Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
(…a lesser-known German poet from the first half of the 20th century once cared to bemoan his own unworthiness, otherwise, he would not allow for the world's self-massacre.
Few of the venerable laureates rise to so a deep comprehension of a poet's responsibility for the fate of the world. Inertly cling they to the trivial standpoints and rituals of their time, yet if you think about it closely…)
However, just to think is not enough, it's also necessary to think out, as Valentin Batrak, aka Lyalka, cared to say somewhere…
On reaching the deadline for my return to take you and Eera over to Odessa, there, in fact, was no place to bring you to. However, with the word given, I had no choice but come back, and at least explain the reasons for the postponement of the move. I had no money for the travel, neither anyone who I addressed for a loan. The urgent need brought about the idea to exchange the wedding ring for money at the pawnshop.
While I found it in the city, it was already open with the line starting outside the front door… The pawnshop was one long room with barriers along its three walls. In the sheet glass partitions atop the barriers, there were small rounded windows one of which even had iron grating. It was to that very window, the farthest one, for all that crowd to queue. At the time when the pawnshop closed for the midday break, I was at some four meters from that window.
In the breast pocket of my T-shirt, there was the ring that I hardly managed to rip off the finger the night before. Even the soap and water from the washstand nearby the hostel were of little help. Along with those self-inflicted tortures, I remembered the projectionist booth in the Plant Park and once again felt sorry for Olga.
The pawnshop opened afresh and, on waiting in the line for one more hour, I apprehensively handed the ring in because the person before me failed – her earrings did not pass the check for genuine gold. My ring proved acceptable though and I received 30 rubles, as well as the pawnshop's ticket…
The following morning, I came to the New Bazaar and bought a blue plastic mesh-bag, and 4 kilos of apricots to fill it with, they were not fully ripe though. Then I went to the booth with flowers and said that I needed 3 red roses.
For the flower girl, it sounded like a clandestine signal word, and from some special place behind the counter she took out minikin roses of dark red, exactly 3, on long sturdy stalks. "You meant these?"
"Sure."
From the New Bazaar, I went to the airport—not much better than the one in Stavropol—and stood in the line till the midday break. When the ticket office window was closed, I remained standing nearby, like a statue with the 3 red roses in my hand, and only put the apricots on the floor under the window. Keeping 4 kilos for an hour seemed too much of a strain for my hand.
After I bought the ticket, there remained 4 hours before the departure and I was already tired of life with my hands busy holding something. I took the flowers and the fruits to the automatic storage cells, but I could not leave the roses inside because I felt sorry for them; they would surely welk in there with the air and light cut off. Looking around a small corridor, I found the janitors' room and asked for permission to leave the flowers and apricots there. They agreed and I went out into the city hands-free, but I did not venture too far.
At six I came after the roses. The janitors were washing the floor in the corridor, and one of them told me I'd better wait. I insisted on getting them right away to be in time for the plane departing in half-hour. She grinned and, without further arguing, let me take the roses sticking out of one of their tin pails filled with water. The janitor only warned that they had treated themselves to the apricots a little bit.
I went to a long shed on the edge of the take-off field and, together with other passengers having tickets for that flight, waited till midnight because each half-hour the loudspeakers announced a delay of the flight to Kiev. My delayed fellow-travelers also tried the apricots and approved.
After midnight, in the crude glare of the arc lamps along the runway, two stewardesses were counting us on the stairs to have no more than 27 passengers because we were an odd load for a potluck flight to Kiev by a smaller aircraft, AN-24. When onboard, it took some time to become warm after the chilly night breeze from the sea during that long wait… Since then I eschew arguing with janitors…
At the takeoff, I was fighting down the thoughts that they might have brought the asphalt while I am away. In course of the mentioned meeting of the trade-union members stretched in the grass, the chief engineer informed that the construction team had come across sharps in their scores. For those unfamiliar with the music notation, he put two fingers of his left hand over two on the right one, crosswise, representing prison grates. Therefore, the finishing works would be continued by those wishing to live in the intended hostel. The Aksyanovs and I enrolled for moving over there, and the Bessarabian family abstained.
