Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
(…everything turns out as it should when you have read it right…)
The freight train picked up speed and passed Bakhmuch station without stopping. People at the platform looked in surprise after the freight train. On the brake platform, I was standing happy and pleased with myself, my hair played with by the wind, sort of a tramp by Jack London…
In winter village chores come to a standstill and Twoic sent me a telegram only in April. We were turning dirt in the garden when his father brought the news about the Chernobyl explosion. The day was cold and windy, the gray clouds flew low. Twoic started a lecture about radiation but I did not care a fuck. What's the difference? However, the wind blew from East and did not let the radiation to reach the village. The clouds absorbed it and took over as far as Scotland, to the laundry hung there on clotheslines. Of course, the Scots had then to throw away that washing, so Morning Star…
But all that would happen later but presently Twoic, leaning against the wall by the payphone, dialed the number, and I scanned the endless flow of hustling crowd, which had no idea about the subtleties in relations between mafia bosses and their bodyguards. And I tried to figure out who of us was more interested in this friendship. Was it the would-be PhD Twoic, or I, his genie from a bottle?
It's a dumb thing to do psychoanalysis having no know-how from the trade… At Psychology lectures in the pedagogical institute, they, of course, shared that it was some mean presumptuous invention of the decaying West called to degrade and belie the capitalized name of Man which sounds proudly. A sad pity, the lecturers uttered not a word about methods in that indecency. Thus, we’ve got no other option but invent the content for the Psychoanalysis thing and work its methods out by ourselves.
Swing your arm, push your shoulder against it – we'll start this bitch of a collider manually!.
(…let's assume, the essence of such an analysis is to answer the dirtiest of all the questions—that of "why?"…)
So, why am I stuck with Twoic? For which reason? The healthy village food performed by his grandmother? Absolutely, yes. Carrying the flowers on a local train, I do look forward to enjoying the meals. Besides, there is one more alluring bait that I strive to with no chance of getting it though, like the ass ridden by Till Eulenspiegel. For any kind of ass, you'll find the sort of grass he will run after like a good little boy. So which one am I after?
The wild descriptions of sex orgies, generously shared by Twoic, keep glowing the embers of hope that I, his loyal servant, will get some crumbs off the master's bed. Say, some slut girlfriend of another whore of his. The dreams do not come true yet, but who says the ass should ever reach the grass? It's a smart ass, and he doesn't give even a sidelong glance at the bunch of grass dangling in front of his nose. He pretends not seeing it even point-blank, and he trots after it just so, for the sake of warm-up, because he adores physical exercises and other agricultural works. Yet, to see what, actually, an ass is up to, you don't need to be as wise as Solomon himself…
Just for the record, there was an attempt at "with a girlfriend's girlfriend"… They came from Nezhyn to Bakhmuch, the ex-lover of Twoic and her girlfriend. Twoic and I met them and took to the village by bus. 2 mattresses were spread in advance over the dry hay in the loft over the summer kitchen. Out of delicacy, Twoic took his ex-lover to the nearby grove, leaving the whole loft for me to use it in undivided mode.
The chick was appetizing – slender and busty but she undressed only down to her pantyhose. No doubt, the modish black fishnet item made her legs look even prettier, but what the fuck I needed that mesh for? The same old acquaintance of a dirty trick – welcome on upper dangles, but no horsing about the chastity belt. I did not try at tearing the pantyhose to shreds, and all attempts at stirring up a reciprocal flame of passion in the teaser fell flat. The state of stalemate was sustained until Twoic brought back his ex-lover from the romantic walk to the grove…
Next morning, I got up first and went for a swim in the kopanka – a pond of about 20 by 20 meters dug in the field by a back-hoe. When I returned, Raissa Alexandrovna was sitting on the veranda porch.
"So how was the water?" she asked with the hint in her ironic black eyes.
"Cold," answered I in all the senses.
After breakfast, already without Raissa around, Twoic asked directly, "Well, how?"
"No hows. We're incompatible."
"How that?"
"She wanted being raped, I wanted to get a shared pleasure. The 2 things just do not click together."
