Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
In fright, I gave Eera a sidelong glance over the white kerchief swaddling my mother's head. Eera, with her eyebrows knit together, took care to keep her eyes on the lowered profile of my mother as if she had not noticed anything. So, that was just a vision, yet more prolonged than that second of running thru the Greek night…
Asking Eera to hold alone for a sec, I hurried into the kitchen to turn the light on there. We took my mother to the bedroom and helped her to sink onto the bed, where my father muttered something in his sleep. Then we returned to the living-room.
Befuddled and kinda reeled, I slid the folding bed-armchair for Lenochka and slid out the folding coach-bed for us. Soon all of the khutta turned into a mutual sleeping kingdom. Only the clock on the wall above the TV was ticking from its plastic box against my temples. It also had no answer to what all that was at all and why that all had to be happening to me…
~ ~ ~
As always before, accepting the notebooks with my translations, Zhomnir jerked his bushy eyebrow up and started to read, inserting his pencil marks in between the widely spaced lines, though he agreed that his options were also not ideal.
"Your trouble, Sehrguey, is that Ukrainian is not your native tongue, you hadn't absorbed it with your mother's milk."
I refrained from stating that the first months in my life I was nourished with the milk of Carpathian cows.
He went over to his archival chamber and returned with a thin book in his hands. "These are Gutsalo's stories. That's how one should write!"
And Zhomnir began to read out excerpt lines from the book, clicking his tongue at the end of especially cool ones, then he handed the book to me for mastering the craft.
(…I had read that collection as well as any other works by E. Gutsalo ever coming my way. What am I to do if singing praises of devotion to the morning dew on cucumber seedlings do not turn me up? (For that same reason, by the way, I do not like Yesyenin even though he's from Ryazan region.) Besides, after The Enchanted Desna by Dovzhenko, who had so beautifully exhausted the theme, attempts at picking it up anew are doomed to miserable copying of the flavors and mood.
And when Gutsalo tried his hand at writing on city life, he dropped off to the level of cartoons in the satirical magazine Perets. I am ready to agree that in one of his stories of that period, he managed to mention the reddish brick dust on the black padded jackets of bricklayers, but the detail had nothing to do with the plot nor with the characters in the story. The good but odd detail just stayed dangling about, a kinda limp cock in an immense vagina…
The constituent parts of a work should add, converge, and develop the whole structure, the way it’s done by pulling the constellation of the Southern Cross and the shimmer of lamplight in the red hair of the doctor on the empty ship deck in the lines opening The Rain by Somerset Maugham, to suggestively send the reader’s train of thoughts down the road towards the clash of priesthood and prostitution…)
Yet Zhomnir should know better and, so as to compensate for the faulty nurture in my early days and mitigate the backwash of skipping the Ukrainian literature lessons at School 13, I took a thin copybook, titled it "Ukr. Lit." and then read all of the books in Ukrainian from the 2 long shelves in the Plant Club library.
There were both Lesya Ukrainka and her mother Olena Bdgilka, and Panas Myrny with his oxen, and the splendidly great Kobzar, and Marko Vovchok, and Ivan Franko, and Jankowski (idolized by Zhomnir) and many others in alphabetical order. About some of them, even Zhomnir knew only from the skimpy notes taken at the overview lectures attended by him in his student years.
(…after sifting all of that thru the sieve of careful reading, I can safely state that in the terms of artistic value most of the authorised authors failed at creating anything above the level of petty amateurs. Quoting a Ukrainian proverb, "Where there is no nightingale, you’ll get nothing but sparrow chirrup."
The sparrow-squealers just kept retelling the latest European fashion in the contemporary belles-lettres. That's great! Glory be to them! The Ukrainian language began to be seen thru the press. However, that's politics and I am talking about the literature.
As of yet, only three authors in the Ukrainian literature would pass with their colors flying in front of the world literary standards:
1. poet Kandyba, aka Olyes, who had for years been wallowing knee-deep in blood at the Kiev slaughterhouse, writing the tenderest poems imaginable;
2. writer Vasil Stephanic;
3. writer Les Martović.
Real master knows what he wants to say, because he has what to say, and he also knows how to say it even without much of learning, just as humans find out the way of natural breathing. The rest of the literature aficionados are left with jingling their cowbells in an attempt to portray the newest of the fashionable waltzes by Herr Strauss, which he creates to the delight and admiration of the decent European public.
