balked at riddance of them right away which proved to be an unnecessary atavism because sowed at springtime in the Count's Park they didn't grow up…
In the fourth year of study I became an almost exemplary student, my classes attendance increased enormously. I couldn't bear staying in the apartment when Eera went to the institute… At the lectures, I submerged into the endless story of Joseph and his Brothers. It became deeper and more palpable, sort of a bass-relief of tranquil streamflow, in the wake of a joint smoked in the restroom during the break.
Under the unbearably long ding-donging final bell, I went down to the side hall on the first floor filled with the students' coats on pegs along its walls and helped Eera into hers. Then among the strident hullabaloo of donning students, I looked for a tiny piece of white fuzz on my coat, and took it off; only after that inspection, I put my coat on and we started home.
That white thread of arachnid yarn appeared on the gray fabric of my coat each time after I had a joint at the educational institution. Yes, in place of the sheepskin coat I wore a demi-saison camel coat bought from Alyosha Ocheret when he was in his final year. I did not share my discovery of the fluff phenomenon with anyone, but for myself dubbed it "God's marking a rascal"… Sometimes, to check it experimentally, I refrained from a joint at the break, and then the fluffy piece did not appear. That’s why, before putting my coat on, I checked it searching for the white mark. It never skipped its duty…
My love for Eera grew ever deeper. Sometimes she asked me not to gaze at her so steadily, especially in public, but I still hoped to stop the fluid moment.
"He gazed at her the way a dog regards a crystal vase,
the stare was answered by a look of crystal vase considering a dog…"
Occasionally, we visited the hostel for a pool at Preferans. Because of Eera’s being in the family way, we did not smoke while playing; only Twoic at times, with an air of a schooled hussar cadet, asked her for kind permission and smoked to the envy of me and Slavic… And Eera, sitting with absent air on a bed by the window, would finely jag with scissors a Belomor-Canal cigarette taken from me…
She did not make a secret of her pregnancy, and still in the second month ordered from Lyalka's mother an elegant loosely fitting sarafan-shift of brown broadcloth.
Once, already in springtime, she left the hostel first, while I was tarrying in the lobby with Twoic. When I went out on the porch, Eera stood near the corner of the building in a quarrel with a student of the Biology Department drooping from a window on the second floor. Unfit to grasp the meaning of the sarafan, the dunce of a sophomore tried to pick up an unknown beauty. I demanded of him an apology to the lady but received an insolent refusal.
While I was climbing up the staircase, Twoic joined me but there were three more guys in the room. There followed a muddled battle with varying success and steady reinforcements to the inmates arriving from the neighboring rooms. I recollect a moment in the scrimmage with me standing on someone's bed while one of the opponents kept his stupid mug in front of my shoe toes begging for a kick, but I restrained myself because he wanted it too openly.
Pretty soon, I was overpowered and leveled with the floor, immobilized by the weight of 3 adversaries, yet hearing that somewhere in the corner, Twoic was still fending off the outnumbering enemy forces. And then the door flew open – Eera stood on the doorsill with a wooden ruler in her hands and issued a shrill cry, "I'll stab them all!"
I was so impressed by the absurdity of the situation—Eera's pirate warcry, that unknown ruler in her hands, and you in her belly—that I laughed. All the present followed my example.
It is not possible to fight in earnest with whom you've laughed along right now. I was helped to get up and we left…
~ ~ ~
Being unfit to immobilize the flowing moment, I had to change priorities. My task became to protect her; protect from the babel turmoil in the crowd of students putting their coats on; from the insidious viper bites of her begrudging bosom girlfriends with their snaky forked tongues, "Hi! You do look ugly today!" To guard against her fears of the things to come – they said, the paramedic Kerdun in the maternity hospital was so cruel, every woman in labor was complaining of her afterward. And protect from so incomprehensible but negative Rh factor in Eera herself…
Protecting from all the world, ready to attack at any moment from where you do not expect, calls for being alert; so, I kept low and was on a constant look-out. That position led to my alienation from the hostel, from the course-mates, from the institute. Only with Zhomnir I still kept in touch. He was the scientific supervisor to my term work The Means of Irony in 'The Judgment Seat' Story by W. S. Maugham. Besides, I needed him as a means to stake off some place for me with Eera in this hostile world. He promised to take my translations for a "matchmaking" to one of the publishing houses in Kiev, where he had connections. But it had to be a collection of 20 to 25 stories in Ukrainian… So, I kept visiting his place, and he was saying in jest that his wife, Maria Antonovna, fell in love with me.
The 2 of them lived in a three-room apartment on the fifth floor in an apartment block of those along Shevchenko Street, because their children had already come of age and separated. The sons moved to Russia, and the daughter lived in Nezhyn at her husband's.
