Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
A pair of armchairs on rusting legs, with their leatherette cover in tatters, were leaned, to prevent collapsing, against the brick pillars – they were the seats of paramedics. At the far end of the canopy, nearby the mesh fence, there stood a couple of short plywood benches with perpendicularly upright backs like those in school desks.
Parallel to the fence opposite the square base, three long, separate, boards were nailed to short stumps sticking from the ground to form 3 consecutive backrestless benches. 3 benches of the same design stretched along the third board fence with the entrance wicket in it.
The iron-mesh side in the square, opposite the entrance, had nothing for sitting nearby, but close to it—in the right upper corner of the Area—there stood toilet of the sorteer type: a box of three rotting tin walls under the equally rusty tin roof. The box’s door was missing for paramedics to make sure that the shut-in inside was not attempting suicide, or otherwise abusing the facility.
The ground surface in the Area was bare and firm, with an admixture of fine clay dust trampled out of it… And that's all?
No! There were as many as 2 "but!" more – the strip of not trampled, green, grass along the outer side of the mesh fence, and the summer sky with white clouds above anything and everything else.
~ ~ ~
The sun was rising from behind the fifth unit’s building and the shadow, thrown back by the roof, started its imperceptible march from the iron mesh to the opposite lumber fence with the entrance wicket in it. While we were taken to the midday meal, the shadow crawled over the fence and we did not find it anymore after the break, and the sun in the sky was still steadily moving on – to the construction site of a one-story building, about 6 meters off the iron mesh fence, and even farther over the site until it disappeared altogether, and the clearly delineated evening shadow started creeping up the wall of the fifth unit, right up to its roof, where it would dissolve in the dusk of approaching night, which meant that now they would take us up to the unit for the end-day meal, injections, and overnight.
But before that, all of us had our feet washed in the vestibule, of course, on the first floor. All 120 people, in turn, would step, one after another, into one and the same tin basin filled with one and the same water. 2 nuts, kneeling on the floor behind the basin, would wipe all their feet, in turn, with one and the same pair of wafer towels drenched thru and thru. Those proceedings had an unmistakable biblical air about them, like, the New Testament feet ablution for the queuing apostles, sort of. Probably, the illusion appeared on account of the measly illumination by the bulb somewhere up in the staircase well…
I met about 10 familiar faces. Tsyba, on the very first evening, hastily approached me in the corridor, gave a brief glance and turned away, "Eew! Not the same!" And he never wanted to communicate with me anymore.
Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, remained sporting close-cropped hair, but he was asleep all the time. In the morning, after our joyful barging in thru the wicket into the Area, he stretched on the bed for injections and only by the middle of the day, without waking up, he conceded a part of it for laying—in turn, with their backs up—of those whose execution syringes were brought down from the manipulation room…
The first one-and-a-half hour in the Area, I usually spent laying on one of the board-benches along the upper side of the square. Behind the fence, there was the area of the fourth unit, whose powerful howling and squealing in no way was less intensive than by us.
Sometimes, I had someone from the slightly inflated standing above me, and muttering to himself it was unfair I had taken up so much space for me alone. Then I had to lower my stumps on the ground and sit up because I could not send him to the 3 board-benches alongside the fence with the entrance wicket in it – that was the grounds of the fully emancipated gymnosophists.
Those communicated with screams, while being cooked in their own juice of free life, inattentive that the skin of their bare bodies, fried in the sun day after day, became cracked and oozing blood, which, eventually, got baked up though… Now, the leader of the community where no one cared about anyone else, bored with the monotony of his swinging back and forth in a seated position, issues a Tarzan howl and plunges for a couple of meters deep into the Area, only for to come back to the board-bench and go on with his swinging. On the way, he kicks off a philosopher of the same well-burned, ceramic hue, who was squatting close to the ground and drawing with his finger on the dust underneath his dangling balls.
"Noli turbare circulos meos!”
Next time, the leader with a single blow will knock another naked neighbor clear away from the bench, who'd never notice that, engulfed in spinning in his fingers a sixteen-centimeter piece of a broken twig and keeping on his own counsel, already on the ground, as serenely as before the passing thunderclap.
