Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
“PhD student“! Each letter glittered with its individual halo. To get into the graduate school by the research institute, Twoic was prepared to pray whatever gods it gave there. Even after the Nezhyn professor brought his mother to the right person from the research institute and she held the necessary negotiations, Twoic still went to the Vladimir Cathedral where he said a prayer and did not stint for a twenty-kilo candle, and now, just in case, he came to Konotop to use me as well. After all, I was Hooey-Pricker, the Hosty elite, the rising star of the English Department, the bearer of the blessing, like Jacob, like Joseph…
(…the devil only knows what blessedness is, but since Thomas Mann said it is around then, after all, it is…)
It looked like Hooey-Pricker had a nasty nosedive and spilled his blessedness, yet you never know, a drop or 2 could still remain. Why not to sprinkle the remnants on a friend like Twoic?
(…he did not say a word about any drops though, and everything else after the point on the giant candle was cultivated in the hotbed of my feverish unhealthy fantasy…)
In the conclusion, Twoic went over to his projects for the nearest future and, without excessive hesitation, laid out the business plan, according to which I did not have anything to lose while he had a scientific career ahead of him, it only remained to get thru the graduate school. But, if in luck, there peeped a decent jackpot ahead… In short, one, like, a wise guy from Kiev wanted to buy a sack or 2 of cannabis. Reluctant to invite to his native village the visitor who might turn out an undercover operative, you never can tell, Twoic suggested me to sell it, at any other place convenient for the transaction.
The friendly offer made me feel somewhat melancholic, sort of. For political transgressions they gave forty-five-day vacation in Romny, but for how long would you be shut on the account of dope? And they could make you sleepy forever too… Yet, Twoic's general assessment of the current situation was to the point, I did not have anything to lose after the accomplishment of my Maugham plan. And I agreed.
On the second platform, we exchanged a farewell handshake: be it of help to you, my whilom friend, the aspersion with my drops, if any accidentally still tarried there. Do your graduate school the whole nine yards…
~ ~ ~
A telegram from Kiev awaited me on the table, "Saturday 12:30 metro by Railway Station guys also." It was not signed, which meant I was addressed by my friend, my reunited friend Twoic.
Any mail for me went to the shelves, but a telegram was received for the first time, and the text looked somewhat conspiratorial. That's why they put it under the desk lamp on the table, for me to see when I got back from work.
Since I kept as mute as fish to any questions from my parents, Lenochka was entrusted with the clarification. As usual, I kept to the evasively elusive style of Delphi Oracle in my responses, fully aware of the aggravated tension thickening in the silent kitchen and adjoining room.
"You have a telegram."
"Very interesting."
"Read it already?"
"What else do they do with telegrams?"
"From Kiev? Yes?"
"So it's printed here."
"And from whom?"
"It's not printed here."
"Are you going?"
"Going is not the only option if you have a hang glider."
Why was I showing off and making so much of mist atop the fog? Because I knew no other way to instill a taste for philosophical dialogues and play on words. How else could I reveal to her, a motherless girl, the eternal feminine secret: so that they wouldn't stop courting you – give, yet without giving? Usually, those meandering conversations were cut short by a busting blast of indignation from the kitchen, "Not tired of this nonsense? Get away from him!."
She was growing up a clever girl. And she knew how to maneuver, albeit still in a childish, naive, way. No wonder though, with the good training she underwent, especially from 3 to 5 when her mother disappeared suddenly, and her father was popping up only on weekends to say "hi!" before starting off to his friends.
On the weekday nights, drunk grandpa was snoring behind the wall and grandma, pissed off that he still managed to give her the slip, although at the end of working day they got to the RepBase check entrance together, and she had to go alone in crammed streetcars, and trudge the bags all by herself along the darkness and snowdrifts in the outskirt streets, would scream at the small girl wild threats of giving her away, the disgusting wretch, into an orphanage.
And it seemed to the frightened kid, it was not her granny, but Baba-Yaga, the crooked witch and mistress of the black blizzard, which scratched into the dark, ice-clad, windows, and all of them were against her, defenseless, five-year-old, wretch. Complains? To who? To hope for help? Where from?
