Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
(…it's one thing when you actually ride a log-raft that keep jostling and bumping under your feet, and quite another kettle of fish if you can any moment hit button Pause, and leave everything frozen until you've poured yourself a cup of tea…)
"Gimme my schizophrenia back!" with genuine bitterness pleaded I Natasha, but it was too late…
In Nezhyn, on the platform near the station's building corner, where the round clock hung on the bar protruding from the wall, Eera and I were waiting for the local train to Konotop.
She had the three-quarter yellow jacket on, and the day around was also sunny, a good summer day it was. Eera smiled at me and said, "When I'll be bad, remember me as I am now when I love you."
"Nonsense. You can't become bad."
"Don't argue, I know."
"How can you know?"
"I know. I am a witch."
Her eyes turned sad, and a slight imperceptible cross-eyedness crept into them. It was as slight as my disappointment, for I had once thought she was a devil in love like in the book which I stole for Novoselytsky.
"No worry," said I, "I'm a hexer too."
Although what hexer could be of me? Some sleepy warlock at best… This thought was prompted by the black hardback cover of The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel which I bought in Odessa and was reading in the trailer of our team during the midday breaks.
Well, okay, to call it "reading" would be a rank bragging. I could not wallow thru more than one page in a break, because of inevitable dozing off… I wonder if the translator understood himself what he was turning out, or just rendered on with "a perplexed mind"?.
In that Odessa bookstore, they did not want to sell this book to me. The two saleswomen were playing for time, exchanging accusatory glances. At that time, the cause of their embarrassment was so amazingly clear: they had been expecting a real warlock to pick up the book in coarse black bounds, but now I just do not know what to think… What's the difference who buys what in the world where each one is like anyone else? Be happy to complete the sales plan…
I kept Hegel in my locker. The lockers in our team trailer had no locks, but nothing disappeared from there. Except for the diploma badge and a book by some Moscow literary bungler.
I was reading that stuff borrowed from my mother-in-law's hutch simply out of the sense of duty, and I felt relieved when it got lost half-way thru. Then I brought The Phenomenology of Spirit, in the way of experiment, to check if they would lift it as well, but no! Unassisted, I had to read it to the very end. And then it turned out, that it was not Hegel who wrote it at all, but somewhat Rozenkrantz noting down his lectures. Then he published those notes for them to translate the thing into Russian so that I would slumber peacefully in our team trailer. And thank you ever so much.
(…sometimes I ask myself: did the original lecturer understand what exactly he was giving out? Or was it just his way to make a living with a tricky juggling of a "thing-unto-itself", a "thin-in-itself" and other things in whimsical juxtapositions?…)
But one passage I did understand completely, where there was reasoning that a German bricklayer had to consume a half-pound of bacon and a pound of bread to fulfill his daily norm, while a French one managed to do it with just a bunch of grapes under his belt…
~ ~ ~
That summer saw the reconstruction at 13, Decemberists. As projected by my father, the door from the veranda to the attached room was sealed and the latter got connected instead to the living room. The changes allowed for the heat from the kitchen stove to reach the attached room in winter making it livable all year round. The rest of the khutta was renovated too.
After the reconstruction, I moved to the attached-joined room and a friend of Natasha came on a visit from the city of Shostka. She had been a group-mate of my sister at the Konotop Railway Technical School. Later, Natasha’s girlfriend got married and divorced but she had no regrets because of her skills at sewing jeans like "Levi's" and though the fabric in her jeans was notably not genuine the business thrived and brought a good income.
She was not too tall, but well-tanned, and she had dyed hair to emphasize her appetizing figure. Yet, moving towards righteousness, I, certainly, kept in check my glances and never asked Natasha for how long her friend was going to stay.
Coming back from work, I sat at the desk in my room and read a book in English keeping a dictionary at hand, or else Morning Star, the newspaper of British communists. Probably, they were not exactly communists but, nonetheless, their paper was sold at newsstands in the land of victorious socialism for 13 kopecks piece. After dinner, I worked at translations and had no spare time for special communication with the guest.
