Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
For the pre-employment medical check (two weeks after getting the job), I visited a corresponding unit facilities in the Vapnyarka village to pass the blood sample analysis. On entering the office, I saw, besides the nurse, a lady marked with that particular eye murkiness, who sat on the couch and, from a corner of her mouth, there was hanging a long flexible tube. The nurse explained that the tube was just a probe, and the lady would not be in the way. As if I could not figure out from her looks what kind of lady it was and why she was there…
Then the nurse customarily pierced the pad of my finger and squeezed it and, instead of the usual bead of blood, it gave out a tiny jet of it, no thicker than a needle, like milk sprinkling from the squeezed nipple of a breastfeeding woman. I had never seen such a thing in my life!
And not only I was surprised – the lady's jaw dropped and that, let's say, probe wanted to pop out too. Just like an alky who had outstretched a cup for a fill but they splashed a whole three-liter jar of hooch over it. What a loss of precious stuff!.
As for reaching to the blood with their fangs, that's just a grandma's fair-tale for sillies. To fill their tanks they use some subtle, inconspicuous and, even though not fully understood by me, yet quite efficient, technology…
The glassy-eyed of the blurry type, who attempted at utilizing me, was a Volga driver that brought his boss to the hostel. In the corridor, there also was a rarely opened office of the mining engineer, visited by those coming to arrange the transaction of taking cubics from the pit.
That day, as always, I came from the mine to hostel for the midday meal and was washing my hands at the washstand on stake, not far from the entrance.
The glassy-eyed did not know me because of being an outsider, and he kept sneakily closing in, holding in his hands the weapon – an artifact that looked like a length of aluminum wire twisted in a special way, about 20 centimeters long.
Noting that blurry glassiness in his filmed eyes and the cautious way of his slinking nearer, I realized that I was done. The distance shortened, yet the moment when he already could reach me with his thing, a gray kitten jumped out from the tall grass and rubbed his scruff against my black spetzovka pants. And at once the glassy-eyed stalker lost any interest in me, lowered his weapon and returned to the car. The unknown rescuer-kitten who I never—before or later—saw around, disappeared into the grass…
But more often I had to rely only on my own prudent circumspection. As on that narrow beach under the cliff of Chabanka.
I wanted to take a swim in the sea and had already entered the peaceful slow waves but stopped – two fishermen in swimming trunks with fishing rods in their hands stood ahead. Between them, there was enough space to swim forwards, but I realized that the rods were the barrier blocking the way to the sea. And only seizing the moment when they simultaneously pulled their fishing rods up, I plunged in and swam away from the beach.
I swam for a long time, sometimes laying on the water for rest and wondering why my father told me that seawater supports a swimmer because of the salt dissolved in it. It made no difference to lying on the freshwater… Then I swam on, mostly on my back, facing the warm bright sky, until I felt a dab at my shoulder.
I looked back and saw a jellyfish in the water, semi-transparent and as wide as a basin. I gave it way and went on ahead, but then I began to come across more and more jelly-fish – you bypassed one of them to just run into another. Popping up a bit out from the water, I looked forward and saw a whole shoal of them which had turned the calm sun-driven waves into some jellyfish soup crowded with their translucent bodies. I didn't get the nerve to breast that soup, I turned around and swam back to the already distant shore…
The shingle beach of Chabanka had some sandy stretches in it. On one of those spits, near the water's edge, I wanted to write "Eera" but the waves did not allow. They ran up and leveled the wet sand before I had time to write out all the letters, and I only scratched my finger to bleeding with the tiny shell fragments mixed with the sand, before I gave up…
But my first meeting with the sea was on the beach of New Dophinovka where I went after work, along the shore of the sea inlet that reached the hostel. The water in it was shallow and very transparent. I walked until saw some worn-out tires in the water, dropped there from the shore by some morons. So I took off my pants, went into the shallow water, and dragged the tires onshore, but after one more bend of the inlet, I saw there was an entire trash dump in it – life would not be enough to drag all that debris out, and it was evening already. Then there started a thicket of reeds stretching to the highway and along its opposite roadside there unfolded the wide vista of the sea and sea alone…
But if going to New Dophinovka by the country road, there sometimes were huge ships hovering in the sky. The ships, of course, stood in the sea which merged with the sky at the horizon, that’s why you saw a field with a ship above it and, still higher or next to its bow, the immense red ball of the setting sun. Those ships were so large that they, probably, do not fit in the harbor and had to stay right there in the sea-sky…
~ ~ ~
With Slavic Aksyanov, at first, I had normal relations, even though I saw that in his past life he served as a Nazi officer in a death camp while at present he was too keen on producing baloney sensations by hoopla talks. And I even helped him to saw boards for the family couch…
The distance from Chabanka to the mine was about two kilometers, approximately same as from New Dophinovka, but with no windbreak belt alongside the country road. And in the open fields, some arrogant flies always started to follow me, a whole swarm of them keeping buzzing around and never lagging behind. But I did not want to bring a "tail of a follower" after me and give out the location of the mine, so I found a nice way of putting them off the track.