So Lenochka learned to get along with her grandmother. She knew when to hug and how to kiss on the wrinkled cheek. And granny brought her cakes with custard filling from the "Cooking" store by the Under-Overpass. Yes, and she sewed for her everything with the Singer sewing machine.
And what good things did she see from her dad? Coming from work, he knew only to rustle pages in his book and even bought a desk lamp. Well, there were also those 30 rubles a month, yet they were just 30 rubles to the granny, while Granny insured her with the insurance and when she is 18 – here you are, Lenochka, get 2 000 rubles!
And whatever you asked, Granny could cook. She also knew all the gossip about her classmates, so that they always had something to talk about. However, when you asked what's happiness, or, say, beauty, then daddy explained more interesting. And he knew how to praise a new haircut so that it felt ticklish all over with joy. But all the same, Granny's better…
My friend Twoic did correct calculations suggesting to meet at 12.30. By that time the first local train from Konotop arrived in Kiev. He did not consider one thing though, which was my disgust to be put in frames worked out not by me. So I came to Mother of Russian Cities two hours earlier, by an express train…
Leaving the railway station, I crossed its square full of traffic bustle, car-honking, clangs of streetcars, and leisurely strolled along the inclined plane of the wide empty sidewalk, towards a busy intersection in the distance…
Half a dozen gypsy women followed me into the first canteen after the crossing. Removing my raincoat and hat on the hanger in the corner, I almost regretted the coincidence because of which I had to wait before they selected their havvage and pull the trays to the checkout, echoing to each other in their dark language.
…calm down, there’s still a whale of a time…
However, the gypsies took a wait-and-see attitude and, glancing in turn at me, clearly refrained from going first. And that's a wise move too – to check which items on the menu were safe to eat that day.
"You're missing bread," grumbled the cashier after a look-see at my tray.
"No need."
With a shrug, she threw back a couple of beads on her abacus and accepted a well-chafed ruble-note.
Seated alone, I modestly kept my eyes down, at the cabbage salad in combination with a snack of custard cake and tried hard not to follow the news announcer in his coat and cap, broadcasting from a nearby table to feed his chewing companion the latest news of his world, where the day before someone swallowed way too much of noxiron and kicked the bucket. Some first-rate dinner gossip, yes, indeed.
Yet, the most stunning thing about this metropolitan newsmonger was that he repeated, word for word, the piece which already was no news in the provincial wild. Tower crane operator Vitalya shared it a week ago. Coincidence, or plagiarism?.
Intercepting my pensive glance, the announcer swelled in vanity, the owner of breathtaking sensation…
In the barbershop on the same street, there was no queue and, when I returned to the station, it remained half-hour before the appointment. The shoe shiner in a satin blue smock polished my shoes, flicking the ponderous anchors tattooed on the backs of his hands.
Instead of eyeing up the ladies that scurried past his booth to the women's toilet and back, I steadily looked at the gray of his head bowed to my knees. The mujik got fed up with that crying anomaly. "What are you gazing at?" he asked, putting off his brush and taking a plush cloth instead.
"I seem to like you."
"Bullshit!" he grumbled grimly. "Even I myself don't like me."
"We have different tastes then." And all the same, there still remained fifteen minutes…
I passed thru the immense lobby of the station, climbed up the white stone stairs to the second floor and, up there, rested my elbows on the wide white parapet over the grandiose hall dissolving high overhead into the twilight-filled void. Idly watched I the rough confusion of human particles in the Brownian movement swarming at the tiled bottom far below. About 5 minutes later, this tiny bit of me would mix with them, but now I was just looking down at the bustling fuss.
Their hasty streams thinned about the center of the lobby and, after bypassing it, they again became denser. The reason for the phenomenon was the athletic figure in a scarlet jacket walking there in unhurried circles. Waiting for someone. Whom? Not me. Nobody waits for me except for Twoic who, probably, right now is by the metro entrance checking the waves of the passengers from the neighboring Suburban Trains Station.
