Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Workmen were always called first to the dining room. Instead of pajamas, they wore black spetzovkas and after breakfast and midday meal, they were convoyed away somewhere.
When the workmen left the dining room, in the corridor sounded the next call, "The second party, to dinner!" And, after a corresponding period of time, the concluding call was shouted out, "The third party, to dinner!"
The left sidewall in the far end of the corridor had three locked doors: to the shower, to the dispenser, and to the dining room. Neither of them had any tablet, but everyone knew where was what.
In the shower room, they kept tin pails and wooden mops for washing the floor. Its door was opened by a nurse or a paramedic for the privileged to take their pastime instruments and locked again at once. However, despite so close control one of the fifth unit shut-ins managed to hang himself in the shower room, although not at the first go.
Before feeding the fifth unit, they unlocked both the dispenser room—to place the brought thermos pots there—and the dining room, to have where to call the eating parties to.
The dispenser room was narrowed by the large robust shelving along the wall opposite the dispenser window. The lumber shelves' load was a dozen of gaudy cellophane packets with food belonging to the shut-ins visited by their visitors on the visiting day. Twice a week, they heralded along the corridor, "Delivery! Who has a delivery? To the dining room!" Those who knew that in the dispenser room there were things they did not manage to stove away completely during the visit of their visitors, trod to the dining room to finish the chew. If someone failed to keep in mind or rejected recollections about the cellophane packet awaiting them on the shelves, then more attentive and caring wardroom-mates would remind him and solicitously escort to the dining room to assists in eating the delivery.
I did not belong to the workmen and ate with the second party. We lined up in a noisy, diversely dressed, but equally hungry, queue along the wall by the door blocked with a paramedic's body leaned on it, while inside they were sweeping off the tables after the previous eaters. The paramedic also controlled that someone would not get in the line after having his share in the freshly fed party.
At last, he commanded, "Come on!" And we noisily barged thru the unusually narrow door into the dining room with three windows parallel to the long tables, kinda medieval refectory if not for oilcloth on the tabletops. They stood in three rows abutting two opposites walls, and the narrow cross-sectional aisle in the middle cut them into six separate tables. We sat at them, overstepping the benches screwed to the floorboards.
Amid the animated noise spiced with loose, uninhibited, gestures, we waited for the constantly on-duty blond masturbator to bring the wide plywood tray cluttered with aluminum bowls, spoons and bread slices. The tray was unloaded and those who got the havvage put in front of them started eating, while the rest watched the process and waited for the chmo dispenser, also from the shut-ins, to fill the next tray-load behind the partition with his window.
We finished everything off and began to wait for a tray with tin cups of sour-sweet kissel, whose skin I hated so much when at kindergarten.
Once I overslept the feeding and had to eat with the third party… Some grievous sight… There, people treated their faces as Plasticine, kneading out of it the most grotesque masks for no obvious purpose. But then and there I found out who produced baboon shrieks, which I heard from my wardroom, and who was answering him with the roar of a wounded elephant. There were none of conversations, even of most desultory nature, at the third party feeding.
And yet, at times, someone from the second party would mix into the third one. Not because of sincere love for living nature, but simply to use the opportunity and eat the neighbor's ration while he was making faces to the window grates. Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, was favoring the third party and often ate with them so as to curb such funny in the head, yet crafty, freeloaders.
Those 3 meals were the noisiest time of day in the fifth unit. If someone started to make a needless noise at an unreasonable hour, a pair of paramedics ran to his wardroom and, following a rectifying blow or 2 with their bunch of keys on his head, fixed the troublemaker. That is, they crucified him, in the supine position, tying his wrists and ankles to the iron corners along his bed spring mesh by means of yellowish cloth straps, obviously former bed-sheets worn-out to shreds…
After feeding, everyone dispersed to their wardrooms or strolled aimlessly over the brown tiles in the corridor floor. I would not say that we were starving there – same havvage as anywhere else. Once, each of us was even given 2 pancakes for a dinner; though being cold, they bore a drop of some sticky jam.
