Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
"Does it mean that you asked, 'What's your attitude to me?'"
(…an interesting question, eh? Where else could I get those data from?
By the way, one of the respondents also asked in their turn, "And what's your attitude to me?"…)
Yes, life turned upside down: once I used to go from Nezhyn to Konotop on weekends, but now from Konotop to Nezhyn. On Fridays by 17.40 local train to Nezhyn; on Mondays back from there by 6.00 local train. 3 times I overslept that 6.00 local and began returning by 19.30 on Sundays because I got into a flap to deteriorate my positioning in the line for getting an apartment.
(…when there was the Negro slavery in America, a number of the Afro-American families got split. Say, the husband was slavering on the plantation of one master and his wife was several miles away on the plantation of another one. On holidays, her husband was visiting her. Such a woman was called his "broad wife".
When I learned that, I regretted that I knew English at all, so deeply the term scratched me, I don't know why, but I got really upset…)
Because there were no streetcars in Nezhyn, the city buses grew too aloof. The tin plates on special posts at every bus stop were telling, with black on yellow, at what exactly time bus number this or that should pull up by, but reading those plates would only aggravate frustration. According to the tin-table, no less than 3 of Bus 5 should have already passed the stop, while you were still waiting for at least a single one… At last! It appeared in the distance instilling a timid hope that… No, it revved by, ignoring the stop because of being jam-packed to the utmost…
However, that night Eera and I were lucky. The moment we reached the bus stop, it was approached by a bus. It was a Saturday night and we walked out because Twoic invited me to play Preferans at his place. He was already a last-year student and did not live in the hostel but rented a flat somewhere, so we arranged to meet in the main square. From Red Partisans Street to the main square there were just 2 bus stops, and we would go on foot but for that bus turned up. Eera would hold on to my arm, so as not to slip in her high-wedge high boots on the firmly trampled snow with rigid circles of white on it drawn by the cones of light beneath the lamp pillars…
When we were dressing in the bedroom, Eera asked me to pass her the belt from her frock – a long strap of fabric. Because the bedroom was so narrow and to skip squeezing between the bed and your carriage, I just threw the belt to her. However, one of its ends I kept pinched with my fingers, in case she did not catch it. Eera, not following my actions after her request, bent forward to zip up her high boots, and the other end of the belt swept over her drooping back.
I was stunned by the striking resemblance of the situation to that scene in "The Gypsy" movie, where Budulie lashed his wife with a whip for goodbye because he was going away to the war, like, gypsies had that sort of tradition. However, Eera had not noticed anything, and I consoled myself with the thought that I was not a gypsy and there was no war anyway…
When the bus pulled up at the stop in the square, there had already accumulated such a crowd that even 2 buses would not be enough. I got off first and stretched out my hand to Eera, helping her to descend. No sooner had she been on the stop than the crowd rushed to storm the bus doors. However, I managed to fence Eera behind my back. And then some girl shrieked loudly because she got almost run over in the stampede. Fortunately, she managed to grab onto the bus side and was not trampled by the crowd pouring up the steps.
As a man not only noble but also gallant, I thought it was absolutely wrong, especially in the presence of my wife, and I shouted to the girl, over the mass streaming between us, apologizing for all that bedlam, "I am sorry!"
Someone in the crowd did not want to be inferior in gallantry to me and, deducting it was I who pushed her, hit me on the cheekbone. Or, maybe, he'd been schooled that a fact of violation must be followed by the fact of punishment.
And then I declared out loud to him and to the crowd which for a moment forgot about the bus and tarried waiting for my response, and even the full moon seemed to turn her face closer to hear the words: "With all my nonresistance this is too much to bear!" And the blow was answered with my blow.
Probably, he was not alone there, or else the guys, united by the frustration from a long wait in the embittered crowd, immediately turned into a close-knit pack but there poured blows at me from all the sides – they found a scapegoat to splash out their rage kindled by inconveniences in life design. All I could do was to cover my face and head with my arms bent at elbows but, in my humble opinion, the self-protection attitude was executed by my body on its own accord, without waiting for my decisions. I, personally, could only hear some unintelligible yells. Who to whom? What about?