Ain’t it funny? Here, in the main station, this burly block goes round and round, waiting for someone, while a bit shorter slob, Twoic, is circling now by the nearby, smaller, Suburban Trains Station, also in a state of expectation. If you extend this line, then somewhere still farther, say, at a streetcar terminal, there is a teenager waiting for somebody. And so on, just like that endless little man in a fire extinguisher on the staircase landing of the second floor in my kindergarten, the man in his cap from the somersaulting pictures who instilled the notion of infinity in me. That kindergarten "I" hadn't even heard the word "infinity", and only infinitely gazed at the fire extinguisher trying to understand: where did those men in caps go? That zany kid is me, who replaced him, and I will be replaced by other "I" because we all are finite unlike the little man in his cap…
Near the metro station, I rested my chin in the chest to hide my face under the tilted brim of the hat. My friend Twoic walked along the line of payphones in the wall, to and fro. He wore a freshly re-established mustache, a prestigious leather coat, the thinning hair and a somewhat surly pensive look in his countenance. There he turned and started back.
After catching up with him, I silently followed from behind. At the end of the row of phones, he turned again right to my grin: "Hi, Twoic. And where are the guys?"
"Hooey-Pricker!" He turned his broad face up and issued the characteristic Twoic's giggle, followed by that same taut sharp squint to snapshoot the situation: what and how?
After a blithe hug, he let me go and started up confused speculations on reasons that aborted coming of Petyunya and Slavic.
Waves of the freshly arrived crowd gurgled from the Suburban Trains Station inundating all of the sidewalk, making us to retreat to the wall.
Twoic gave up developing sketchy hypotheses about possible excuses for the absence of our dear friends, asked me for a 2-kopeck piece and began to spin the disk on a payphone, holding an open pocket notebook in his clutch. It’s safer to have a blunt pencil than a sharp memory, as ran a KGB adage once shared to me by their brunette gallant…
Rucks of sundries floated by in the waves carrying mesh bags, suitcases, rolls of wallpaper, packages, boxes, buckets, bundles of pipes, briefcases, backpacks, seedlings, cornices, bird-cages and all other kinds of imaginable and exotic items, they flowed to the metro and to the stops of public transport of all types on the square, dashing fleeting looks at the pair of metropolitan tough guys.
The one with the broad leather back, spinning the phone disk, should be the boss, and the other, with a sticky gaze from under the lowered brim of his hat, a bodyguard. And although not everyone in the crowd knew such words as "boss" or "bodyguard", yet at the back of their collective mind, they shared common respect to those 2, at least for having their spines free of burden, and having where to call on the phone in the metropolitan city of Kiev.
How could they guess, that ever-flowing crowd, that Twoic was an upstart in the city, and I was a nothing-at-all called in by his telegram?. And, by the by, where's he calling? I had no idea, and it did not matter for I was just an instrument. There's always someone to decide for us, and my part always was to execute the orders…
~ ~ ~
A year before, Twoic became a graduate student and now paced along the straight path to PhD. His scholarship was higher than that of undergraduate students, yet not enough to meet expenses for divers temptations pervading the big city life. Okay, there were no problems with clothing, because his mom controlled a district trading base. Food also was not a pressing issue, coming back from weekend visits to his native village, Twoic fetched torbas tearing the hands off by their weight. Yet, for all that manna from heaven he had to pay in kind by the exposure to the parental chewing his ear off with their twits for a diffused lifestyle, and working thru all the weekend: digging, manuring, hauling, pulling in the garden and about the khutta.
Twoic had enough health and strength to make the sport of farmer's chores. And he especially liked hauling something weighty and bulky – armfuls, bundles, sacks with a harvest from the garden to the shed. Raking up the muck in the pig stall, or from under the bull calf, was not as pleasant, but also a job he was used to. Quoting the old priest from their village, "Where there's muck, there's lard". However, the mom's moans and lamentations about the Kiev whores, who rob and eat off the goof of her sonny, were more than enough to make even a saint see red. That's why Twoic needed ready money, but where to get it, was a tricky question.
Unloading freight cars at the station as in the student years seemed below a graduate student level. Besides, he was a skilled workforce at playing Preferans. The game was pure Arithmetic, and in his curriculum vitae, Twoic had 2 years at a mathematical special school, plus the feel of whether a player was bluffing or having a good hand indeed. And there also, last but not least at Preferans, was Twoic's appearance of a natural hick, putting opponents off track.