Another outstanding event was that incomprehensible late-night feast, when in the hall appeared 2 laundry basins brimming with sausage of two types: liver-squash and blood-mixture, and everyone might grab as much as he wanted. Except for a pair of the third party members, who suddenly grew sane enough, but the fat shut-in in charge of the basins drove them away. Discrimination happens anywhere…
Yet, the main delight in the life of the fifth unit appeared with the stately, flax-haired, nurse who brought it in a pillowcase bulging with angular pieces of refined sugar. That pillowcase she took into the "Senior Nurse" office and every day those, who had the brains to come and ask for, received a few pieces of not just pressed but a real, refined, sugar, which did not melt on your tongue in just 2 seconds.
I, for one, had brains to ask twice a day. And that sugar I tried to consume unnoticed because those too deeply troubled in their head to turn to the original source were annoyingly sane enough to beg it from me. To show that it was over, I patted at the emptied pocket, but then, recollecting that lying was not the right thing to do, I shared the sugar from the other pocket in my pajamas.
Once in 20 days a slim black-haired woman with a sharp nose and, naturally, in the white smock, came to the hall in the middle of the corridor. You could see at once that she was from the glassy-eyed, but I had already kicked that stuff and, therefore, accepted the version of the fifth unit old-timers stating that she was a former circus acrobat. The acrobat cut the stubble off our faces with a hairdresser machine, and for the haircut she used scissors if you did not ask to crop it also with the machine in "zero" style…
The cultural life was ensured by the TV set. One hour before, and one hour after the news program "Time", during which it was a break for the procedures. Some 10 watchers gathered around it dragging stools and chairs from their wardrooms. The paramedic by the observation wardroom also moved nearer…
At night, the wardrooms were lighted with the electric bulbs until the daylight. Probably, so that no one did something to himself or his neighbor. Sleeping with the light on is inconvenient because even if in your dream you were free to walk some city streets or in the wild, the inescapable presence of the bulbs was felt even there. Yet, the corridor was not lighted so too brightly for the on-duty paramedics to normally doss down in their chairs.
In the small hours, Wardroom 9 was usually visited by a young guy eager to show how dexterously he juggled a pair of boiled eggs from a delivery. Sometimes he demonstrated a small, yet proficiently executed picture, where a stark naked male was moodily chasing a girl with only her high boots on and the triangle of Russian crown-fillet on her head. Her long taut braid flapped on the run and, in fright, she looked back at the meter-long dick of the determined pursuer. Apparently, a copy of some original from the first half of the XIX century.
Then a frail man with elusive eyes came to take the young guy away. According to his repeatedly shared story, he got to the psychiatric hospital after accidentally breaking the window panes in the khutta of their Village Council with a walking stick, not omitting a single glass… He kissed the youngster in his pate thru the stubble hair, called him "mnemormysh" and led him back to his wardroom. It was his habit, to kiss any young person in the pate and call him "mnemormysh".
(…never before or later heard I that word from any one at all, in no dictionary whatsoever you’ll find an entry for the unheard word, but still the gentle tenderness of its sounds makes it so lovable, soft, like, say,"pinniped pup", can you feel it, eh?—I’m serious, not kinda pulling for a fella from our side, you know, repeat any of these 2 for 10 times before shaving and you’re guaranteed from cuts even if using Neva blades…)
~ ~ ~
The time for getting up was announced by paramedics jingling their key bunches against beds’ side rails so that by the arrival of the head doctor and the nurses the fifth unit life would orderly flow in its channel. First of all, all flocked to the toilet.
2 / 80 = F(0)!
Two toilet bowls for 80 shut-ins are too FUCKING few(!),
so queuing to them started in the corridor. The line continued inside, closely parallel to the walls in two rooms, firstly, in the hallway, and then in the toilet itself.
In that anteroom, I once fainted for the first time in my life, absolutely for no reason whatsoever. Black darkness congested in my eyes, and rubbing my back against the wall, I slipped down to the floor and sat in nowhere. However, I did not lose my being completely and after a while, though still thru the darkness, there began to come echoes of distant voices explaining to each other that I just passed out. Then the blackout turned murky gray growing gradually lighter, then I opened my eyes and returned into the line.