The Zhomnirs used only 2 rooms for living, the third one Alexander Vasilyevich turned into an archival study furnished with a desk, a chair, and stacks of shelves, up to the ceiling, made of mighty planking and filled with a welter of cardboard folders, books, magazines, and paper sheets, and all that stuff splashed out and piled in heaps even on the sill of the naked curtain-less window, the only one in the room… I liked it.
And I also liked Eera's story about the Zhomnir's inhuman behavior… His family lived then in the same apartment block with Eera's parents and, at renovating his flat, he divided the floor area by the number of his family members, painted his share, placed the brush in a jar with water, wished the labor successes to the rest of the family, and washed his hands…
His wife, Maria Antonovna, a noiseless woman with her hair gray to radiant whiteness, presented me with a book of poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva and made me fall in love with her poems. Before that, I believed that poetesses were only good at lace weaving, which is adding frills to rhymed lines. Marina was not like that, she knew how to rape words, when necessary.
I remembered her poetry in the local train vestibule, coming from Konotop because I remained an itinerant passenger although not every week as earlier. I felt it my duty to Lenochka; she always was a good child and I even loved her in my own way. It's only that I was never good at playing and lisping with kids and grew bored in less than 10 minutes… In the car vestibule, I had a smoke and then, all of a sudden, started to feel the lapel of my camel-hair coat. I didn't know why.
As it turned out, a long tailor's needle was hidden in the lapel corner, stuck entirely in between the fabric layers. Getting the needle out was a mighty hard job. Everything repeated itself with the second lapel.
(…a stabbed-in needle exactly as in that early poem by Tsvetaeva…)
I threw the needles out thru the slots above the glass panes in the doors of the electric train rumbling along to Nezhyn. Where did they come from? Stuck by the jealous mother like in that poem? Or bought together with the coat from Alyosha? And (most perplexing) what made me find them?
(…there's still a lot of questions that I will never find answers to. Never…)
My visits to the Zhomnirs disturbed my mother-in-law. Her main concern and worry were if they ever treated me to cooked sausage there. Apparently, she was afraid that such sausage could manipulate a person, making a zombie of them like in the "The Matrix" movie, produced by Hollywood some thirty years later.
She didn't know that I was from a new generation of robots being zombied and formatted thru printed text. And how would you like, Gaina Mikhailovna, that Zhomnir fed me a book by Hesse, in whose prose one paragraph can flow for a page and a half?
(…the possibility to affect the mundane world putting to use the leverage of text-zombied me was more than once observed and experienced personally.
Like, in the toilet of in-laws' apartment, I find At the Steer Wheel magazine cut up for convenient hygienic use. Sitting on the potty, I read scraps of an article about big Soviet trucks. Then I leave for the institute, get round the corner of the block and get appalled! There is no way to cross Red Partisans Street because of the growling stream of KAMAZ's and BELAZ's. They are rolling in hosts!
Of course, later they tried to put me off the track by irrelevant fibs of repair works on the Moscow highway and detouring of the traffic thru Nezhyn.
So, they waited with their repair until I found the time to read a cutting from At the Steer Wheel?.)
My relations with Gaina Mikhailovna fell into the traditional "son-in-law vs. mother-in-law" pattern exactly, maybe, in part refracted by the intellectual level of the participants to the template… At first, we got along in just a bright and sunny manner, but after a week or so, she suddenly began to fasten up the collar of her dressing gown with a big safety pin. The robe was for home wear with a deep cut, but I did not even notice it until that pin popped up.
The outfit transformation robbed me of the blissful unawareness, because between that pin and the first button under the cut there formed a gap, and any gaping would, naturally, catch your eye. I did not ask her previous son-in-law (Tonya's husband, Ivan, from the other bedroom) if he had observed the like symptoms before my coming to our parents-in-law's, and with what frequency. I just had to put under control the direction of my glances. Although, what was there to see? The woman had gone seedy long before…
Once, we happened to be alone in the whole apartment, just she and I. It was getting dark outside the window. She was standing with her hands behind her back leaned against the big mirror in the wardrobe door, and telling me, seated on the folding coach-bed folded up because of the daytime, how she was being carried away to Germany in a freight-train car crammed with lots of young girls.
Clattering its iron wheels at the rail joints, the car was jostling its live load in abrupt sways. Everyone was frightened by the uncertainty of what would happen next, and they felt very thirsty. Some of the girls were crying…
The train stopped in the field. The guards threw open the doors of the cars and shouted something, but she did not know German then. In a nearby hollow there ran a stream; the guards told with their gestures they were allowed to approach the water.
They happily rushed to the stream, drank and washed their faces. Suddenly there were shouts and sharp reports of a machine gun round – one of the girls had attempted to run away and was killed.