However, the hostel was too shallow waters. You ripped your neighbors for a fiver once or twice, and they started shying you. Everyone grew so awfully busy, no time for a pool at all, yet between themselves, they went on playing. Yes, behind the locked door in someone's room, a kopeck per trick, so mean misers. Still and all, somewhere, someplace there had to be the upper crust, the elite. It was the capital, after all. Playing by candlelight, on the green cloth, with a freshly unsealed deck, and the trick no less than fifty kopecks, that was his dream. But how could you reach the upper crust without money?
All that brought Twoic to designing sundry romantic plans for getting a jackpot… The initial plan to become a drug trafficking baron in the cannabis market somehow withered by itself. It was followed by a plan to make friends with some of the foreigners scudding thru the capital, to establish a stable barter trade for clothes smuggled from outside the Iron Curtain… That's when he called me to use as a productive tool at the operational end. And since then I entered into the service to Twoic on quite acceptable terms if you don't care a f-f..er.. a frigging flick anymore about anything at all…
Prospective business with foreigners did not prosper either. On the day of the attempt at acquiring a suitable acquaintance, there sounded only Roman languages on the sidewalks of Khreshchatyk. It was no use to approach such passers-by with my English of Nezhyn make.
2 times Twoic hallooed me at different twos of Negroes in slouch hats. However, the targets in response to my cheerful, "Hi! let's have a talk!" shied, for some reason, and kept mum. Probably, they had already experienced invitations "to go out for a talk" at some or another of dance-floors. I had to explain to Boss that they were Negroes from some of former French colonies, so English did not click with them.
The futile hunt seemed to wear Twoic or, maybe, he decided to think over another new plan, anyway Massa got seated tightly on a bench in the University greens and allocated me 2 hours for an uncontrolled free search. The task did not seem too attractive, but I had to work off the grub, both consumed that morning (buns and Pepsi) and upcoming. So, leaving him thoughtful on the bench, I did not shirk my duty in any way and kept the ears pricked up for anyone uttering something in Shakespearean parlance from any side. On Shevchenko Boulevard a group of neat men, passing the Vladimir Cathedral, referred to it as "cathedral". Might it be?.
"No," one of them explained in Russian, "we are speaking in Latvian."
I felt fed up. Okay, one more last try at The Intourist hotel and that's it… On the wide porch in front of the glazed entrance, a burly block with a saxophone string around his neck asked politely what I needed. They kept some naive bulldog at the establishment. How could I—a foreign tourist—possibly knew all those local dialects? On an indulgent survey of the two-meter tall aboriginal, I, without a word of comment, went over in and turned to the left where the bar was.
The inscription in English asked to pay in local currency only and notified that the current day of the week was a day off. Yes, it's time to have a rest… The massive-looking chairs by polished tables turned out very responsive and tremendously comfortable. My loyalty got rewarded, had I been shirking I wouldn't enjoy such a soft seat; much better than the hard bench planks accommodating Twoic.
At the far end of the bar enjoying its day off, there loosely sat 12 she-apostles and their black-bearded Teacher with his fervent sermon of the truest truth. What's their language, by the by? They should know better. Okay, when reporting Twoic, I'd mention coming across a non-governmental delegation of poultry farmers from Romania.
Separated from me by a vacant table, two Germanly colorless girls exchange brief clues over the empty top of their table, while doing their level best at keeping their looks off me. Damn that f-f..er..I mean, fundamental language barrier. The chicks were bored. It would be manna for them to hear, "You're cute and I'm cool, besides, I have a friend named Twoic. How about to dump the boredom in a party of 4?." But they would hear nothing of the kind because of the obnoxious language prison, they're locked up in their cell, and I in mine. We don't even look at each other, like sage foxes ignoring unattainable grapes. But they at least could prattle between themselves, while I stayed some deaf and dumb.
"An o'fooly nais plais," informed I the girls urbanely, "ain't it? Baat (with a slight sigh of disappointment) nahbady to have a tauk wid!" And I gave a gallant nod to their amazed gazes, "Bye-bye!."
~ ~ ~
For the period elapsed since that hunt, no jackpot had ever turned up, yet Twoic liked having me about because I was not only a relic of his student life but also a docile tool all ready, like a young pioneer, for anything. So, after the first telegram, there followed similarly curt ones, just the village name and the weekend date for me to show up. It took a half-hour ride to get from Konotop to Bakhmuch by a local train, and then ten more minutes by bus.