When there sounded the growl of the started engine, I somehow was already in the square, off the stop, in the cross-light of the street lamps bounding the place, but still keeping on my feet, although bareheaded. Probably, the wrath-spillers were too many, and they hindered each other to knock me down flat on the trodden snow crust. The pack ran off to catch the door from slamming on the other side of the bus. It left and I returned to the stop where, among a dozen passengers who had not managed to squeeze in, Eera stood with my rabbit fur hat in her hands. Farther aside, in the shadow of the dark news stall there loomed Twoic who had come to meet us…
He led us to his flat which he rented together with Petyunya Rafalofsky, and I played one pool with them there. Then they went out to see off Eera and me. The narrow sidewalk allowed for only two persons to go side by side, and Eera was in the first couple walking along with Twoic. He wore a long sheepskin coat and a furry malakhai headgear giving him a look of a bear next to Eera in her coat of straight cut and a closely fitting woolen hat.
I was walking behind them, alongside Petyunya, and felt unbearable bitterness because she was not with me. Yet, what else could I do? To kick up a scene of jealousy? To pull her away from the Twoic's side? Then who was I? Hooey-Pricker in the demi-saison coat from Alesha Ocheret, freshly from under the kicking herd in the square. No one would want to walk with such a wretch by her side, even if she were your own wife. In the skirmish an hour ago, I was not hurt too bad but how painful it was to walk coupled with Petyunya now!
He and Twoic saw us to the square, and then still farther, down the street to the bridge by the hostel, where we finally managed to part. For a goodbye, Twoic, averting his look away from me and taking deep often swallows from his cigarette, expounded on his having a sex recently with one of his Bio-Fac sluts, how she embraced his waist with her legs, while he was dragging her around the room holding up by the grip at her tits. That gross self-advertising of a male winner utterly shocked me. I’d never share shit of that kind in presence of even those sluts of his. Some f-f..er..filthy mudak.
When we walked on towards Red Partisans, Eera never put her hand on to my arm, and she kept silent. I just had to shut up as well. Some emprises are certainly not worth it, like begging pardon of stranger girls…
~ ~ ~
The management of SMP-615 found a way to, at least partially, smooth out the fact of keeping around a bricklayer with a diploma. I was appointed one of the Assessors at the Comradely Court.
Such courts considered minor, insignificant misdoings, offenses not addressed in the articles of the criminal code or, if envisaged there, not bearing excessively grave nature, like, some petty vandalism or, say, theft of trifles. The Comradely Court was rather a means of moral upbraiding than a punishment dealt with all the legislative rigor.
The position of a Comradely Court Assessor provided no payment and was electable by vote. However, it's not always possible to draw a clear borderline between election and appointment. The words "Who's for?" during the voting at trade-union meetings was not a question addressed to those present but rather the drilled-in command, kinda sounding the bugle to signal it was time to raise their hands. That unanimous show of hands might serve an illustrious demonstration of a secondary reflex, no less indicative, but not as repulsive, as the use of a Pavlovian dog dropping saliva thru the glass tube.
The very same responsive reflexology ruled at Komsomol meetings. Actually, thru all the years of my work at SMP-615, there occurred just one such meeting caused by an unexpected visit of an inspector from the City Komsomol Committee. It's highly unlikely that he came to the assembly hall on the second floor of the SMP-615 administrative building on his own accord, he sooner was charged to check how high the life was running among enthusiastic youth under the age of 28 engaged in the construction sphere.
So our Seagull made an extra round to bring us to the base, yet knowing there was no pay awaiting there diminished our enthusiasm usual for the rides at this time of day. The pitiful lack of the puniest interest even in the most pressing issues of our time demonstrated by the busload of us brought to sit thru the meeting, which rolled, with catastrophic swiftness, to its end, filled the cadre with bitter indignation which made him forget the rut of protocol and ask another question, both stinging and exotic, "How could you be so passive?"
At so unfamiliar sounds the folks simply did not know what to do with their hands, that’s why I had to get up and respond rhetorically, "And who, I wonder with your kind permission, would the active lead if there were no acquiescent passives, eh?" Still and all, that f-f..er..I mean, forlorn diploma keeps you obliged to follow a certain line of conduct.
