Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
When the brick wall is laid 1.2 meters tall, it is continued from trestles put close by it. Between Kyrpa and me there were 2 such trestles, which accounts for a distance of about 15 meters.
He wanted to show off before the pair of young girls in freshly black padded jackets, who often used in their talk the funny-sounding "yoy!" So he yelled, "Here, Sehryoga!"
And he hurled a brick hammer in my direction over the pallets and boxes in between us 2. The tool flew like a tomahawk spinning around its hilt. I did not have time for calculations and I did not calculate anything. I just stepped forward and raised my right hand and the moment as the hammer handle smacked my palm, all there remained to do was to squeeze my fingers in a grab. Everything turned out all by itself.
When seeing that I did not duck behind the brick pallet to dodge his throw, but stood instead holding the hammer in my hand proudly aloft, that turncoat Kyrpa flip-flopped at once and declared to the girls who suddenly turned mum, "See? So are the bricklayers on our team!"
That’s why I do have what to be proud of in my life…
~ ~ ~
In addition to the rubber doll from the village store, I collected a whole set of gifts for your birthday. There were those glossy plastic what-you-call-them, which electricians insert into the junction boxes. They looked like little ninja turtles, although before the production of that cartoon there remained more than 20 years, for which reason you couldn't determine that they were ninjas, yet the similarity of those bits of plastic to turtles was evident at once.
Besides, there were white ceramic checkers as well. Every item in the set had a double, except for the doll.
(…it's, like, a soldier at the front line collecting a present from shot cartridges. However, our team was indeed at the forefront of the world mastered by humans. Birthday presents from the edge of the ecumene…)
It was important for me to get to Nezhyn at a fitting time when no one would intercept and spoil the celebration day. The local train from Konotop, moreover on your birthday, was too easy to ambush with the “it” in a black-and-white tartan and then a slight swishing touch against my jeans would be enough to derail everything. It was wiser to approach from the rear, where I could not be expected from.
The bus Kharkov-Chernigov suited the purpose ideally, but it passed Konotop at five-thirty in the morning. That's why I did not go to bed that night, so as not to oversleep. I was just walking about Konotop in different directions.
When I walked along the concrete wall of the Meat-Packing Plant, there was a crowd of cattle driven thru the roofed gallery up there, to the slaughter work floor. With what human voices they were screaming! Worse than in "The Western Corridor". And they absolutely got it – where they were driving them and why…
About midnight, I was at the Kandeebynno lakes and decided to take a swim. I stripped down and entered the water in the altogether. And who would see? The dark currant bushes on the shore, or the stars and the moon? They had seen more than that. So I plunged ahead. And the darkness around was vibrating with the grunts of mating frogs…
One plasterer, an elderly female, though sporting long taut braids, told me how she was going to commit suicide in her village on the night of this very kind, and the air was filled with the buzz of insisting whisper, "Come on! Here it is, the pond! Go into!" But I did not have any voices, only the frogs.
And then I swam towards the moon. It had just risen over the fish lakes and didn't have time to grow small in the sky. The huge full moon a sliver up from the horizon.
I swam with sidestroke, soundlessly, but still pushed waves ahead of me. Smooth evenly rounded waves, like those lines printed in the handkerchief with the sailboat. Only there they were blue on white and here it was thin silver lines against the black darkness. Besides, these lines were moving, like the waves of ether, until pondweed by the opposite bank began to cling to my feet. It felt scary, all slimy mermaids came on thought, and I returned, swimming on my back so that to watch the moon all the time.
My hair was wet after the swim, and I slowly strolled to the station so that it would dry on the way. At the station, there were huge clocks on the front and back walls of the building, and 2 more inside, in the halls. That's why I went to the station.
I did not have a watch, when I tried to wear one or another on my wrist it would stop in a couple of days, or they started to show the wrong time and should be taken to repair, or replaced with a new one…
Along the way, I remembered that unfortunate guy from the Arab Nights fairy tales, who shed tears all the time and kept tearing the clothes on his chest because he loved a beautiful sorceress, and she loved him too but warned that a certain door in her palace should never be opened, yet he opened it—out of pure curiosity—and got into another dimension with only sand and stones around, and no way back. So, all that remained for him was to cry and beat himself in the chest…
About 2 years before that, I went with Eera to the Desna River. Just 2 of us, she and I. Gaina Mikhailovna was keeping you on that day.