I did not know how Eera learned about the visitor at 13, Decemberists, but she suddenly started asking questions about Natasha's girlfriend and then announced that she herself wanted to move to Konotop, so I had to talk about it with my parents.
Returning to Konotop on outspread wings, I at once called my father and mother into the yard. They got seated, side by side, on the bench under the tree by the porch way on whose steps I kept standing and taming effervescent joy frothing within me. Then I informed them on Eera's wish to move to 13, Decemberists. And I was completely unprepared for what happened next.
My mother crossed her arms over her chest and said that she would not accept Eera because it was impossible for two of them to get along together in one place.
I heard her words but could not get it – what's that? My mother who always pulled for me was now sitting on the bench, with her arms crossed, saying she wouldn't have Eera around here.
I turned to the father for help. He shrugged, "What can I do? All documents on the khutta are issued in her name, she is the landlady."
It was already dark in the yard, but in the light of the lamp lit in the veranda, I saw my mother's unwavering, unyielding stance. Desperately, exerted I my mind to limit in search for any worthwhile arguments, appeals, for anything at all, but it was blank and void and dead sure that nothing whatsoever would mollify her.
My father went over into the house and I, overpowered by the hollow emptiness in my head, sat limply on a porch step.
The wicket latch-handle chinked, and the visiting girlfriend of Natasha's entered the yard. She was alone, without my sister. "And why are you like that?" asked she, and got seated next to my mother.
My mother immediately enlivened and started to explain that the next day the 4 of them—my parents, Natasha and Lenochka—would go to the RepBase camp for recreation by the Seim river. However, the refrigerator was full and those staying back at the khutta could cater for themselves.
The girlfriend approved and turned so that the light from the veranda would boldly delineate her large breasts under the taut clinging turtleneck.
Even dumbfounded as I was by the result of the negotiations with my parents, I realized that I was doomed, and when left eye-to-eye with such breasts, without anyone else in the whole khutta, no bridle would restrain me safely. I knew myself and got it clearly that my righteousness would not persist for a whole week, and even the fact that she was my mother's nickname would not save me because, no matter what the fridge was full of, the innocent lamb prepared for the sacrifice was I….
The next day after work, I did not go, as usual, along the railway tracks and the wall surrounding the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant to Decemberists Street, but got on the streetcar going to the Settlement and rode to School 13. From there, I moved along Nezhyn Street, entering the yards of khuttas with one invariable question, "Where can I rent an apartment?"
At number thirty-something, I was told that in the khutta under the big birch opposite the Nezhyn Store, they seemed to be renting.
The birch was found in the indicated place, and it was so old and tall that the red brick khutta under it looked very small. However, it had two rooms and a kitchen, apart from the dark hallway-veranda.
The landlady, a single pensioner Praskovya Khvost, suspiciously looked me over, but showed a room of three by two meters, with the window looking out onto the wide trunk of the birch in the neglected front garden. One-third of the room was occupied by an iron bed produced before WWII and the room itself was entered thru the doorway from the kitchen screened off with hanging curtains. To the right from the same kitchen, behind the same curtains in the doorway, there was the owner's room.
For me, it was essential to leave 13, Decemberists on that very day, and we agreed on 20 rubles a month.
(…Later, Lydda from our team told me that I could find an apartment in At-Seven-Winds for just 18 rubles, but I kept to where I was…)
Coming to Decemberists Street, I borrowed a handcart from a neighbor, put it at the wicket to number 13, and only then entered the yard.
Seated in the folding bed-armchair, Galya was watching TV. I said polite "hello" and that I was not hungry, and then went over to my room to collect the books and disassemble the bookshelves.
The self-made windows in the room did not have leaves to open, that's why I had to take the things out iterating thru the living room and the kitchen. So as not to change the shoes with slippers at each go, I paved the floor with pages from Morning Star. The young woman in surprised silence watched my manipulations from her armchair.
I took the books and bookshelves' parts to the handcart waiting in the street. All fitted in, only I had to drive slowly because the varnished shelves, stacked on top, were sliding over each other.
