Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The driver, who came down from the cab, had a head though; he led me, with care, aside. I did not resist. The dump truck left, taking away the one on the passenger seat, with the viper asp blackness upon his shoulders.
Black traces of tires stayed on the road. They should not be left there – the darkness would follow reading the black marks. I began effacing the traces with the soles of my shoes. Would they last long?
The wind was rising, a spread open newspaper sheet raced frisking from the square to rub against my shank. I made out the headline "The Prince's Tomb"; it took it a really long time to find me. The paper rustled its goodbye and slipped farther on along the asphalt…
The sky became gray… The dog-tired, yet satisfied, cat cautiously retracted her way across the road to the five-story block to pick up her upper-society day life at the lordly loft estate. Woeful laments of suppressed despair and supplicating clank of chain sounded after her.
The new day dawned, but I stood there until a woman in white crossed the square in the distance heading to the left edge of it, unseen from my post. An old woman in black appeared in her wake, pushing a carriage. But I knew there was no baby at all. It was eggs she was pushing along, white and round like billiards balls; dense grapes of eggs.
And I realized that I might leave my post and go on to the square… I walked along empty streets until I turned into the door of a factory check-entrance.
In a narrow room, I asked for water from an old man in black spetzovka, wearing glasses and a workman cap. He gave me a glass of water and we both watched closely if I would swallow the black speck floating on the water surface.
I drank all of it. The speck remained stuck to the glass wall. The man in black told me how to find the nearest employment office…
~ ~ ~
The office was locked, but then a woman with the key came and opened it. I said her that I was looking for a job, and she told me to wait for one more office employee, who should presently come.
Not far from the office there was an open diary café. The kopecks I still had were enough to buy a large bottle of milk, but I drank only half of it. Over a tall tumbler of thin glass, I uttered the parting words of Romeo, "Here's to my love!" And then I drank it…
When I returned to the employment office, the second employee was already in place. I knew at once that she was Death, and the one who came first was Love.
Death looked thru my documents and surly announced that I had been divorced already, but Love smiled and said that, well, so what? Then she went out to the other room to make a phone call and I stayed with Death, obviously irritated, who looked a little like Olga. Maybe, because of her dyed hair, only longer.
On her return, Love said that there was a job for me at the Odessa Mining Management, I had to go to Pole Explorers Square and find the chief engineer there, and also remind him about a car she was waiting for but forgot to mention while on the phone. A car for Maria, okay? He should know…
The chief engineer said there was no position for me at the management and only the job of a roof-fastener at a mine which was incompatible with my higher education.
I hurriedly assured him that my education would not be in the way at all, and he commanded me to get into the bed of a truck standing by the porch of the management, which tootled off and soon was out of the city. Apart from me, there was a tall and white, yet shabby, refrigerator in the truck-bed, and a pair of black chains, like from a chainsaw only much longer. They looked like a couple of mating snakes who, with the jostling of the truck-bed over the bumpy road, kept sneaking up along its floorboards, gradually closing in on me.
In the village of Vapnyarka, the truck entered the grounds of somewhat manufacture. The engineer told me to drop the chains from the back and I hurled the damned stalkers into a deep puddle, although there was a dry place too.
"Got crazy?" shouted the chief engineer, but I saw that he liked my exploit.
The truck driver dragged the drowned serpents into the open door of the warehouse… Then we drove to another place in the village and schlepped the refrigerator into a summer cottage in the group of the like cabins, surrounded by a common meter-tall palisade. The chief engineer stuck the cord into a socket for a check, and the fridge hummed in satisfaction.
"I've nearly forgotten," said I, "Maria wanted you to send her some car."
In fact, I remembered those signal words all the time and only waited for the proper moment…
The chief engineer explained how to get to a water tap in the street. I went there, took off my jacket, washed my hands and arms up to the short sleeves, and also my face and neck. Two militiamen with officer stars in their shoulder-straps stood on one side from me, and two army officers in their fatigue uniform on the other. They all waited patiently while I was splashing because I was with the chief, and after that water, no needle would ever be able to pierce the skin in my neck. Then I walked away wiping myself with the tiny handkerchief that at once soaked thru.