The projected hostel was located about 20 meters from the old one, and it also was a former cattle-farm building. Each apartment in the hostel under reconstruction was of two spacious rooms and a single standard window. I chose the one looking on the sea inlet.
However, the walls in our would-be home still had to be plastered, and the window awaited its glazing, but I liked our place all the same, even though it had neither doors nor any floor yet.
Once, they dumped a truckload of hot asphalt between the old and the new hostels to make flooring in the rooms. Aksyanov together with his assistant at the stone-cutting machine were moving the asphalt with a wheelbarrow to the Aksyanovs' rooms, while I hauled it with a pair of pails to ours. They managed to cover with the asphalt both of his rooms, and I only half of just one, yet making the flooring of higher quality, before the heap outside was finished off. That's why, while the plane was gaining altitude, I did not want any asphalt were brought without me around.
Then I started looking out of the porthole. The moon was absent from the cloudless sky, but the stars were shining, thousands of them. And the lights of cities and towns far below were shimmering too, no bigger than the distant stars. And I thought I'd rather for the pilot not to lose his way among all those stars from everywhere. But then, deep in the darkness under the plane wing, I made out separate lights, maybe in some village, whose configuration was the exact replica of 1 from the only 2 constellations I could ever single out in the night sky. The village lights repeated positioning of the stars in the Little Bear, and I relaxed because it's impossible to get off the right course with the North Star in view…
~ ~ ~
At six in the morning, I got off the Kiev-Moscow train at the station of Nezhyn and by the first bus of the day came to Red Partisans. The door was opened by Ivan Alexeyevich who hardly recognized me because I had become so lean. I took the blue plastic mesh with the apricots to the kitchen and carried the dark red roses to the bedroom past the folding coach-bed in the living room, where the mother-in-law was already starting to stir.
Both of you were asleep. I inserted the roses stems into the small violet vase by the pier mirror on the table and looked behind the window curtain. The handkerchief with the anchor was gone from the windowsill. Okay, I could find out later… I undressed, went to bed, and hugged Eera in her long white nightie.
"Oh! You?"
"Yes."
"So scraggy?!"
"Hush, don’t wake up the baby."
Then Eera told me that her sister Vitta was on a visit in Odessa, and wanted to see me at the mine. She reached the village of New Dophinovka, but a villager named Natalia Kurilo advised against going any farther, because of a too difficult road.
"Yes, that Natalia sits at the mine office in the pit up there."
"She complained that you didn't listen to anyone but the foreman."
"How could she know? She sits up there."
"She must know if she's saying… And how is all over there?"
"There all is so… classy… the sea is… well, in general… ships above the field…"
"But you got so too skinny… Have you had sex with someone over there?"
"You crazy?!"
"Quiet! Don't wake the baby! Well… you were doing something right now… you've never been doing that before."
"Ah… I got it from the stone-cutting machine… her disks move that way."
"What's your position there?"
"Some long-named one – the assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator; but, to myself, I call me shorter – a phallic associator."
"What's that?"
"From old Greek. It's a long story."
"And what are the housing conditions there?"
"We'll have two rooms. So big. Tolik from Machine 2 says they are well located. Looking away from the winter winds. And the sea inlet under the window."
"But look at yourself! Thin as a rake!"
"Hush! The baby!."
But all the same you got awake…
"Look, where's the handkerchief that I've left on the windowsill?"
"What handkerchief? I've never seen any."
In general, that's correct. To see a thing you have to know what you're looking for. I, for example, could not recognize the sea at once.
(…so the sailing boat had not found its anchorage and, later on, it disappeared too. For all I know, it might be still sailing expanses of the universe somewhere…)
It was not what you’d call inspiring news to learn from Eera, that in the maternity hospital she was informed that her hymen had not been completely busted, and you had to finish it off from inside.
Though embarrassed, I still did not feel much difference, if any, after my wife lost her virginity in such an unconventional way. Yes, there was a certain feeling of guilt for that overly stealthy night in Bolshevik, yet since then I always was shooting the bolt my level best, unreservedly. Besides, she was not the first virgin to give birth…
(…leaving aside the Holy Family, our particular case was the result of textual programming thru the novel by a French writer, Herve Bazin, which I read back in my adolescence.
