Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
I covered the pail with its lid, changed from my shoes into the slippers, and silently passed by to crash onto the folding coach-bed without ever speaking back to point out that in a series of scumbags there is not much difference, if any, between the last and previous ones…
Before the Prohibition, I was a very moderate drinker. My weekly dose of alcohol was the 2 bottles of beer after the visit to the bathhouse, but Gorbachev with his "dry law" literally brought me to that excess. Sure enough, the weeks were not absolute replicas of one another. There happened more liberal weeks when the bricklayers of our team shared to me wine brought to the trailer. But they did not bring it each week, and sharing also was not the dogma. And all that because of the principle, with which I returned from the business trip to Kiev, where I had a discussion with one young superintendent.
We considered the case of a workman lying, purely theoretically, on the ground next to an unfinished, say, trench. The young theoretician claimed that the jack was just bombed, excluding any other possible hypothesis. My counter-argument was based on the fact that the man had his spetzovka on and, consequently, he had just fainted because people do not drink at their workplace, in this case the aforesaid trench. Of course, I knew perfectly well that they drink anywhere and with anything on and kicking against the obvious was a lousy weak standpoint, however, on that particular occasion, I felt like embracing an idealistic stance, on the grounds of an unclear reason…
On my return to Konotop after the business trip, when I was offered a drink in the trailer, I still stuck to the role of a fighter for ideal, declaring that I did not drink at work, although I wanted it. There followed a reasonable argument, that the trailer was not the workplace. I had to make corrections to the principle's formula which ended up as "I do not drink when in my work garb". So, they offered, in the form of a compromise, to change into clean clothes, have a swig and then change back. With time, the procedure was reduced. I simply got undressed and, in my underpants and tank-top, fuddled, just to be polite, and put my spetzovka back on.
In our team, the principles were treated with respect, and I was tolerated in even such a negligee. Only the crane operator Vitalya used to explore and lose his temper, "Why share to him? He'll sell us!"
"No, he's not a snitch."
"When the superintendent drops in and sees his underwear, can't he get it what we are up to?"
But a crane operator was not a member of our team, and Vitalya wasn't even a Konotoper. He came to work from Bakhmuch, and just had that sort of frantic temperament. Once at the midday break, he started to make fun, "Got stuck again into that Vsesvit of yours? Come on, have a drink! But don't undress, I also have my principles."
He giggled, gaily flashed his eyes, grabbing the bottle with his hand missing a finger, and poured only for himself and Kyrpa…
One good turn deserves another. For the next midday break, I bought a bottle of "Golden Autumn" and a bar of chocolate from the grocery store because Vitalya and Kyrpa were playing cards in the trailer.
I slowly stripped myself to the underwear and started sharing to the colleagues an exalted example of the sybaritic attitude to life by taking desultory sips from the bottle for 1 ruble 28 kopecks and nibbling at the bar of expensive chocolate.
(…it was not revenging at all, but an act of purely remedial education…)
Vitalya kept himself in check for quite a long but, eventually, his temperament took over, "Fuck! Snacking the mutter-mumbler swill with "Alenka"! What a pervert!"
But that, of course, was out of envy, in all his life he never tried it that way. And I calmly drank the whole bottle and did not share it even to Kyrpa, who was backing Vitalya's giggles the day before.
(…however, at times, there still creep some doubts in if that indeed was unalloyed pedagogy or, after all, a sort of vengeful exhibitionism?..)
However, occasions of such kind were merely exceptions, rare and far apart, until the Prohibition shattered my indifference to alcoholic matters…
~ ~ ~
On Thursday, I stayed in the steam room a little longer and left the bathhouse at something past seven. Before Gorbachev’s coming to power, I would not even notice it—the blissful don't follow the flow of time—however, the Prohibition brought about rigid temporal limitations for the sale of alcohol. But my after-bath quota?!.
In the beer bar on the opposite side of Square of Konotop Divisions, instead of the usual bright radiance of its fluorescent lamps, a measly yellow spot of a single bulb left on inside. In deject despondence, I was passing by when the bar door opened and two men climbed down the tall porch way of the facility. Well, well, well!. The situation called for closer inspection…
The unlocked door yielded willingly to the light pressure. And indeed, just one 100-watt bulb was lit inside, above the beer tap. Yet, the beer was still flowing from the tap into glasses! Men were grabbing them and retreating to hang on about the tall round tables. If not for the scanty illumination, all was like in good ol’ dry-lawless times!