In the khutta by the Nezhyn Store, my landlady had a visitor. The 2 old women grew silent and watched the underground functionary shipping stacks of illegal literature to his new safe house…
Back in Decemberists Street, I returned the handcart to its owner and gathered some of my clothes—the briefcase from Odessa stood at the ready—then I said polite "goodbye" to Galya, and left her to enjoy the TV because I knew how to win with dignity.
(…of course, it was not her fault to get into the thick of a family sorting out, yet later she managed to marry a guy from the Settlement, not for too long though, but that's already her personal story…)
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ Defying the Wash
The landlady fondly quoted her deceased spouse and every other day boozed with her veteran lady-friends, not in the kitchen though, because of the tenant, but behind the closed curtains in the doorway to her room.
Softly, I kept turning pages in the rented room and did not intervene with anything – no use forbidding folks to live their lives in style.
My connection with 13 Decemberists was not cut off entirely. I had to ask my father to manufacture at the RepBase some spare parts to the wardrobe designed for installation in my room. He produced a prop and two thin tubes according to my sketch; my mother sewed the needed piece of burlap and it turned out a fabric-walled wardrobe in the corner, as it once was in the hallway of our apartment at the Object. However, since then the advancement of technology moved far ahead and the top for my wardrobe served a Polystyrol plate, light and thick, of those used for thermal isolation finishing inside the walls of railway cars renovated at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.
The room was seemingly too squalid to become a safe house, and conspirators shunned to show up. So I switched over to considering it a hermitage cell whose appearances were to my liking, especially the black-and-white bark of the birch behind the window pane allowing for no other view; sometimes, when tired of translations, I just sat and looked at the black marks in the huge tree trunk.
When I settled down, my mother came for a visit, escorted by my father. In the kitchen, my former and my current landladies measured each other with mute, irreconcilable, glances while exchanging official nods. Then my parents stood and sighed silently under the raw bulb hanging from the ceiling on its dust-blackened wire. To all their questions I responded in a polite, though monosyllabic, way and they soon left because the one and only chair in the room was not stimulating much longer stay.
Mid-September, in the middle of a working week, Eera came from Nezhyn. She found our construction site in At-Seven-Winds, I changed in the trailer, and we went off to the city. I always liked that romantically loose cloak reaching below her knees.
We went to visit Lyalka. His wife, Valentina, was relieved to learn that everything was fine by us. A couple of times, after occasional quarrels between me and Eera, she used to later come to Konotop asking Valentina to call me from the Settlement which was a long way from Peace Square. And so, with Valentina's mediation, Eera and I reconciled upon the folding coach-bed covered with a hard carpet in the Valentina and Lyalka's living-room.
In fact, you'd hardly call them "quarrels", it's only that at times Eera got in a huff and felt like yelling. Like, because I was so ugly to look at, which she discerned after we went out to watch some sort of a comedy with faggy innuendos produced at the MosFilm studious. Or else, that no one would ever be interested in those translations of mine…
But real wrangles between us just did not work. Despite my tongue-tiedness, I somehow managed to convince her that such yells were not our role, why to give out other people's clues? However stupid it might seem, but I myself understood what I meant although could not express it properly…
And it happened just once that I misbehaved. That time I brought my payment from SMP-615 and put it on the table under the old pier-mirror. Eera asked how much was there and then started yelling that was not money. She did not need such alms!
Then I grabbed that skinny stack and tore it in two before throwing out of the window… While Eera was away out in the yard, I did not know what to do and kept cursing bitterly my lack of restraint.
At my stay on the next weekend, Eera somewhat shyly shared that they do accept glued bills at the bank.
(…and that's correct because banks also need money, and 70 rubles are not scattered in your path, except when you chanced to pass under a window on the first floor, but even then in a torn-up condition…)
What I, personally, was surprised by at that occasion, it's the poor quality of paper used for printing money. Say, if you cut some funny money of newspaper—the same number of bills—it would be harder to tear it up that my payment. It literally went in two of its own will, in my hands….
Then we visited the new Culture House of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant built next to Bazaar. They say the construction cost amounted to 6 million rubles. The Loony’s Director, Bohmstein, moved over there to embrace the same position. The Culture House had only two floors, less than in Loony, but on the upper one, there was a ballroom with a bar.