For those who couldn't keep in check their excretory system any longer, a tin basin with handles was placed on the floor tiles in the center of the actual toilet room. When it got filled up full, some of the nuts would ladle the excrement with his hands into a separate pail and empty it into one of the two bowls, the remaining urine was poured out in the stub of a drainpipe in the corner.
There was some tacit time quota for squatting on the bowl, when it ran out, the nearest queue started to grumble, and a minute later some of the deaf-mute nuts, from those lining in the hallway, would yank you off the toilet bowl without explanations why…
After breakfast, the toilet was locked until the end of the midday meal, when they opened it briefly for washing the floor. The last chance to use the toilet was the half-hour following the dinner, because of the final floor washing of the day.
My rather lax attitude to the urinary matters before entering the madhouse left my bladder lacking the proper discipline to fit into that quite simplistic schedule. When feeling the urge, I lapsed into a panicking confusion – how to withstand it until the next half-hour of the open toilet? Appealing to paramedics in whose possession was the coveted key did not make sense because of their unchanging answer, "Piss off! You can't use the toilet, the floor there is washed." So to avoid a warming up, explanatory, hit over the head by the whole key bunch, you had to conform and piss off.
One day, driven to desperation, I tried to take a leak into the sink on the end wall in the corridor, and got jabbed on the ribs by the shut-in who often smoked there on the sly, admiring the sink, like, it was a park fountain on repair.
During another crisis, overcoming shame, I turned to an elderly nurse with keys on her belt, trying to delicately explain my need and plight.
For a considerable stretch, she couldn't understand my muttering about what I felt within my bladder, but then she opened the door to the shower and, indicating the drainage trap, ordered, "Puddle here!" No wonder they were named "sisters of mercy" in the Czarist army…
~ ~ ~
One time, the shut-ins were driven, in groups, to the bathhouse in another building. There, it was necessary to stand under the lukewarm shower in a slippery cast-iron bathtub, disgusting long streaks of slimy-brown rust stuck forever to the flaky enamel in its sides. While you soaped the washcloth left by the previous shower taker, the next one, naked already, pops up by the greenish eggshell of the bathtub with a remarkably intense glare at the rotten concrete in the too low ceiling while giving a twitch to his cheek of not immediately interpretable meaning… The small waffle towel got soaked before you could wipe half of yourself, and the residual moisture got absorbed by the underwear on the way back to the unit…
pops up the next to the greenish eggshell of the bathtub with a remarkably intense glare at the rotten concrete in the too low ceiling while giving a twitch to his cheek of not immediately interpretable
In the afternoon, it was better not to come too near the windows in the hall. A couple of tower cranes were seen thru the panes, slowly turning their beams at distant construction sites, and from the bus station, there came muffled announcing on PA loudspeaker about the departures of buses to indiscernible destinations and wishes of a good voyage. The sun was shining, the snow melting, life was going on out there, but you were on this side of the vertical iron bars…
Saturdays were for reception of visitors to the fifth unit, who were not allowed on any other day of the week. The harsh ringing of the doorbell in the corridor called the on-duty nurse to check who was out there, and then they shouted along the corridor the name of a shut-in to go outside the door and see his visitors.
My parents came on the very first Saturday. I was greatly surprised because I did not tell anything to anyone when leaving for Romny. As it turned out, the following day my landlady informed them of my absence, they called SMP-615 and were told where I got off the bus the day before. At the bus station, someone also recollected seeing me, and the tangle got unraveled…
We met on the landing in front of the door to the fifth unit, one of the long benches was vacant and we got seated along it, in one row. My mother, pushed the fluffy kerchief back from the head onto her shoulders and said, "How's that, sonny?" and she started to cry,
My father, so as to calm her down and in the way of consolation, announced, “Again! Started again!" He did not take off his fur hat, and did not cry, but kept his eyes directed at the bench opposite, where another pair of parents fed all the goodies from their cellophane packet to their shut-in – a crazy guy who did not talk at all because he had been bitten by an encephalitic tick.
I also was eating all sorts of homemade cakes and buns brought by my mother, and Eclair cakes with custard filling from the cooking shop by the Under-Overpass, because she knew what I loved. There was also lard in the cellophane packet to take it with me, but I flatly refused. So, at the end of the visit, my mother handed the bag to the nurse for storing it in the dispenser room shelving. Still and all, I declined going to the dining room when they yelled from the corridor to come and eat deliveries. For the principle's sake…
On the following Saturday, my brother and sister came instead of our parents. My brother had no hat on his head, but he frowned just like our father and said, "Why, Sehryoga? It's no good you do it."
