Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
I proudly stated those relations to be fruitful, meaning you. Then I cautiously asked how Eera was.
"How what?" answered Zhomnir. "Whoring about the city."
Of course, my logic was deductive enough to know the answer to such an elementary “how”. I even could visualize it easily if not for untimely distractions popping up, like, “look! What a strange bird over there!”, or else, “Where did I misplace that thing the other day… What was it a Thursday? I definitely could not find something on Thursday but what was that?” and so on… And now, having my nose paternally rubbed into it was fully deserved. Well, yes, maybe below the nose, I felt sledge-hammered into my plexus, although his reply rammed me not as hard as the words of Eera that she had a certain Sasha, about who she cared to inform my sister Natasha, who withheld the news until my divorce with Eera, to make a booby prize of it, I suppose. Yet, most of all I was bewildered, stunned, in fact, by Zhomnir’s literal reprisal of the response got from the slob to my inquiry about Olga, back at the Konotop Brick Factory…word for word, not a hair-breadth variance…
(…for all the difference in educational and cultural level, when we need to knock our neighbor's brains out, we use the same good old stone ax…)
When it was time to set off for the local train, Zhomnir put all the copybooks with my translations in a cellophane bag that turned tight and heavy, and went out to escort me to the station. That hooch was damn well strong stuff, but I remember how the local train pulled up and hissed to slam the doors open. Refusing Zhomnir's assistance, I headed into the round tunnel of the car vestibule thru the curved gleam of nickel-plated handrails in its unsteady sides. Catching the left one, I climbed inside, went over to the opposite, closed, door and hung the bag on the top-knob of the handrail there. The last thing I heard was the sound of the door slamming shut behind me…
Slowly coming to my senses in the gradually emerging car vestibule, I still had the top-knob of the handrail clutched in my left hand next to the closed door. The train stood as motionless as I, at the fourth platform of the Konotop railway station. It was empty of passengers because according to the timetable its departure to Khutor Mikhaylovsky was in 2 hours after its arrival in Konotop.
The sight of the empty handrail beneath my clutch turned my abdominal muscles stone hard and stopped still my breathing. On the remaining 3 top-knobs in the car vestibule, there was no cellophane bag either. Slamming the sliding door, I went into the empty car and glanced along the empty rack rails above the windows, then I returned to the vestibule and exhaled: hooooey!
I did not feel like sitting in the leatherette-covered seats of the empty local train, I walked thru the underground passage and over the station square to the Loony park, to a hard, wooden, bench. There I sat for a long time without any thoughts, only now and then seeing myself in the form of a stupidly frozen statue by the handrail, while they were removing the cellophane bag. Who?!. Doesn't matter, makes no difference… Whoever the pillager, they hardly got happy with so a useless spoil, except for kindling firewood in their stove, it would do for quite a few winters.
After the stupefied shell-shock sitting for about an hour, I remembered that it was SMP-615 on-duty day in the public order squad and I dragged myself to the stronghold room to sit on further – indifferent, detached, and silent.
Only with the arrival of the militia officer, I knew what to do next. "Comrade Captain, lend me 3 rubles till our next turn on duty."
"I do not lend in rubles. Only in days of arrest. 15 enough?"
His dull wit only confirmed the correctness of my plan… The next day, 3 rubles were borrowed from our team and, after work, I went to Nezhyn. There, in the five-story block for the institute teachers in the Count's Park, I found the apartment of ever-smiling Nona and said her that, after several years of work, I lost all of my translations from Maugham. Now, for their restoration, I needed the originals of the stories, all of which were collected in the four-volume edition by the Penguin Publishing House that was in her possession. Could she, please?.
Wearing her usual sweet smile, Nona brought the books, placed them into a cellophane bag, and handed over to me. Enormous joy nearly stopped my heart pounding – thank you!.
"How do you like it, Maria Antonovna? That rapscallion Ogoltsoff lost all of his translations in the local train!"
"Because you shouldn't have made the poor boy drink so much!"
Maria Antonovna also did not know that all my misfortunes or joys, ups, and downs, all my pleasures, and deprivations sprung from that rascal on the Varanda River bank in the inconceivably faraway future…
~ ~ ~
"The habit's a heavenly gift
To substitute for happiness…"
This immortal lines of the great classic implies unequivocally, that for the third time they raked me up exclusively out of the developed habit… And that time almost everyone in SMP-615 knew that any other day they would nab me.