We came to my apartment the moment when Praskovya was driving her orgy of alcoholic widows out into the neighborhood. I introduced her and Eera to each other in the kitchen. The landlady carefully examined her and, in my opinion, she also liked Eera's loose raincoat. She even kissed her suddenly and me as well, on the spur of the moment, and then went to sleep behind her curtains.
Eera made a small grimace of misunderstanding, however, she did not dare resist, and as for me, I did not care at all. One time Eera and I were going by a local train, and some gay guy from the opposite seat started to make overtures to me. Eera simply flew in a temper; she even started bickering with him, and that was ridiculous because I always was indifferent to them. Say, once, Sasha Chalov's daddy kissed me on the cheek, and now it was tipsy Praskovya. Who would care?
Yet, in my entire life I've never come across a more sweet, lasciviously tender and, at the same time, so eagerly tight-fitting cunt than on that night; even by Eera herself it was both the first and last time that I happened to feel it that way. As for where the carnal treat of a lifetime had sprung from – the austere interior of a monk’s cell or the kinda blessing double kiss by the boozed landlady – I remain in the dark till now, and pretty firmly too.
(…there is still a whole lot of questions that I won't find answers to. Never…)
~ ~ ~
Later that autumn, I was sent to the railway station of Vorozhba to work at the construction of the three-story Communication House where the walls and the roof were already in place and my responsibility was laying the partitions. While there, I got another proof that the body of a human being is much smarter than he himself…
At both ends of the building, there were inside staircases with only one of them completed. Newly arrived at the site and not fully acquainted with the details of the current situation, I started up the right one until noticed that the steps between the second and third floors had not been yet inserted and just the pair of channels for the eventual montage of stairs were tilted up to the landing in between the two floors. Feeling lazy to traverse all of the rather long building to the other staircase, I decided to climb up the channel by the wall, whose width of 10 cm seemed enough. So, I turned sideways and, facing the wall, made a couple of careful steps upward.
Then I discovered my mistake – the channel ran too close along the wall whose surface kept my center of gravity dangerously off, too far over the void below, an offset for another inch would send my body into a dive precipitated, according to the laws of physics, by the free-fall acceleration, onto the debris interspersed by crooked spikes of rebar-rods, deep in the basement.
The undertaking did not seem worth it already. However, having moved up the channel I could not back those two steps already in the reverse direction, there was not room enough to even turn my face without losing balance, because of the shifted off location of my gravity’s center. So, I clung to the red brick wall as if to something most dear to me and viewed an unforgettable transformation: my hands turned into separate tiny asynchronous octopuses, each finger lived its individual life bending in all directions, searching for holes in between the bricks. As they got rooted in the wall, I pulled myself upward and then cautiously shuffled my feet up the sloping channel. After many a repetition of that trick, we got out.
But I remain dead sure that were the mortar slushed to fill joints in the brick courses with the proper righteousness and not in the hasty style of "off we drive!" no unknown reserves in the human body would get me off the hook.
From the ensuing surge of adrenaline simmering thru my system, I realized why cliffhangers love mountains so much, yet I, personally, would not risk it every other day….
In winter, they excavated all of Professions Street. The rumors had it as if that was done for sewer construction, but it looked like a foundation pit about a kilometer long, and four to five meters deep. The chasm was randomly crossed by a thick underground telephone cable suddenly got in the open and hanging in the air across the pit, from one wall to the other. And deep down there, a bulldozer was moving earth and leveling the gravel heaps dumped by KAMAZ trucks. Only along the concrete wall of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, there remained a meter-wide ledge with a path over the heaps and hillocks of the spoil…
With a cellophane packet in my hand, I was walking along that trail oscillating up and down when ahead of me I marked a schoolgirl who walked in the same direction. The yellow-and-gray tartan in her coat fabric, made me realize that I should not go any further; that was not my way. Fortunately, a telephone cable was sagging nearby towards the opposite wall in the pit. I stepped on it and walked without slowing down; I did not even mind the bag in my hands. Yet, after a couple of meters, the usual story happened again – I started to doubt if I really was a tightrope walker to stride telephone cables.
