Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
~ ~ ~ The Parade of Planets
On the Day D, aka my departure day, everything hung on a thread, more precisely, on a single cobweb fiber. I got it at once on entering the staircase-entrance vestibule to spark a joint because I never smoked in the apartment, not even vanilla cigarettes. The cobweb thread hung from the upper crossbar in the cracked entrance-door frame, stretched tautly downward by the weight of a burned match dangling from its end… How long could it last?.
It was I, who always stuffed burned matches up in the gap between the frame-top and the whitewashed plaster on the wall because there was no trash bin in the staircase-entrance vestibule. After Tonya's toddler son had exposed my connection to cannabis, I did not care what might be sniffed out by the passers-by in the smoke I left in the vestibule… Would the cobweb thread hold on until I get away?.
I looked from the sultry shade in the staircase-entrance out into the yard. A squadron of black ravens coasted lowly thru the heat-melted sky. Heading north-east, they did not move their wings—made all too reluctant even for the slightest effort—the feathers at their wing-tips stuck out kinda rigid spikes harrowing the hot breeze… Could I get thru?.
Eera was seeing me to the station. When we started for the bus stop, from a balcony in the neighboring five-story block Alla Pugacheva sobbed up after me in her latest hit:
"Please, come back for at least a day!.."
I did not have much luggage – a briefcase with a book of stories by W. S. Maugham in English (soft pink cover, Moscow publishing house "The Enlightenment"), the Hornby's Learners' Dictionary, a thin copy-book of 12 sheets with a stub at translation of "The Rain" story by Maugham (4 pages of a rough pencil draft made hard to read by manifold corrections), the employment history book (the first entry made on September 13, 1971, at Konotop Locomotive and Car Repair Plant), the passport, the military ID, and shaving accessories.
The briefcase was accompanied by the blue sports-bag with a shoulder strap, containing a change of underpants, two tank tops, a pair of shirts, jeans, and the geologist jacket, sewn by my mother of hard green tarp… Boarding the local train, I threw them onto the car-long rack of thin tubes running above the windows and went back to the platform.
Eera was nervous that the doors would slam shut and the train leave without me. I climbed up one step to the car vestibule and stood there, holding a grip on the nickel-plated vertical railing, "I’ve left something on the windowsill, let it be there till I'm back."
"What's that?"
"Look for yourself. I'll be back exactly in a month."
"Call at once as you've arrived!"
It was the last car on the train. An old woman ran up along the platform. She asked something but I neither listened nor wanted to, I was looking at Eera until the speakers in the car shouted, "Beware! The doors are shutting!" And they cut me off her.
The electric train pulled and, gaining the speed, rumbled along the rails in the direction of Kiev…
The night before, I went out shopping together with Eera. The department store was locked already, but the glazed stall by its side still worked. From the sitting inside middle-aged gypsy woman, I bought a new safety razor, a shaving brush, a stand-up mirror, and two handkerchiefs with a series of pin-thick blue wavy lines printed across their fields and leaving out only thin circular frames in the center. Both size and looks of the handkerchiefs were quite alike except for the pictures inside those frames – a small sailing boat in one, a neat blue anchor in the other. In my pocket, I was carrying away the handkerchief with the sailing boat, its counterpart with the anchor was left on the windowsill. Coming back, I would put their circles to each other, the boat to the anchor. It would be the ritual of return…
And pretty late at night, my mother-in-law suddenly freaked out and started anxiously persuade me there was no need to go anywhere, and it was still possible to return the train ticket Kiev-Odessa to the booking ticket-office at the station.
I thought I was going to lose it – what ticket return, eh? Eera and Tonya also joined the conversation, only the father-in-law was out, called to the situation at the Bakery Plant.
Staring at the oilcloth on the table, Gaina Mikhailovna was mumbling about a too complicated moment, so that even Ivan couldn't get thru… A week before, Tonya's husband Ivan left for the Transcarpathia, yet without ever reaching there, he returned from Kiev a day later—I couldn't get it why—and now he was all the time hiding away in the bedroom with the children of their family.