Back to the cars they were all passed by the dead. The killed girl lay on her back with her eyes open and looked so beautiful… Dusk thickened in the room, Gaina Mikhailovna stood with her palms pressed to the surface of the mirror faded away behind her, her head drooping over the killed beauty. Now she was there and felt herself that young mournful Gaina.
I was sorry for her, and I was sorry for the killed; I wanted to say or to do something only I did not know what I could say or do. So I got up from the folding coach-bed and silently clicked the switch. The light of the 3 electric bulbs under the ceiling smashed everything into spiky shards. Instead of the frightened girl Gaina, an elderly woman stood by the wardrobe with an absurd hole beneath her collar, and unforgiving glare from under a strand of her dyed hair. Who had asked me to bust the spell? Thus, I proved to be the standardly unacceptable bastard of a son-in-law…
In fact, I never felt any particular antagonism to the mother-in-law, yet I cannot help but note that your grandmother, at times, allowed her feelings to have the upper hand over her intellect… She was unswervingly anti-Semitic. Perhaps, the years spent in the well-to-do German family were telling on her attitude to them those Jews. Folks tend to imitate the sentiments of people around them. The former Dean of the English Department, Antonyouk (who lost the position because of his guerrilla pencil-raids against the names of Bliznuke and Gourevitch in the Whatman sheets on the wall) remained a hero in her eyes. She was indignant that there were Jews all around wherever you cast a look and resented her husband's indifference to her choler caused by the escalation of Zionism.
Sitting with a newspaper in front of his massive nose and, when it's completely forgotten what exactly had been told to him, he would wake up to give you a reply, "A? Well…yes, sure." And then again his nose would drowsily get buried in the paper. That's a supporter in life for you!
In her ardent struggle against Zionism, she even went to see a newly appointed Rector – to open his eyes to the crying shame of each and every institute's Department being seized by the proliferating tribes of Israel.
(…it's ridiculous to approach Rector of the NGPI, named Arvat, a Jew from Odessa, with complaints of Jewish domination at the Nezhyn institute.
“ Eine lächerlich Wasserkunst!.”
Or how was it turned out by Rilke?..)
But life did not stand still, Eera's belly was growing with the waves from your knees and heels rolling over it. Rather firm heels you had at that time, my nose remembers that. And one day Eera in a scared tone of voice told me to call her mother… Gaina Mikhailovna entered the bedroom.
"What is it, Mummy?"
On the statuette-like smooth and impeccable skin beneath the already very large belly, there stretched shallow groovy marks.
"Tightening."
"Does it pass after the childbirth?"
Her mother lowered her head with a frown, but nothing was said…
~ ~ ~
The final examination session started but, instead of questions, they told Eera to give her Grade Book right away and entered their evaluation mark…
Late on the evening of June 14, Eera's water broke and we walked to the maternity hospital. They were surprised there that your mother came for childbirth on foot and took her to the prenatal ward, and then they brought her clothes out and passed to me. I took the clothes home and at once started back to where I left Eera, where I could no longer protect her.
About 200 meters before the maternity hospital, a bulky KAMAZ truck with switched off headlights loomed by the sidewalk. Only the triple ember-red beams atop its cab shimmered like blood-smeared scales in a dragon's crest. When I got nearer, KAMAZ suddenly sprang at me, shooting from the long puddle in the road a splash-mesh of dirty foam. I jumped up in time to make it miss… The foam-mesh croaked and died in hissing disappointment; I landed on the wet sidewalk.
Get lost, filthy dragon! Back to your lairs! There's no time for trifling with you, a more potent mission awaits me tonight.
The KAMAZ submissively roared away, heading towards Red Partisans Street…
In the waiting room, they told me the childbirth would take place in the morning and I walked outside. The maternity hospital comprised a long one-story building with the entrance from the butt wall. Near the middle of the sidewall, there stood a rounded gazebo constructed of iron pipes, it was wider than that at the construction battalion and without the pit in the center to receive cigarette butts.
I entered under its tin canopy, sat on the beams of the bench inscribed alongside the circumference of the cemented floor, and started to wait. I had nothing to do without Eera in the empty narrow bedroom of her parents' apartment.
A belated couple walked from the gate to the entrance of the maternity hospital; soon after the man went back to the gate alone. So, not only we were arriving on foot; probably, because such a day it was.
The full moon shone in all of its glory high above the hospital roof… I smoked a joint, and the moon turned into a distant exit from a long tunnel with pulsating walls.
The wide-open window of the delivery room looked straight at the gazebo. I figured out its purpose from the fine mosquito net which dimmed the light when they turned it on inside, and screams of a woman in labor broke out into the night. It was not Eera shouting, not her voice. Maybe, the one from the couple who came after us.