The paramedics never intervened into the internal affairs on the benches of the deeply introvert as long as the howl-squeal-screaming in their free territories did not bypass the notch of a permissible level. When it was transgressed, the paramedics, assisted by the volunteers from halfnuts or fully nuts, would pull the stark naked nuts raging at the board-benches and fix him onto the second usable bed by the scrap-metal heap under the canopy…
When the heat drove me away from the Area, I got seated on one of the plywood benches ignored by the crazy public because of their merciless backrests. To spend the whole day on a firm horizontal plane was not an easy task, in the evening you did not know which of your buttocks to use for sitting.
The Area itself was in the state of seething motion: back and forth, to and fro, circles, jerky tags… Where to? Where from? After what?
Along the board fence behind the board benches on which I lay in the morning, there lined a row of backs of replacing each other bozos stuck to the gaps between the nailed boards. Someone giggled into the gap, another one beckoned a fellow-patient, someone else beat off within his not removed pants because the fourth unit kept shut-ins of the opposite sex entertaining similar sorts of mental inclinations, up to the state of stark naked gymnosophists.
These are just my assumptions though because I never approached the gaps in the fence and had seen only one of our neighborixes. Black-haired and skinny, about 30 years old, she emerged topless over the fence, and with a ballet sway of her arm threw a large creamy flower into the dust under our feet. The nuts kicked up a skirmish over her flower, and she was sharply pulled away from the other side of the fence, yet and all, the breasts were beautifully shaped…
3 times a day, so as to stretch my buttocks, hardened by the shots, I left the shade of the canopy and walked around the Area in wide circles. While promenading, I memorized by rote the lines of The Novel- Cartoon, conceived by me still in the wild, but having taken its final shape already at the funny farm.
The content did not exceed one page of text, and it was important for me not to lose a single coma, and prevent substitution of words for their synonyms, because I was arrested without a pencil and paper on me.
The Novel- Cartoon
Maybe, the energy applied for the action was somewhat too much, yet a failure and another try at turning the handle down would cost a dent to the self-respect and bringing nearer to the end.
The warm dense dusk wrapped him behind the door. He doffed the cloak onto a horizontal rod and made between black silhouettes of solid tables and mighty seats for a blurred spot of light in the distance. The spot enclosed the face and hands of a woman at knitting.
– Hello,– said he,– a glass of juice and a sandwich.
The woman shuffled the snack and collected the payment.
He landed at a nearby table, cast a glance around, and started chewing.
– So, what’s the latest news in your beautiful town?
– Aren’t you local?
– Me? I’m omni-local.
– What’s that?
– Means a local any place you get to.
– Well, not much by us. Nothing new…
…over the town stadium hangs the stench of raw shit from the intestines of Christian martyrs torn apart on that day by the talons of beasts to entertain the public…
– Just never happens a thing…
…in the central square whiffs of a breeze play with the ashes of heretics burned by the good Christians…
– Each day all’s the same…
…in the greens a bunch of aristocratic youth whip by their canes the body of a peasant lass they presently cluster-raped, gaze at welts and bursting slits in bleeding skin…
– Same yesterday, same today…
…a dozen of peasant lads, swaying bayonets on their rifles, drive a freaked out herd of aristocrats to the nearest gully after the town limit…
– Every day alike the other…
…in the sidewalk a blonde with black briefcase catches on a pair in unisex jeans, in a sec her black cape wile brush under the right one’s knee…
– What news can be here at all…
…above the sandbox in the kindergarten playgrounds a flying pan of Cassiopeans and a fight-pod of Anti-Worldies rush at each other in the front attack…
– An enviable lot, as befits people you live,– concluded he downing the glass.– In good and peace.
One time, too deeply immersed in the punctuation of unwritten lines, I inadvertently crossed the invisible borderline alongside the benches of the absolutely free till 2 or 3 rapid punches on the body and into my head brought me back to the surrounding reality…
I could not allow that reality to break my system of survival in the void and therefore, on Sundays, I went to the beach. For that purpose I dragged two plywood benches out from under the tin-roofed canopy to the mesh fence—away from those cooped-up yet still too free—and all day long I was sunbathing there, with breaks for the midday meal and when they called me to share the bed with sleeping Sasha, and get my syringe in the butt.