By that time, I had grasped already that the whole world was in the state of tumultuous fracas, amid some unceasing battle in progress – but who against who? That was some question! Because all of that went on under wraps, beneath the surface presenting only the conventional layer of casual life. Still, thru occasional rinds and gaps in the disguising cover, there at times glimpsed certain inconsistencies, secret signs, and I already started to understand that the true reality consisted of something surpassing the customary limits of commonplace views we were brought up to keep to, and those my guesses were affirmed by the instances when people let things out, and pretty frequent too.
Was I sure they were exactly people? Well, I did not have another name for them… Letting out? What namely? What about?. About things that did not belong to the life which we were taught to see and no deeper.
…Ivan unable to get thru…(repealed on his emissary mission)…and whose side are you on?. (the fire at the Bakery Plant just an episode in the universal battle)…
I had to find the ways and means for collecting the strewn puzzle pieces of concomitant reality, turn them into some-wieldy-thing, without getting lost on the way midst all chance hints of recondite raw truth. Who's for who? Who's against who?.
A thunderstorm broke behind the black window in the living room. The ramble of falling water outside got overpowered again and again by thunderclaps fighting blindly in the flicker of mighty flashes. A pillar of enormously white light struck the transformer box in the yard. And the pitch-black darkness engulfed all around.
Tonya groped her way to their bedroom to calm down the children and Ivan. When she came back with a burning candle, I saw in its feeble light that I was talking to Mothers. Those very Mothers mentioned, in all too cautious, cut-and-run, manner by Goethe… Three Mothers were they: the old yet powerful, the middle, and the beginner – Eera. She was not my ally, she was one of them. I needed to persuade them, otherwise, nothing would come out.
With the storm raging outside, behind the blinking candle reflection in the panes of black glass, I still managed to get their go-ahead… In conclusion, their eldest, the leader said, "If something goes completely awry…in a hopeless, extreme, situation…turn to the very Head…"
At night I had a prophecy dream… I lay on a gurney, trying to become inconspicuous in the cold and dim fluorescent light flooding from everywhere thru the pale gray, semi-translucent, ceiling and walls, so as to exclude the slightest possibility for even a sliver of a shadow. A group of someones in white robes stood all about me. The one standing out of view, behind my head, asserted, "If not for the fat, it still might come out…" Even without seeing, I knew that the one in the white who pronounced that was also I. With a furtive glance from under my half-closed eyelids at the stomach of me lying raw upon the gurney, I saw thru the sheer skin a thin yellowish layer, probably, the fat I was talking about…
I went out into the train car vestibule and sparked. Thru the sky of dusty glass in the automatic doors, a small harem of seahorses floated with their tails curled forward under their bellies. Lined from the taller mare to the smallest colt, they were also fond of a system, like the lost figurines of white elephants. The train hurriedly raced ahead, yet couldn't leave their formation behind…
A man entered the vestibule with a dangling row of medals on his civilian jacket breast. A war veteran; here's the one who once knew who's for who, who's against who. We shot the breeze for a while without advancing any particular line of thought until at one of the stops, a man with a bundle of long thin planks in his hands stepped in from the platform. He carried his load between us 2 and went on into the car. The veteran freaked out, his staring eyes stuck to something in the upper corner behind me. I knew that there was nothing there, but since he saw it, then there it was. I left them to sort it out between themselves and followed the fascia-bearer into the car, to the window under the rack carrying my things, because Kiev was running towards our train…
~ ~ ~
At the station, I took my luggage to the cool huge underground checkroom hall. Then I came back up to the hot surface of the station square in whose right corner I slipped thru the inconspicuous passage leading to the steep and long stair flights that descended to the canteen once shown to me and Olga by Lekha Kuzko.
At the bottom of stairs, I sparked and went on, but had to stop smoking, when a platoon of militiamen poured out of the canteen and marched towards me along the sidewalk, so that I had to pad thru their ranks, with a smoldering joint between my fingers…
From the canteen, I returned to the station and took a walk-round. There were not so many glass-eyed as on the night watch at the Nezhyn station, probably, because of the different time of day. Still, there were some and at my approach, they hurriedly pretended that they were there just so, kinda ornery passengers.