2 years later, at an accidental meeting on the narrow trail along the railway embankment, behind the sports grounds on the outskirts of the engineering college, that knowledge was disclosed also to me by the retired Major Petukhov, the then head of the personnel department at SMP-615. Without any pressure or leading questions on my part, Petukhov gave me an account of how the superintendent Ivan was coming every other day from the construction site to the personnel department head’s office to call psychiatrist Tarasenko about my latest deviations.
"He sang this morning. Maybe it's time?"
"Let him sing."
"He wrote an explanatory note in verse."
"What note?"
"He lost his helmet and I demanded to write an explanatory. Will you come after him?"
"Not yet."
"He shoved his shirt into a hole in the bridging slab and buried it with mortar."
"That's it! Make sure he doesn't get away."
Singing at the workplace I allowed myself not every day, but rather often. At times, especially when a construction site in At-Seven-Winds drowned in a cold dense fog, one or another bricklayer from our team would ask, "Sing, Sehryoga!"
"I had a wife,
She loved me so much,
And just one time she cheated,
And then she made her mind:
Eh! One time, yes, and once again,
And many, many, many, many more times again…"
However, to the Vysotsky’s trade-mark The Gypsy Girl our team, almost unanimously, preferred his The Ballad of Gypsum:
" I lay prostrate, all plastered over,
My every member's well pre-packaged!.."
As for the helmet, it was not lost, it's just that I gave free rein to my gentlemanly urbane nature. Walking among the construction sites in At-Seven-Winds, I saw by the nine-story block 2 female plasterers from PMK-7. They picked some flowers in the fresh grass, most likely, dandelions because of their yellow color. When asked for a cellophane packet, I, with a wide, hussar, gesture, threw them my helmet to use as a basket for collected flowers. Then I pointed out the brown trailer of our team, so that they knew where to return the headgear to. I saw them for the first time and it was the last time I saw my helmet…
Of all our team, only I wore a helmet, that's why the superintendent Ivan demanded of me that explanatory note. But calling "verses" what I scribbled for him is nothing but a staring flattery, just so vers libre, at most…
Well, about the shirt, yes. With that shirt, I ran into it flatly. That time I imprudently indulged in my inclination to self-invented rituals because it was the first day of summer. Now, was it possible not to observe the event? In summer, even wearing nothing but a tank top under your spetzovka, you still swim in your sweat; a shirt in summer is a redundant element.
That green shirt of some kind of finely creased synthetics I donned for 6 years. Yet, that bitch of a shirt did not want to wear off, and I had to sweat in it as in any other synthetic crap, despite its being finely creased. And so, on June 1, I got out of the trailer in kinda green artistic wrap atop of my black spetzovka worn, in its turn, on my stark naked torso. I made for the team's current workplace and buried the shirt in one of many loop-holes in the floor slabs among the unfinished walls… There were no garbage bins at the site and to simply drop the shirt into the latrine’s ochco did not seem right – we had been so close, sweat mingling, buddies for so many years…
Then I went up to the third floor in the next section and laid the traverse wall with ventilation ducts working alone until Peter Lysoon appeared to call me to the trailer. Along the way, he somehow kept his eyes off me and spoke on esoteric botanical topics.
All those strange symptoms flew out of my head when in front of our trailer I saw a UAZ-van with a burly militiaman next to it in his red-band forage cap accompanied by psychiatrist Tarasenko… Our team, together with overseer Karenin and superintendent Ivan, formed an uneven semicircle facing the visitors.
Tarasenko announced to the standing audience that my behavior had always been abnormal and today I stepped over the line by burying my shirt into the hole in a concrete slab. Then he democratically asked the crowd if they had noted any additional anomalies about me.
The people responded with silence. One of our women endeavored to clarify that the shirt was completely worn out and Tarasenko, so as to avoid meandering discussion of a tangent topic, ordered me to go into the trailer and change.