Uncompromisingly, I lay there all Sunday, with my eyes closed under the hot sun, and the surrounding soundtrack noise accurately reproduced the shriek-and-squeals on a crowded summer beach…
On admission to the fifth unit, instead of underpants, they gave me long johns with strips for tying them to the ankles. However hard I tried, I couldn't roll the rigging up above my knees. I had to surrender in the end, and on the plywood-bench beach, I pulled them off and wrapped my loins with the tank top.
One Sunday, the head doctor was on duty herself and got utterly shocked by the frivolity of my costume.
"And this is a person with higher education!", indignantly exclaimed she from the shade beneath the canopy.
How could she figure out at that distance that there was nothing under the tank top but me in the altogether? Deductively, the rhyme-riddle for kids about "A and B" and the rule of thumb helped her out: If the pajamas put under the head, and the blood-smeared long johns drape the back of the bench – which letter is hidden under the tank top codpiece?.
The day after she drenched my reputation by spilling that compromising stuff, I was approached by Tarattoon, from the new wave of shut-ins. He invited me to collaborate in the creation of a nuclear bomb, for which purpose they had already formed a reliable working group.
And I said, thank you, yet, said I, such a task called for the nuclei splitting, and I was fed up with even a fleeting thought of breaking, breakers and so on down that road… He never repeated the invitation…
Among the paramedics there also popped up new faces. The man of short stature with a beautiful head of crisp red chevelure and the broken right leg, for example. Or, maybe, it just was shorter, but he was heavily falling on that side.
The other one was a slender black-haired youth in an immaculately white doctor’s smock. He was the only one to call me with the plural "You", and planning to enter a medical institute in Leningrad.
In the meantime, he gave me injections above my pulled down pants and long johns and—so as to comfort me—he kept complaining sympathetically that there simply no place was left to stab into, that's why it's bleeding so.
One evening, when we, hurraying and banzaiing, came back after the day in the Area, that naked sunburned bodybuilder pressed all of his front (dirty with the dust stuck to his sweat) against the "Manipulation Room" door in the hall by the observation wardroom. The paramedic youth, so as to prevent staining his snow-white smock, drove him away with high kicks of his black shiny shoes.
"Just think of it! Now the door has to be washed!" Shared he his indignation.
That moment I seemed to understand the naked introvert – to press your sun-smitten body to such a clean, coolness emanating, door… even if locked…
Once upon a time, H. G. Wells wrote his novel The Sleeper Awakes… The skinhead sleeper Sasha woke up on the bed under the canopy and, without opening his eyes, pronounced, "What a ridiculous name he has – Tarattoon!" A second later the paramedic's yells added to the customary noise in the Area… I turned my head.
Snapping the iron mesh, Tarattoon flew over its two-meter height and disappeared behind the nearby construction site. The paramedic, falling on his right leg, ran up to the mesh, yet he had brains enough to figure out that even trying was of no use.
He doffed his white smock, passed it to his partner paramedic and left. Soon, another paramedic came to fill his place in the tattered armchair.
The Area was in the excited state until late in the evening, they even stopped masturbating. Before the rite of feet washing, the redhead cripple entered the Area, pleased like an elephant about his catching that bastard!
We went up to the unit floor and some of us visited the sixth wardroom, where Tarattoon was already lying on his bed, fixed and pacified by the shot of sulfur.
Dragging on the cigarette butt which one of the halfnuts kept in front of his lips, he spoke softly. He fled to the outskirts of the city and hid in the bushes of a deep ravine, no one saw him there, there were no khuttas around. How could that red-haired bastard have found him at all?
(…and I felt melancholic sadness about white spots in psychology books as of yet. While they got stuck and making a muck out of schizophrenia with their monographs and insulin, what fascinating horizons of incomprehensible human capabilities are unfolding around!
How did sleeping Sasha learn about Tarattoon's flying the coop a few seconds before its actualization?
What led the redhead to the right ravine and to that very bush behind which the fugitive got frozen sitting on his haunches?