Now, everything that keeps me on Twoic's leash boils down to the needs of my stomach, and that of the reproductive organ and… and is that all?. We need something else here, thinking in only 2 dimensions seems not enough for a Hegelian… Where is the third?! Spit it out!. A-aha! Here it is – the brain! The brain with its lofty aspirations and, first of all, the need to pour out the crap crammed into it, to ease the tension in the storage cells so as not to burst sending its gray matter in every thinkable direction. Ain’t it a torture – be full of pearls but having no one to spill the goods in front of?
(…who would decline the role of Mentor? Feeding the pearls of wisdom into the oral orifice of a naively gaping youth…)
Twoic presented me with that opportunity also, by his questions. How to choose the right route in the jungle of a research institute laboratory squabbles, where each spider for himself in the common jar, one for all? Who's more practical for your scientific career – a talented but alcoholic Micro-Chief, aka the manager of the laboratory, or the dull as 2 felt boots together Macro-Chief in charge of the institute department? Who of the two to choose for your Master?
Answering these and similar questions, I was amazed by the largeness of reprobate Machiavellianism stockpiled in me. I wouldn't ever dream of having so vast resources, communication with Twoic brought into the light the cached stash.
However, the essence of my maxims was so plain that Twoic sensed all of that himself and instinctively conformed to even before my broadcasting. It's only he couldn't put it to words that we get landed into this world where everything is occupied already—"the house's sold out!"—which situation calls for snatching a place under the sun for our dearest selves, and the end justifies the means, so… And Twoic was all too happy to agree. But what about me? Do I live by this sermon? Do I follow it, eat it out?
(…following your own theories is not the must though. Nietzsche, the inventor of superman in the form of a "blond beast", was himself a physically miserable nuisance.
"Snap a place under the sun for yourself," proclaimed I, that's true. However, as far as I’m concerned, I'd sooner drift away in search for the sun attainable in a more humane way, avoiding their scrimmage…)
Well, now, are you happy with your self-psychoanalyzing? Got all the nooks turned inside out? Don't be shy, we are alone – Twoic's too busy with dialing and checking his pocket notebook. So, is that it? The orgies for your stomach plus hopes for getting a second-hand whore, and tickling your vanity by spilling intellectual pearls? Is it the full list of reasons why I'm with him?
Well, that's why, definitely, yes… And also because of the feeling of freedom, when I break loose from the routine of my ordered, polished, clockwork way of life with the bath-going on Thursdays, washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, with the beach or reading room on weekends and the ever-present feeling of voided privation, and never ending vigilance…
Wow! As I see, you now flashed your love for freedom too, well done! And, hopefully, is that all?
Of course, yes, is not all of that enough for a sincere friendship?
Don't try to cheat the dialectics. You have omitted the opposite force – hatred.
And why should I hate him? He feeds me, provides drinking, presents an outlet to escape…
Seems like, in your enumeration, you bashfully omitted the opportunity to practice masochism, eh? What is a pleasure if not some sweet pain?
…had he slept with her or not?.. everything in me contracts into a tight tangle of scorching pain and slowly dissolves in mute shrieks: no, it cannot be.. but if?. and the pangs grip anew to be followed by numb warmth spilling over the innards: no, no, no…
At one of my first visits to the Twoic's village, we were sitting at the bus stop by the wide empty square in the tight breeze beneath the warm stars of a summertime night. The whitewashed walls in the stop-shed, as well as the planks of the benches, were stamped with inscriptions and cuts of all kinds of Deep Purples, Dynamos, Svetas, Blitzes, Vovas, and lots of dates… All of a sudden, Twoic spoke of Eera, "She said she had never had a better sex than with you."
That compliment, sort of, scalped me. They do not come up with such confessions at a café table. For such a subject, you should lie together in one bed after having a sex. Did she count on Twoic someday would deliver these words to me and I recreate the whole picture? No, a combination of too many moves… she’s not a Bobby Fisher… Sooner, the feline female custom of branding their fuckers by marks of scratching talons… That's why he reached then out for a cigarette of Belomor-Canal…
…don't succumb to complexes, Twoic, I've never been a sex prodigy… and now I know why he found me in Konotop… and I am sorry for the helpless babble about blessing drops… he came then with much more trivial agenda – to urinate over the ashes of his dear friend, Hooey-Pricker, and stop feeling envious even post mortem…
He somehow felt that he had blurted out a bit too much and, to efface it, started swearing that he had never in his life had anything with Eera… As if I asked him whether it was so.