We went there by the morning bus of Chernigov destination. But how would we come back? Come on, something would turn up… When I saw the Desna thru the bus window, I asked the driver to pull up and we got off to the roadside. Then we were going over a field. In another field nearby, women in white kerchiefs were raking hay into mounds, from afar you could not make out what century you were in.
Then I carried Eera on my back over a channel to a long spit of sand overgrown with wide green leaves past which the enchanted Desna flowed calmly. We spread a blanket over the leaves and spent all day there.
When I had to take a leak, I swam to the other bank, the river was not too wide there. Eera strictly warned me not to drench my head. I remembered that and, all the same, I could not help plunging headlong from the bluffy opposite bank. And now all that was left to me was to cry and tear that T-shirt of blue acetate silk on my chest…
The rest of that night I spent sitting in the square between the station and the first platform. The benches there were not very comfortable, lacking the backrests. Seated on one of them, I met rare night trains together with the trolleys of the on-duty workers from the luggage office, into which the workers of postal cars threw out boxes and bales of parcels. And from that same bench, I was seeing off the groups of passengers yawning from the night chill. Have a good trip!.
When the black box in the front wall of the station lit up 05:00, I walked to the waiting hall to collect the cardboard box with the birthday presents from the automatic storage cell and went from there to the bus station. It's close by, almost immediately behind the Loony park…
The Kharkov-Chernigov bus did not pass thru Nezhyn, but from the turn of the highway, nearby the round building of the traffic police post, there again turned up something, so that about 9 in the morning I was already in Nezhyn. At that hour, the local train from Konotop was only approaching Bakhmuch. But I did not want to be a bolt from the blue, that's why I called Eera at her workplace from a payphone booth.
What a beautiful voice she had! So mellow, so dear. I said that I wanted to see you and give a birthday present, and she answered that, yes, of course, and that you were at home with her mother.
I went to Red Partisans with a joyous tide in my chest because Eera on the phone sounded quite friendly, and even somehow pleased.
The door did not open, only the peephole darkened momentarily, then brightened up again. I pushed the doorbell button once more, but this time shorter, and I heard footsteps cautiously departing from the hallway. I also heard your voice complaining about something from the doorway to the living room, and how your grandmother was shushing you in a whisper.
If a person has voices from a psychiatry textbook, they tell him something. I couldn't make out any words but thru the door I could see—and very clearly—you, a four-year-old kid, anxiously looking up at your grandma – who's there? Gray Wolf? Bad Unclie? And I also saw Eera's mother in the six-month perm-wave, with her finger pressed to her lips, "Shush!"
I am not of those who kick into a locked door, and I did not want to scare you any further. I rang to the opposite door on the landing and it opened.
There lived a pair of teachers at the NGPI. Groza-husband, he taught scientific Communism, and Groza-wife, who was teaching me German in my second year of study there.
I left the birthday box with the Grozas and asked to hand it to you personally. As for coming back to Konotop, I could already use a local train. What's the difference? Just 1 ruble 10 kopecks…
~ ~ ~
(…an attempt to live a righteous life results in developing a bad habit by the person. Not a detrimental one but, at any rate, meaningless – you fall in the rut of that business and keep on even knowing that that makes no difference…)
After the final and even ritually confirmed break-up with Eera, giving back The Godfather—the last of the books I had stolen—had no sense, but it was too late because I kinda got addicted. The reason why the book tarried by my side was that I did not know where Vitya Kononevich went to work off for his diploma, but then I learnt that the actual owner of the book was Sasha Nesteryouk from whom Vitya borrowed it.
I had to go to Nezhyn again… However, at the address, provided by Vasya Kropin, Sasha Nesteryouk was no more and the place was already rented to a married young couple. The young man wore a white tank-shirt, his wife a dressing gown, and the apartment richly smelled of grease smoked herring.
What else would you need for happiness, but a separate apartment and a young woman at any time of day?. When they proposed the address of their landlady who, possibly, knew where Sasha Nesteryouk moved, I turned it down and dropped any further search because I remembered that in the last year at the institute Igor Recoon, my course-mate from Konotop, became bosom friends with Nesteryouk. So it would be easier to give the book to Igor and let him pass it instead of me. Anyway, I felt fed up with the path of righteousness.