There’s a hell of a lot of questions that I won't find answers to. Never… And others don't care about them at all…)
~ ~ ~
That tall, emaciated, black-haired young man stood out among the representatives of the new wave by the expression of normality in his thoughtful face, yet he got easily aroused at mere words. Once, he started talking about some fascists all too ready to walk over dead bodies so that to reach their fascist ends.
I responded with a conversational shrug, "The end justifies the means." It was an unwise observation because he interpreted my casual remark as an attempt at justifying those unspecified fascists and flared up immensely. Still, I was not hit for that clumsy clue.
Incidentally, he also was a construction worker and brought to the fifth unit at 8 o'clock in the evening, directly from the construction site.
"Your team work two shifts?"
"No, we finish at 5, I went there just to plan work for the next day."
Oh, sweetie! You did come to the workplace after five, eh? They're right – your place's in the coop!.
Ah! Yes! There was also music in the Area! It was being made by a shut-in with a button accordion.
The repertoire comprised 2 or 3 songs: "Walking the Don river…", "You're a cop, I'm a thief…", and… and that's all, I think.
The performance of those pieces began in the morning with an interval of an hour. The interval grew shorter and shorter and in the twilight, the numbers were already rolling one after another, and again, and again.
That way he achieved perfect virtuosity at performance, to which in the evening was also added singing without too rude deviations out of key. With those two songs, the accordionist was bringing the Area to an ecstatically orgiastic state, transforming by the evening all of us into a single organism, where each organ did what it was supposed to do.
Some sang along in chorus, others danced enthusiastically, even the absolutely free under their ceramic sun-cracked tan began to squeak somehow in time. I saw an elderly female paramedic, succumbing to the general ecstasy, she also danced and shouted amid the circle of halfnuts under the yellow light from a bulb in the summer twilight… That's not to say that such euphoria could be registered every evening, but it happened.
Then the accordion player got discharged because his forty-five-day stretch was over. For 2 days something was somehow amiss in the Area. But suddenly, after a break for the midday meal, with a smile of certain embarrassment in his face, the musician popped up in the wicket because earlier in the morning he put on his necktie and ventured to the city executive committee to point out to them their crying mistakes at managing affairs in the city of Romny…
Ivan Corol, which means "king" in English, would have remained quite normal but the name, eventually, brought megalomania about and here he landed among us, one of us, but with royally conceited manners.
He was not patronizing the gaps in the fence to the fourth unit, he was a gourmet. Louis le Roi Soleil. He lay in ambush for the female plasterers from the nearby construction site to go out on the porch in their mortar splattered spetzovkas. Then he entered the three-wall box of the tin toilet and, watching thru the holes in the tin pierced by erratic nails, he commenced to hastily sweep his palm along his dick—back and forth—standing in profile to the rest of the courtiers in the Area. Some refined example for the sovereign subjects, eh?. On having it away, he left the Versailles with the royally ceremonial, albeit exhausted, gait.
One of the plasterers took a brush for whitewashing, put it on the porch and started to cut its end with an ax, like, to make it even or, maybe, just so, in retaliation.
A male voice cut thru the jungle cacophony in the Area: "Put a plank under! Making the ax blunt against concrete, you fool!"
She dropped her jaw, never expecting instructions from that side; she thought there were only ceramic ones.
It's just that I don't like when they spoil instruments. Probably, that's a hereditary idiosyncrasy…
(…as of yet, I have only outlined the external contours of the Area, the shell of it. But what is its essence? What is the point, if any, in all that chaotically turbulent movement or, on the contrary, in the frozen motionlessness not giving a fuck for anything? Does it exist? Certainly, yes.
The boiling bouillon chaos of the soup, both from messy lightheaded ingredients and motionless vegetables at the bottom, is nothing else but a cross-section of the component parts and the current state of the human race. The question "how tasty is it?" does not belong here. So, without much ado, yet strictly to the point, inside the Area, you easily will assort the following five categories of nuts:
a) personnel, aka paramedics, aka bitches in white, etc., etc.;
b) not all there, aka phase-shifted, aka cunt-thinkers, etc., etc.;
c) crazy, aka schizics, aka halfnuts, etc., etc.;
d) nuts, loony, mad, etc., etc.;
e) stark raving mad, aka bananas, aka departed, aka irrevocably free, etc., etc.