(…if you pretend to be a stupid ass for too long then, at times, you become it…)
"Have you ever beat her?" he asked a little later.
Oops, so she shared about that slap too.
"I hit just once, at the final date," reported I, "but it was a light spank, solely to comply with the protocol."
Twoic laughed his endemic laughter…
The next morning, we went for a swim in kopanka. I did not feel like entering the water, so I just walked around the pond and lay on the beach.
Twoic swam it from end to end. His blue eyes radiated a melting glow of satisfaction when he came ashore nearby me with water trickles dripping from his trunks.
"This look was in his eyes when getting off her," thought I. The thought brought pain and even though not so acute as I expected, yet more replete than I would like…
~ ~ ~
She approached me on the beach and started a talk about the Morning Star dropped on the sand next to the pink coverlet on which I was sitting. If I really read or it was it just a trick to lure girls. What that big article was about, for example.
So, I had to retell for the examiner what happened to a 19-year-old youth, a member of the family of smugglers. They regularly flew from Pakistan to England, swallowing a heap of small tight packages before the flight. Stomach served an ideal repository, the specially trained controller dogs at airports couldn’t sniff out any drugs. Upon arrival, at a safe house in London, the whole family underwent the stomach lavage and—rah-rah-rah!—congrats on the successful shipping.
The fizzle happened on the flight when one of the small packages burst in the stomach of the young man. They used to tamp too much into one package and, on the arrival, the guy was taken from the aircraft straight to the hospital with a severe overdose. They washed the drugs out of his stomach and saved his life. And that was the end to the family business. Some sad, in general, story…
She sympathized and shared that she was also a nurse… Basically, a good profession for a girl about 30, who did not look a movie star, yet everything else was in place. My trunks could witness to the fact because, when finishing the story, I had to pull my knees up to my chin to look like a civilized gentleman and not a heated gorilla in the zoo.
Then everything went on like in a fairy tale, she told me her address in At-Seven-Winds, and we arranged my coming to her place on Tuesday with a visit of friendship and reciprocal understanding. She strolled away along the sandy beach, and I had to stretch out on my stomach, so as not to attract the public attention by my swimming trunks stuck out in anticipation of the day after tomorrow…
That day came at last and, after work, I rode from the station square to City. In The Flowers shop there happened nothing to my liking and I had to buy a kinda crossbred of daisies and sunflower. There still remained a hell of a lot of time before the appointed hour, so I took a walk back to the station and then along Club Street to At-Seven-Winds.
In Zelenchuk Area, Vladimir Gavkalov, the truck crane operator from SMP-615, who looked like Eera's brother Igor, crossed my path.
"Sehryoga!" yelled he on the run, "You've lost your way! The bathhouse’s in the counter direction!"
I did not like that whisker of a bouquet myself but valiantly carried it on.
And all the same, up to At-Seven-Winds I got half-hour ahead of time and decided to keep my long-standing promise to myself that one of those days I’d come on a visit to that family of tall Birch trees in the vast area of construction sites… Following the trail trod in the tall grass, I approached the group of the white-trunk beauties.
Stupid bitches! The tenants from the nearest street who made a garbage dump under the trees… Scrunched between the closing in cloud layers, the sun went down like a bulb, without a sunset. Clenching my teeth at the ugly discovery, I took my stupid bouquet to the address, for the principle's sake.
"Oh!" she said. "Even with flowers!"
And I, both immediately and too late, got it that it should have been vodka… Then we chattered about nothing in the kitchen of her one-room flat. After tea, there happened an incident – the big jar of strawberry jam slipped from her hands and thwacked against the floor. It took her a considerable time to collect the large sticky puddle and wash the floor in the kitchen.
At about eleven she started sending me home. I had to drive a fool that everything there was locked and latched already, and the wolfhounds set free to run around. She, like, took pity and granted me half of her double bed, on the condition that I would behave.
When she put the light out and also lay down, I endeavored to continue the relationship in the most natural way, which move was met with unyielding resistance. I would never learn nothing! Did she call me for to wallow in demonstration of her chastity? I dropped trying and felt I didn't really care, just like about that sealed post package on my bookshelves.