Although there was no childbirth in that work, I still should not be allowed to read just anything at all…)
I went to Konotop to collect warm clothes, the sheepskin coat, rubber high boots. My father gave me his navy black pea-jacket with copper buttons in 2 upright rows. I even took my guitar with me, because I was moving in earnest to stay there.
And in Konotop, they also kept grumbling that there had remained only half of me, but I never was in finer fettle indeed… My mother wrapped the things in a white cloth and sewed it up; it turned out a bulky and thick bale.
Yet, I had to do one more thing. To do and – cut and run. To do, and lie low at the bottom, in the mine "Dophinovka"…
(…throughout all those five years plus, I was perfectly aware that everything should be paid for. Nothing is given for nothing. And I don't mean money for pot, which goes without saying. I mean the main payment for getting stoned, high, and on the flights. And the closer to the final full-stop in the trough of the common urinal at the Kiev intercity bus station, the deeper I realized that I even knew who exactly was paying the unreasonably high—more expensive than any money—price for my buzz.
I had neither desire nor occasion to share that knowledge to anyone, because it was so complete crazy nonsense. Nutty hooey. That's why I silenced it and kept it hidden and buried away, even from myself, but it came back to me over and over again, even at my not-stoned moments, that I was irredeemably indebted to the long-suffering people of Cambodia sweating in the swelter of the sub-equatorial hothouse climate of South-Eastern Asia. And there was no forgiveness for me…
Nothing comes from nowhere, and it is the immutable truth. The tactile sensations at my maiden getting high, in the stoker-house of the construction battalion, established an inextricable link between blowing jive and getting smashed in the brains.
Subsequently, the rigor of the correlative interdependency dissolved, but the buzz continued to flow in. Which gives rise to a question: if not me, then who is smashed in the brains?
By the end of the five-year-plus period there came the answer. The Khmer Rouge troops, when seizing another village, killed its inhabitants, the same Cambodians as themselves. To save the ammo, they were butchering them by bamboo club blows against their skulls. Then they turned the bodies on their backs and photographed dead faces, like for a passport. In those pictures, the right eye is half-closed and the left one bulging out.
I saw them. Multiple rows of those pictures—dead people with feline faces—were regularly placed in the central newspapers. They looked like some different non-human race, them those people with their, as if skinned, faces. I had what to feel guilty about.
Of course, after the events accompanying my first flight to Odessa, the peasants' brains were not any longer being smashed out for me, which did not stop the show so that someone else would get a kick.
In Odessa, I found myself amid a universal battle of who knows who against whoever else. In the course of inconceivable vicissitudes, I became a some who's ally, making enemies with whoever else, still remaining in the complete dark as to who is who?
One thing was totally clear though, that those, with whom, as willed by fate, I happened to be on the different sides of the barricades, would not fail to track me down and square the accounts. It's no coincidence that, the moment I got off the Kiev-Moscow train in Nezhyn, a window in one of its cars opened and a glassy-eyed (apparently from the monad of the chief engineer) spit out a long streak of saliva on the platform. He undoubtedly was leaving a signal mark for other militants from their dark legion where to pick up the trace of my further perambulations and follow my subsequent movements up to Konotop. And there, they would easily and inevitably discover the cannabis plantation at the end of the garden of my parents' khutta in the Settlement. With incalculable and unimaginable consequences of the most horrid nature.
My duty before the unknown allies, and before the remains of still not finished off peasants at their squalid villages in the humid depths of jungles in South-Eastern Asia prompted the only right decision…)
In the shed at Decemberists 13, I took the bayonet-type spade and went to the plantation in the remotest bed.
They stood proud of their almost three-meter height; issuing the piercing rich aroma.
…forgive me, I know you're eager to live, forgive that I was late for that train to Odessa, but now I have to do what I have to, forgive me…
And they were falling—one after another, one next to another, one on top of another—from the bayonet strikes piercing deep, slicing the roots, cutting the life off…
I stacked them in a high pile, went back to the shed and returned with the jerrycan of gasoline. The crackling fire rose up, the thick white smoke floated.
Alerted by auntie Zeena, my mother hurried to the garden, "Sehryozha!. What are you… Why?. How is it?.."
"It must be done."