"What's the news about you each weekend getting on a train with flowers? Visiting your wife or what? But you're, like, divorced."
"Visiting a friend in the country. The flowers are for his mom and grandmother." "
"Are there no flowers in the village?"
Yes, they were there, yet much more than flowers there was work waiting for my arrival. Repairing the roof, constructing a barn, turning dirt in the garden. After the work, of course, hooch, gobble up to your heart's content. However, without the flowers, I'd be like a farmhand there, while a bouquet in my hands, like, turned me into a guest, sort of…
The house of Twoic's parents stood on the village outskirts in a narrow lane named Shore. The lane narrowness resulted not from its layout but was dictated by the dense fruit trees overhanging the fences from both sides. The house, of course, was called khutta, yet, in terms of quality, it was still a house. Between the gate and the khutta, there was a well behind a low palisade to the left, with water at just 2 meters down the concrete 1.5 meter rings, with a tin roof over the pail chained to the windlass. On the right, there stretched the whitewashed brick wall of the structure comprising anything – a summer kitchen, whose porch way almost closed with the steps in the high porch to khutta's veranda, a garage for a car that still had to be bought, a tool store, a shed. However, the entrance to the barn was not from the yard but from the back of that building.
Passing between the two porches, you found yourself in the backyard with one more shed of timber for goats, chickens, pigs, and anything else. Under the windows of the khutta, there grew raspberry bounded by half-dozen of Apple trees and, still farther, the huge vegetable garden beyond which there opened an even field followed by the distant windbreak belt hiding the railway. The collective farm did not use that field because of abnormally high subsoil moisture. The folks on Shore lived in a big style indeed…
The house was ruled by Raissa Alexandrovna, Twoic's mother, because her husband, Sehrguey, was, for the most part, engaged in the housework and he didn't have much time for yakking. Of course, when something really put his back up, he could address his wife with a loud appeal to shut up her bunghole. Then Raissa Alexandrovna would pause, bite her lower lip and act a dull and dumb villager, however, all that was a pure theatricality – in 5 minutes the phone on the veranda would ring up asking for Raissa, not Sehrguey.
Apart from the domestic affairs, she ran the local politics, accepting several visitors a day, both on an appointment and without it. Her favorite scenic image was that of a folksy rural woman beset with all kinds of troubles and worries, in a quilted waistcoat and weathered kerchief on her black hair, and only the irony in the look of her black eyes did not fit the disguise. She knew how to artfully tie her kerchief, re-arranging its appearance several times a day. The knot changed its position from the forehead to under the back of her head, or else above the ear—the gypsy style—depending on whom Raissa Alexandrovna was going to let in. For the current visitor (in his jeans, long hair and the beard like that of a hippie from Los Angeles) she unexpectedly got it tied under her chin. Then Twoic told me it was the young priest at their village.
The hippie priest left and, in half-hour, a Zhiguli car pulled up by the gate and a young, extremely loud, woman in awful need of "a gown, eh?!." entered the yard. Raissa Alexandrovna took her to the veranda and was humbly making her brains for at least 40 minutes before sending away with a promise of that "a gown, eh?". She did not sell things at home, to accomplish the transaction the visitor had to visit the trade base if only the negotiations ended positively.
Raissa winked at Twoic and me after the retiring priest's wife, blissful Mother, and crossed her face with a thumb. Holy, holy, holy! But then she decided that we had spent way too much time playing cards on the porch step, and ordered us back to the garden to turn the dirt, or spread the muck, hauling it there in the handcart whose wheels kept sticking deeply into the black soil on the way, or to collect the corn ears…
However, when I and Twoic were erecting another barn of logs, we were out of her jurisdiction – Sehrguey had announced a smoke break that's why we were playing… The food after work was not a havvage but a bounteous rural grub on lavish fat, with dill aroma, mouthwatering whiffs of steam over the plates, and a bunch of crispy green onion studded with fresh water drops, on a dish in the table center.