…probably because the loss of jam was too great a shock… the three-liter jar would have seen her for at least thru half the winter… or maybe an ominous sign for the superstitious… and I don't care those morons have made their stupid dump there… when from one or another construction site I watched them waving at me it somehow eased… like a promise of something nice… when they eventually will cut them down and replace with a five-story block the trees will all the same be waving their tops like saying "Hi!" thru the heat haze… it will stay by me while those smarties remain stuck in their garbage heap for life…
In the dead of night, I awoke because light cautious fingers were feeling my cock thru the underpants. The nurse, after the failure to get raped, was checking why so. She'd better ask the sand on the Seim beach… But those frisking fingers of a stranger checking my flesh… It had already been somewhere… Only I couldn't recollect where and when before falling asleep again.
In the morning I left, declining the proposed tea with sugar. What was her name? She should have one anyway… it was some easy name, yes, sure… see? I even snap my fingers… now… well… er… perhaps… something like… mmm… yes…
~ ~ ~
The dance-floor in the Central Park of Recreation was all that still remained there for me. And I visited it not as a belated shooter in search for lame game but simply to get blues. A session of nostalgia priced 50 kopecks.
I was one of the first to enter the round enclosure of the dance-floor and get seated onto the timber bench of beams running along the tall pipe-grates in the peeling-off coat of silver-gray. The large black boxes of the loudspeakers on the stage thundered with trendy records because "live" music became bygones. Between the numbers some, like, DJ switched the mike on and announced what had just been played and what was coming next. At times, he attempted at making a clumsy cockamamie joke, fortunately, not too often.
I sat quietly, the back of my head leaned against the iron pipe in the fencing. The twilight closed in but high in the sky the flocks of swifts still revolved beneath the clouds touched by the parting sun rays. I recollected their carousel on that day when you turned one month old, and we brought you for a checkup in the children's polyclinic, in the hand-me-down carriage under the tulle cover to throw off the evil eye. Only those swifts kept chirping shrilly when circling above the roof of the department store, while these near the fading clouds were not heard because of being so far and high.
Then the sky became dark, the night fell, and I still sat on the bench and never danced because I knew my place which was among the other thirty-and-over-year-olds outside, under the lamp in the nearby alley. You might stop there for a couple of minutes to watch the jumping joy of the next generation before going back to your settled life with a davenport opposite the TV…
I sat quietly as becomes a foreign particle, listened to the music and watched, point-blank, the young stock mass getting gradually denser in front of the bench… that girl's neck is longer than that of Nefertiti… very nice, like a lithe stem of dandelion… And I admired it without getting aroused. Then she did not show up for a couple of weekends before coming back with her neck drooped guiltily and obviously shortened, and I knew that she got cut off at the entrance examinations to an institute…
At eleven, in the general throng, I left the park for the streetcar stop by Peace Square. Those who lived closer diverged from the common flow in pairs and groups. People from far-off neighborhoods discussed: to wait or not to wait? Streetcars at that time of day were an avis rara…
Once the stop was occupied by a glass-eyed mujik of about 40. He eyed the approaching youngsters with a scornful stare, akimbo, his palms on his buttocks, in the attitude of a Nazi officer by the death camp gate bearing the inscription "Forget all hope you who come in here". The scared pairs and small companies got silent and bypassed him to timidly cram in the remaining half of the long stop. Triumphantly stood he, feet planted wide apart into the conquered living space alongside the track rails…
I stopped in front of the victor, barely two meters away.
…so, Sturmbahnfuhrer, dueling of attitudes, eh?.
Mine came all of itself, from the newsreels of the Victory Parade in Moscow, 1945. Besides the dumping fascist banners to the Lenin Mausoleum, there were also footage stretches filming civilians, girls for the most part with their faces so sad. Almost all of those girls from the past assumed the same posture – their left arms hanging alongside the body, the right raised across the stomach to grip the left elbow.
Facing the glass-eyed, I replicated their stance. Only my right hand was clutching higher than by those sad girls, around my left biceps and because of that my hanging down left arm became a kinda trunk already, sort of a dangling proboscis at rest. The opponent was not fit to withstand even 1 minute. He dropped his head in desperation, clasped his hands behind over his butt in the traditional zek attitude, and began to pace in shortened steps across the asphalted width of the stop, as far as the walls of invisible cell let him go.