As for Natasha, she did not cry but kept upbraiding me, "Tell me just one thing – you really need it? Well done, good fellow!" She said that Eera did not come, although she phoned her so that she knew.
Eera never came to Romny, but I understood that she had to look after the baby… On March 8, they brought a gurney to the corridor with a pile of free postcards for the holiday. I filled one out to Nezhyn with congratulations and love for Eera. While writing, I was horrified by the ugly quiver in the message lines, and the handwriting was anything but mine. Probably, because of injections…
~ ~ ~
The head doctor of the fifth unit never started whim-wham discussions of my preferences in music, she was busy with curing me. I was injected with iminazine intramuscularly, 3 times a day. An initial couple of days, it still could be tolerated, but later there remained no intact spot in the buttocks. One shot got upon another, sore nodules cluttered my ass and turned it into a terrain of tightly swollen knolls, it became difficult to even walk along the corridor, leaving any orbiting out of question. Besides, the skin down there, denied any time for regeneration, started bleeding, not too profusely but constantly, the hospital underpants soaked thru and stained the pajamas from inside.
The most unbearable was the third, concluding, injection of a day. It was shot at about 9 pm, the tinkling of the steel boxes with syringes pulled on the gurney along the corridor, made my teeth clench in a spasm. The tinkles gradually neared our wardroom, and the on-duty nurse appeared in the doorway with a syringe in her hand. Having done an injection, she returned to the corridor after another syringe for the next shut-in.
Once a nurse missed me and, so as not to remind her, I pretended to be asleep and, when the gurney tinkled away to Wardroom 8, I could not believe my own luck. An hour later, the nurse called me from the doorway, holding a syringe in her uplifted hand, she smiled victoriously, "Hoped to skip it, Ogoltsoff?"
In the manipulation room, before they started a round, those syringes were charged according to the list, and when on the gurney remained an unused syringe, she realized that someone had been missed… You remembered – well done, but why to smile?. At that moment, she reminded me of Sveta from my polygamous past; probably, by her hairstyle…
And I was also injected with insulin intravenously, but at first, the head doctor warned my parents that they should agree to that treatment. Beltyukov, a young but experienced neighbor in the wardroom, told that they extracted insulin from bull's liver, there was nowhere else to get it from. The purpose of those injections was to bring a shut-in to a coma. Many were cured that way, subtracting the percentage on whom the drug worked incorrectly. Still, the number of survivors remained higher. The tricky part was snatching the shut-in off his coma in time.
Shots of insulin were done to me and Beltyukov in the morning, one insertion in the vein inside arm elbow. Then the nurse called the nearest paramedic and he came together with volunteers from the shut-ins to fix us with rags to the iron beds we were stretched on. They fixed only our arms but firmly, so that we could not wring them away when led back out of the current coma.
After about 20 minutes, the nurse returned to the wardroom to fill out some ledger, sitting at the white desk in the corner. That's why it was placed in that improper place – she was watching us like milk on fire not to let it drip over when seething.
Beltyukov and I lay on our beds, side by side, and talked, looking up into the ceiling. He was a sociable guy and somehow resembled Vitalik from the construction battalion or, maybe, not very much so. Then our conversation turned into incoherent exclamations: Beltyukov shouted about the dominance of fucking matriarchy, and I kept proclaiming that all people were brothers and how could you possibly not see it!? Meanwhile, my head was tilting back to see my backbone, only the pillow was always in the way.
It signaled the nurse to put aside her ledger, and give us a shot of glucose intravenously to ward off the upcoming dive into the fatal phase of coma. Then they untied us and gave a glass of water with a thick sugar solution because the mouth was burning awful hot. That does not mean that Beltyukov and I always shouted the same thing, yet such were the core themes of our slogans at uncontrolled chanting when under insulin. On Sundays, they did not inject us that shit…
The hardest to recover from was the shot of sulfur. Normally, it is injected to drunks in the form of punishment, however, the head doctor might have been having some special experimental considerations or certain optimistic hopes. She wanted to do her best, probably. It's also a shot in the rear, with the effect spreading over deep into the bone tissue. 2 days following the injection, the patient treated to it has to drag his leg because of feeling a sharp pain as if your join was finely smashed.