She left, and my brother Sasha came instead, "Sehryoga, what are you at?"
"It must be done."
My brother always believed that I knew what I was doing, even when I did not know it myself. He stopped asking me and just stood there, and we both watched the fire turning the dense green of the trunks and branches dumped on a pile into black charred sticks and fine ash, brittle, white…
~ ~ ~
The aircraft landed in the Odessa airport at midnight and I managed to be in time for the 6.00 bus from the New Bazaar bus station. Outside the city, irresistible slumber overcame me so that I missed the stop and woke up only after 300 meters past it. At my request, the driver stopped the bus atop the ascend, and I crossed the windbreak belt.
In the garden of the outermost cottage amid the thinning dusk of the retreating night, an elderly mujik in his underwear and a woman in a white nightgown swept, for some reason, the beds with brooms. They moved in a strange, robot-like, way. The mujik's eyes were filmed with the glassiness. I did not see the woman's eyes though, she was careful to keep them averted. Rather strange agricultural practices for so early an hour, but I could hardly be surprised by anything already.
In my four-day absence, they did not bring any asphalt. But the pinkwashed outside plaster of the old hostel walls had got spattered with blue splashes and dispersed lines as if to camouflage the barrack. But why blue?.
I got in the everyday groove at the mine. The weather changed because one day coming back from Odessa, I found that in my pocket remained just a single three-kopeck patina-blackened coin. "That's not money," thought I to myself and threw the coin back over my shoulder, among the trees of the windbreak belt. For exactly 3 days thereafter, the cold wind blew from the sea, refuting my dismissive opinion of the 3 kopecks, and making me get the message in the byword "to throw money to the wind".
The electrician, my neighbor opposite the corridor, died on the road from Chabanka before reaching the hostel. They found him 3 days later. I always knew that was a dangerous stretch of the road. In summer, there were constantly flying fluffy spherical balls, like to sea mines, but white and smaller, of course. Probably, one of them scraped the defunct, when he was unaware or failed dodging.
They buried him in the village cemetery, on the cliff between the highway and the sea. Kapitonovich was carrying a wooden cross ahead of the coffin, like a banner, but he himself had a sash of a long narrow towel tied in a diagonal loop from one of his shoulders, the way best men of grooms adorn themselves at village weddings, instead of pinning a handkerchief up the jacket sleeve as was the custom at funerals in Konotop. What else might you expect of them? They’ve heard the song but got the wrong sow by the ear.
In the father's black pea-jacket with yellow buttons, I presented a colorful figure, like, a seaman from the black-and-white movie "We are from Krondstadt", but I also helped to fill up the grave. Then we were taken back to the hostel by bus. The women from the mine office in the pit prepared the wake feast from their home supplies. I wolfed a disgracefully enormous amount of every viand like on the visit to the Tshombe's field camp in my student years…
The repaired radio set was brought back to the hostel, and I had to move into the room of the diseased electrician. Soon Vasya, the new roof-fastener, joined me there. At first, I doubted his sex, when accidentally noticed red-brown stains on his bedsheets, as if from menstruation. He hurried to explain, that they were from a tomato that rolled under his blanket and he kicked it to squash in sleep, although I hadn't been asking about anything at all. That hostel's just another Bellamy Isle with everyone around reading your thoughts before you had the time to think them off. However, what simple explanations might sometimes be found for incomprehensible, at first glance, facts…
Autumn came into its own. I inserted glass into the window frame of the respective room in our would-be two-room apartment, however, they still were not bringing any asphalt… And so it went on in its everyday manner until the moment when the chief engineer came from Vapnyarka and said that I was announced wanted in the all-Union hunt, and the mining management received a letter from the NGPI with accusations of sheltering a runaway who shunned working off at the place of his appointment.
"So, write the application."
"What application?"
"Requesting to fire you of your own volition."
"I have no such wish."
"We cannot retain you here after such a letter."
As I stubbornly negated any desire for leaving, a compromise was found, based on one of many articles in the Labor Code of the USSR: "dismissal by agreement between the parties". Thus, instead of a chosen, I became just a party…
In the end, I had a parting walk about Odessa streets in the sheepskin coat wide open, like a soldier from the Peasant Army of Nestor Makhno, and in rubber high boots bravely splashing across the puddles left by the recent heavy rains. When back in the hostel, I packed them in a bale with the rest of my clothes and the tools which I had started to collect already, one by one: a hammer, an ax, a saw, an iron, an electric water heater, and a white enamel kettle.