The young folks were amazed at the ease of my victory over the cockroach, and they began to fill the whole stop, taking note for the future, that know-how is power… Yet, to be honest, my deed was pure improvisation, a flukey present from my generation to theirs…
~ ~ ~
Over and over again, clattering wheels beneath the floor rock the car in shallow sways, the local train carries me away from Konotop… But where, by the way, am I going? By all that black-ink darkness outside the window, it’s a late local train, so my trip is no farther than to Nezhyn, which means I’m paying another visit to Zhomnir…
My fuzzy reflection in the doubly-glazed window nods dimly in time with the rhythm of tapping against the rail joints: yea-to-him-and-no-where-else… Why do I go there? Well, probably, there is some reason… Say, typing with his typewriter another story, or maybe a couple of verses…
(…how can I now recollect from such a distance?..)
But all that's nothing but a downright smoke screen, and there's no use to tell lies to oneself. In fact, I am going to feel, again and again, the aching longing for the lost irreversibly. I am going to torture myself on the bank of invisible river, that same river in which, eternity before, there splashed a ripple where I loved and was loved in response… That's why the train rumbles along, thru the night, and in one of its cars I'm sitting on the edge of a three-person seat, while my briefcase basks impudently, smack in the middle of it.
It's a rare occasion when the car is empty; well, almost so. About 20 meters from my place, in a seat on the same side from the aisle, a girl is sitting. Because of riding backward, she’s facing me with her head leaned against the black window glass. At such a distance I cannot make out the features of her face, it's just a girl, alone in an empty car of a night train, with a bob cut of blond hair. She does not care about my presence, but looks quietly thru the window, where the picture of nocturnal darkness is sweeping by behind the dim reflection of the lamps in the ceiling of the empty car. Of course, it is empty. I am of no account, I sit quietly in the distance and do not stare at her at all. My absent gaze is directed along the aisle into the empty car vestibule behind the glass of the sliding door, trembling and quaking in time with the thuds of train wheels. Though such an attitude doesn't, of course, prevent a sentimental corner of my eye from catching the outline of her blond head and the upper part of her shoulders visible above the series of the seat-backs separating us. Just two in an empty car rushing thru the night…
But—lo!—she wakes up from her sad stupor. The right hand touches her blond haircut. She turns a bit deeper to the window, demonstrating her profile, and then looks straight ahead with her face turned to me.
From my place, I can't see where exactly her eyes are directed, yet I don't need any longer to show interest in the empty vestibule. Now I look at her and admire, with platonic frankness, the face turned to my side and her shoulders beneath the cloth of her cloak. That's all I can do; I will not let her down with too daring jokes or suggestions, like, "You're cute, I'm cool, be my third wife…" But—ah!—she's so nice, I swear! Even at this distanced semi-discernibility…
The clattering of wheels fades into the muffled background substituted with the beautiful melody by Tariverdiev from the soundtrack to the series of 17 Moments of Springtime. It's when the secret agent Isayev, aka Stirlitz, has a meeting with his wife, arranged by the Center at a small café in Germany.
She gets seated three tables away from him so that he might admire her after a decade of separation. How's she getting on in the already unknown to him USSR? For ten dangerous years, he’s been away from his country, away from her…
But sweeping away all the thoughts unnecessary for the moment, he only looks observing stealthily the new features in the half-unfamiliar woman. More! Please, more!.
But no, the time is up. Another Soviet secret agent, her escort sitting by her side, looks at his watch. The undercover meeting's over. And he takes her away so that the bloodhounds of the Gestapo wouldn't run them down…
Yet here, in the local train car, Tariverdiev's melody does not abate, we are out of their control, alone in the whole secluded…
BRENNGG! ZPRTYCH !!
From among the leatherette backrests between us, like from a slightly sloped deck of cards, a red joker jumps out. We were not alone!. That drunk has been sleeping between us all along!
Swollen with the hangover, his red mug semaphores: "The remote flirtation is over!"
Oh, gods! I did roll in the aisles in a fit of horse-laughter! With all the stops pulled out.