Not everything though. The noise and din of warm friendly conversations were missing. The barman in a white smock kept warning, over and over again, from behind the counter, "Keep quiet, mujiks! And be quick, we're being breaching it."
There's no buzz in booze under the whip-clicks of a stopwatch… Here, in the murky half-dark dungeon room, where you couldn't make out the face of a man standing at the table opposite, we were like the last handful of Knights Templar after their order was crushed and pronounced anathema. Here, we hid ourselves away from the alcohol-free spies and informers. Any low-grade trader could point at you and yell, "Lay hands on him! Hold fast! Call the militia!" We were outlaws…
Honestly, I do not really like beer bars. You stand in the line and watch how tipsy scumbags approach the mujiks queuing ahead of you, "Bro, and a couple for me, eh?" And instead of one line, you have to stand, in fact, thru 2 or 3. Even more disgusting, when already quite close to the tap, you feel a jab in your ribs and a guy who you, like, have seen someplace, giggles and winks at you, "Don't forget? I asked three mugs." No, next time I'd rather go to a café where they sell only bottled, more expensive, beer but without those impudent tail-clingers… And on the following bath-day Thursday, I haughtily passed by the beer bar and stomped to the café.
"We've got no beer."
Damn! Okay, I can go to Peace Square… But in the café next to the cinema there also was no beer. The railway station restaurant remained my last chance. Same story. But it's Thursday!
That way I was made buy a bottle of white wine. The tables in the restaurant were big, for about ten persons each, surrounded by heavy chairs in leather upholstery, yet almost empty of guests. I took a seat somewhere in the middle of the hall and started to pour wine into a glass as I would do it from a bottle of beer – in a knitting-needle-thin trickle. So was my habit.
After the first glass, I was approached by some mujik of an ambiguous occupation who asked for a permission to get seated by. The whole hall of vacant tables, and he liked this particular one. Well, I did not mind.
Landing into the next chair, he shared that he was in transit from the city of Lvov. I answered that Lvov also was a good city, welcome in passing, and all that. And I started to fill the following glass. Embracing by his intent stare the filigree-thin trickle, he announced his recent release from Zone… The couple of guys at the next but one table cut their gossip. I congratulated him on being free at last and drank.
His face got suddenly distorted by the expression of indistinct malice, and he went over to loud threats of having intercourse with my rectum when 2 of us would land in the same prison cell.
(…all that, of course, in the most explicit straightforward terms…)
The wine was finished off, the neighbor at the table obviously did not like me, and I got up to leave. One of the guys that were sitting nearby, was already standing in between the tables. "Bang the bitch!" he said to me. "What are you waiting for? We're in!" An absolutely unfamiliar guy, probably, he had a fit of patriotism.
"You did not get it," answered I. "He's not local. The law of hospitality does not allow for crushing the bottle against his pate. When on a vacation I'll visit the city of Lvov and check what problem makes the travelers from there so impolite."
I do not know if the guy understood my lengthy speech. Anyway, he returned to his table, and I went out, leaving my neighbor in front of the empty bottle by the empty glass on the empty varnish of the tabletop. He had resorted to the ultimate invocation, yet the magic did not work and the bottle did not turn into a scatter of fragments by a wallop against his Ascabar trained pate. But still and all, I cannot forgive it Gorbachev… You may ask what had Gorbachev to do with fucking my asshole? Even in the era of deficit and severe shortages, the bottled beer did not disappear from Konotop. Never…
But he went loose beyond all bounds of decency and judgment and kept amending the Prohibition with new articles to toughen the struggle against alcoholism… In the evening of the day with the fresh, stricter, measures coming into force, I went as usual to the Central Park of Recreation. However, I reached neither the dance-floor nor even the ticket office.
In the central alley of the park, I was intercepted by a muscular stranger with a dark hair and horseshoe-shaped mustache in the style of VIA The Pesnyary. He told that I did not know him, but he knew me because he was from KhAZ, where he worked with my brother… I recollected as one time my brother Sasha admiringly mentioned some former border guard fond of demonstrating miracles of acrobatics at their workplace. Probably, that was him.