The inspecting functionary was unprepared, in his turn, for such a counter-question, and the meeting got safely closed…
So, the SMP-615 management decided they would show a proper respect to the system of higher education in our state by making me, a carrier of a diploma for such an education, an Assessor of the Comradely Court which required one Chairman and two Assessors for the period of one year, until the next report-and-election meeting of the trade-union.
At the Assessor position, I discovered a latent tyrant lurking inside me, who used to come up with suggestions of the most draconian punishments. For example, a month of solitary (sic!) correctional labor for the plasterer Trepetilikha, in the northern, far-off parts of the SMP-615 grounds. Whereas, for her, a day was lost, if at the bus ride from the station to At-Seven-Winds she would not yackety-yak a couple of colleagues to coma.
Of course, from the SMP-615 production building (the place of the supposed correctional labor) to the check-entrance house by the gate, there was a distance of merely 200 meters, and the check-entrance house was the seat of Svaitsikha the watchwoman, whose tongue was also in no need of oiling. However, the court did not heed my proposal and sentenced Trepetilikha to be removed for 3 months from the position of straw boss in the plasterers' team, which meant the cut in payment to the amount of 10 rubles for each penalty month. Anyway, she got off lightly because her offense could easily have a political resonance.
The trial revealed the following chain of events:
Trepetilikha peeked out of a window in 110-apartment block and saw that the accountant of SMP-615 was going home.
Well, and why not go? She lived in the At-Seven-Winds area, and it took her about 15 minutes of a leisurely stroll to get home from the SMP-615 administrative building. And the time was already twenty to five. Her gross mistake was in answering the question of Trepetilikha who drooped out of the window, "Well, well, and what's there to be carried?" The plasterer meant the cellophane packet in the hands of the passer-by.
"Fish," responded the dimwit of an accountant.
The word "fish" served the detonator for what followed. Trepetilikha went to pieces, collected the women of her plasterers' team and, with prolonged intonations, informed them on the unfair distribution of life's good things, despite the era of developed socialism, "They're sitting there in the offices! Made themselves warm and cozy! An electric heater under each bitch's asshole! And we a getting stiff from cold! And when it's fish, it's for them?! Enough, girlfriends! Collect your spats and hawks! Yes, and even so brazenly she mouthed, 'It's fish I've got.' But do we have no families?!"
The fact is that our Seagull bus at times brought food from ORS, aka the Department for Workingmen Provision. Once, when we were on the 110-apartment block, they brought fresh buns, and on the 100-apartment block, it was mineral water in glass bottles of 0.5 liters.
When and what was meted out in the administrative building of SMP-615, I had no idea, but the following day the women on Trepetilikha's team did not start working and that, from whichever viewpoint, was a strike.
I never knew whether they had brought them fish or some other equivalent, but the finishing work was, after all, continued and Trepetilikha stood before the court. That is, our Comradely Court. The SMP-615 management could not turn a blind eye to the fact of idle time with a political lining to it, especially when the deputy chief technologist wore a tie with the imprinted sickle and hammer. Which says a lot. Yes, my cloth scarf bore a pattern of Kremlin tower on top of the five Olympic Rings and the inscription "Moscow-80", but I had nothing to choose from, while the neckties at the Department Store were fairly diversified with crisscrossed, striped, and even dotted pattern…
On a mature contemplation, it can’t but be admitted that rejecting my proposal to transfer Trepetilikha to the SMP-615 base, the Comradely Court made a wise decision. Keeping her there would tantamount to playing with an open fire atop of a powder keg. Had they brought there something of which she did not get a share, she'd blow up the whole base.
"There are certain women in the settlements of Russia…"
Without false modesty, I have to note that in the villages of the Konotop district one might come across even more cool females whose potential could only be measured in megatons or even by the Richter scale.
"Phui! What brazen folks I have to get along with! The whole of the village was out to hassle me! I’ve barely managed to bark them off!"
And the welder Volodya Shevtsov would even get exiled, had the court played along with my suggestion.
He was a very professional welder who had worked for 20 years at the KEMZ Plant, and there was some kind of hereditary intelligence about him. Maybe, that's why he was drinking like a fish.