The shot of sulfur broke my will. Dragging the leg, I shuffled to the dining room to eat the lard from the delivery, but when the chmo dispenser shut-in handed me the cellophane packet, it smelled like my briefcase in the sixth grade, when I forgot to eat the ham sandwich at school, and it spent there all winter vacations. I had to throw the rotten lard away…
My relations with the fellow shut-ins were even and correct, as anywhere else, I staunchly stayed an undeclared renegade. Naturally, those derailed out of reach and submerged into the vagaries of their private worlds, did not notice me, while shut-ins capable of thinking, as far as possible, showed certain respect caused by the sympathy and compassion for my exposure to the insulin injections. Only one young guy, Podrez, for some time was fawning over me without any reason but then, in the queue to the dining room, he hit me in the stomach, I couldn't guess why.
2 minutes later, Beltyukov, in the same queue, found some fault with Podrez, pinioned him and kept immobilized. He did not say me anything, not even with his eyes, but there was no need for hinting that Podrez was fixed by him for me to jab the guy into any spot at my discretion. But I did not hit, I feel sorry for the mentally ill, notwithstanding my hurt stomach.
A far more terrible blow dealt me the loss of the book in English. On the white desk in our wardroom, there remained only the copybook with the since long finished translation and the pen stuck in between its pages. I was upset unbearably because the book was borrowed from Zhomnir, who had borrowed it from another teacher at the Department of English – the ever-smiling Nona. But when I, in that terrified state, turned to the head doctor, she, with the indefinite indifference, responded that the book would not go anywhere.
And she was right. 3 days later it was returned to me by a shut-in who collected it from the nutty kidnapper at Wardroom 7, he failed to keep it concealed any longer.
(…I understand the thief's sentiment. At those times they did not know in the Soviet Union how to produce such glossy paperbacks for books, and all of a sudden—wow!—a gaudy close-up of a female face against the background of the fifth unit. Who would resist?..)
He did not spoil it in any way, and only the backside of the cover bore light touches of a pencil by which he tenderly poured out his adoration, slightly reminiscent of a sketch of the cerebral cortex, or whimsy curls of whirling smoke. It even might have been some formulas of the unknown scientific language from beyond the future, only that I have given up already moving down that road…
The shut-ins were all so very different. At first sight of some of them, you could immediately see they had a yo-yo stream of consciousness if any at all, but with some other, you’d hardly say he's nuts.
In general, there were all kinds of sorts, with quite neighborly types among them, like that brunette fat man. However, one day, lying on the hospital couch in the hall, he confessed to me his murder of someone else and, usually so very cheerful, he grew at once all gloomy. Maybe it was a lie because the murderers were kept at the second unit whose paramedics were brutes accomplished and his confession was simply a day-dream like my bumping Gray off in the stoker-house of VSO-11…
Yes, there happened incurable liars around. One of them, with a fat tattoo of "Kolya" on his hand, without any invitation started convincing me that his name was Peter, and after that, he took an obvious offense at me although I had not expressed any doubts.
As for Tsyba, he amazed me by his erudition enumerating the unsuccessful suicide attempts of Hemingway until he found out that a pistol was the most steadfast means for the purpose. And before that, I listed him among the unmistakable half-nuts…
There was a seemingly normal gaffer, whose queerness you could guess only from his sentimentality, he got devastatingly hurt hearing that we all lived in a madhouse. Always. For life. The madhouse thru and thru, both indoors and outside, no difference.
"Do not say so, at least here it's a mental hospital."
Such a delicate soul…
Or, say, that mujik whom I for a long stretch considered dumb. On the contrary, he was very inquisitive, it's just that he prepared his questions all too carefully. It took him a month before he approached me and, eye to eye, asked about the sorest spot, "And your wife, was she a chaste virgin?"
Firstly, no dumb have such words in their lexicon and, secondly, I hadn't checked her ears, quoting Rabentus.