The stranger carefully held a white cellophane packet in his right hand, and he did not slap the nasty night mosquitoes but instead blew them by sharp puffs off his biceps bulging out the T-shirt sleeves. Just like me, another adept of non-resistance, or else that way he was trained for frontier patrols – make sure to avoid producing unnecessary sound waves betraying your location.
Giving a slight shake to the white cellophane—to which it responded with a luring clandestine tinkle—he informed it was wine in there because he wisely procured it before the curfew. Would I keep him company? The answer was in the affirmative.
It looked strange to me though, when he turned to the flocks of youngsters streaming to the dance-floor with the repetitive request for a knife to open a bottle. Everyone shook their heads and some even recoiled, scared by the incongruity of the question with the general spirit of concurrent times… But then, maybe, it was his personal form of protest against the Prohibition…
A knife was never found, yet he somehow contrived to tear the plastic cork off by application it against a beam in the bench by which we stood in the alley. He handed the bottle to me. I said it would be better for him to start it because of a certain flaw in my brake system.
"Never mind. I've got another in the bag," insisted he.
Well, I had warned anyway, ain't it? And I killed the 750 ml without a trace.
"Hmm, yes," observed the companion thoughtfully. "I did not get it properly." He uncorked the second bottle, yet refrained passing it to me, just held in his hands, and when we sank onto the bench, he put it between us.
We began to probe each other as to which of manifold philosophical subjects might flag off a friendly conversation. As a rule, after the second glass, you start to give out awesomely smart things, getting astonished yourself by their unexpected wisdom. In the end, of course, everything will slide into the eternal, slippy gash as predicted by the truck crane operator, Ivan Kot, but why not to glitter the sequin of your well-trained mind for a starter?
Alas, the envious malevolent stars forestalled any shining, or sparkling, or glittering… Along the alley, slowly and almost inaudibly, rolled up a van with inscription "militia" on the door. It stopped and 2 gentlemen in cockades jumped out of the cab.
My interlocutor, not waiting for the further development in the upcoming scene, without delay threw himself over the bench and started down the side alley towards the dark building of the city council. I didn’t even think to compete him in this track and field event and, with a bottleful freshly tanked into the hold, I could only admire how quickly he was leaving. Moreover, those 2 bulls were already towering above me.
None of them followed him either, only the older officer tapped his shoe heels against the asphalt in a pretty fast step dance, staying in the same spot though. The performance was accompanied with a strange, possibly, also Irish, air, "Oolyou-lyou!". The border guard accelerated sharply and dissolved in the darkness.
The militiaman dancer picked the open, but still not started, bottle up from the bench. He turned it upside down in his outstretched hand and held so in both sadistic and mournful attitude, while the wine gurgled out to the ground.
"Come on," the second man said to me, nodding at the already open side door in the van… I stuck my head inside. In the dim light of a tiny bulb in the ceiling, those invited before me sat along the blind sidewalls. An elderly militia petty officer sat leaning his back against the partition from the cab, facing the public.
Admiring the impeccable finesse of my own movements, I ascended the interior. The door slammed shut behind me. "Good evening!" amiably and indiscriminately greeted I all the present, and at once got a kick in my ass.
"The prick even 'good-evening' knows!" yelled the petty officer who hit me.
Falling on someone from the previous catch, I automatically exclaimed, "I beg your pardon!" and immediately looked back fearful of another kick. It seemed, I was not going to get it for the "pardon", the officer was too lazy to get up.
The ride was not long. Leaving the vehicle, I recognized the courtyard where The Orpheuses were brought for giving the testimony on the disappearance of the accordion made in DDR, but now I was taken to another building. At the desk in the corridor, there sat a militia Captain. After a couple of questions addressed to my fellow-travelers, they were sent to the cell.
Then he turned to me. Observing that I answered his questions adequately and did not try to push for my rights nor refuted the report of the officers who delivered me, he asked where I worked. Then he called somewhere to verify and after a very short talk as well as checking my proficiency at bending exercises, he finally ordered me to go home. "Straight home! Got it? Nowhere else!"
I went out of the gate. Why do they all push me around? Fuck them! And I obstinately returned to the park and bought a ticket to the dance-floor.
To celebrate the new stage in the on-going anti-alcoholic campaign, the gate was guarded by a militia sergeant and 2 public order enforcers adorned with festively red armbands.
"Did you drink today?" demanded one of them.