On the train back, I for the first time was visited by the thought – maybe just so it was necessary? A woman of your own, of course, is a good thing, whichever way you turn it, but why then I did not envy the young lodger? And what was the reason for the odd, ticklish, laughter seizing me at fleeting recollections of the bliss accentuated by the herring, a white tank-top, and stuff?.
Igor's mother said that he was not home and that he worked on the first floor in the building of the City Party Committee.
The building itself was by Peace Square, behind the gray monument to Lenin where once stood the tower of the city television studio before it was dismantled. At the entrance to the City Party Committee, I answered the militiaman which room and to whom I was going, and he let me pass.
The room was empty, but the moment I idly walked up to the window, Igor got in, obviously unwilling to let me see the view outside. He had not changed at all. The same glasses of tea color in a golden frame, and the same smirk under the sharp nose. Only in his demeanor there appeared the air of condescending; clear enough though in a man who got in the tracks of a wide road to a brighter future.
The Godfather hardly surprised Igor, and he promised to pass the book to Sasha Nesteryouk… Probably, it's nice to feel superior to someone who you were looking up to when being a young entrant to the NGPI with your school certificate received just a month before, while that someone had served already in the army. But now the ex-superior was slavering at a construction site, and you had an office in the City Party Committee, albeit having to share the office room with another functionary…
We never met again, yet I was in time to catch a glimpse thru the window in his career-spring-board office and to see the strip of the cracked asphalt in the blind area under the wall, the sun-killed lawn, and the facade plaster "coat" on the blank opposite wall in the opaque gray whitewashing and… nothing else. To whichever heights he was to rise in his future career of a cadre, he’d never see that group of tall Birches among the construction sites of At-Seven-Winds that looked like slender trees in the summer haze of African Savannah. Even if you were pointing at them, he would not see…
~ ~ ~
Still, I was persistently harassed by a sticky hope because when Eera talked to me on the phone her voice seemed so joyful. What if?. And it was none of her fault that my mother-in-law decided to expose me before you as a brutal door-kicker. She certainly had not even consulted Eera, whose voice sounded like my Eera's voice…
To assert those hopes, I went to the Intercity Telephone Station, next to the main post-office. The glass door and walls cut off and left behind me the clang of the streetcars and the everyday fuss in front of the Department Store on the square's opposite side.
The woman behind the glass partition over the counter wrote down the city and the number I was calling. She passed the receipt to me, and I paid for a three-minute talk. Taking off the receiver from the phone on her desk, she told someone to give Nezhyn, 4-59-83.
I slipped the receipt into a hip pocket of my jeans and became one of the few waiting. When somewhere in another city someone was picking the receiver up, they were told that it was Konotop online, and the black loudspeaker in the station hall shouted in a female voice which booth to enter for a talk with that city. Behind the glass inserted in the door of the indicated booth, a light bulb lit up revealing a narrow compartment squeezed in between yellow chipboard plates. The expectant walked into the said booth with the phone on a small plywood shelf in the corner, next to the high stool with the crimson-plush covered seat. I did not know whether the stool was soft or hard, I had never sat down…
"Alma-Ata! The number does not answer! What will you do?"
"Repeat!" From the loudspeaker floated up a distant echoing of long telephone rings in the faraway Alma-Ata.
"Petrozavodsk! Cabin 12!"
What they were talking about was not heard in the station hall, unless they started to shout because of a faulty connection.
"Alma-Ata! The number does not answer! What will you do?"
"Take off!" The person of unfeasible expectations returned the receipt and got their money back.
"Nezhyn's online!”
I entered the booth and left the station hall behind my back and behind the glass in the upper half of the closed door. It's very difficult to talk with your heart throbbing pit-a-pat up inside your throat.
"Call Eera, please."
"Who's talking?"
"Sehrguey Ogoltsoff."
"Now…"
"Yes."
And the throb broke off at once, killed by the permafrost chill in her voice. I said hello, was saying something else, but I heard that I could never get thru that dead, adamant, ice.