To begin with, you need clearly understand and keep it in mind that the boundaries between the above categories are oscillating and overlapping – some medical workers, for instance, are distinguished from certain other forms among the following categories only by the color of their uniform.
Secondly (and this is of prior importance!), the touchstone that allows for differentiation, is the possibility of using the individual in the interests of the current social formation, which creates those Areas. Such a formation must necessarily be current.
Now in order of appearance.
Those suffering from a "phase shift" are distinguished from the normal ones by their inability always and under any conditions remain the same as everyone else. Therefore, for all those who are constantly like everyone else, they are not all there. Don Quixote, for example, who was not all there, would have perfectly fitted the ranks of the normal in the previous formation, where he would appear like everyone else.
Schizics, those incomprehensible geniuses, invent theories of relativity, probability, etc., or write something like The Finnegan’s Wake in the aftermath of which the normal are necessitated to pretend they have understood the slightest bit of crap in all that theories or literary works.
Yet, if you try to push forward your crazy ideas without having the appropriate diploma – welcome to the fifth unit! The hotly hospitable Area will brotherly embrace you!
Nuts have difficulties when asked to intelligibly expound the logic of their actions, however, having a musculoskeletal apparatus sufficient for moving weights, and being capable of reproduction, they are the backbone of any formation. It's only that from time to time them those sancho panzas must have their ass kicked so they’d wipe the drivel off their gaping muzzles and abstain from crossing the street to red.
The Tarzan-like roaring departed, who has achieved absolute freedom from the conventions of morality and behavior patterns of human species, would easily become their own in the family of brown bears, or in the lost and, sadly, never found by Mr. Darwin, link between the ape and human herds, but the currently normal have no application for his qualities.
Yes, but why shall we need each other? What could the normal have to do with the absolutely free? Let's don't forget the mobility and overlapping of the categories; before reaching the absolute, the departed had been start-ups within the lower leagues. Besides, some of the normal (or else exceptionally gifted pretenders) could still harbor hope for a return of the departed ones out of the rough.
"Shine! Shine on!
You, crazy diamond!"
Don't panic, partner! They'll never catch up! They cannot climb the shining peaks of your absolute freedom…
What category am I, personally, from? By the method of excluding the superfluous, I irrefutably place myself at the not all there. After all, no normal one would allow themselves the luxury of a hearty laugh when all alone and there is no "Comedy Club" on the TV.
My belonging to the departed is excluded because of my aversion to impurities; both physical and mental… Well, and I do not have the IQ to count myself one from among the geniuses. I have not been tested but I know for sure it won't be enough for the category.
In the course of life, you have to naturally zip in any of the categories because each of us is just a drop in the streams and tides of the current formation. Sometimes, the current gives me over to a stream to drag along the rapids, at other times I happen to be kicking back in the languid backwaters.
That's what my letter is, actually, about, which I am now due to proceed with…)
~ ~ ~
Everything returns to normal, and in forty-five days I returned to our team. A couple or so of months later, the buttocks also returned to their normal shape. The body is fluid. It's only that walking along the Settlement streets, whose dusty potholes for the future puddle-pools, had already been filled with scattered piles of fallen apples fetched out from under the trees in the gardens and dumped in the road, I felt saddened that everything rolled on somehow without me.
"So the summer has passed,
As if it was not there…”
At 13 Decemberists appeared Guena, the husband of my sister Natasha. He was a representative of a well-to-do layer in the population. His mother, Natalya Savelyevna, with her face and blue eyes was like a movie star from the Mosfilm, but she worked at the station restaurant and every night returned from there loaded with food-filled bags.
Her husband, Anatoly Phillipovich, had already retired, kept shouting at everyone and swallowing his medications – an unmistakable specimen of the managing stratum. The newlyweds still did not get along with the husband's parents, but there's a time for everything…
Yes, I missed the wedding, but every cloud has a silver lining and Lenochka had gone all the way to "Artek". It turned out feasible, despite the pessimistic forecast of "boss" Slaushevsky. Besides, all came off so cheap, I did not pay a kopeck for her seaside summer, the expenditures for recreational facilities in our land were traditionally met by trade-unions.