(…because of the like hesitation, Simon, handled Stone, aka Peter, instead of a leisurely walk over the water started to go down into it…)
The cable went a-jitter, shallow swings turned into the sway of growing amplitude. I shot up my arms and fell. Luckily, when in the dive, my hands grabbed onto the cable. I caught breathe for a couple of seconds, then let it go and, like a parachutist, landed on the pit bottom.
There, I leaned over the face of a prostrate prostitute in a broad-brimmed hat with red lining who stared upward past me. How come the prostitute in the snow? Why was I there? It's an easy one about the hooker, she simply slipped from the bag in the fall. And it was right I got there – my way was finished on that cable, another one was starting from that depths…
So I went along the graveled bottom of the pit to its end in the distance with the ramp for KAMAZ trucks to drive down but not at this early hour. When back on the surface, I proceeded to the station square to be in time for our bus and go to work and, after the working day, I got off our Seagull by the bus station to buy a ticket, and to run, waving it, into the already starting bus, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!" Because Eera told me about her country trip to the Hare Pines forest so as to train her conjugal fidelity despite the champagne in the glove box. Because what else did I have to do? That's why I went to Romny…
It was completely dark and cold in Romny, but I found a hotel. The receptionist did not know where to accommodate a guest with a cellophane packet in his hands, so she allotted a room with 4 beds for me alone. Although she could combine me with that pair of business travelers that came from the same bus in my wake.
The room was a usual pencil-box for 4, empty and freshly painted over the paint coats from the previous 20 renovations. 4 thick terry towels hung from the backs of the 4 beds, and the radio on the wall was singing in thick bass a romance about the cold morning, gray morning.
I had nothing to do. I turned off the radio and the light too. Then I lay down and stared at the darkness until I fell asleep…
~ ~ ~
The morning, contrary to the forecast from the radio romances, was bright and sunny, and pretty soon I found the psychiatric hospital. I left the cellophane packet in the snowdrift on the lawn under a bared big tree and, without any luggage, entered the open gates keeping my hands visible.
When the guards got it that I was not visiting anyone but wanted to stay there myself, I was taken to a small office. A young man, who looked like a militia lieutenant, except for a white doctor’s smock, asked about the reason for my coming.
"I want a certificate that I am not crazy." I knew perfectly well that by those words I had burned down all the ships and blown up all the bridges behind me, and now they would lock me up for sure.
"And who says you were crazy?"
"Well, in a streetcar, for instance."
His animation grew exponentially. He started inquiring what kind of a seal I wanted on the certificate – round, or triangle?
"It does not matter as long as it's signed."
So, he called a young doctor and an elderly nurse to take me to the shower, and then to the fifth unit. Before the shower, the nurse sheared off the hair in my groin with a hairdresser's hand-machine. I felt embarrassed, but I did not resist – a strange monastery is not the right place to barge into a-preaching your doctrine.
After the shower, the doctor took me to an interview. In order to consolidate the success, I drove a couple of fools, she only moaned lustfully while scribbling post-haste in a thick notebook. When we went out into the yard, I said that I had left a cellophane packet outside the gate. The nurse refused to believe me, but then she went off and with amazement brought it.
(…and what was there to be surprised at? Who'd get the nerve to lift a packet left, like a bait, in front of the gaping gate to the regional psychiatric hospital?..)
The doctor frisked the cellophane and allowed me to keep it together with its contents: a copybook, a pen, and a book in English with a close-up of a woman in a wide-brimmed slouch hat in the front cover…
The fifth unit at the Romny psychiatric hospital was located on the third floor of the building constructed by the blueprints from the Stalinist times when the installed flights of steps formed a wide stairwell. Halfway up, there was an iron mesh across the well to surprise a would-be suicide with the failure of his shifty schemes. The stairs ended on the wide landing in front of the locked door in between the two long wooden benches by the sidewalls.
Behind the door, as you would normally anticipate, there started a corridor stretching to the right. It started from the window with vertical grates and, past the closed office door tableted "Head Doctor", went away to its other—blind and murky because of the distance—end with a tap and sink in the sealing wall.