Nearby the hostel there stood a long structure of a former cattle farm, which I began to use as the disinfection lock in a spaceship visiting unexplored planets. I entered the building from one end, with all the buzzing flies swarming around me, and marched to the exit at the other end. The whiff of the manure from once upon a time allured them; confusedly, they rushed in all directions in active search for fresher dung, while I walked out into the air, with the food bought in Chabanka and without a single buzzing follower behind my back…
Now, Slavic asked the foreman for permission to use some floorboards from the old farm and make a couch for himself and his wife because he was expecting the arrival of his mother-in-law. Then we went and pulled out the boards for the project; a rather decent material they were, only nailed way too deep, but there was a breaker by us.
With the material procured, we started to discuss the measurements of the planned furniture item. By that time, I had already had a certain, fully developed, numerological system in which the meaning of some individual figures was brought to a complete clarity, thus, for instance, 22 corresponded to "death", 24 to "wife", 10 to "sex", and so on, and all that remained there was just to combine their meaning the way called for by the situation. Minding the purpose of the product, I offered him the best solution for its length – 2 meters and 10 centimeters. Which read that 10 for 2 is the very thing for a young family. But he balked!
"I wanna have 2 meters and 30!"
Okay, you know better what you want… He schlepped a "goat"-trestle from somewhere, the kind used for sawing firewood, and we started. A board on the "goat", two marks with the tape measure and – off we go!
When we stopped to catch a breath, his wife, Lyouda, was passing by to the hostel entrance. Pointing at the "goat", she with unhidden disgust announced to Slavic, "Don't you hope, that I ever lie upon this thing!" Full of indignation, she went away and I got finally convinced that she was not a native to this world. What normal woman has never seen a "goat"?
Apart from that, she could read thoughts… I once entered their room, where Slavic was eating soup and watching television. I said I was not hungry, and sat by the door to wait for him to finish off his havvage. And in the corner behind his back there stood a refrigerator, with a stand-up mirror put atop of it face down. The mirror frame had a pair of plastic legs to keep it upright, when not in the supine position.
From the chair by the door which I was seated on, the puzzle collected into a coherent picture: Slavic, eating the TV with his stare, ladles the soup into himself, the two green legs sticking out of his hair in the form of curved horns, kinda lyre only without strings, of course. Then I thought to myself, that is, inside my mind, "So, you're not only a Nazi but a cuckold too!"
Lyouda read that thought, and went directly to the refrigerator, she turned the legs down and gave me an eloquent look. Like, we need none of your comments on the skeletons in our family cupboard!.
Well, in general, when Slavic fired up the shakedown flights on that aerodrome of a couch in their room, there cropped up some inconsistencies in the game. Three days later, he dragged it out of the hostel in the tall grass and shortened with a hacksaw. That’s what the trial and error method is about…
"What's he bungling at?" asked a Makhno bandit another when they were passing by.
"As if it's not clear. A machine-tool for fucking, what else?"
"A-aha!"