Thru his cloudy ignorance, watched the drunk my convulsions, then he looked back at the girl, slap-wiped his mouth with his paw and stiffly shoved off to the vestibule, and then to the next car. His delicate nature revolted against traveling in the same car with screaming quadrupeds.
And you are so right, alky! To each his own. It’s time to knock off the mopish shit…
~ ~ ~
The burial of Brezhnev was performed in an outrageously ugly way. Two mujiks with black mourning armbands simply dumped the box into the hole by the Kremlin wall. Those, who watched the ceremony in the live broadcast, before they cut it for the news program "Time", were simply shocked.
The death of Lyonya, smack-smacking each word when he read speeches written for him, wallowing in tawdry orders and medals of the Soviet state awarded to him every year (except for Honored Mother Medal which decorated only women who bore 10 kids), bestowing triple, loud, wet, smooches on whoever leader of fraternal parties or progressive movements in the wide world he only could put his hands on, became a trial for the Soviet population. For almost 20 years, people got used to life if poor and full of shortages, but without non-stop mass repressions of Stalin's times, without running the hunger riots over by tanks and shooting troopers as under Khrushchev…
Leaving the bathhouse on a late Thursday evening, I witnessed how confused got people, amassing into freaked out flocks and looking around for a shepherd. It was the key to documentaries, where big men in officers' shoulder straps burst to pieces in weeping fits about the death of Stalin… Meanwhile, at 13 Decemberists, as if for fun yet evidently lined with fear, they constructed the Great Paper Wall so as to ward off the upcoming unknown. The material used in fortification was all kinds of scrolls of honor awarded to the family members throughout its existence. They became pin-up blocks, side by side, in the gapless row along the wood slat which kept in place the oilcloth substituting for tile paneling in the kitchen wall… I would never imagine there was such a hell of a lot of those certificates. Starting from the sideboard at the window, their close rank stretched up to the washstand by the door to the veranda. The scrolls of honor received for excellent studying in the third grade, for the second place in the pioneer camp checkers tournament, for taking part in amateur performances were serving now a breastwork against the future. I only shrugged. What's the difference?.
After Brezhnev, there followed the leapfrog of mummies, who came to power for 3 or 4 months, and then the population had again to switch off their TV's for 3 days because there was nothing on except for stiff quartets of chamber music and the news program "Time" reading out telegrams of condolence from all kinds of fraternal parties and international leaders. Because that's what mourning is for.
And at last, after another funeral, a certain Gorbachev got to the rudder, quite a middle-aged man, to cut the spree of classical music on TV, although having a suspicious port-wine stain over his bald head. He began to make speeches about acceleration and reconstruction, pronouncing the sound 'g' in the Ukrainian 'gh' way. Well, let him talk if so is his pleasure, who cares? However, one year before the moment we are now at in this my letter to you, he issued a decree with a long title which, in short, introduced the Prohibition, handled "the dry law" for the clarity's sake. That act showed immediately that the talkative leader had never in his life read works by John Mill, where it stands in black on white, that only those governments resort to the like measures who consider their own people as a band of juvenile sillies. Kinda pushing the latch to lock the veranda door and announce, "You're not going anywhere today."
It was more than I could tolerate and, on the day of the Prohibition coming into force, I got off our Seagull bus by the big grocery store in At-Seven-Winds. There I bought a bottle of wine and drank it from the bottle’s neck, without caring to get out to the street. That's how I expressed my indignation with "the dry law". Some of the saleswomen began to squeak that I should be grabbed and the militia called, but in the queue filling the store there happened no supporters for that law-abiding project. I took the emptied bottle out and gently dropped it into the trash bin on the sidewalk.
With streetcar changes, I reached the terminal in the Settlement, although it was not an easy task. After Vsesvit at the midday break and no snack in the grocery store, the wine did not behave well in the stomach. I hardly managed to keep it under control on the way to 13 Decemberists, where it was finally thrown up into the spill pail in the veranda.
My mother, appearing from the kitchen, screamed in fright, "Kolya! He's throwing up with blood!"
My father also went out to the veranda, but getting the whiff of a familiar scent, waved her fears off, "What blood? Don't you see? Zonked like the last scumbag."