The truck left the village and rode on along the highway and very soon the road dived into a steep tilt to the right of which there unfurled a vast limitless field. I could not understand what it was until a moment later it woke up and stirred in movement, and long low waves with white crests ran to the shore. So that’s the sea!.
I took out the pocket notebook and, consulting the watch on my wrist, made the entry on the inside of its back cover:
"July 20, 1979
13: 30: 15
Eera
Sehrguey
Liliana"
The highway went up again. At the top of the ascent, the truck turned left onto a country road, and thru the outskirts of a village went to the field where the road ran along a windbreak belt. Two kilometers farther, after a long gentle slant there appeared and were passed two or three barrack-like structures and, after another hundred meters, the road ended in a wide pit rigged with a narrow-gauge track running past the office-cottage labeled "Mine Dophinovka" into the dark hole of a cave-tunnel in the opposite wall…
Three worn-out armchairs with wooden armrests stood in the shaded room. In the one with its back to the window curtains sat the mustached mine foreman, about 45, of a placid countenance, with the hair thinning away on his pate.
From the chair opposite him, the chief engineer with jovial laughter recounted my flinging the chain-snakes into the water. The foreman did not partake in his mirth, and the chief engineer subsided guiltily. His guarded respect to the foreman made it clear who was in charge there.
Seated to the right from the foreman, I handed, at his request, my passport over, a little ashamed that it was so sullied.
He opened it and, without touching, passed his right palm over the pages.
And I beheld how the paper in them brightened getting filled with life as if it had just come from the printing house, and there even appeared some ectoplastic transparent glow from its innards. Both the chief engineer and I watched fascinated, doing miracles was outside our limits. Seemed, like, I, after all, managed to reach the most supreme…
He had long since left the clouds and acquired the form of a foreman at a shabby mine. His name? It shall not be taken in vain. Bypassing the ineffable name, I can only disclose that he had fancied the patronymic of "Yakovlevich"…
Then I said that all my things were lost at a bus station in Odessa, and there was no money by me, but I had to call my wife because she would be worried. The chief engineer at once outstretched a dark-blue five-ruble note to me and announced that I would live in the hostel above the pit.
I needed no explanation that the hostel, as well as the mine itself, were a deceptive illusion for gullible dupes in the world where one should constantly be on their look-out. So I pinched the tiny brownish mote off the bill and gently placed this fuzz-mark on the wooden scarred armrest getting rid of it…
~ ~ ~
Besides doing my jobs – at first, a mine roof-fastener, and later on an assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator, not to mention some short-term labors, I constantly was in the state of ceaseless alerted search for an answer: what's hidden behind the seeming facade all around? My quest for clarity continued also in Odessa, where I often went for making long-distance telephone calls to Nezhyn from the intercity telephone station on Pushkin Street. Where was the money from? I borrowed it in the hostel from Slavic Aksyanov, or his wife Lyouda.
In the, let’s assume, hostel, seemingly, adapted from a, supposedly, cow-farm-house there were four rooms on both sides of a long corridor from end to end of the barrack-like building. In one of the rooms lived the young childless family of Aksyanovs. Their neighbors were a Bessarabian family with a one-year-old baby. An elderly single electrician occupied the room next to them.
I was given a room across the corridor from which, reportedly, they moved the radio set away but left the grates in the window. First of all, I pulled the iron frame with bars out and put it outside in the tall grass reaching the window ledge. Then I whitewashed the walls, and for one entire evening was thrashing them with a tube of a rolled-up newspaper in the battle with a myriad of vampire mosquitoes. The following morning Slavic Aksyanov, looking fairly battered, asked what I was doing there all the evening after repair.
"Safari," curtly said I without going into detail for he obviously got his share in the battle.
The rest of the doors in the corridor were locked, except for the first to the right from the entrance where there was a shower.
The mine workers were brought in the morning by a truck from Vapnyarka and New Dophinovka villages. They arrived whistling and screaming in the truck-bed like devils, but they called themselves Makhno bandits. Every 2 days, a pair of them were filling the large tank of the shower with water from a small hut in a hollow, some 30 meters from the hostel. There was a deep well with a bucket tied with a chain to the iron windlass. Electric heaters heated the water in the tank long before the end of the working shift.