I went up to the third floor where there was the mother-and-child room and explained to the watchwoman that in a month I would be passing their station together with my wife and baby daughter, and now I dropped in to check the conditions. Well, in general, rather a clean corridor, thank you.
Near the toilet rooms on the first floor, a young militiaman with a black eye of deep purple hue took pains to avoid the least eye contact with me, although both of us perfectly knew that his black eye resulted from my walking thru their formation and that he, who had suffered in the universal battle, would not forgive me that.
Then, for quite a stretch, I stood in the waiting hall on the second floor, in front of the huge news stall counter keeping heaps of diverse newspapers, magazines, postal envelopes. But all that time I looked at just one postcard with the bluest blue sky in its picture.
It was a long wait until there at last sounded footsteps behind me, barely audible in the joint buzz of the crowd filling the hall… My eyes stayed fixed at the picture. The footsteps stopped. A copper coin the size of an eye iris fell from behind my back onto the blue in the postcard. Only then I turned and went away without ever looking back – from that moment on no casual genes would ever be able to change the color of your eyes. And only then it was, that the station loudspeakers' call broke thru to me:
"The train Kiev-Odessa departs from the third platform. We ask escorting citizens to leave the cars."
Needless to make any special point that at those, communicationally underdeveloped, old simple days, even the bravest minds could neither imagine, in however sprightly fantasy flights, nor dream about installation of surveillance cameras in public places. Then, given the conditions of the aforesaid period, what else could cause the ungraspable scene which took place the same evening in the queue of passengers lined at the bus stop in front of the Kiev intercity bus station? There might be solely one reasonable explanation – the vigilance of the taxi driver.
(…the derivative of "reason" here is used without any deeper connotations but in compliance to its since long established core signification, that of correlating the details of surrounding reality in congruence with the linear, orthodoxly perceived, and conventionally evaluated, modifications of the standard cause-effect prototype.
However, at that particular period I was beyond the old-time etiology because of a too deep submergence in tracing and angling up the intricate complexities from the sketchy, haphazardly twined, chain of transcendental symbols and signs of varying significance, confronting me at random flicks of revelations, which goaded to strive and grope with might and main for a new, elusive, but incisive and tantalizingly close level in apprehensive comprehension of the recondite world wrapped in the disguising sham of make-believe reality, so as to find, thru those acumen insights, a firm footing for ensuring my function in general scheme of things if only I would discover it and assess properly because “often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to..” quoting a commendable American transcendentalist…)
Now, back to the taxi driver in the cabstand by the steps to the underground checkroom hall at the Kiev railway station for the trains of long-distance destination… At 17.06 a young man of about twenty-five-to-seven years old, height one-meter seventy-six-to-eight centimeters, with straight brown hair, and a trimmed mustache, emerged from the underground passage. He wore a gray jacket and gray pants, not matching though the shade of gray in the jacket. Noticeably upset about something, the man got into the taxi and suggested the driver go down to the underground hall instead of him, and bring a briefcase and a bag from the indicated automatic storage cell, the code to which he would provide. The driver, naturally, refused.
The dark-haired individual fell into a reverie, twisting a burnt match in the fingers of his right hand, then sighed, broke that match, asked to wait a bit and disappeared down the passage steps. Five minutes later, he appeared again and asked to take him to the intercity bus station. Upon arrival at the specified location, he paid, hung the sports-bag over his left shoulder, gripped the briefcase handle with the same-side hand, and slammed the door. Synchronously and, like, accidentally, he wiped nickel-plated door handle with the right hem of his jacket destroying, by all the canons of criminal films, his fingerprints. After those manipulations, the man disappeared into the entrance to the intercity bus station.
What could the driver do? Of course, he, naturally, called the operative who he was secretly collaborating with, under the operational pseudonym "Tractor".
What was witnessed by the queue of passengers at the bus stop to which I joined coming back from the bus station building, after a visit to the men's toilet and a five-minute pit-stop in the middle of the empty lobby to stare at the multi-square-meter billboard "Fly by the Aeroflot!" with a stewardess wearing her most happy smile and the blue uniform piss-cutter in it?
Nearby the stop, a freshly washed red Zhiguli car pulled up abruptly. A man wearing dark sunglasses got out of it, came up to me and, holding out the ignition key in the bunch with divers other ones, instructed, "Get in the car, we'll go right now."