Well, what else is there to expect from mujiks? They just can't bring it over in a subtler way, blurt out as is, without numerological refinement…
And when his mother-in-law arrived, he started to have fits of frenzy. He visited my room and made faces. The purpose of that fleering was clear to me without any explanations – he wanted to drive me mad…
Once Ivan, the driver of Machine 1, called me to share a midday meal with him and his assistant in their shaft. His wife worked in the canteen of some military school in Odessa, where they also trained Negroes from the countries of awakened Africa. So those Afro-Africans were not too hungry after their sleep, judging by the amount of provision she brought home from there. When Ivan removed the lid from that aluminum pot, it was brimming with meat on ribs, without any garnish though. The 3 of us—Ivan, his assistant and I—hardly managed to finish off that hecatomb, leaving a pile of bared bones on the sand by the 5-liter pot. And then Slavic came up to borrow some spare part for his stone-cutting machine; on seeing that cannibal still-life, he distorted his mug in earnest, bitten by the recollection of everyday oats from his mother-in-law, most likely.
Maybe, that’s why several hours later, when the hostel residents were enjoying the coolness of late evening, he wanted to fight me. He even snatched one ingot from the gold stock in the tall grass, raised it with both hands over his head and hurled at me. The action resulted in a really beautiful sight – the full moon pouring its tender light onto the scintillating tracery of dashes in the arc-shaped trajectory chosen by the lobbed ingot for its flight, gleaming lazily with white, apparently aluminum, color against the velvety darkness of balmy night. (Or was I wrong, and the mine was mining platinum, after all?)
Now it was my turn to ran backward in the manner of Alik the Armenian. Slavic's wife, Lyouda, took him home from the arena of demonstration performances…
During my next visit to Odessa, I dropped to a legal consultation. I did not plan it at all, just their office sign caught my eye. Without leaking any names or geographical locations, I asked for a recommendation if pestered by a neighbor in the hostel.
"Turn to the Komsomol Committee of your enterprise."
Well, and those also were not of this world. They are already anywhere, see?!.
But if Supreme Head was Yakovlevich, then who, the heck, could the chief engineer be? It's not difficult to guess – who's Creator's antipode? Prince of Darkness and master of the impure, in all his glory.
That could be easily deducted even from their attitude toward each other – respectful, but armed, neutrality. I recollect them standing in the trunk tunnel and talking eye to eye – correctness itself! The foreman in his black spetzovka and the chief engineer in a summer shirt with a white handkerchief bent over its collar to keep the dust off. If there were a safari helmet on his head instead of the regular plastic one, it would be a ready picture "I'm the master here!" Although, of course, the depths under the ground are his domain.
(…you might protest here: how could be possible a contact between such antagonistic opposites? Do not forget – it was the twentieth century around, in its second half, when everything got so intertwined, confused and tangled that a simplistic Geometry could no longer help out…)
I assumed the stance of a foreman’s sympathizer. I took a liking to him just so, no proof demanded, like, bread’n’fish multiplication and stuff. In fact, his trick about juvenilization of my worn-out passport was more than enough for me.
By the way, the chief under Chief also presented his credentials. One day during the midday break, he came to hold a trade-union meeting. (Ahem!)
We settled under the trees by the hostel. He got seated on a chair and took off his shoes, and socks too. Like, don’t you think all talks of my clove foot are a stupid gossip now? Stuff and nonsense! But I am not the one to be hooked on by illusory chaff.
The devils of Makhno bandits lay down around in the shaded grass under the trees in their black spetzovkas. Only I was in the nylon shirt which I wore in the mine under the spetzovka jacket and every evening washed in the shower.
(…nylon is ideal for washing: you rub it for six seconds flat and it's clean, and then it gets dry even faster…)
In the way of a polite, albeit arch, response, I also took off my helmet. Like, you wanna make me believe you've got no hooves? Come on, admire my hornlessness then!. All the other workers had their helmets on, especially Slavic Aksyanov.
And so it went on for some 10 minutes when suddenly the rooster crowed. Surprise! The chief, who's not Chief, shoved his socks into his pockets, and raced to the nearby country road, thrusting his feet into the shoes on the run. And there, as if from under the ground, popped up a biker in black and in a black-leather ribbed helmet, like those the miners wore in the days of the first five-year plans. And they whizzed off in the direction of New Dophinovka. Not clear enough? Who shoots away at the rooster crowing?
Not that I confronted with… well… the chief engineer, but there happened certain frictions. Like it was when a truck dumped a heap of coal for the winter, and I shoved all that anthracite into the stokehold. At the end of that day, he came from Vapnyarka and asked me, haughtily so, "Well, how much is you want? 3 rubles enough?"