Still and regardless! We will catch up, and overtake his orchestra because we've got our inimitable balalaikas!.)
So, after work, I had what to busy myself with. And even a local train could be easily turned into a passable study. That's why on Fridays, I came to At-Seven-Winds with the briefcase and, after work, in the train car, I took out of it a thin copybook, a pen, and a volume of stories by Maugham, in English.
Stooping over the compact print in a book page, I plunged into the tender humid night of the exotic southern seas, where the fragrance of the jungle in bloom spreads for miles beyond the islands.
Emerging back from there with a pair of rough lines for the copybook, I stacked the pinch into the ruled-paper cells, and dived away to roam forth along the sandy beach by the water's edge with white-crested, even in the dark, waves of the rolling surf, and, with a start, looked thru the pane in the car window… Pryosterny?.
Delicious rides they were…
Writing into a copybook placed atop of the briefcase was not comfortable, yet the desk problem found its elegant solution. On Fridays after work, I extracted from my locker the plywood piece intended for the shelf to keep a headgear because if you're holding a piece of plywood 50cm × 60cm pressed in your armpit, it doesn't look too outrageous and, actually, it is not in the way when boarding a bus or a train car.
Upon arrival in Nezhyn, the desk of plywood perfectly fitted into an automatic storage cell, while the briefcase traveled to Red Partisans and there under the table covered with the tulle tablecloth, on which the old pier mirror stood leaning against the wall. The expenses for storage of that single item in a cell amounted to reasonable 30 kopecks: 15 kopecks to set the code inside the door and slam it, 15 kopecks more to open it, after collecting the code from outside.
Once, on the way back to Konotop, the cell door jammed. In such cases, it's opened by an on-duty station attendant with a special key, and in the presence of a militiaman. Before opening the frivolous cell, the militiaman asked me about the things put inside.
I did not want to expose the fella to an unnecessary strain and never mentioned any desk nor shelf, but the ungrateful bonehead utterly refused to believe even in a piece of plywood.
When the attendant opened the cell door, I pulled out those 50cm × 60cm and walked away, yet the militiaman for a considerable stretch kept at the cell agape, peeping into the void of its dusty innards. He, to use the favorite byword of our team foreman, Mykola Khizhnyak, was inspecting it like a magpie the piece of busted bone. A trivial magic trick, dumbo…
And at times the briefcase was filled with also things for laundry because Eera had instructed me to bring the washing over. I readily obeyed because it felt like we were, sort of, becoming a family, even though in the mother-in-law's washing machine but still somehow, yes….
However, the first family celebration was no success. You had turned exactly 1 year old, and I invited Eera out to a restaurant. She refused because Gaina Mikhailovna was not in favor of our going to restaurants.
Well, at first, Eera a little hesitated: to go or not to go? But I failed at persuading her because of my tongue-tied manner of speaking. Most often the fits of tongue-tiedness befall me at some casual, everyday, situations, I just cannot explain obvious things. "Well, you know, let's go, eh?"
Some impressive appeal, you bet… And in the meanwhile the mother-in-law, leaning against the jamb of the bedroom door, trots out neat arguments, slick as a whistle, that it takes a decent woman at least 2 days to get prepared for going to a restaurant.
"Well, what? Come on, let's go, eh?"
And a suchlike pitiful crap instead of saying, that it's our daughter's first birthday which would never happen again and that sometimes an impromptu might be a better hit than hatched events.
Tongue-tiedness is a real curse. It calls for some abstract topic for me to be quick as a wink at turning a repartee…
When Brezhnev for the first and final time was passing Konotop by the train made of just a couple of cars, they put up his portrait, 2 months in advance, in a tin shield taller than the station itself. The giant close-up of dear Leonid Ilyich—Mind, Honor and Conscience of our Time—with all his Gold Star medals of the Hero of the Soviet Union on his jacket breast. In case, he would glance from the bypassing car and see how totally we loved him around here.
Only they forgot to warn me on the day of his traveling by, and I walked from the Settlement along the tracks until a militia sergeant stopped me, and told I could not go to the station.
Okay, said I, I was going to the Under-Overpass and not the station which I could easily bypass by taking that service path so that to keep my jeans clear of the fuel-oil-smeared rails.