When looking at his crisp curly hair, I somehow had associations with the City on the Neva. There was some intelligentsia flair in Volodya… elusive feel of the white nights in Pete-Town… subtle allusion to the Peterhof fountains… But he got tanked up like any other boozer, especially on paydays.
At the court session, the Chairman described the case as follows, "We get off in the station square after work and, by reaching the next from there traffic-lights, Volodya manages to get plastered in full."
Well, it was he who slept – from the station to the traffic-lights by the Under-Overpass there were 2 delis plus the Rendezvous bar in the station square.
At that point, I suggested deporting Volodya to some countryside where there were no traffic-lights tempting simple innocent souls by their unhealthy satanic wink, which would take away the reason for Volodya to booze until he's steaming.
The court rejected such inhumanity, and Volodya himself took offense at me, without emphasizing the sentiment though. And that's a pity, I did miss his classy refinement, "If you would like to go and fuck yourself, please?" at which splendidly worded suggestion, you felt the refreshing gust of breeze from the seafront of our Cultural Capital…
SMP-615 was based in Konotop, but it had several branches operating at other places: a pair of jacks in Kiev, a construction team plus a truck crane in Bakhmuch, a team with a BELARUS tractor in Vorozhba… The third case was that of the overseer at the Bakhmuch branch. They finished somewhat building there and were leveling the adjacent area with a bulldozer borrowed from a local organization. The overseer noticed that a pile of the moved earth was about to bury a defective bridging slab left over after the project completion. So he took the slab into the yard of his friend or, maybe, relative to cover the earth-cellar pit. The building was safely delivered, and then some rat reported a plunder of the socialist property.
At that court session, I had only one question for the criminal, "What would happen to the cracked slab had it not be taken to cover the earth-cellar?"
He gave a discontented shrug and replied, "Would get buried in the ground. What else?"
I demanded to declare public gratitude to the overseer for his contribution to raising the general welfare of the Soviet people. It did not matter who was whose relative, but all of us were one united family.
Due to the general monotony of life, that proposal was also neglected… At the next year's report-election trade-union meeting, no one mentioned my name for election to the Comradely Court. As if I had never had that f-f..er..I mean, fully worked off diploma in my life…
~ ~ ~
After you turned one year old you came on a visit to Konotop, briefly though, for a week or 2. That summer there were frequent thunderstorms. After one of them, I drove you for a spin in your carriage. My mother and Eera were against it, but I did not want to sit in the house and wait for the next teeming rainfall. Finally, Eera conceded for our going out, and they went back to sleep, people grow sleepy in the rain.
There were lots of huge puddles all over the road, but you and I still managed to make a roundabout over almost all of the drenched empty Settlement – from the streetcar terminal to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, and back along Professions Street. You were adequately dressed and sleeping under the buckled apron and the raised top of the carriage. Only at the end of Professions Street, when the rubber tire fell off the right front wheel, you woke and sat up, and grabbed the tire which I had placed over the buckled apron.
You grabbed it with your both hands as if it was a steering wheel, but I took away that wet and muddy piece of rubber. You whimpered a little, then hushed but never went to sleep again. Decemberists Street was not far away already, and we reached there on just the hind wheel pair in the carriage…
Then the weather cleared up and in a couple of days I took you out to the field near the streetcar terminal. There I got you out of the carriage and put on the green grass. You were not too firm on your legs yet and just stood with your hand leaning against the carriage side.
I lay down in the grass nearby. The green field slanted upward into the blue sky, and larks were singing from up there. So loud, joyful. You stood there until your red pantyhose showed a dark patch of moisture. I had to take you back home because pampers had not been invented yet…
Another time I took a spare pantyhose along with us and drove you to the pond by the Approvals village, which Kuba and I had been visiting on our bicycles. It's not too far, 5 kilometers or so. You slept all the way.
The pond by Shapovalovka was rather big. I placed the carriage on a low sandy beach to watch your reaction to an unfamiliar world because you had not seen any ponds yet, it was like the first walk-out from a spaceship to an unknown planet.
You woke and sat up, left on your own with something you've never seen in your lifetime. I stood behind the raised top, so as not to interfere with the first impressions.