I went amok: half-day in the sun, and he, like as if offering a pittance to a dirty wretch. Okay, you're the prince of darkness, but I am also a chosen, even if not initiated, one.
"No!" said I, "let I'll be paid the worth of my labor."
"You won't get such an amount then."
I did not believe him and the next day applied for a day-off and went to the Mining Management in Pole Explorers Square. I was shown the door of the chief accountant office, Weitzman was his name. No sooner had I stepped into his office than the phone on the desk rang. He took off the receiver, "You are listened to."
(…just like that, word for word: "You're listened to." Clear, smooth, distanced. Without sticking his neck out for a fraction of a millimeter. That's some Weitzman for you!.)
I depicted the essence of the matter in hand, he got it at once and took out a thick book in a gray paperback The Unified Norms and Tariffs, and he found in it where it was about loading and unloading of loose coal and gave me to read. There it stood in black on white, that even if I were shoveling that coal in an area north of the Arctic Circle—to be paid with the highest northern coefficients applied—and with each shovelful of coal I were circling 3 times around the hostel, before heaving it into the stokehold window, so as to gain the bigger distance of moving the load—then, by the rates from that normative bible, I was entitled to the payment of 1 ruble and 20 kopecks.
(…and it was revealed unto me, who did not know the truth hitherto, that to foremen, supervisors, engineers, etc., etc., should the workmen bow low for the lies added to work orders. Without the addition of false figures, the working class would die out long ago, together with their families. Pray for your benefactors and bread givers, O, workmen!
But what bastard composed all those rates and tariffs? I’d like to share my shovel with them in a brotherly way…)
His diggings were near the Hunchback Bridge in Odessa. There he lived in a house of his own, together with his wife and their son, fifth-grader. He treated me to a glass of home-made tomato juice. (Ahem…) Everything as expected – some red, thick, brackish liquid. But could I say "no"? Margarita also drank it, at the annual ball of Satan, in Moscow. Yet until now, I brew the black tea after the recipe he shared… That evening he also shared his recollections about working in the Arctic, where, after work, he put a pair of bricks on an electric stove and seated his wife atop of them to bring into the working conditions for the night…
One time the impure attempted at a putsch, they wanted to change the layout of world stratification. The day before it, the mining engineer Pugachov popped up at the hostel and opened one of the locked doors in the corridor. Like, distributing to the miners some food products to be paid for later, on their payday.
I walked along the corridor and Slavic Aksyanov shouted to me from that room, "Come on, get it too!"
There were five Makhno devils inside the empty room and a box of "Prima" packs upon the desk without a chair; Pugachov was meting out from 5 to 10 packs each.
Food products, eh? Ammunition supplies! "No, thank you, "Belomor" is my smoke."
Going out, I still heard Slavic motivating the devils, "No fear! Youth will write off everything!"
The next day not a single traffic lights worked in Odessa. It was a day of complete bedlam; people were shouting at each other, and the trolleybuses were jostling and jumping like mad. There was no shooting, of course, because the putsch took place on a different level. However, by my estimations, it failed, as long as I was in time to buy The World Atlas, a thin booklet in a soft green paperback…
In Odessa of those days, the most stable and widely used expression of approval was "you can’t but love!"
"What’s your thought about Sonya's latest groom?"
"You can’t but love!"
And, instead of "no" they were saying "dick to mama!" Yet, with Odessa-Mommy around, it sounded even patriotic.
"So, The Black-Sea Footballer won yesterday, or what?"
"Dick to mama!"
In the small park on Deribassov Street, there grew some unseen trees looking as if they had cast off their own bark. In the evening, the brass band played there, almost like in the times of Johann Strauss, but seldomer. And in some other park, in the daytime, I dived into the pool from the five-meter-tall tower, the air whistled in the ears during the dive. A little later two guys jumped off as well, holding hands, but it was a heels-first cannonball dive and one of them had black socks on. That way those jumpers were effacing my footprints to put off track any possible followers…
At the intercity phone calls station on Pushkin Street, they played a good joke on me. That time I made the order and waited, then went out thru the porchless door wide-open onto the sidewalk. The moment I lit a cigarette, the loudspeaker inside shouted, "Nezhyn! Is anyone waiting for Nezhyn?!" I threw the cigarette into the trash bin by the door and ran back. "It's me! I am waiting!"