(…the night I was bringing it from Odessa it was real dark with some primeval darkness that you meet once or twice in your lifespan, darker than in abandoned galleries without the flashlight. All the way from the Dophinovka village to the same named mine I was singing to perk the kettle up, not let it get too spooky. No, not whistling in the dark but singing and shuffling the road too so as not to miss the right forks, all the way to the farm-like barracks of the miner’s hostel, which I could see by simply groping at that time, all the songs I could remember. Maybe, for personal tone up as well, yet only in part for it is a disgrace for a chosen which I was at the moment to be afraid of darkness. Only in the dark you can see light and become enlightened, right? And become an initiated chosen. Only they found me there and cut off and out of that game for kids. Damn!.)
The bale was taken to the station and sent off by a luggage car. Then I returned to the hostel where a recently bought briefcase and sports-bag Aerobica were sitting together with the guitar, before starting to the airport the following morning.
Slavic Aksyanov dropped into our room. We finished off a whole pan of fried potatoes under "The Bolero" by Ravel from Vasya's receiver. I told Slavic to fix the door to the toilet booth above the sea inlet. It was kicking back in the tall grass, I had seen it there. He swore to execute my last wish. However, just in case, I threatened that if he did not, I would haunt him the way the Hamlet's father’s ghost was molesting his sonny. A genuine funk flashed in his eyes. Who would have ever supposed that even they were afraid of spooks?!.
~ ~ ~
Eera told that they had sent a letter from the Transcarpathia to the institute, reporting my absence from the appointed school. Gaina Mikhailovna was summoned to Rector, who demanded of her to disclose my current location. After Rector declared that in summer he had personally met me in Odessa, she was forced to give away my affiliation with the mine. Now she was going to have troubles at work, and my diploma would be taken away unless the Republican Ministry of Education annulled my appointment.
I had to urgently go to Kiev, as far as the metro station named after Karl Marx, and up the street starting from The October Revolution Square to a gray-stone building in a row of similar ones, yet different to them by its sign of the Republican Ministry of Education, and up the white steps of polished marble to a tall leather-lined door on the second floor…
Head of the department in charge of shirkers, surnamed Baranov, looked 5 years older than me and superbly refined with the appropriate chiseling, grinding, and polishing as required by his position. The only chink in his armor was the single blonde hair on the dark gray shoulder of his jacket, donned over a snug woolen waistcoat thru whose narrow cut glimpsed a thin-pin-striped necktie against on the Tattersall shirt of squares as fine as those in the elementary school students copybooks for Arithmetic – unpierceable coat of mail.
(…yes, because the clothes we wear are not for just airing our dress-code. Their main purpose is to protect us and not only from the weather, which is too trivial. First and foremost, they have to protect us from other humans more adequately clad for the current situation.
Remember that Yalta Conference? Stalin and Churchill in the greatcoats of higher commanders at their respective armed forces and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in between the iron-clad rhinoceroses, flashing his democratic chic? Guess whose country had to bury their leader a couple of months later? I can’t keep back the tears of condolence watching his naive necktie and defenseless fly in the pictures.
But then who knows? FDR might have been in a suicidal mood right then…)
He glibly trotted it out that our state for 4 years bore expenses to give me the higher education free of charge, and it was time to compensate the charity by honest work in the Transcarpathia or say goodbye to my diploma.
I did not waste time on useless arguing. We both knew it perfectly well that the interests of state was the ace in trump suit, there was nothing to counter it with. My defense was built on my passionate desire to work in the field of enlightenment of the younger generations, and nowhere else but on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, yet how about my family?
He encouraged me to take you and Eera over there.
And what about the second or, rather, first of my daughters?
The presence of Lenochka was a surprise for him. By the force of inertia, he suggested deporting her together with the rest.
I had to show my passport to prove that she was the product from my previous marriage. After a bitter pause, I admitted lack of information of her mother's current whereabouts.