The chef cook in the khutta was Grandma Oolya who cooked delicious things with just one hand, the other, since long paralyzed, she kept in the pocket on the stomach of her apron. And distilling hooch was also her responsibility because she liked to watch the product dripping into the vessel set beneath the tube…
I liked that kind of life more than sunbathing on the Seim beach sand. I liked the energetic one-legged neighbor Vityouk, the experienced player at the Throw-in Fool. And even more, I liked Ganya, the sister of Raissa Alexandrovna. There was no acting or irony about Ganya, she was calm and attentive, and she understood everything. I was sorry that she had cancer.
Doctors recently removed "the pea" out her belly, and on her coming back home the loving hubby did not give her no peace until she let him see the fresh gash from the surgical knife. I knew that she would not survive because at renovating the stove in her khutta all the firebricks from the old one were quite rotten. Yet, I was told to use the bricks again all the same – there were no others, but I could see that it was not for long…
They buried her in my absence, with heart-rending lamentations at the funeral, Raissa was held from both sides to stop her falling onto the fresh grave of her sister with wild embraces and sobs. When they were taking her from the cemetery, the old villager women yelled at her and other mourners: "So what? Cried Ganya out? Returned?" Twoic was very indignant describing their cruel brutality but, in my opinion, that was primordial psychotherapy and one of the rituals in the continuous comedy of life…
At my next visit, the husband of the deceased was also sitting under the black Mulberry tree in the khutta’s yard. At first, I could not guess where those tiny sounds were coming from. I thought some puppy sneaked into the yard, but it was the widower's whining. Such a burly man, a bus driver, the tears flowed down his cheeks and he did not even try to hide them. If all of them together could not call her back, what's the chance of you doing it single-handed?.
Ganya's son, a guy about 14, was at war with Twoic because he fell in love with Twoic's wife, but then Twoic divorced her, offended the beloved of the youth, sort of. For me, it was complete news that he got married and divorced, but Twoic said, yes, a Jewish girl from the Biology Department.
He also told that his father-in-law, when visiting people, after the first shot of vodka used to grab lard for a snack, sort of to demonstrate that he was not from kosher upholders. Now the ex-father-in-law would raise Twoic's son as he pleased, up to making him a strict Orthodox Jew under the most Ukrainian of all last names. And Twoic sighed at this point in the best traditions of the Moscow Artistic Academic Theater.
Raissa Alexandrovna did not allow time for Twoic's grief though, she shouted from the phone in the veranda that he had to change into clean clothes because they were bringing an aspirant bride for the "evaluating look". The loving mother did her best to find him a good party from among local girls, for which reason they periodically were brought to Shore, otherwise, them those Kiev whores would surely bamboozle the dumbo of her sonny. Twoic said inaudible "fuck!" and went to change.
Soon behind the gates, a car was heard and a pair of parents led their elegantly donned girl into the khutta… I stayed alone on the porch way to the summer kitchen, but then a visitor joined me. Some old man bent literally into an arc. When standing, he couldn't see the face of a man before him, only up to the waist.
We started a desultory talk, and the old man confessed that once he was a young and well-proportioned rural clerk, sporting a military tunic and high boots. The collectivization began and, with the clerk's participation, they were making lists of those to be deported to the Siberia. Now he was not able to look into the eyes of people around him.
And, after all, all was to no purpose. The grandsons of the misers, who at that time got keys and seals of the village council, were now penniless drunks, and the descendants of the robbed and exiled returned from the Siberia and got prosperous again. Because on such a soil only a lazy fool lives poorly… Raissa never showed up and he left, leaning on two short sticks in his hands, gazing at the sand under his feet that walked the road.
(…as it turns out, the theft of a crimson tablecloth is not the worst thing that can happen to you, there are things for which you punish yourself much more severely…)
~ ~ ~
Then Sehrguey came up with the major project of paneling the khutta’s base with bricks, which he had prepared for several years already. It took me three-weekend visits because the khutta was not a small size. Twoic worked as a bricklayer’s mate preparing the mortar and fetching the bricks up… We finished on a Saturday. Next morning, I got up first and went out on the veranda porch. My shoes stood on the second step with their noses directed towards the gate, although in the evening I left them exactly the opposite.
(…some signs I can read easily –
"the Moor has done his job…"…)
I put my shoes on, walked out of the gate and, on reaching the end of the lane, turned to the windbreak belt because in its clearings a very slow freight train was clanging along. I strode fast, and then I had to run but in the end I managed to jump on the brake platform of the rear car.