The guy in the militia uniform loved and respected Brezhnev no more than I did. However, taking into account the concomitant circumstances—a person without a uniform trying to prove something to a uniform-rigged guy who, moreover, had an order—he asked me an absolutely well-grounded question, "Are you sick?"
To which, without a moment’s delay, I gave it out proudly, "I am incurably infected with life."
Yay! I liked the sound of it myself. The sergeant, from awe and admiration, could not find what else to say but did not let me pass all the same….
That is why I had to celebrate the family holiday alone, although Eera and Gaina Mikhailovna predicted in a duo that nothing good would come of it.
Yes, the prophecy was slap accurate. All I managed to get in the "Polissya" restaurant was a shot of vodka – the last in stock, so they told me. I was encouraged to buy a bottle of cognac instead, but I'm not a drunk to put away a half-liter cognac single-handed. So, I concentrated on that lonely shot and meditations, for a snack, on the futility of arguing with Mothers and that under the conditions of all-pervading matriarchy there certainly had to be a system of communicating vessels between my mother-in-law and the unfriendly waitress.
In the "Seagull" restaurant, located farther off from Red Partisans, I bought a fluky bottle of champagne and also a parsley salad… On my way back from the celebration, the champagne, naturally, hit my bladder.
In those days I tried to do everything right (in the hope to avoid the inevitable). That was, like, sort of insurance – the righteous guy's wife couldn't cheat on him…or what? There, of course, was no guarantee but, if not to consider the matter too closely, the assumption inspired some puny hope… As long as peeing in the sidewalk was wrong, I headed for the toilet in the Bazaar whose gate turned out to be locked for a long time before my coming, and I had to climb over. That also was not entirely correct, but not too noticeable in the dark.
By the time when in the corner of the empty and dark Bazaar I approached the iron-sheet door to the toilet, it already bore a block-letter inscription "On Repair" drawn in chalk. Meanwhile, the champagne reached the peak in its fight for freedom, so I had to pour my indignation at the dictatorship of the communicating vessels out on that same door. Without impairing the inscription though.
Well, and who else could met me climbing out down the gate but a militia patrol? Welcome to your native planet! Of course, they did not buy it that someone would go over the closed gate when there was so much of sidewalk in the dark around, and I was taken to the sobering-up station.
The doctor there, to check my stage of intoxication, offered to perform several forward bends.
"Heels together, toes apart?" inquired I conversationally. But that capillary vessel complicated the task, and I had to do the bends with my feet pressed close to each other.
Then the doc asked how much and which stuff namely had been consumed, received clear information and, with a shrug, handed me over to the lieutenant.
The lieutenant wanted to know my place of work and, learning I was not local, asked for my mother-in-law's number and called Gaina Mikhailovna to identify my voice over the phone. Then they just pointed at the door, refusing to give me a little lift, and threatening to lock me up if I attempt to do any more nuisance of myself.
Thus, despite the die-hard opposition by conspiring females and their henchmen, your first birthday became a truly unique event – the one and only time when I got into a sobering-up station…
~ ~ ~
The development of my marital relationship with Eera moved onward thru gradual and quite predictable stages. At first, when after a working week I came to Nezhyn and excitedly pressed the coveted nipple in the doorbell, Eera in a flash opened the door for me. I hugged her in the hallway, and we kissed.
She even smeared my wrists with glycerin to treat the skin cracks from the frost at the construction site. "Oh, what a silly fool you are!" said Eera and I felt happy, although the cracks smarted.
At the following stage, the kissing got cut out. Still later, instead of embraces, we exchanged the casual cues, "How d'you?" "Fine." And that is correct because something had to be said anyway.
The relationship did not stop at that, and the door started to be opened by my parents-in-law, mostly by Ivan Alexeyevich. Sometimes, I had to push the doorbell button twice already…
In the winters when my hands' skin condition became of no interest, I stopped freezing it. Probably, I grew more experienced, or else the skin realized it had no chances of being treated with glycerin anymore.
At our final kiss in the hallway, I instantly realized that something was wrong. Instead of her lips, Eera somehow guiltily set up her neck, and there wafted a whiff of fox. It's not that I had ever sniffed a fox, yet directly got it – the vixen funk. Later on that visit, she told me that she had been home alone, the doorbell rang and it turned out to be one of her classmates from school. He knelt before her in the kitchen, embraced and kissed her knees, but she told him to leave and nothing happened.