Keeping mum, I turned away. The man proceeded to the bus station building.
Soon after, 2 young men emerged from behind the right corner of the building—one of them in the militia uniform, the other wearing plainclothes—both of whom took a position on the right off the queue. Round the left corner, the same man in sunglasses came together with a short companion in a thick-fabric cap; they stopped on the other side of the queue. The man in the cap (an obvious scumbag and tipsy as well) mixed with the line of passengers and approached me. He started rubbing against me from behind. The nearest passengers watched in bewilderment.
That disgusting scene was interrupted by the appearance of a bus with the inscription "Polyot" on its side… On the way to the Borispol airport, I did not respond to the puzzled looks of the fellow-travelers, returning with my mental gaze to what had not been recorded by the then-non-existent (and, therefore, absent) surveillance camera in the men's toilet room of the Kiev intercity bus station.
I went up to the sloping trough of the common urinal and poured into it the mustard-brown powder of all the dope I had on me. Then I crumpled its packing sheet of paper and threw it to the trash-bin. The way I was taught by the French criminal movies starring Belmondo.
(…which is the evidence that I can be programmed not only by means of a text but with application of cinematography as well.
In all my life that followed, up to the present night in this forest by the river of Varanda, I stayed straight and strictly abstinent…)
At the airport in Borispol, I didn't use an automatic cell to keep my bag and briefcase, both were left in the baggage room for them to have a shakedown of luggage and see there was no point in rubbing their scumbag provocateurs against my ass… A ticket to Odessa for a plane flying from Moscow cost 17 rubles. It did not exceed the amount of 20 rubles I had by me, stashed for covering survival needs until the first advance payment at construction sites of the new port city…
On arrival in the Odessa airport, I couldn't see it in the dark, and from there, on a city bus, I reached the intercity bus station where all the ticket offices were already locked, yet the baggage room still operated and in the waiting rooms there were benches for overnight sitting.
Of course, I felt myself the winner because I did manage, despite everything, to break thru Kiev. The gleeful delight with the success was assuring me of my exceptional invulnerability.
The return to actual state of things was not too pleasant when a rarefied line of passengers slogged in the early morning thru the station's back door for the first bus. In the incipient daylight, I sat in numb doze with my head thrown back over the bench backrest, leaving my whole throat, in the disdainfully victorious attitude, completely undefended. The pain from the needle stung to the right from my Adam's apple made me pinch the skin in the carotid artery area. Of course, there was no needle there but the feeling of a deeply stuck or, rather, hurriedly pulled out, needle persisted. The following half-hour I winced, rubbing, time and again, the skin covering my throat about that spot.
The ticket office opened and they informed me there were no runs to Yuzhny, and to get there I needed a local communication bus from Station 3 located by the New Bazaar.
Having reached there and examined the bus schedules fixed on the walls of Station 3 where the line "Yuzhny" repeated itself at different hours, I decided that I should take a walk before departure because—damn you, OMG!—it was but Odessa-Mommy!. I’m in Odessa! Yay!.
At the end of the small station-hall, there stood just a couple of sections of automatic storage cells. All their doors were locked except for one in the upper row of a section. I put my things inside, combined a code, dropped 15 kopecks into the slot, and slammed the door. The out-of-order lock did not click, that's why the cell stayed unused.
I took the documents out from my briefcase and put them in the inside pocket of my jacket. Then I quietly closed the door, so that it would look as if locked. On the crest of the hill-tall wave of euphoria, I left the bus station and entered Odessa…
~ ~ ~
Not everyone has chanced to experience the state of complete happiness in their life. I am from among those luckier ones. More than that, I can indicate the time and place of the absolute happiness experienced by me. These are the few hours of my first walk in Odessa…
The gleeful sunshine was filling the streets which I walked. I was a part to everything around and everything was a part of me in that unfamiliar city, where everyone tacitly recognized me because they had so long been waiting for my coming. I felt what was being thought by people and mentally responded to their thoughts… Here walked a woman rejoicing in her own beauty.
…wow!..that's a really good one!.
And she bloomed up victoriously.