To which the telephone operator said on her microphone, "So, wait then!" The crowd in the hall split their sides. That again, they were saving me from something.
Some cat was waiting there too. They announced his number connected, "Chelyabinsk on line! Enter Booth 5!" And before going to where was told, he uttered with a bitter disappointment, "Eew!"
That's an enlightened one! By the booth number alone, he knew beforehand the pending talk’s outcome!.
I got to know Odessa very well. On foot, for the most part. I found the Public Library Nr. 2; and Privvoz Bazaar, where the porters in blue smocks pushed station trolleys in front of them, shouting "Feet! Feet!" so that the crowd would give way to them warned by their shortened "Watch your feet!". There, in Privvoz, an old gypsy cast a curse on me with their witchcraft art; I did not get it what for, but she should know better or maybe I just popped up at the wrong split-second…
Factory of Gastric Juice; who would ever imagine there were such enterprises?!. When I was passing thru the yards of five-story blocks, mujiks at their "goat" game would bang the bones louder against the tables to shoo off the cats, so they would not run across the sidewalk in front of me. Also auxiliary allies…
To Odessa I was going by bus, only a couple of times on foot; it's only 20 kilometers or so all in all. And one time I walked from Vapnyarka to New Dophinovka along the seashore, over the cliff. In one place there stood some military installation behind the fence of barbed wire. The sentry yelled from there it was forbidden to pass by their site, approached and demanded to present my papers. I showed thru the wire my handkerchief with the sailing boat in the circle. He realized at once that the level was different, "Okay, get along…"
From up the cliff, the view was very beautiful. The sea was quiet, almost smooth, yet sparkled and glittered under the sun. Sometimes the wind rushed along to ripple the water and draw various types of galaxies. Spiral, for the most part. The wind was copying them from the clouds that hovered above the sea…
In Streetcar 5 going to the Arcadia beach, I saw Gray from our Stavropol construction battalion. It surprised me a little – four years had passed and he remained looking so young and, for some reason, in the black uniform of a sea cadet, in their cap with the ribbons hanging over the back.
I stood up and quietly asked into his ear, "Gray, is it you?" He did not respond, neither moved the tiniest bit although he heard me, dead sure…
And another time it was my father by a newsagent booth. He did not look like my father at all, I only recognized him by his voice. It was in that exactly voice he told me of the murderer, whom the camp director brought to a new murder.
When he spoke to me, I pretended that I was all too busy examining the portrait of psychiatrist Burdenko in the Ogonyok magazine cover, which hung behind the glass of the booth, so it was the seller who responded to him.
(…confronted with the meetings of such a kind, anyone will start asking themselves: what's going on? But you can't get an answer to it if having no grasp on the conception of monad.
Monad is a made in Germany gadget for philosophizing, which everyone understands to their personal liking. For someone, it might mean a singularity from a set, while for someone else – a whole set of singularities.
For example, when a guy asks his girl, "Tell me! Am I just another one of many for you, or the only one from all their many?" Here, the second "one" in his question is that very monad or, maybe, vice versa…
In some Indian Bible, there is a gaudy picture of a baby that crawls over the grass, a step ahead of him, a kid is running, before whom there walks a man just about to overtake a withered old geezer, and then again only the green of the grass. The picture is called "The Circle of Life". That is, from nothing to nothing.
Now, together, they all comprise one monad because it's the same person.
So, it only remains to assume, that monads can be formed in a different way; for example, by the timbre of a voice; and everything falls into place. It depends on the standpoint from which you are viewing the monad: here – it's your father, while on its other end – a homeless drifter speaks up to you by the stall with Burdenko.
Of course, all that is a bit more complicated than to learn by rote: "if you stumbled with your left leg – everything would be okay, but if it was the right one – don't even try, turn back and go home." However, monad, as abstruse and hardly comprehensible as it is, still explains a lot…)
~ ~ ~
A certain Odessa Preferans player in his youth was a part to the illegal underground. But later he reformed and began to collaborate with the television studio of Odessa as a commentator on the latest criminal news. He even wrote a book sharing impressions from his bandit past, in which he claims that the year of your birth, and especially the summer period, was marked by an unseen, critically baneful, surge of violent crime in Odessa.