In both sidewalls of the long corridor, there gaped rectangular doorways to the wardrooms, that at the first, unaccustomed, sight looked like passages to caves because of lacking any door. The light from the outside world reached the corridor after creeping transversely thru the wardrooms whose grated windows considerably decimated it. That's why, in cloudy weather, the bulbs in the corridor were turned on all day long. That dim illumination served rather to emphasize than disperse the twilight.
Halfway to the far-off end wall, one wardroom on the left was missing, substituted with a small hall of two barred windows. In the hall corner next to the right window, a tall pier-mirror stood atop its empty cabinet, and the partition returning to the corridor from that corner had a white door with the tablet "Manipulation Room" on it. The hall’s left window was blocked by a tall box, like, pedestal for a turned-off TV. The lofty pyramid was abutted by a hospital couch alongside the partition wall with the other white door in the hall, tableted "Senior Nurse", exactly opposite the manipulation room.
The floor in the corridor was paved with middle-sized ceramic tiles of a dark brownish hue conforming to the general gamma in the all-pervading twilight. The floor-tiles gleamed moistly since the privileged shut-ins washed it twice a day with wet cloths on wooden mops…
For a starter, to check how dangerous I was, they placed me to the observation wardroom, opposite the hall with the pier-mirror. At the jamb of the door-less doorway to the wardroom, there stood an armchair whose carcass of nickel-plated pipes, upholstered in brown leatherette, leaned its back against the corridor wall. The slender pipes of legs supported an elderly but sturdy mujik in the seat—a paramedic—rigged out in a white smock and a small white capulet. With one ear turned to the observation wardroom, he faced the distant parts of the corridor where another paramedic sat at another wardroom in the exactly same chair, yakking idly with a young man in the pajamas and army high boots, who squatted with his arms hung over his knees, in front of the sitter.
The paramedic took me into the wardroom, chinking on the way the bunch of keys tied to the rope-like strip of his belt against the back of the bed nearest to the doorway, where a young blonde in bright red pajamas lay with his unswerving stare stuck into the crevices in the whitewashed ceiling while hastily beating off under his sheet. The clang was upheld by a burst of sardonic laughter out of the opposite corner, but it choked abruptly.
The third bed from the window was pointed at by the paramedic's stubby finger and I humbly lay down. The bed between me and the window was occupied by a supine young man clutching the collar of his blue hospital gown tightly wrapped around his stuck out neck with closely cropped head on it, whose eyes were intensely peering upward, absorbed in watching transition of stains in the ceiling, one into another.
Soon, he turned to me an inquisitive stare from the bluish circles around his eyes and asked whether my brother's name was Sasha and if I had a sister as well. Not waiting for my response, he squeezed his head between his hands to report that he had been studying with them at the technical school before one evening his father sent him to collect cows when the hoary fog was drifting thru Podlipnoye which instilled a cold into his hatless, unprotected, head and ever since the poor nob aches regularly.
A couple of times he left his story off to holler at a nuts who approached the siderails of my bed mumbling some poorly articulated questions. Then he said that his name was also Sasha, turned away, and fell asleep.
A pair of patients without speech problems exacted from the blond in red a song, and he whined and wheezed out the latest hit from the "Mayak" radio station:
"Save, please, save, please, save, please, save my broken heart,
Find, please, find, please, find, please, find her for me…"
Two hours later, I was classified a not violent case, the senior nurse called me out from the corridor and led to Wardroom 9, closer to the office with the tablet "Head Doctor".
The 9th looked more cozy accommodating just ten beds. It's only that the white desk partly jutted from the left corner across the entrance, but since there was no door it felt like a minor inconvenience. Wildlife shrieks from neighboring wardrooms gradually grew more habitual and ceased to stir upsurges of funk by their primeval jungle force.
In the evening, along the corridor there sounded a cry "to the kitchen!" and then a group of privileged shut-ins, led by a nurse, marched to the exit. A half-hour later they returned in a hurried pace, precipitated by the weight of two huge thermos pots schlepped over in the counter direction. A few minutes later, from the remote end of the corridor, they hollered, "Workmen to dinner!"