…but I have Eera…
To which the woman saddened and, with her head lowered, passed by.
For a middle-aged Caucasian, gaping around with a ho-hum stare, I threw in the thought – "Eew, Javad, I still remember your dagger blow!" With all of his boredom shed off right away, the man woefully sagged his shoulders and pulled at the mustache, stunned by a sudden memory of a treacherous stub from Javad of whom up to the present moment he had not had the slightest idea.
…okay, let's not think sad things…
A swift flock of pioneers in scarlet neckties and white shirts shot past hurrying to the celebration of my arrival into the city.
On entering a big bookstore to make my choice for the future, I communicated with the shop-assistants and buyers there without ever opening my mouth.
I walked up the steps of the famous stair, bypassing the monument to Richelieu who never was a cardinal. In the nearby green grove there again were pioneers, but another ring and too much, to my mind, carried away with watching the freight cars slowly rolling into the port grounds.
"Pioneers!" shouted I to them. "Boats are nicer than cars!"
They looked around, waved and smiled, they recognized me.
The taxi driver took me to the “Bratislava” restaurant sharing on the way that it was a canteen on weekdays. But the current day was the holiday to celebrate my arrival, and he also knew that it was the so-eagerly-and-longly-awaited-for I…
I washed my hands and face with the water from a tap in the toilet, then I climbed to the upper floor to become the only guest in the huge dining room. The lone waitress appeared from somewhere and I ordered soup. When she left, I noticed a wrinkle in the tablecloth resulted from hasty ironing; I passed my palm over the crease and it disappeared.
…well, no wonder, after ironing those heaps of swaddles it's easy to smooth any crease out with just laying hands upon…
The waitress came and went leaving me alone in the whole wide hall. I began eating soup cooked by the recipes of the port city. On a low deck nearby there stood silent loudspeakers and amplifiers of the restaurant group.
…so, what to listen to?. something light… okay, let it be The Smokie… I flicked my fingers.
No sound.
…what?!. am I not omnipotent?!. or is the music here switched on some other way?.
And then, as if rammed by an unexpected blow, I got crushed by the feel of a gross mistake. Somewhere, there was a fatal flaw in my suppositions; I was terribly wrong somewhere. The soup became utterly stodgy, not eatable any more. The rice in it turned into fine shell-flakes that settled on the plate bottom, kinda layer of tiny splinters of mother-of-pearl.
…somewhere something was drastically amiss; I made a terrible mistake, miscalculated something…but what?!.
I started to pace between the tables, to and fro. The waitress approached, and I explained that I couldn't eat, I forgot something.
"What?"
"My jacket in the toilet," said I the first thing that came to my mind.
At that very moment, the door of the hall opened, and a neat pensioner announced that my jacket was in the cloakroom downstairs.
I went down to the cloakroom barrier where a woman with the juicy Odessa accent gave me my jacket, which the old man brought to her from the toilet.
"And the pockets had been filled to the utmost," she said with the bitter reproach clear to both of us. She meant that Sunny City who saw my arrival after such a long wait had bestowed the gifts which I stupidly lost by the mistake and still stayed in the dark as to what namely blunder it was. I despondently climbed upstairs to pay for the soup cooked of mother-of-pearl…
It's like in that game where you rise higher and higher along the winding path of figures and then fall in a precipitated nose-dive thru the pipe drawn to the very bottom line… I rolled out into the street from the restaurant “Bratislava”, where I had intentionally left my jacket in the toilet because there were documents and money in its pocket at the moment when I was admitted and entered the new shining world that needed neither money nor documents.
On the way to the bus station, I noticed a long slit in my pants. The seam had burst on the right thigh, starting from the pocket. And I went on covering it with my jacket whose pockets held no gifts from the new world spilled and scattered into nowhere because of my fault… The unlocked cell at the bus station was also empty of things I'd left there.