I obeyed unquestioningly, and then I climbed into the van with some drunk in its hold, and we were taken away… During the stop near the Medical Center, the drunk began convincing me to jerk the claws in different directions – the militiaman couldn't chase 2 at once. I kept quiet, realizing that it was better 45 days under syringes than the rest of my life on the run. Then a young plain-clothes guard joined us, bringing one more drunk and, along the trodden familiar road, I was taken back to the city of Romny.
On the way, we made a stop in some roadside village for an additional load of 2 old ladies in black and a troubled man who anxiously swore to all of the present, in turn, that he did not remember anything of what was yesterday.
Upon arrival at the psychiatric hospital, we were led in different directions and, for some reason, I was X-rayed in a supine position. Maybe, they were just testing a newly installed equipment… I did not see any of the drunks anymore, in the madhouse such cases belonged to unit 3, while I was an adherent of the fifth unit…
And again the Area became the arena for daily brainwashing applied to my ass, followed by the overcrowded wardroom for the night repose… Of the acquaintances among all the categories higher than that of the absolutely free, I saw only Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, but he slept without ever waking up.
As a veteran and for the sake of philanthropy, I turned to the head doctor with the plea to substitute my iminazine injections for iminazine pills. She promised to think it over and, 10 days before the expiry of my stretch, she canceled the concluding stab from the 3 injections in my daily quota. And right now, her name popped up in my grateful mind – Nina it was.
Nothing more remarkable happened, except that I learned how to provide first aid in case of epilepsy fit. It is necessary to grab the epileptic by the legs and drag away from the Area into the shade under the canopy. There he would go on beating his back against the ground, yet with gradual reduction of the tempo until his excitement finally die out. Some halfwits consider it useful to slap flies with their dirty paws from his face, however, that does not have a telling effect on the course of the seizure…
On that narrow trail under the railway embankment, Petukhov did not tell me just one thing – why I was so closely followed and kept under the unremitting control. But there was no need for it because I knew the reason as well as he did.
My arrest took roots in the reconstruction of the maternity hospital, a long two-story building by the crossroads of Lenin Street and the descent from the Department Store. Each construction enterprise of Konotop performed their part in the works. SMP-615 was responsible for several partitions and bathrooms in the right-wing on the first floor. 4 plasterers and I were sent to accomplish the task. We managed it in just 1 week.
When the women were already plastering the partitions laid by me, in the corridor appeared a man in a clean suit and a necktie. Beholding the 4 yummy females, the visitor began to spread out his peacock tail against the backdrop of the wretch of a hand, for which he took me.
I politely asked him to keep his ardor in check and not cough in all directions.
"Hey, you! Know who against you're ramming? I am the First Secretary of the City Party Committee."
"And I am a bricklayer of the fourth category."
"Okay! You'll have it!"
He left and a half-hour later our chief engineer flew into the corridor, out of his breath, because he was also the chairman of SMP-615 party committee. "How d'you dare use foul language at the First Secretary of the City Party Committee?"
The plasterers unanimously testified that there was not a single taboo word on my part which information did not console the chief engineer though, but he left.
That's all. Nothing could be simpler – a male with levers of power at his command versus a male in a mortar splattered spetzovka. The only thing that really hurt me was the accusation of using the derivatives of "fuck" because in all the years at SMP-615, I righteously refrained from using such words even deep in my mind…
~ ~ ~
The autumn came and, soaping myself in the bathhouse, I suddenly discovered a bulging stomach on me, kinda rigid fore wings of a May beetle, and similarly unyielding. Soon, my mother noticed that I was turning double-chinned. After one of the late evening dinners at 13 Decemberists, she put her hand on my shoulder to victoriously announce, "You're getting fat, Brother Rabbit! Relax, so it should be, you're from our breed."
I did not answer to the smile in her round face under which—I knew that without looking—a much rounder figure was expanding, so I just kept silent. I did not want to be of such a round breed and turn a blubber guts. I would not succumb to their iminazine! Some radical measures were the must.
If, for a start, we consider those same dinners at 13 Decemberists, my mother skillfully piled no less than two servings of rice or potatoes onto a plate. At the same time, everything was so delicious, that you imperceptibly ate all of the humongous portion.
Repeal of bread became the first step in my struggle to keep lean. Okay, I eat as much as you care to load, but I'm not obliged to eat bread along with it, and I will not. So, I cut it out from my diet even at canteens.