It’s a very rare case when a printed text failed to convince me because that summer I was there in person and never noticed anything of the kind. Which speaks in favor of the theory about the existence of parallel worlds. The reformed commentator and I lived in separate parallel worlds, therefore each of us was receiving different impressions from different worlds both of which had in common only the ordinal number of their current year. On the face of it, 2 separate worlds, despite their parallelism do overlap from time to time which explains a couple of criminally tinged episodes in course of otherwise quite quiet summer of ‘79.
In all of my reiterations to and detours within Odessa, I happened to observe just 2 occasions of contact and reciprocative penetration of our parallel worlds. The first one occurred on the morning bus Gvardeyskoye-Odessa when a young slob from the second seat on the left rebuked the driver for a minor change in the route thru the city outskirts.
Upon arrival at the bus station by the New Bazaar, the driver hurried from his cabin into the bus with apologies and technical (to some extent too-too obsequious) explanations. He was forgiven when the other passenger on the same seat spoke for him to her easily irritable companion…
The second interpenetration occurred in the building of the railway station, where I inquired a militiaman about the number of population in the city of Odessa. For an answer, he directed me to the police station on the first floor. The on-duty lieutenant, to whom I repeated the question, told me to wait for a while.
Obedient to his instruction, I leaned against the barrier separating us and watched as the red worms of his lips lustfully closed on, wrapping and twirling, the filter of his unlit cigarette, under the accompaniment of heavy thuds and loud shrieks behind my back.
With a fleeting glance in that direction, I registered a door opened to the next room, where a woman in a chiffon headscarf and the black robe of a janitor aptly wielded the hard handle of her wooden mop to knock the crap out of a bozo draped in only his red underpants. Same red underpants with seldom prints of blue tennis bats as on me, maybe, not as vividly chromatic because of being acquired a couple of years before mine. So I didn’t feel like watching his obviously lost match. Turning back, I dropped my eyes in meek concentration on the top of the high sturdy barrier separating me from the lieutenant… After getting the pleasure due to his rank and position, the officer lit the cigarette, and said that a million was not reached yet, maybe, somewhere about 600 000 people…
That's why, when on my next visit to the city and being late for the last bus to New Dophinovka, I preferred to spend the night in the greens inside the circular intersection in front of the railway station. It turned out to be completely deserted because the underground passage to it was unlit.
Having chosen the most distant from the lamppost bench, I lay down. The bench beams felt so hard that I recollected Edgar Poe killed on a bench in Baltimore, state of Maryland, for $40—a literary fee he had just collected—and partly pulled out the breast pocket in my shirt the advance I received on that day in Pole Explorers Square, like a coquettish handkerchief made of three-ruble notes, for the purpose of self-training and development of my personal courage. The traffic along the circular intersection had almost ceased, but the bench became even harder. However, I kept my eyes shut for the principle's sake because the night is for sleeping. So I was not asleep when there came the tiny sounds of cautious steps over the rounded walk.
He came up and for about a minute stood over me lying on the bench, with the Edgar Poe mustache, in a blue T-shirt and the Soviet three-ruble banknotes sticking out from the breast pocket on it. Then he left, keeping as quiet as he was when approaching. For the sake of principle and training, I did not open my eyes to see who it was.
In the morning, I woke up on the same bench rather chilled and stiff as a board but, unlike the great American romantic, alive. A flock of ravens flew croaking in the dawn sky, flapping their wings. Seemingly, the same ones that coasted above Nezhyn heading north-east on the Day D. It did take them a long time to get over to Odessa. A feather dropped from the wing of one in their squadron and, somersaulting in zigzags, kept falling down.
The face upturned, I followed the jerky trajectory and walked to intercept it, not heeding the dug up beds with sickly flowers. At the meeting point, I outstretched my palm towards the black dodger, caught it, and went back to the asphalted walk. There I dropped the catch tenderly into a trash bin saying, "Not while I'm around, please."