And there, of course, happened another fit of covert agony, but even choking in the steely grip of jealousy I still managed to keep my heartbeat bursting absolutely out of time and, when it numbed and breathing gradually normalized, I somehow began to live on further…
From the hallway, I proceeded to the bathroom to wash my hands, and then entered the living-room to say "good evening" to everyone absorbed in TV watching, and to sit down at the table abutting the windowsill.
The table center was allotted to the TV but, beside it, there remained enough of the oilclothed room for the plate, fork, and bread laid by Eera so that I could have a supper. I did not block the screen and did not bother anyone, if only aesthetically – by my chewing profile on the left from the TV… Then I took the plates to the kitchen and washed up, as well as all that crockery-cutlery stacked in the sink after the meals on that day. I was not ashamed to wash up even when Tonya's husband, Ivan, was entering the kitchen. On the contrary, I was proud that Gaina Mikhailovna trusted me with the task and that after a couple of strict proficiency tests I was approved for the job of a weekend pearl diver.
First of all, I boiled a kettle of water on the gas stove, because it took too long to heat it in the boiler, for which it was necessary to bring firewood from the basement. The process of washing up took place in a large enamel bowl put in the sink. Civilization had not yet come up with detergents and other useful things for washing dishes then and, for a start, with a bar of laundry soap I rubbed a large piece of gauze to give it rich foam. And in the end, of course, I rinsed them all under the tap, in strict keeping with the requirements of technology shared by Gaina Mikhailovna. Washing up helped me to pass the time. I even liked it, especially in that part of operation, when the turned on gas was hissing and burning its blueish flame under the kettle bottom.
Besides, I was trusted with dusting the carpet taken off the floor in the living room out to the yard. It was a shabby thread-bare rug, so one could feel free to beat it thoroughly when dusting. Sometimes, when I was working it over, Eera would go out in the yard and say that it was enough already because the neighbors in the apartment block were human beings too and deserved compassion. And Gaina Mikhailovna once remarked that the method of my dusting showed the temper of a born translator. I cannot imagine where she could have seen translators busy with that job…
At times, I offered some services on my own accord. Like, when Gaina Mikhailovna was very worried about her son Igor being ill and hospitalized in Kiev, because she could not go there and find out how he was, and I suggested that I would go.
Igor was very surprised and could not believe that I had come to Kiev without any other agenda but visiting him. 4 hours on a local train to see my brother-in-law, with whom I did not know what to talk about. If I disclosed having a certain interest of my own, and that in those 4 hours I had finally read The Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Radishchev, would it feel better for him?
Then I had time and again to report to my mother-in-law what her son looked like. Well, he looked quite normal, except for an unmistakably monkish air, like all the other patients there. It was an officers-only hospital where they were given long blue gowns, yet allowed to keep their military forage caps. The combination resulted in an awesomely wondrous costume, especially when you watched the ostensibly strolling shut-ins in peripatetic gossip pairs along the allies in the tiny outside garden – the cape-like Merlin-style blue garbs beneath the khakied halos with the scrambled-eggs of cockades. Some special order of monks: Forage-Cappians…
And I was also entrusted to coat the apartment floor with the glossy red paint. Not at one go, naturally, because people had to live in the apartment undergoing the process of renovation; so it took two weekend-visits. But the kitchen, the hallway, and the corridor connecting them, Ivan Alexeyevich painted in my absence.
He helped me a lot when I decided to make bookshelves in the form of a bookcase without doors and walls. The shelves were, sure enough, designed for our future family library. 10 volumes of The Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language were already collected. I was too late to subscribe to the Dictionary, but many of its subscribers soon stopped to waste their money, and the rejected volumes were put on free sale at bookstores. Apart from the incomplete collection of the Dictionary, there were full Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s works in 4 volumes, a dozen books in English and a hotchpotch company angled at different bookstores…
At SMP-615, I could not find the material required for the project and asked my father-in-law to have the planks planed and cut in the carpenter workshop at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant. So, I supplied him with the list of measurements of what I needed… He brought the bundle of readied plank pieces and dumped it in the hallway of his apartment, then started to convince me it was impossible to make anything worthy out of them. He even called Eera to the hallway to be an arbitrary, "Look, what shelves could be made of these slats?" And those indeed looked very slim but, before asking him, I had thought out thoroughly how to make shelves that would be both light and sturdy.