You turned to the left—only the wide water surface was seen from your viewpoint—then to the right, there was just the same incomprehensible substance, and you burst into tears. Of course! Waking up in the middle of who knows what and all alone. I had to show up and soothe you before we rolled back….
The clothesline under the load of already dry washing stretched from the wicket at 13 Decemberists to the front porch. On the way, it passed above you sitting in your carriage. My mother stood next to it with the basin in her hands to collect the dried things. Suddenly, you gripped on something hanging alongside, rose and stood up in the carriage at all your height.
My mother told me to remove the baby and you, like, responding, threw both your hands up, as if in a dance, as if to say, “See how big I am! I can do what I want!”
And then thru my mother's eyes, there flicked something so dark and eerie that I instinctively pulled you back. Rather, I pulled the handle of the carriage and, by that move, I yanked its bottom from under your feet. You tumbled over the carriage side onto the ground. The spot was, luckily, soft soil and you, fortunately, landed on your back.
Instantly, I picked you wailing at the top of your lungs, but Eera was already darting from the garden in panther leaps to pound her fists against my head and the shoulders because my hands were busy holding you…
The local train taking you back to Nezhyn was overcrowded with the passengers standing in the aisle as one thick mass as well as in the space separating the bench-seats that abut the car walls between the windows. When I had to take your plastic potty to the toilet in the car vestibule, I kept it over my head like a waiter his tray in a crowded tavern…
(…in my memory, I keep two sets of images which can be easily retrieved and considered in detail. The first set is a collection of apocalyptic impressions, full of howling darkness, crowds in panicky stampede, cold horror.
The second one contains nice, heart-warming pics but they arouse poignant longing for something unreachable, or underachieved. Like that view thru the open door on the bus pulled up nearby Vapnyarka, next to a lean concrete post bearing a blue tin square at its top numbered 379, and behind it there opens a narrow gap for a country road in between the walls of ripening wheat halted immovable, as well as a boy of ten by the roadside post, his hand aloft over his wheat-color-haired head to wave goodbye to the departing bus…
I mean, all those mental slides with you in them are from the second set…)
~ ~ ~
After coming back from Odessa, I lived in a never-ceasing fit of panic, in agonizing fear of what, sooner or later, had to happen or, maybe, had already come to pass. The fear was fueled by jealousy and resentment at not some specific one, but at his taking my Eera from me. The excruciating dread was kept deep hidden as some shameful want, but no camouflage eased the choking grip of misery that never let me go.
Occasional reprieve happened only when Eera was nearby or when I was slaving at a construction site, or worked at the translation of another story. But even then, the crushing anxiety did not disappear entirely, but only receded into the background. Physical pain is more merciful – the part of the brain receiving the pain signals gets inured and eventually turned off, so the pain no longer reaches you.
I did not attempt to alleviate my situation. Firstly, because I never learned to analyze and make up plans for actions, I just lived on, silent about where it pains, enduring the unbearable. Secondly, the alternative to that agony was no less horrible than the torture itself…
Our team was sent to the local train stop "Priseimovye" by the bridge over the river of Seim to build a 2-apartment cottage for the track-men and their families. We worked there about a fortnight.
At one of the midday breaks, I spread my spetzovka on the grass and lay down next to the sun-scorched footpath with the traffic lines of ants bustling over the cracks in the ground. To pass the time at one-hour midday breaks, I had Vsesvit, a thick monthly received on subscription, where they printed Ukrainian translations from the world literature of all times and peoples. Soon, I got tired of reading and put my head on a page in the open magazine.
It was a sunny day around, filled to the brim with the busy summertime life. The ants were dragging their flotsam and jetsam along the cracked footpath, the tall grass, swaying under the rare gusts of breeze, carried the shaky shadows of leaves in the foliage of trees and bushes above it. The unending buzz of horseflies, bees, wasps, and common flies filled the sultry air.
From time to time, the breeze idly picked up the page next to the one under my head, and then everything around got screened off with whiteness and blurry spots of letters brought overmuch close to the pupil. The standing page effaced the piers of the bridge across the river, and the long spit of a narrow sand island washed up by the unruly current, as well as the fisherman standing on that island with his long fishing rod, everything got lost behind the whitish blurriness.