"Never!" responded I and proceeded to my bench under the fence to sit there until the end of dancing. Which happened after a couple of numbers…
The letter of advice on my detention reached SMP-615 a month or 2 later. I already forgot about it when the new boss called me from the construction site and demanded to write an explanatory. He obviously made his mind to use the situation to full advantage, and in a week the trade-union committee met to consider my personal case.
With the autumnal chillness setting in, I attended the meeting in my raincoat and hat on.
The new boss, in his jacket and tie, began to expound my transgressions. The freshest of them, attested by the paper from the militia, was my violating directives of the Party and Government on a park bench. That's how I disgraced SMP-615 in the eyes of the public and the authorities! How long to tolerate?!
However, I chose the position of an observer and to all rhetorical questions answered with a shrug of my left shoulder under the raincoat…
And my contemptuous attitude to the management?! Here, if you please – an explanatory written in verse! From the stack of papers on the desk in front of him, the new boss picked up one sheet and shook it in the air.
…wow! I did not know there was accumulated such a dossier on me…
And look at another sample here! The reminder written by me to the trade-union committee (he read it up), "3 months ago I applied for upgrading my bricklayer category. However, till now the qualification commission of SMP-615 neither raise an eyebrow nor move their horns."
The trade-union committee burst in laughter, the new boss, obedient to the herd instinct, also grunted not understanding though what funny was about it…
Besides, it's simply dangerous to be next to me because I was putting an arm under the slab!.
And that’s a fact. On that day there were 4 of us: the overseer Karenin, the carpenter Ivan, the crane operator Vitalya and I. The sun was glaring upon the March snow around the construction site where we were starting a new apartment building. The foundation blocks had been laid in the pit since autumn, and then, throughout the winter, Ivan's job was to look after them. From 8 to 5. He was coming to turn on the heater in the trailer, and watched the silent white snowdrifts outside the window, or considered the cut-outs of cute beauties from girlie magazines that he glued on all the walls to give his hands at least some job… On that March day, he became my hand.
The task was simple – to lay 4 courses of bricks in the short wall of the future staircase-entrance so as to install a stump of a slab over the future doorway to the basement. Standing on the trestle between the foundation blocks, I raised 2 short corners and started laying courses under the shnoorka to finish the stump’s prop of a wall. It was a half-hour task, no more, while the working day ended in an hour plus. However, Vitalya, the crane operator, was impatient to climb down from his perch in the cab of the tower crane and play cards with Ivan till 5. So he shouted from above to the carpenter to hook the concrete slab stump intended for the installation. The stump's one side would rest onto the blocks of the traverse wall, the other side would be supported by the readied corners of the unfinished wall. They'll lap it up! And the remaining gap between the bearing corners would be filled sometime after, in the process of construction.
I tried to bring it home to Ivan, that now it was the most convenient moment for finishing the started wall. Later, to fill the gap left under the stump, the bricklayers would not have the trestle under their feet. Let him better bring the mortar and I'd finish it in 15 minutes, working under such favorable conditions. Yet, Vitalya for Ivan was a closer pal than logic, so he went and hooked the stump as told.
The crane operator raised the load, turned the boom and rolled the tower crane along the railway, carrying the stump to me for insertion as he planned. He yelled from his cab to quickly spread mortar on the corners of the unfinished wall otherwise he would drop it just as is, on dry bricks – they'll lap it up! Instead of mortar, I put my arm on a brick corner so that he did not fulfill his intention.
Vitalya poured hectic curses from his birdhouse in the height, rang the crane bell without interruption, and kept closing in on the arm, with the load. In general, it was a frontal attack of two fighter planes against each other: he who yields was nothing but a snotty chicken.
When the concrete stump neared the arm to about a meter, overseer Karenin awoke from watching the breath-taking battle of two aces and yelled to Vitalya to take the load aside. And there it hung while I finished the wall the way it was right. Overseer Karenin stood on the blocks above my head and asked, "Why did you do it, Sehrguey? He's crazy enough to crush your arm. You'd be a cripple."
"Karenin, my whole life is crushed. All that remains is just my work. I don't want them make a snot of it."
"Where?" asked Ivan standing on the other wall of blocks behind my head. "What's the talk about crushin'?"
"He means it was his written fate from birth," overseer Karenin explained to him.