For the last ruble, I bought a ticket to Yuzhny and shoved it with the kopecks of change into the hip pocket. The bus was crammed with passengers jamming the aisle. My neighbor on the seat kept sighing and silently rubbed the damned un-outable spot in her skirt hem; I knew she had got spattered because of my lapse. And that my flaw caused the stuffed bus to stop at each and every traffic lights, all red with rage. Then the bus stood for a long time on a trenched street, giving way to an endless file of disgruntled pioneers covered with the dust from the heaps of earth on the pavement. It was I who spoiled the celebration…
By and by, the bus got outside the city, the passengers were leaving at the stops. I also got out at the last but one stop, because it was wrong to come to Yuzhny with a hole as big as the wound in the Spartacus's thigh pierced with a spear.
On the outskirts of the settlement, I respectfully greeted a boy of about twelve and asked for a needle and thread. He got it at once what I needed, and led me behind the high hedge of big stone blocks joined by thick seams of mortar, to a secluded place in the weed thicket. Then he ran away and returned with his friend who had a needle on a long black thread.
The boys got seated on the fence with their backs to me; I doffed my pants and started sewing up the burst seam. From the other side of the stone wall came the sounds of the tires screeching sharply, of the clashes and roar of lorry motors along the difficult roads, forth and back, in the endless universal battle… The boys sat there as mere on-lookers as if having no idea that behind their backs a member of RMC was a-darning a wound in his thigh.
With gratitude, I returned them the needle and the still long enough stretch of the thread… When alone, I got seated under an Apple-tree, took out a Belomor cigarette, lit it and stuck the match into the earth driving it full-length in to put out the flame. Ouch! How she cried!. I startled at the wild heartrending holler of that black-and-white cow at the nearby tree, who desperately bellowed with her muzzle turned up to the heaven. How could I know that everything was so intricately entangled and mingled with each other!.
Then I walked thru a dense Willow thicket, and in the sky above there hung a huge bird, like a stork, almost motionless, with an escort of smaller birds stuck to the air around him…
…so, that's it – the highest Head… Devil, or God or What else you could be is more than I possibly can comprehend… the messy mingle-mangle of a whipped up world is entangled too confusedly… and here I am with nothing but the documents, a pocket notebook, a pen and the handkerchief with a small sailing boat… let's sign the contract then as becomes your trade, eh?.
I took out the pen and the bus ticket. I did not know how to draw such a document, so I simply put my signature below the lines of figures knocked out by the cash register at the bus station. I put the pen back in my pocket and placed the ticket upon the long leaves in a pliant Willow fork. Then I turned my back to the contract – it's a fair play, no peeping.
A sharp gust of breeze swirled the bushes, but when I turned around the ticket was still in the same fork, only turned over with its blank side up… so that's your signature?. smart move, no one will ever be able to forge…
I went out of the Willow thicket to a tall brick building, like the central warehouse at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, and started to ask where the personnel department was. They told me that everything had got closed already, but after the second shift, the bus was going to the city for which I had to wait.
I waited for a long time, then there was a long ride thru the night by a small PAZ bus. The fellow-travelers were leaving the bus, in twos and threes, on dimly lit streets in the city, until the driver told me I had to get off too, on the corner of a large empty square.
Getting off the empty bus, I saw the yellowish gleam of lamp lights in a narrow street nearby and went along its fences, then turned to the left and at the next crossing I chose the left turn once again. Dry snaps of claws against the asphalt behind my back were following me; judging by the sound, it was some hugely big beast of a dog, yet I was not afraid at all, and I did not look back, and just kept walking on slowly.
Ahead, the same square opened and I stopped about 20 meters from it because it was dead sure that I reached my sentry point. The lamp on a pillar poured down yellow light, but I stood outside the circle drawn by its cone on the asphalt so that it could not reach my feet.
From the black silhouette of the five-story block on the left, a cat trotted stealthily across the road to the yard of a dark khutta and was met there with a joyous jingling of dog's chain, the date of antipodes. Even slaves have it off at times…
The night went on and I stood motionless, pretending that I had nothing to do with that crushing din and ramble beyond the horizon, where the cogwheels of the universe clockwork with frenzied screech were coming to a clash halt because of my fatal mistake at who knows what…
When the dump truck pulled up behind me, I turned but did not give way, and only threw up my right hand, because that was my post. Those sitting in the cabin had no heads, impenetrable pitch-black darkness cut them off to the shoulders dimly visible in the feeble beam of the lamplight from the pillar.