Aside from the barrack-hostel, on the slope overgrown with tall grass, stood a tin-walled outhouse. There was no door in it, and the facility had to be approached with some kind of a warning tootle, so as not to catch a user in the posture of an eagle on the roost… From the doorless toilet there opened a magnificent view of the long sea inlet and its sheer opposite shore.
(…there is a concept of "stream of consciousness" which presumes that a person is capable of making mental comments on anything happening around them, or to think about something extraneous, having nothing, at first glance, to do with those happenings. Following the widely entertained assumption, "the stream of consciousness" was invented by an Irishman named James Joyce, although he tried to bring into play a certain French author from whom he, allegedly, picked up the idea. However, much earlier that same stream, even though not on an overly prominent scale, occurred in the meditations of the failed-to-become mother-in-law of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky.
Thus, "the stream of consciousness" seems to be one of those discoveries which have to take place repeatedly and in different places, just in case, to ensure they would not be missed. The "stream", when boiled down, announces to the human race that a person is really able to exchange thoughts with themselves.
What happened to me in Odessa in that crazy summer of '79 which turned out to be the most beautiful summer in my life, could hardly be called a "stream of conscience". A stream? I pray, desist! No! It was a waterfall and a refreshing one too, tuning up my tensely strained senses on their constantly alerted lookout…
I exchanged thoughts not just with myself but also with any-every-one-thing I came across. Starting from a small pebble stuck in the dust of roadside up to the night stars with their dew-like glint in the sky.
"Seen that?"
And the stars would answer with high-and-mighty indifference, "And more than that, and more than once…" And they went blinking on the way they did the millions upon millions of years before our era.
And it did not bother me at all, that tireless, constant, wide-spray fire-pump, gush of thoughts. After all, the human brain is engaged for some scanty 10 percent of its natural full capacity. So, let it have a knock-up, sweep away the cobweb and dust motes accumulated in the remaining percent!
Of course, during working hours the intensity of my single-handed brainstorm somewhat decreased – the workplace environment seemed more static and settled when compared to split-second changes of circumstances on the city streets. However, I can proudly state that even as deep as 38 meters under the earth surface, the intensity of my mental labor was much higher than the obnoxious ten-percent standard…)
The mine "Dophinovka" produced cubics – three-dimensional freestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm cut out from the underground limestone strata. For which purpose, there was a drift tunnel dipping from the wide pit and going under 38 meters of other stratification layers. Down the tunnel, here and there, the shafts were branching out on one or another of its sides—also tunnels, but lower and narrower—just like boughs from a tree trunk. At the end of those shaft-galleries, there were placed the stone-cutting machines which cut cubics from the wall in front of their noses. Such was the general, birds-eye-view, picture…
As for the details, my instructor in the roof-fastener job bore a sonorous name of ancient Russ princes – Rostislav. However, he never responded to this name because even to him it sounded strange and foreign, since everyone knew and addressed him as Charlic.
First of all, he led me to the shaft of Machine 3 because of his humble trepidation before its operator, whom Charlic titled exclusively with his patronymic "Kapitonovich". Being just a petty demon, Charlic at every turn made up to Kapitonovich, a stout devil of esteem, who had once served a stretch of ten years.
Both Charlic and I walked holding a flashlight in hand. Going down to the mine, everyone received his flashlight from Lyouda Aksyanova, the lamp-rechargeress, in her cave by the entrance to the main tunnel. Without the light, down there you got into the wholesome pitch-black darkness and could easily stumble over a rail of the narrow-gauge track, or against one of the rarely put ties under it, and have a nasty fall. That's why everyone in the mine wore a plastic helmet and each morning, before going down, they scribbled their signatures in a ledger to testify that they got instructed on safety rules and now knew their risks and were up to them.