"Look, I'm not asking for anything, but the girl needs a father."
"Do not worry, she’s got a father already."
"Yes?. It's…good." The conversation was over.
I went directly to the exit but when in the glazed cage of its vestibule, I looked back at the booth where the light had already gone out. And I said to myself: "Look well, it's number 7. See? That number means your getting crucified…"
~ ~ ~
There are miles upon miles upon miles and three time zones between the UK and Konotop, but—lo and behold!—because of that faraway kingdom, or rather because of that kingdom's communists and, reaching the very core, because of their Morning Star newspaper, I missed the wedding of my sister Natasha that summer. After all, if you consider things carefully, it's because of Morning Star that I landed into the madhouse once again.
(…because of the daily reading the news that half-month before was the latest news in the United Kingdom, you begin to sympathize with the Labor movement, and the names of Michael Foote and Tony Benn become not so empty sounds as the names of Suslov, or Podgorny, or whoever else was among the members of that Political Bureau of their Central Committee of the CPSU.
The head of the British government, Margaret Thatcher ceases to be "Dear Mrs. Margaret Thatcher!" as announced by Leonid Brezhnev scrutinizing the lines in the sheet of his welcome speech and playing for time with triple senile smooches on every other word written for him to read out. She becomes that bitchy iron twat who starved to death 29 Irish lads because of their wish to wear sweaters in their prison cells.
That is, there is a shift towards an inadequate perception of the surrounding realities. You start to behave like a miner from Kent County or a public utility worker in the city of Manchester.
Of course, I could defend myself bringing in my lack of awareness because, after all, I lived in the era of stagnation and did not ever suspect it. However, this is a weak excuse, because equally ignorant of the fact was the KGB officer, who answered the phone call from SMP-615…)
At the height of summer, when the annual battle for the harvest was unfolding in the boundless fields of our great Motherland, when the miners of Kuzbass region promised to give out the millionth ton of black gold in the current year, when he, the aforesaid KGB officer, still could not make up his mind whether to go on Saturday to his dacha in the Zholdaky village or rather have a ride to the Desna river, from where for the second week at a stretch already mujiks were coming back with a good catch…
Shattering the summer softness of lazy contemplation, the telephone on his desk buzzed to give out the message less welcome than a spare prick at a wedding. Emergency Situation. Strike and sit-in at SMP-615.
How many strikers?
One.
Where exactly?
On the porch of the administrative building.
"Do nothing before the arrival of our operatives."
Yes, I was sitting on the wide concrete two-step porch of the two-story administrative building.
Yes, it was a strike, because at 10 in the morning, instead of chinking my trowel against the bricks, I changed in our team trailer amid At-Seven-Winds and showed up at the base of SMP-615.
Yes, it was a sit-in strike and, so as to be seated with more comfort, I took a wooden chair from the check-entrance house at the gate and schlepped it onto the porch of the administrative building.
It was a classic summer day, in the blue sky a huge puffy mass of a solitary, brightly white, cumulus hung anchored over the production building, sending no shade to the vast sun-smitten yard. The gray fence of concrete panels couldn’t hide the tall railway embankment, along which express trains flew with hasty knock-knocking past the mortar unit, giving way to solidly pounding cars of endless freight trains getting on in both directions.
It was a casual busy day, and only I did nothing but sweating in that blue shirt of acetate silk which is the same crap as nylon, just a little softer.
I was sitting a little bit aside from the entrance, so as not to accidentally obstruct the way to rarely passing employees of SMP-615.
Two locksmiths, the husbands of Lydda and Vitta from our team, stopped by to ask why I was here and not at work. Without a word of explanations, I pointed with my thumb at the board for pointers in labor performance of glossy brown linoleum, placed on the same porch, but on the other side from the entrance. And the chief mechanic guessed himself to read it carefully…
The pointers board, normally, was hung for life in the lobby on the first floor, next to the shut up window out of which once a month we received our payment. And year after year, the board chastely guarded the intact virginity of its linoleum, although a piece of chalk was put on the lower plank in its frame… That day the board's star hour pealed and out it went and stood there covered with the pompous handwriting from which, without any graphology, anyone could right away see a graphomaniac:
Our trade-union boss is a liar!