The project was accomplished at 13, Decemberists because in Nezhyn there were neither conditions nor tools for such an undertaking. And when I sawed out the bridle joints in the planks and spread casein glue over the tenons to stick them into mortices and, when they dried, polished with sandpaper, and covered with light yellow varnish, then even my father approved the shelves.
Eera, on one of her solo visits to Konotop, was not too much impressed though, at furniture stores you could see more baroque items; yes, they're shelves, and so what?. As for Ivan Alexeyevich's false forecasts, it could easily be understood – the workman at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant workshop told him the planks were unsuitable for the project, and he just repeated the opinion of a specialist…
~ ~ ~
But then my initial perambulations about Eera's parents' apartment grew even shorter because I canceled eating in the living room… The decision was made when after my arrival at Red Partisans, it took my father-in-law way too long to open the door and, eventually entering the hallway, I heard the cries of a squabble. It happens, you know, a casual family stank.
I heard angry yells of Ivan, Tonya's husband, in high-pitched tones, then she herself flashed thru the corridor to the kitchen and back to the living-room, where more voices wrangled in a confused manner. Eera peeped into the hallway, "The bread is on the table, you bring the rest of snack along from the kitchen." And she disappeared again to bicker on with Ivan.
On account of my arrival, the theater of hostilities moved over to the bedroom of Tonya's family. From the living room, it was only heard that Ivan took a circular defense in the corner, and his parents-in-law and sister-in-law, individually and then in chorus, cried out to him what particularly they were not happy with. The words remained indistinct, like, Pillutikha’s curses, but I could tell that Ivan was responding with dour short bursts, like a Bandera-guerrilla used to use the ammo sparingly. At times, some of the attackers retreated to the living room to recollect what else they could've omitted to divulge and then again rush back to join the clashes. Except for Tonya, who did not leave the bedroom, but kept monotonously banging off her dismal clue. I did not even look in there, but everything was clear enough, family squabbles do not shine with the diversity of dispositions.
And all that turmoil raged against the background of wild screams from the rebellious farmers in the Central Asia, because the TV was feeding series of The Man is Changing His Skin and they kept rushing discontentedly from one edge of the screen to the other. Hence the voices. The rioters were taking the full advantage of watchers being busy with personal sorting out in the bedroom. Then the dehkans grew so impudent that even jumped out of the TV, and continued their scrambles all over the oilcloth on the table.
And I knew that you could expect anything from that TV… One Sunday, my mother-in-law cooked soup from a raw bone and put the plate for me next to the TV where some mafia clan members were forcing a judge to commit suicide. And, when he put a bullet thru his temple, the brains splashed out smack into my plate – oops! What was there to do with my mother-in-law standing vigilant behind my back to control if I would show the proper respect to her cooking? I had to lap it hot…
Yet, no one would escape the just retribution, and now, when the TV and I remained eye to eye, I clicked it onto another channel. It turned out a neatly mellow violin quartet of chamber music. What a relief!.
But then the father-in-law jogged from the bedroom for recharging. And he felt that something was amiss, not as stimulating as expected. He did not immediately realize that it was because of the cello. What could a cello possibly do in a Central Asian bedlam? Unfortunately, he got it what was what, and clicked the channels back, directly into the wild grateful wails of dehkans, "Ala-la-ah!" He swallowed it, like a sip of energizer and, with replenished ammunition, rushed back to the interminable battle…
Since that night, on my arrival, after the hallway and the bathroom, I made straight for the kitchen. There I laid the kitchen table to have some havvage. And I never opened the fridge, so as not to give Gaina Mikhailovna the pretext for her undertone mumbling reprimands to Eera.
While I was eating, you would come running to the kitchen with agitated chatter in your own, as yet not very understandable, language… However, I again have run ahead of the events…
~ ~ ~
To keep Eera, my Eera, to ensure that she would be mine and mine only, I went down the path of righteous life.
(…they do not sell the code of righteousness at the news stalls because no one needs them. Without checking it by code, anyone knows whether they did the right thing or not. Even if your wrong-doing can be bolstered with tons of excuses and justifications, or even called for by written law, and all around glamorized your deed, "well done! good fellow!" you still know, deep in your heart, that you'd better not have done that and, at that point, you'll be right, because you can't deceive yourself and you know all along what's right from what isn't.