The temperature in the mine was always above zero, even in winter. A constant calm and pressing, underwater silence reigned in the shafts if no one talked to someone else and no mechanism was working nearby… We walked and walked along a narrow low gallery, one wall of which bore serifs from a stone-cutting saw and the other was screened off by a hedge of cubic debris. A loose pair of thick electric wires in white isolation ran along atop the hedge which was rather tall but did not reach the gallery ceiling. In mining, the ceiling is called roof, but more on that later…
At last, far ahead appeared dim yellow light of a pair of bulbs thru their scaly incrustation of thick dust. The stone-cutting machine stood facing the end wall, and Kapitonovich sat in its open seat waiting for us. He worked without an assistant because his dream was to one day get paid 300 rubles a month.
The stone in the end wall before the machine – 2,5 m x 4,5 m – was already crisscrossed with deep furrows of "the sketch" whose parallel cuts ran horizontally between sidewalls and were intersected by vertical ones cut that same way from the ceiling to the floor. The grid formed the butt ends of the future cubics. Now, you just needed to drive a breaker in one of the slots in the middle of the "sketch" and break a cubic out. Then a couple of cubics next to it, until there formed a niche roomy enough to allow for breaking the rest of them off with a sledgehammer.
Kapitonovich was waiting for us because in the past 2 days his stone-cutting machine moved forward, away from the end of the narrow-gauge track. Charlic and I extend the railroad with two pairs of three-meter rails, delivered the day before, and now the mine cars, aka wagonettes, could be pushed closer to the end wall to stack the broken out cubics upon them… If an empty wagonette capsized off the rails, the situation was called "a bored-in wagonette" and 2 or 3 workers heaved it back in the track, the method being named "fart-steamer". Then a tiny mining locomotive would come down from the open pit, and pull back the wagonettes loaded with the cubics, collecting on its way up the loaded wagonettes waiting in the entrances to other cutting-machines' shafts.
Not all of the cubics were breaking evenly off the wall, so before the next "sketching" the most sticking out pieces of the limestone had to be knocked off with that same sledgehammer. Those fragments together with the spoilage—cubics broken off too short, or split because of the stratum faults in the stone—served the material to continue laying of the hedge-screen along the shaft wall. Without that masonry, there would be no room to shove the sand off.
Where did the sand come from? When the cutting-machine, with growling din and clang of its chain, was cutting a furrow in the wall, a long jet of sand, or rather sawdust gushed out into the shaft. The shield of metal-slatted glass protected the operator from the whipping sand, although not from the clouds of dust. The sand pile rose like a dune around the cutting-machine, and if not shoved off with a shovel into the "pocket", between the hedge and the wall, there would be no room for the narrow-gauge track…
With the track-promotion accomplished, Charlic took the helmet off his head, put it down and sat upon as on a potty – that's much more comfortable than sitting on the floor, or on a heap of sand or rubble. He lit a Prima begged from Kapitonovich and reverently inquired about the meaning of the large blood-red stains in the right wall of the gallery cut through the hard mass of stone.
Kapitonovich with portent gravity forwarded his explanation that once there was the sea around here with a steamboat on fire, which, eventually, sank, leaving the red of the flames in the stone. Charlic gave out a servile giggle, while I was trying to suppress the unnecessary contemplation that ten years was the standard stretch provided for murder because I liked Kapitonovich.
Before leaving for other cutting-machines, we fixed the roof in the shaft. For that purpose, Kapitonovich started the machine and cut a series of short horizontal slots under the very ceiling of the gallery. When the stone plates between the slots were crushed away with the breaker, a mortice of 20 cm x 20 cm and 40 cm deep was formed up there. The same operation was done on the opposite wall.
Then Charlic and I fetched an 18-cm-thick log, of those named ploshchuk in the mine lingo, and thrust its end into one of the niches, as deep as it could go. The other end we raised to the opposite niche and shoved inside, not too deep though, so as not to pull the log out from the first one. We propped it up by the sidewalls with a pair of shorter stoyak logs. Now the shaft roof was fixed.
Where did the 3 logs come from? Very simple, retreating our way about some 30 meters back into the darkness of the shaft, we pulled out one of the previous fastenings. Where else could they be from?. In the period of my work at the "Dophinovka" mine, there were shipped exactly 3 new logs there. I personally bared them of bark with the "stroog" tool (kinda ax welded crosswise to a breaker's end) before Slavic Aksyanov took them into the drift tunnel on a wagonette…
So, the roof in the shafts was secured with the economically saved materials… Sometimes the roof started to "drip" or "get rainy". Then it began crackling, splitting and dropping down pieces of rock; something in a way of collapse though not total.