As for the "will not" that was a sham, because I always liked bread, especially rye bread, moreover when it's warm. I was able to finish off a loaf of such bread at one sitting, without any spicing stuff, except for the byword learned from my father: "Soft bread and mouth wide make the heart rejoice at every bite."
A month later, marking that the breadless diet was of no help, I just dropped going to canteens at the midday break which move brought equilibrium to the previously impaired balance. Breakfast in the canteen plus two servings at the late evening dinner stood for traditional 3 daily meals. As for the midday havvage, I devoured, by our team's definition, Vsesvit, brought once a month by me to the bricklayers' trailer for reading at midday breaks. As a result, by the New Year Eve, in the same city bathhouse behind Square of Konotop Divisions, I proudly observed my sunken, like on a healthy wolf, stomach. I always preferred that form… Some concave-bellied Narcissus.
(…there are lots of words you seemingly know because you have heard, read, and even pronounced them more than once. Sure, I know the word!.. until asked about its meaning. But overly inquisitive bastards are of seldom ilk, and you continue to interpret seemingly known words the way you vaguely feel they should mean, sort of…
The word "asceticism" is one of the brightest examples of how people do not understand what they themselves are about. 90 percent of the population, to whom the word, like, yes, clear, would imagine a man of wildly lambent eyes above a hirsute ungroomed beard, weary with his self-inflicted tortures and privations. This is just as wrong as applying the word "athlete" exclusively to sumo fighters.
In fact, the root meaning of "asceticism" is conveyed by the word "training". If, cherishing ambitions to win a beer tournament, you keep putting away 3 liters of beer daily, so as to train and keep yourself in proper form, you are an ascetic. As well, as the neighbor's girl that every day rushes violin scales thru your apartment wall. Damn her asceticism with all those f-f..er..flats and sharps!
On the whole, an ascetical ascetic, preparing themselves for future life in heaven, is nothing but a special case among all other sorts of asceticism manifest in manifold patterns, both short and long-term, depending on the purpose of training…)
And what—if I may ask—were the goals that made me so rigorously guard my being thin as a rake, and every weekday write out unfamiliar words from the newspaper Morning Star? As I have tried already to explain, my general plans were always marked by ungetriddable vagueness in their details. I simply felt that this or other something had to be done and, therefore, I did so…
The extracts from the Morning Star called for a keen attentive self-cross-checking. When meeting in the newspaper some incomprehensible word about which I definitely knew it had been met and more than once already, there rose temptation to neglect it because it was exactly same bugger! Okay, and what's the meaning, eh?
To rummage thru the pile of scribbled up copybooks seemed way too tedious, much easier was to look it up anew in Chamber's Dictionary and write it out one more time. As a result, more than once I happened to look up a word whose entry page number I could say by heart, but not its meaning. Some colander of a memory. That's what asceticism does to a person, making you go thru a certain set of actions hardly knowing why you have to…
For me, the incident of that evening was not a temptation, I rather felt amazed. And she, on her part, was not seducing me and only tried to claim fulfillment of parental duty because I was grossly indebted to Lenochka. I never took her in my arms, nor kept her in my lap, nor raffled caressingly her hair, nor fondled her cheek, not to mention other “nors” of what I owed her. We just lived in the same khutta, where she had once been told that I was her dad, yet who would earnestly consider me a father? Just some dry abstract formula, a contactless, symbolic, dad.
Of course, I never gave her the cold shoulder, and at times I could even get carried away by talking to her, but for a child that, probably, is not enough. And for me, as a father, that surely is not enough but just so turned out my relationships with each and every one of my five children…
When Lenochka was born, I simply was not ripe yet for the role of father. Dad at eighteen? With all due respect to Swan of Avon, that’s just ludicrous. Then followed the years at the construction battalion and the institute…
When you were born, I was already fit to be a father, and I loved you selflessly, but not for long enough – my reputation separated us.
I met Ruzanna at her seventh year. She called me "daddy" all along, and I loved her as my daughter but, for the first time, I hugged her when she was departing to Greece, to her husband Apostolos. The consequences of that same chronic, cursed, contactlessness…
Cuddling of both Ahshaut and Emma, born after him, was impossible before Ruzanna, their elder sister, because she'd seen from me nothing of the kind, so caressing them in front of her wasn't right, it would be a glaring iniquity. That’s how the father of five children remained just a formal dad. Poor kids!. Yet, taking pity on them only is not just, what about me, who lived a life devoid of children's warmth and fondness?