They finish their empty praise, disperse, and now you're left to live on and wade thru your own disgust at yourself and futile blinking at the scruples or, maybe, tries at drowning them in more and more atrocious yet commendable wiles…
Honestly, my quest for righteousness sprung from a personal interest: if I kept doing everything right then nothing wrong would happen to me, otherwise, it would be so unfair. That flimsy guesswork served the main prop to pin my hopes on. I never felt like looking under the hood of my loose construction and only tried—and real hard too—to do everything right…)
That's why it took bricklayer Peter Lysoon 2-3 hours less than me to finish the walls of a bathroom-toilet unit. No wooden insertions? Who cares? Spit a spat, and go on laying the unit walls. When the carpenters come to install the doors, they would think of something to do about fixing the problem.
The partition laid up with a "belly"? So what? Say: "they'll lap it up!" and leave it as it is. The plasterers would come and solve the issue with an additional mortar layer.
But that's not right. Therefore, my specialization in the team was gypsum partitions, and that of Peter – bathrooms. However, nothing was dogma and there always happened moments for a harum-scarum "off we drive!" and forced castlings.
Yes, doing everything right is a time-consuming undertaking, but that's not the whole story because choosing the path of stringent righteousness you can't constrict yourself to the limits of current life, you start to strive for fixing wrongful deeds committed in the life past, which goal calls for open repentance…
When I came to the institute hostel, former freshman Sehrguey from Yablunivka was finishing his fourth year of study, and still lived in Room 72. I returned to him the thick English-Russian Dictionary by Mueller.
"Ho-ho! How come?"
"I stole it from you."
After a moment's confusion, everyone in the room burst into a loud laughter, willy-nilly joined by me.
(…what's funny there? In his story Jane, Maugham explains that there's nothing funnier than the truth…)
Nobody laughed though at the library of the Plant Club when I returned a couple of books stolen there and confessed that one more was missing and that I was really sorry and ready to reimburse. They discharged my unrecorded loans, forgave me without compensation and did not even cancel my reader form…
2 weeks later, my father started to upbraid me for behaving as if I was not all there. He stuck the forefinger out of his fist and fiercely drilled the air nearby his right temple.
I translated his gesture into the parlance of the Holy Script, "Go and take him for he's out of his mind."
"And again some frostbitten hooey! Gone nuts in Nezhyn? Is that what you've been sent to the institute for?"
Then I lowered the bar, and switched over to the Ukrainian folklore, "With the father's khutta burnt down, whose attic will the sparrows spend nights in?"
Unfortunately, the widely-known koan was out of the elder's ken and the following half-month or so the 2 match boxes dropped at ready by the tiny gas stove on the table for cooking in the veranda were missing. But then everything settled down and returned to normal.
"I'm ashamed before people! You enter the streetcar and get frozen like a statue with your look nailed to the window."
"I have to knock step dance along the car, eh?"
"No!! Just be like everyone else: 'hello! how are you? fine!' Do not be a renegade!"
And then the Central Television news program "Time" showed an employee at the Moscow Central Library named after Lenin, who confessed that for several years he kept purloining valuable publications from the archival department, under the gray smock of his uniform. I realized that I was not alone redeeming wrong-doings of the past. But what was it to make him follow the path to righteousness?
"The fur-coat form of schizophrenia."
Unexpectedly entering the kitchen, I overheard my father announcing to my mother the diagnosis turned out by Tamara of the 4th kilometer in Chernigov, which, most likely, reached him with Eera’s mediation…
Yet, later on, the sorcerer of Ichnya, after a couple of visits by my sister Natasha there, said he had done his job and I was put aright. Eera became happy with the news, but not I. Life became boring. The overwhelming powerful stream of consciousness, in which I had to choose the fairway like those rafters driving their log rafts down the foam-boiling rapids in the Carpathian rivers, turned into placid shoals. I could still see breakthroughs of the impossible into the world of everyday life—where everyone is like everyone else—but between those insights and me, there already rose that dreary grating from the Bulgakov's novel, its dusty grates canceling all pirate brigantines in the unknown seas. The heat and full-blooded throb of the belonging vanished.