Then the page would fall back to disclose that same fisherman, yet standing in the current already up to the ankles of his high rubber boots. The fishing rod got bent by the taut line, he whipped it up snatching from the restless stream the flicking splendor of a catch. The geezer took it off the hook and threw behind his back onto the spit, where the fish went on pulsating in the sand. He threw the freshly baited hook back into the river and, watching the float, did not notice the river gull that crabbed up along the sand to the beating of the fish. Grabbing its prey, the bird flew off.
The fisherman did not see that, neither how another river gull dived from above the bridge, attacking the first one. They collided in the air fight, and the fish fell from a five-meter height back into the river. The geezer did not see anything of that, he stubbornly followed the float.
It was only I, who saw the whole episode, but nothing of it touched me. I did not even hold the page so as to watch uninterruptedly. The river and the white blur took turns before my eyes, and I saw that all of that was Nothing. All that life full of events and struggles and changes was just a series of pictures on top of Nothing. I watched, and I could also not watch and nothing would change anything. Everything was drowned in absolute Nothing. Even the constantly present pain receded getting flooded with Nothing, from which I did not need anything.
I lay stretched out like that long spit of sand around which the stream of life hasted on, gurgling and splashing, but both of us knew that all that was just one and the same, bleak, void, Nothing. That was some terrifying knowledge. How could you live with it? How to live on without wanting anything and rid of waiting for something? So, the choice I had was not overly extensive: either Eera and the hang-fire agony, or Nothing…
Eera was visiting Konotop without you as well. So was it for the occasion of Vladya's wedding, when the winter was setting in.
He married Alla, who already had a child and worked at a large canteen. The wedding party was held at that very canteen on the outskirts of the city, nearby the stop of the diesel train to Dubovyazovka. The "live music" included already heavily bald Skully and still curly-haired Chuba. At times, at the guests' warm requests, the groom also approached the mike to sing along with the ex-Orpheuses. Everything was delicious, loud, and fun.
But all that was on the second day of Eera's stay, and in the late evening of the first day, I made two discoveries. The first was about the hidden resources in the human body…
At the starting night, Eera and I passed thru the veranda to the attached room. In winter it was not heated and turned into a sort of storeroom for odd household things. That’s why when leaving the kitchen, Eera threw over her shoulders some of the jackets from the hooks by the door; she always liked to try things on. In the room among the other things, there stood a pair of old armchairs, the relics from the Object times, whose wooden armrests still retained their yellow varnish and enough of stability to let us have deeply satisfying sex among other stored items. At such moments I did not think of any agonies…
We seemed to cum together but Eera, with her eyes half-closed, started to moan "More! More!." Until that moment, I knew it for dead sure that after orgasm you needed to catch a breath for at least half an hour.
"Mo-ore!."
And up I got to penetrate and go on above the glitter of the freshly spilled trickle that aspersed the floorboards a minute ago. However impossible, at times it, nonetheless, can happen…
The second discovery, concerning the white spots in the human's conscience, occurred when Eera and I returned to the living-room.
My father had already gone to the bedroom, and my mother, who felt completely out of sorts on that evening, sat on the folding coach-bed with her hands dropped widely off onto the seat, she was looking in front of her and not at the TV on its stand between the two windows. Only Lenochka was watching it from her, not yet slid-out, chair-bed. The subdued murmur of the TV merged with the feeble light from a couple of bulbs in the luster.
After groaning for a while, my mother asked me and Eera to help her to the bedroom because she had no strength in her at all. We took her by the arms from both sides and helped to get up. Giving out weak grunts and shuffling her slippers over the floor, she moved, with our support, towards the curtains in the doorway to the dark kitchen.
In that manner, the 3 of us reached the middle of the room beneath the chandelier of 5 white shades only 2 of which painted the circles of yellowish electric light in the whitewashed ceiling. When there remained a final couple of meters to the doorway, the light around me suddenly dimmed going away and I found myself confined in the darkness, not complete though because I could discern that I was having a sex with my mother from behind. Wild horror lashed me, kinda electric shock, and threw back into the lighted living-room. To the kitchen doorway, there still remained a distance of about a meter.