Down with Slaushevsky!
I knew, if that had happened somewhere in England, the younger representatives from both factions of the Labor Party would have already been portrayed standing next to the board, and the reporters of that same Morning Star would have already interviewed me: what's caused so a militant intolerance towards the trade-union leader? Until that morning, I also had only sympathy for him.
The foreman of carpenters, Anatoly Slaushevsky, had a pleasant countenance below the milky gray hair on his head. In Hollywood, he would have easily made a career in the line of a noble sheriff in various Westerns. But we too kept noble looks in high esteem, and Slaushevsky was year after year elected the chairman of the trade-union committee of SMP-615. It was a no-charge position, so he also lived on just his monthly payment. Like everyone else. And he thought that I would understand him, like everyone else, when he told me on the site that morning, "No go."
"How's that 'no go'?"
"Just so that no go."
Never, in the most horrible nightmares, ever dreamed he of being accosted with the unknown, yet obviously defamatory name of "boss"—white on brown—accompanied by aggravating demand to put him in an unusual position.
Sympathy is a short-living thing. A month before I would readily give him a hug when he told me there was a permit to the Artek pioneer camp.
Yes, I wanted it, sure thing! All my pioneer childhood I dreamed of visiting the sunny Artek on the Crimean coast. Now I, naturally, did not fit there by my age anymore, but Lenochka would be happy to see the Black Sea…
In fact, Lenochka got a little scared and began to ask her grandmother, who responded that Artek was very good. And Lenochka had already passed all the doctors from the children polyclinic with their medical checks. She even made her choice which suitcase she would take with her for keeping her things in Artek.
"No go."
A month before Slaushevsky did not yet know that someone else would guess that Artek was very good. That's why he offered to me that free permit paid for by the trade-union. And it did not matter that the smart late-comer, to whom some manager from SMP-615 boasted about having such a permit, was from another organization. Anyway, his position in his organization was higher than that of a bricklayer.
"No go."
If you live on just your monthly payment, you must think rationally. As everyone else. Grunt, scratch in the back of your neck, say "fuck!" and go back to your workplace. What's the use of showing your horns to Slaushevsky? He's also like everyone else…
I knew exactly how all that would evolve in England, but I had no idea what would happen next here, in my native land. So, my role was that of an on-looker in acetate silks, only I had to unfasten a couple of buttons, the day was too darn hot…
Round the white-brick corner of the administrative building slowly floated a white Volga. It made a loose turnabout over the fine dust in the road surface and pulled up in front of the porch with its nose to where it had come from. The driver got out, leaving two passengers in the back seat, climbed the porch, read the 2 lines on the linoleum in the monthly pointers of labor performance board and, without ever looking at me, entered the building. He soon returned, got back into the car and his 2 burly passengers came out of it and approached me.
"Let's go."
"Where?"
"You'll see."
It's inconvenient to talk turning your face up in two directions. I got up and put my hand on the back of the chair, "Okay, I'll just take the chair back."
"They'll take it without you."
And the 2 of them instantly gripped my biceps – each one from his side with both hands. Gently and slowly they led me towards the Volga.
At a distance, the monitor group of 2 locksmiths and one welder stood watching from the shade in the doorway to the production building, a lost and found preparatory sketch by Repin for his famous "The Arrest of a Propagandist".
The archangel on the left, responding to my meek compliance, loosened his grip a little. He already, like, just strolled along comradely embracing my arm with his palms.
I shouted to the driver, "The one on my left is shirking!" The grips from both sides immediately hardened and soon the 3 of us were sitting in the back seat, with me in the center. Like, a f-f..er..I mean, festive king on the coronation day.
While Svaitsikha was opening the gate—the first and last time that I saw it locked—I shouted to her to take back from the porch the chair I had borrowed from her workplace. And the Volga drove to Konotop.
After some other gate, they told me to get over into a small UAZ van with no windows in the back. One of the burly guys got in with me, the vehicle revved ahead but soon we stopped again. Thru the opening to the driver cab and the following windshield, there were seen the Poplars nearby the City Medical Center.