And the dumb, on hearing that, began to cry. He fell silent again dripping noiseless tears.
A rather gloomy madhouse on the whole…
~ ~ ~
However crazy, the shut-ins knew everything, and 4 days beforehand they warned me that on Friday I would be called to the commission where they decide to set me free or go on with their treatment. The commission consisted of the head physician of the psychiatric hospital, the head doctor of the fifth unit and the on-duty nurse. Afraid of saying something wrong, I was amenably falling over myself to agree with anyone, grovelling even before the nurse, "Yes, yes, of course, yes!"
The head doctor said they had prepared me for discharge, but I would only be released if some of my relatives come to pick me off.
How afraid I was that no one would come on Saturday! After all, there had been such a Saturday when I waited in vain. The whole evening after the commission I had to restrain myself so as not to burst into tears. Sobs literally clenched my throat – I would not stand another week of injections…
My parents came together, and from the landing by the door, we were summoned to the office of the head doctor who said that my treatment should be continued with iminazine pills.
My mother thanked her so very much, and my father took out the money from his jacket pocket and handed it to my mother. She came up to the head doctor and put the money into the pocket of her professional white smock, but the head doctor did not even notice it.
(…as I learnt later, the amount was 40 rubles – the combined daily earnings of a team of 6 bricklayers. That day there were 3 discharges, so the head doctor earned my monthly payment in one morning.
As they say in Konotop, it depends on what you've been trained for…)
On the bus from Romny to Konotop, my mother cautiously informed me that my things had been moved from the apartment rented under the great birch tree, back to 13 Decemberists. Though saddened by that news, I had not strength to resist…
At first, our team met me guardedly as a person returning from Romny. However, at construction sites, such attitude wears off quick enough, if by the end of a working day you neither surprised anyone with your shovel over their head nor took a dive from the fifth floor then you're like everyone else.
True, Lydda noticed that I leaned against the pallet with bricks and dozed off in the sun, while the crane was fetching another batch of mortar up, which previously never happened to me. And Grigory commented to Grynya that I was not the same, and pointed at the spanner laid by me over the niche for the electric meters on the landing: one edge 5 centimeters higher than the other.
Grynya answered that they would lap it up all the same because the niche was to be screened behind the frame around the box for the meters.
So I had to put the spanner to rights during the midday break, but before Romny I wouldn't have allowed me such a slip.
And, in general, I became more compliant. The only thing that the treatment couldn't straighten out, was my ill will at falling on all four when laying from the bridging slabs the load-wall on which they rested. Everyone did it on their all four, it's more convenient that way, and safer too. Yet, I still just hunkered when laying the brick course at levels lower my feet, in disregard of protests from my center of gravity. Vitta also at times refrained from kneeling.
(…sometimes, it’s an up-hill job to get rid of the young pioneer inside you.
"Better to dive from the fourth-floor height than lay the wall standing on your knees!"..)
When I went to Nezhyn for a weekend, I took pains to keep my eyes a little squinted, otherwise, people felt creepy at my shell-shocked sight because my lower eyelids drooped as if I'd been forced to watch a documentary series about the death camps, gas chambers, and grim crematoria… I recollected the long article about Clockwork Orange in the monthly Moscow read in the stoker-house at the construction battalion, about how they applied the same technique to him…
Noticing a double chin that started to form under my jaw, I threw the glass container with iminazine pills (the generous gift from the fifth unit head doctor) into the drain pit in the garden at 13 Decemberists. The next day my mother spotted it there and threatened that she would report to psychiatrist Tarasenko my violation of directions from Romny.
"Mom, how can't you see it? Their pills are just a means to make me crazy."
I did not want to lose my leanness, which I always pride myself in, notwithstanding its slight stoop…
Everything became as before, or nearly so… Construction sites in Konotop, weekends in Nezhyn… The eyelids came back to their normal level canceling the need to strain the eye muscles… The translations. The poems…
Those poems started to pop up after the start of my bricklayer career at SMP-615. They were not poems at first, just unattached pieces of irrelevant phrases. Some seemed attractive with the alternating play of sounds within them, others because of inherent ambiguity, or rather being double-barreled so that they could be interpreted in different ways.