Except for that occurrence, when four-year-old Emma busted her head in the courtyard of our unfinished house when trying to repeat the number of Chinese circus actors seen on the TV. The oozing blood soaked her hair and stained my shirt sleeve when I was carrying her in my arms to the former regional, and now republican, hospital. A weightless, frightened birdie clinging to my chest in anticipation of something terrible, unknown, she didn’t cry at all, believing everything would be fine since Dad was by her side.
(…children at that age look up to their father as to God, and later they grow up and become atheists because the Almighty, as it turns out, is just a stubborn wrinkled curmudgeon who does not understand a thing…)
The nurse at the traumatic unit treated the wound, the on-duty doctor prescribed antibiotics and 2 days later, when I brought Emma for a second inspection, he yelled at me for being a penny pincher saving on medicine for my own child! Stupidity is incurable, even a diploma is of no help here…
At the end of the month in the end of the 90s, one week and a half before the salary, I was borrowing bread from the nearest shop and the seller, Razmik was his name, did not even write me into his ledger of misery debtors. In the pharmacies though the drugs were released only for ready money…
On the payday, straight from the line to the university cashier window, I walked off to pay for that beggarly bread, and then handed the rest of my salary to Sahtic. It doesn't not work to make a private “stash” if in the month end you're begging bread from Razmik…
For the record, there is nothing easier than creating a university. You take Stepanakert Pedagogical Institute and call it State University – enjoy!.
I got a job there when they kicked me out of the Supreme Council. And rightly so, with the officially ended war, the management had all the reasons to find out: who it was that analyst of theirs wearing such a brazen mug.
But that was just an outward appearance, because inside I was afraid like everybody else, only that I restrained myself and didn’t race down to the basement used as the bomb shelter, but kept to the corner of my office room, away from the window, and at 18:00 sharp I left the building of the former regional party committee and walked along the empty streets midst the crushing roar of the cannonade. First, what's the difference? And secondly, it’s quite impossible to predict where the next shell, missile, or bomb would burst up…
Arthur Mkrtchian, the first Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, gave me the job of an analyst before they killed him under the guise of suicide so that no one would ever dare disobey Big Brother.
Well, yes, like, after putting a bullet thru my head, I removed the cartridge case and accurately cleaned the pistol. However, a more authoritative investigator flew in from Yerevan and explained how all that was possible, and Arthur’s wife withdrew her testimony about the dark-haired guest who knocked to their apartment door a couple of minutes before the tragedy because she had to raise their son as a single mother…
Now, following his updated version, all that day she spent in the bedroom because of the temperature and didn't hear anything at all. Yes, people from the nearby five-story blocks saw her rushing to the apartment balcony to scream "murderers!" after a KAMAZ truck without the license number which was leaving the common yard, yet the investigation filed no such testimonies because no one bothered to ask people. So, her son will grow up and get the diploma from the local university, and find a quiet nine-to-six in a quiet institution, like, Protection of Monuments or something. He'll get married and then his wife will bear a boy and they'll christen the baby Arthur to commemorate his grandpa, you know. So is my prognostication…
I did not mix with Arthur Mkrtchian in private because all happened way too fast. He called me, a jobless employee of the defunct The Soviet Karabakh (presently Free Artsakh) to his office and gave the position of an analyst-translator at the Press-Center by the Supreme Council of RMK. At second hand, I learned that he was a blithe person and somewhat strange, you know, he could laugh quite unexpectedly when no one had shared a fresh joke.
Stepanakert besieged, half of the city turned to ruins, people live in the basements, Karabakh blockaded and he, all of a sudden, laughs!
Well, whatever, I'm still in debt to him and I keep on analyzing. Free of charge…
Who Killed Arthur Mkrtchian?
The dark-haired assassin from the KAMAZ truck does not count that way you'll end by laying the blame on the metal in the bullet. No, the murderer is the one who points the victim out and puts the weapon into the executioner's hands.
Version 1:
Before the war, in the village where Arthur worked as a school teacher, he displeased someone and, taking advantage of the confused muddle around, that someone settles scores. Squaring up on a district level.