After a prolonged wait, the back door swung open. On the sidewalk stood the psychiatrist Tarasenko. "Yes, it's him." After those his words, the door slammed shut again and I was taken to Romny. Without any voluntariness on my part…
~ ~ ~
Your looks depend on how favorable is the disposition of the mirror you are looking in. I noticed it more than once. In some mirror – wow! I'm really gorgeous! While in another – is that ghoul I?
The most in-love-with-me mirror I had ever met, was the pier-glass in the hall of the fifth unit of the regional psychiatric hospital in the city of Romny. It showed me what a terrific handsome man I was, after all. And without any cinematic sweetness – just a comely man and that's it.
In those three months in Odessa, I looked like Konkin, or he was made up to look like me when starring in "No way to change the meeting point". And it did not matter much, who's like who, the main thing that there, from the pier-glass, at me was looking a man of unusual, for the stereotyped standards, handsomeness by the Titian's brush. The red pajamas in pin-thin yellow stripes, brown soft hair slightly lightened by their sunburn, but the main advantage was the color of the eyes. Some singular, inimitable, color – that of melting honey.
And let Captain Pissak, composing my verbal portrait in front of the ranks of the First Company, say, "Look at his eyes! They are lynx eyes!" But no, Captain, the pier-glass would not lie – they were good!
The only pity was that no one saw it except me. The hall was empty, and the corridor was quiet. A dozen shut-ins stayed in the observation wardroom and all the rest of the fifth unit for the entire daylight hours were kept—with the break for a midday meal—in the Area.
It's summer, after all!.
When, in the Experimental Unit by the Repair Work Shop at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, we, the Unit’s locksmiths, in the end of working day were awaiting for the final, most slow-go, concluding, half-hour to expire and, leaning our backs against the vices, were yakking of this and that though, in general, of nothing, some younger locksmiths agreed that it would be nice to get back to the army again, but only now, already knowing what's what and, surely, not for the full hitch of 2 years, but, like, for a week, or 2, or maybe for a month…
To me, a soon-to-be draftee, such conversation seemed unconvincing, yet now I'm ready to agree, that the same phenomena might have more than one and rather different appearances.
At first sight, thru the roundly perplexed eyes, things look one way, but when you watch them from the height of the accumulated experience, they acquire quite a different aspect. And 1 month is just a trifle. They do not lock you up for less than 45 days in the madhouse. 45 days is half of a season: half the summer, or half the spring, or whenever they pinched you and made a shut-in.
As a regular at the fifth unit, I knew that already as well as some other nuances, however, I hadn't yet been there in summer. For me, as an unmitigated recidivist, they no longer cared to spend expensive insulin. That time I was not treated there, but getting punished with iminazine. 3 executions per day multiplied by 45; I knew what mess they would turn my ass into in the subsequent half-season… And, as a cheaper patient, I was placed in a larger wardroom, Number 8. The more the number of sick people spending the night around, the higher chances for hearing their screams from their nightmares, or witnessing a showdown lighted by the inexorable electric bulbs.
(…every summer has its drawbacks and, first of all, the influx. Any resident of any resort would agree – on the arrival of those crowds, the standard of living takes a nosedive…)
In summer, the fifth unit served, on average, 40 patients more than in other seasons. To provide everyone with a place to sleep, in Wardroom 8, for example, 2 side-by-side beds served to accommodate from 3 to 4 men a night, depending on how lucky you were. In that half-season, I was lucky both ways.
But there was a huge "but!" – summertime removed the problem of the washed and, therefore, locked toilet because we spent all day in the Area. The Area was a square 40 by 40 meters. The 3 sides of its perimeter, including the one with the wicket in it, presented a robust fence of rough gray boards 2.2 meters tall, nailed vertically side by side. The fourth side was a sturdy 2-meter-tall iron mesh fixed to the concrete stakes. Alongside the fence in the base of the square, there stretched a thirty-meter-long canopy with its low gable roof of rusty tin propped by few and far between pillars of red brick.
Scores of broken iron beds randomly piled on each other formed one high heap rusting in the canopy’s shade. 2, still usable, ones stood close-by the heap’s slope, both covered with a cloth blanket over the spring mesh. When the syringes with midday injections were brought down to the Area, the shut-ins, called by their names, were coming to the blanketed beds to pull their pants down, lie with their backs up, and get their dosage into, one by one.