Did Lenochka meet her mother Olga? After all, Theodosia was also in the Crimea. I do not know. I never learned to ask the most elementary, simple, questions…
The newlyweds returned to live with the Guena's parents and, as the wedding present, I built in their khutta yard the walls for garage and summer kitchen combined into one shed. The roof and plastering were not of my concern though. Well, there were also partitions in the bathroom inside the khutta. Just so trifles…
The mail brought for me to 13 Decemberists was placed on the handmade shelves, next to the photograph of Eera during her pioneer practice near the town of Kozelsk, in the north of Chernigov region, where she stood midst the summer stream in black sports pants rolled up above her knees, and smiled from under the plastic visor in the cap-kerchief… My mail was invariably the thick monthly Vsesvit in Ukrainian. I opened it and, with my eyes closed, sniffed somewhere from the middle – I always liked the smell of fresh print ink…
However, this time there was nothing to smell, it was an envelope which I disliked at first sight. It looked like having been ripped open with a kitchen knife and then, in a fit of funk, they daubed the rent with glue spread, just in case, in thrice more quantities than needed. Here, at once and all too clearly, the hand of layman was felt, the maiden flight of younger generation.
I opened the envelope from its side, but I still had to tear off a strand of paper stuck with glue, sacrificing pieces of typewritten text.
"What is it, Sehryozha?" my mother asked anxiously.
"Did Lenochka not tell you?"
"No."
"She will then."
It was a summons to the local People's Court over the lawsuit by a resident of Nezhyn, Citizen Eera, to dissolve the marriage since the family, in fact, never existed, and I was regularly taken to psychiatric hospitals diagnosed with schizophrenia…
In the queue for the soon-to-be divorcees on the second floor of the People's Court, I was the second, after a couple of ample-bodied local people disappointed in the institution of marriage. They looked like a pair of fluffed-up dove-pigeons, absolutely not talking to each other, and taking pains to gaze the opposite ways.
A girl, a little over the age of 20, invited them to enter for the procedure.
For several minutes from behind the door, there was heard a dialogue of varying loudness but of the same illegibility.
Then the couple went out of the door, still not looking at each other, blushed in their complexion, as if leaving the steam room in a bathhouse. One after another—the man first—they left…
In the room looking like a corridor, two tables formed the letter "T". The judge was sitting in the center of the crossbar table equipped with 2 lay judges, one for his either side. They were a thirty-year-old fair-haired man of military uprightness and a woman well over her forties who had already let all of it go at all. The girl-clerk got seated at the second table where it adjoined the upper one.
I liked the judge at once – a handsome man about 35 who looked like judges in Western movies. His jacket was off and he even opened his waistcoat for a couple of top buttons to represent a true embodiment of the Western democracy.
I decided to play along with him and, sitting on a chair a meter off the “T's” base, assumed the attitude of a kicking back cowboy – the left leg stretched out with its heel planted into the floor, and the right heel resting over the left foot.
"Don’t sprawl! Get seated as you should! Forgotten where you are?!" barked the fair-haired.
"If you demonstrate how to sit at attention, I'd be happy to ape you, Comrade Lance-Corpo.."
"Well, okay!" intervened the judge like a ref in the ring calls “break!” before the boxers turn the noble art of crushing each other’s visage into an unruly fang-and-kick street fight. "Let him sit as he likes."
Then he read up the lawsuit of Citizen Eera about the absence of a family and my diagnosis. He finished off and addressed me, "What can you say in this respect?"
"My wife is always right. Each and every her word is the holy, purest, truth," averred I solemnly.
The girl-clerk registered in the papers that not only the Caesar’s wife could be beyond any suspicion.
Then the judge used his home-made trump with which he had started, pumped, and heated up the previous pair of divorcees, "But wasn't there at least anything good in your marriage?"
"Why not? We were the sexiest lovers at the institute."
With a sidelong glance at the flash of innocent flush in the girl clerk's countenance, the judge announced that was enough and the court didn't need any more evidence.
Thus was dissolved my wedlock with Eera.
~~~~~