(Falls thru because of the suicide staging.)
Version 2.
The displeased is a big shot in Yerevan who has connections in the local Committee of National Security. Squaring up on a republican level.
(Not impossible.)
Version 3.
The displeased puts to use the Federal Security Service of Russia which, as well as the Committee of National Security of Armenia, is that same KGB in a refreshed make-up. Squaring up on the federal level.
(Not impossible.)
At that particular stage in the struggle for the Mountainous Karabakh independence which started back in the 1920s after General Secretary Stalin generously presented this part of the Caucasus, as well as its Armenian population, to the Soviet Azerbaijan, the Supreme Council of the self-proclaimed Republic of the Mountainous Karabakh was located in the building of the former Executive Committee of the Autonomous Region of Mountainous Karabakh facing the greens in the round square of Pyatachok (‘5-kopeck coin’ in Russian).
The Press-Center by the SC of RMK was one room with one window, one door and two sizable desks (yes, put in the shape of capital ‘T’) on the second floor to the right. The staff comprised the Press-Center boss Guegham, his secretary Aghavnee, the operator of professional video camera Bennic, and the analyst-translator Sehrguey.
The room was constantly packed with dense cigarette smoke and multi-national media correspondents, both in groups and solo dare-devils, equipped with photo- and video cameras, rucksacks and other traveling necessities, arrived from the former brotherly camp of socialism now transfigured into free European states to witness that the old bogey of the USSR was there no more. Although, even from outside, it was already clear that the great Union of the Republics of Victorious Socialism with Human Face (to distinguish it from the Sweden counterfeit, or the repulsive Made-in-China sham by Chairman Mao) got safely palsied, collapsed and disintegrated, it still was interesting to check how fared the Mountainous Karabakh Armenians. They were the first to throw the spanner under the hood of the Soviet terror machine and rally for the mass meetings on the Stepanakert main square in front of the Regional Committee of the CPSU building. The crowd filled the square, people were chanting, “We de-mand!”, “We de-mand!”, they held the posters of a clenched fist and their own live fists aloof in the air over their heads.
To keep in line with the internationally approved practices for such occasions, the Regional Executive Committee voted for sending to both Baku and Moscow the petition to transfer the region under the jurisdiction of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Everyday rallies on the main square went on until they were reacted to. No water cannons, neither tear gas was used to disperse the meetings in Stepanakert. The development unheard of in all the time under the Soviet rule was answered in another city.
The Sumgait tragedy. The 3 days and nights of pogroms in the city 36 kilometers, 42 minutes, from the Baku city, the capital of Azerbaijan. 3 days of killings, rape, torture, dropping people from their apartment-blocks balconies, pulling with motorbikes noosed baby corpses, you name it.
It was unthinkable, the like atrocities could only happen in some faraway Rwanda, or Jakarta but not in our united mutual Homeland. 3 days and nights of genocide when they break the door of your home, do unspeakable things to your family before your eyes and finally murder you just because your last name ends in ‘-ian’. Ironically, there were ‘-ians’ in the gangs of beasts too because Sumgait, the city of youthful oil-drillers, was built by zeks many of whom stayed living there after doing their time, in best tradition of Soviet urban planning: Zona breaks the ground for a town to grow up.
When ex-zeks and ‘chemists’ were set loose, lots of ordinary Azeri citizens joined the crowd, other Azeri citizens were giving shelter and hide-outs to their neighbors of Armenian origin. Humanity and nationality are different things.
After the 3 days-and-nights of ticking by, the units of the Soviet Army restored order in the city of Sumgait… End same year Mikhail Gorbachov was elected the first President of the USSR which at once disintegrated into a number of independent states because in too many places people started to chant, “We de-mand!”. In short, they became independent states, The USSR collapsed and the Armenians of the Mountainous Karabakh had to defend their land and lives in the war for independence while all kinds of correspondents from the international (mostly European) mass-media arrived from Yerevan (the capital of the independent Republic of Armenia) to Stepanakert (the capital of the self-proclaimed-but-never-recognized Republic of the Mountainous Karabakh) by choppers flown at night to avoid being shot at in the toombs and finally handed their business cards to Guegham who dumped them in the drawer in his desk full of heaps of the like pieces of paper.