That was the checkmate. Großmeister Baranov had not been trained to parry such moves and, having got to Zugzwang, acknowledged that I had a really swirly plot. I would get the free diploma—namely, the cancellation of my obligations to return my debt to the state by honest work at the place I was appointed to—if there be presented the reference from the Head of Street Committee, that Lenochka lived at 13, Decemberists Street in the city of Konotop.
Meanwhile, the bale sent from Odessa arrived at Nezhyn. The tools did not impress my father-in-law, but he got delighted with the teapot strainer. It was his long-term dream to have such a one, only you could not find it in stores even for ready money… Eera and I started discussing at which of the construction enterprises in Nezhyn I should apply for a job to get an apartment as soon as possible when she suddenly said that I needed to be checked, as advised by her mother.
I was a little surprised because medical check was the must when you applied for a job, even without her mother's advice. As it turned out, I had to understand that there was a need for special examination, to check if I was normal at all. Some traits in my behavior were giving rise to certain fears and threatened to disrepute in the public eye the otherwise totally respectable, if not for me, family of Eera's parents.
For instance, quite recently I walked the streets in torn shoes, and I also collected every mote of dust around the baby's carriage, and any question, even of the most trivial nature, made me think for too long before answering, and when she was in the maternity hospital, I came home in the middle of night and declared that the rain was warm. Besides, Eera was shocked by the news from Konotop about my fanatical auto-da-fe of the cannabis plantation, which, though not included in the list of deviations, spoke volumes…
I had nothing to counter with, it was the King and Queen pair from trump suit, she was right on each and every point.
Yes, shortly before that talk, on a clear peaceful autumn day, I went out for a walk wearing my shoes. They were not torn, of course, but fairly worn-out along the sidewalks of Odessa and country roads in the adjacent Komintern district. The walk inspired an elegiac mood. I recollected the distant galaxies on the smooth sea under the steep cliffs near Vapnyarka, the endlessly long street of Kotovsky's Road, and the ridiculously short one of Sholem Aleichem walked by those brown leather shoes with lengthwise incut pieces the tops of toe caps. They were sort of a spaceship on the return from an interstellar expedition across the universe – still alive, but hopelessly out of vogue… When I was taking them off in the hallway, Gaina Mikhailovna remarked that it was time to use some warmer footwear. I felt really pleased with such caring attentiveness from my mother-in-law…
And I could not deny the delayed quality of my reaction to any questioning. Each inquiry that I was addressed with fired up an inaudibly rumbling computer in my mind (although I did not even know the word "computer" then) revving in a hectic round of the combinatorial analyses of all the possible responses to choose the one whose value would not lose its validity even in the most unforeseeable future.
(…an idiot! All that, in fact, was needed:
"A?. Yes,.. Hmm…"…)
As for the entrenched defense line around your carriage, I have already mentioned it. Nonetheless, even fully aware of my innocence, I never thought of debating or proving anything—especially since I had no excuse for neither the warm rain nor the annihilation of cannabis in merciless conflagration—so I just went where Eera led me…
It was a corridor on the second floor in an unfamiliar building with wide floorboards painted red. The place was rather crowded. On the whitewashed wall, there hung a sheet of Whatman paper with a picture executed with crayons in the technique of The Funny Pictures magazine where a kettle addressed a washcloth with the question, "Why did you tell the saucer I was a colander?"; most likely, a gift from some art lover patronizing the institution. A young man in the army officer pea-jacket without any insignia was happily contemplating the picture. His forage cap was tilted a sliver of a notch on a screwballish side.
Eera entered one of the offices to state complaints. Then they called me in, but no conversation followed. The doctor, addressing exclusively Eera, announced that I should be examined in Chernigov because he was not qualified for the like cases, not even competent.
(…exactly as my father used to say: "They are sitting there, getting their salary but when you turn to them – 'I am not Copenhagen!' is all they ever can give out!"…)
The Chernigov psychiatric hospital was located 4 kilometers from the city, in full correspondence to the nearby bus stop named "The 4th kilometer". The gate in the tall concrete wall of the institution was conveniently nearby the bus stop. The collection of modern huge-block buildings behind the wall would readily beautify even the city center by its architectural style, were it not located outside it.