Charlic got under such "raining" in front of my eyes when pulling out one more of "economically saved" logs. He was lucky though to be lying on the sand heap between the hedge and the wall, close to the ceiling. The dropping cob of stone, that separated from the roof, did not have room enough to gain speed and just lay on his chest, gently. Not a too big flake though, half-meter by half-meter and about ten centimeters thick.
He immediately recollected Alik the Armenian. When the roof started to rain, Alik had to retreat for 16 meters, backward. Racing, of course, as quick as he could because there was not even time to turn around with the roof crackling and falling and catching up. And so he ran, backward, yelling on the way, "Fuck the mine! Fuck the money!" But how? That was the question… So the roof in mining is not the same as an ordinary roof…
Besides the operating shafts, there also were abandoned ones in the mine. The layer of proper stone dwindled out there, and they were left off. Entrances to such shafts were sealed with a wall of cubic rubble joined by mortar, so that prevent drafts.
However, not all of the left off shafts were sealed. One time the foreman showed me the emergency exit from the mine. Thru one such unsealed shaft, we reached the old trunk tunnel where once the wagonettes were pulled by horses. That drift also led to the same open pit, only on a higher level than the present one. And that old tunnel also had its shafts. When Charlic was on his vacation and I remained the only roof-fastener in the mine, I was pulling the logs from there.
On one occasion, I returned to the newer part of the mine, to Machine 4 shaft, so pleased and proud of myself that I was hauling a whole log alone. With some stupid jest too, like, "Here's for Machine 4 by special order, all the way from Rio de Janeiro!" Then I dropped the log off my shoulder and the bastardy piece of wood—crackle!—fell apart into two, because of being way too ancient material.
But those gossips, as if I was roaming the abandoned shafts without a flashlight, were blatant lies. They started because when someone else's flashlight was on, I turned mine off. I did not even know why. To save energy? It made no difference because after the shift all of the flashlights were delivered to Lyouda for recharging.
A meter-long length of wire connected the flashlight to the accumulator in the small tarp shoulder bag. The flashlight with the clumsy 16 dubbed on its accumulator side was mine.
In the abandoned galleries, I always turned the flashlight on, and one time its beam caught a flash of some unseen, unearthly beauty.
I couldn't make it out from afar what were those brilliant sparks in the tremendous overpowering silence that the dark gallery was filled with. It's hard to describe – some spiky pure-white alien structure or, maybe, like some creature from the ocean depths where even bathyscaphes could not reach, and there it was shimmering with tiny diamonds in the circle of light. Awesomely beautiful.
And I had an ax in my hand for checking if the logs out there were still usable. So the ax swooshed thru the darkness above the light and the white thing fell to the floor. And now instead of the inexplicable beauty, I saw just a huge slimy spittle, only then I guessed that it was a garland of mold. Later I was coming across the like garlands, but smaller in size and only brown, as if being punished for the murder of that pure beauty…
Then Charlic returned from his vacation and a new worker, Vasya, was given the job of a roof-fastener, and I became an assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator. Well, it's not as romantic as walking the no man's shafts and it's deafening, and the nose and mouth must be covered with a cloth because of the dust, but—wow!—familiar all faces! Messrs. Breaker, Shovel, and Sledgehammer…
~ ~ ~
But all the aforesaid was so only at the first, uninitiated, glance. What actually produced the "Dophinovka" mine under the unadvertised supervision of the most supreme chief, that is, Yakovlevich? Well, it depends. Jedem das Seine.
The mining engineer Pugachov, who showed his pyramidally straight nose down there once a month, was interested in gold only or, rather, in the gold sand. He would suck at the gold fix on a fang in his mouth, and quietly ask the stone-cutting machine operator, "Enough sand today, eh?"
After I had (unintentionally) heard him say that I started to dust out my spetzovka pockets at the end of each shift. Like, you're not gonna buy me with your vile metal! Moreover, I did not know the way of turning that sand into gold… Tolik, the operator of Machine 2, got stunned when he saw what I was getting rid of.
But they, no doubt, knew how to turn it into gold indeed and then, under the guise of aluminum castings, stacked it in the tall grass nearby the hostel. Those looked exactly like ingots of bank gold reserves, only of aluminum color, of course, so as to camouflage.
The foreman himself told me that and almost straightly too, "Such a worth and no one has brains to collect them, so they kick back here, littered." And where a mine for cubic production would get aluminum ingots from? Or for what purpose?.
As for the cubics themselves, they were, naturally, souls. Machine 5, for example, whose operator was Hitler, or else Adolf (well, anyway, everyone called him so: either Adolf or Hitler) was producing human souls.
Ivan, from Machine 1, felt hurt indeed that, when his wagonettes were pulled to the pit up there, lots of his cubics were rejected while anything from Adolf—however uneven and defected—went thru. But, if you think about it, so it is – many human a soul happen with flaws. And what is paradoxical, his namesake—Hitler—annihilated so many souls, and this one, down here, turns them out slapdash and keep taunting Ivan.
Whose souls were sawed out by other machines, I could only guess. For archangels? Demons? Titans?. That's what really depressed me most – my ignorance. Yes, I felt, of course, that I was a chosen one, but I remained a so sorely ignorant chosen, like, a pawn in the game whose rules all are aware of but you.
Advancement to getting it went in trial and error method, checking each hunch I had on the way. Sometimes there happened real insights as it was when after the shift I went to the New Dophinovka village to buy food for the next couple of days. Among the workers in the truck-bed, there was some old woman in a headscarf. The truck was purring past the hostel where the Bessarabian stood in the doorway with the baby in her arms. "Such a nice baby-girl!" pronouncing these words, the old lady released her headscarf and tied it up again, but somehow differently…
I returned home walking thru the fields alongside the trees in the windbreak belt. But I could not get rest in my room – the one-year-old girl of the Bessarabian family was choking with shrieks and cries, and her mother, not knowing how to ease the baby, kept carrying it along the corridor—from end to end—swaying in her arms, chanting "ah-ah!", but nothing helped. I never could bear children crying, but the hostel was not a local train where you might move to another car.
And suddenly I remembered how the woman in the truck-bed had tied her headscarf differently while praising this, so calm at that time, child. Going out into the corridor and silently, but steadily, looking at the baby's mother, I took out my handkerchief from the pocket, stretched it open and folded back again, yet on the other side, after which I went out to the well-hut to fetch some water.
When I returned the woman gave me a happy grateful look; the girl in her arms was perfectly calm, a kerchief had appeared on her head tied in a knot on the forehead. Bingo!.
However, there happened misfires too. The rooster, swaggering around the hostel entrance, did not understand my fair intentions and contemptuously turned away, when I offered him a grain of laundry blue from the pinch scattered over the wide bench next to the entrance. The proposed supplement to the ration of the bird was based on good motives and freshly gained experience. That day it was revealed to me, that the combination of blue and black symbolize strength: the cock with his black plumage would turn a super-cock had he picked up that laundry blue speck…
And the fact that I was both chosen and protected one became obvious when a certain glassy-eyed was sneaking to me with obviously inimical intentions…
There are three distinct varieties of glassy-eyed. Those in whom eye glassiness is combined with pronounced purity of whites in their eyes are harmless. They, beyond doubt, are possessed, but remain just tools for the transmission of information, like, what's up and on and how it goes? – kind of a spyglass, and nothing more. Where does the information flow to? Who's the recipient? The former dwellers of Olympus in their current forms, of course.
The second variety, with blurry luster filming their eyeballs, are self-employed freelancers looking for a chance refreshment with "red-and-hot", or striving to somehow otherwise get recharged on your account.
"There's an underground passage for people, but we may use it as well," one such one told me, apparently taking for one of her likes when, in an unfamiliar and poorly lit area of night Odessa, I asked her how to get to the bus station – their favorite feeding trough. Those it was, waiting for me to get out of the "Bratislava" restaurant with my torn thigh, and they impatiently urged the usher-woman to cut the needless chit-chat (which was not that but a talk loaded with meaning understood by both of us even though not to the same degree of clarity) and set “the rabbit” (me) out for their hunt…