I was finishing the last course of bricks, like, busy, but I could not let the erudite conversation go without me, "May his hand wither, to that writer!"
Karenin and Ivan instantly got silent, the overseer somehow shrank and turned his eyes aside. And exactly that very moment, squinting my eyes at the rays of the sun descending to the horizon, while spreading mortar for insertion of the slab stump onto the finished wall, I for the first time thought that the particulars of our lives were defined and occurring the way as we recount them in our later life. And it doesn't matter to whom and whether in gossip or writing…
(…it's scary! As it turns out, by that spontaneous curse I wished my own hand to wither away?!. Why? It is so unfair!
..shut up!. who are you to make complaints of unjust treatment?. how else could I show that cheeky puppeteer in his made-in-Germany sleeping bag that I’m not a servile marionette neither a tool to go by his drowsily scintillating blabber meant for reconstructing the past beyond his reach?.
I’m not sure if you can get it though, good news is that at least I can follow myself… however, I’d better shut up now for not to overstrain our brain.
…moreover, if not for this sleeping bag my story might very easily and more than once have ended in the nameless river at the Object…)
Ivan and I inserted the stump. Vitalya got down from the tower crane and still had time for playing cards with Ivan before we went to the road to meet and board on our Seagull. I soon forgot the whole incident, however, the new boss did not omit to add it to the dossier…
"And you all know as well as I do, how often they nab him to the psychiatric hospital… Yet, worse than anything else, he is a chronic violator of labor discipline. 3 occurrences of absenteeism in only one year! That's why I propose to fire him for systematic absenteeism."
That's right – 2 days to Moscow after the train model for Andrey, and 1 day to the publishing house Dnipro in Kiev… At the time of mentioned violations, I fully realized that it was an act of absenteeism. However, it was normal for a workman at SMP-615 to have a week of absenteeism, and a couple of champions had accrued up to 20 days, which fact I considered a guarantee of permissibility to skip 3 days, the grosser violators would serve a cover for my ass. Yet, no go! The integrity of the labor discipline couldn't be bribed by a smartie's calculations!
And now, after 5 consequential records in my workbook marking the gratitude for and appreciation of my labor achievements, on October 18, 1985, the head of personnel department of SMP-615, A. Petukhov, with that same beautiful handwriting wrote that I was fired on the strength of Article 40, for absenteeism without satisfactory excuse. The participants in the meeting of the trade-union committee unanimously raised their hands in favor of the measure proposed by the new boss. Afterward, some of them commented that such a result was exclusively my blunder, I should have stood up, and, hat in hand, humbly ask for mercy and then they would forgive me…
Why did I maintain the role of a monitor to the end and did not make a speech in self-defense, pointing out the absenteeism of others, quite a few, and did not express my bitter regret for my wrong-doings? I simply was fed up. The time had come to seek other grounds for the application of my experimentalism. Not because of so was my plan though. As always, I remained just a tool, an operation-end man executing his orders. The time and Experimentalism were the decision-making bodies…
Besides, another 100-apartment block was finished in summer. A bricklayer from our team, named Nina, a fat woman with a hairy birthmark on her cheek, got an apartment in it. She entered SMP-615 a couple of months before the commissioning of the apartment block and, having received the apartment, quit the organization.
I went to the personnel department and asked Petukhov about my progress in the queue for improving my housing conditions. He answered I was number 35 in it.
That's ridiculous! 6 years before, I was 24th in the line!
He replied with calligraphic roundness: since those times 3 bosses replaced each other, and he, personally, was not around when I got a job at SMP-615, so now my place in the list was thirty-fifth and no other data to refer to…
Fare thee well, my beloved construction train! Farewell, our team! I won't set on fire our trailer, even though my guitar, brought for celebrating Grynya's birthday, the next morning was not there…
~ ~ ~
When the last entry in the workbook ran "on strength of Article", you became a sort of blacklisted – no organization had any job for you. However, in Konotop there was an enterprise not overly afraid of outcasts, "Rags" was the name of the brave company, aka recycling factory.
On the strength of my basic specialty, they gave me the job of a workman at the overhaul unit. All of the overhaul consisted of 3 workmen, but we did not do any major repair, neither any repair at all for that matter. We sat in the room, idling the time and occasionally went out into the yard of the factory full of stacks of modern recycling equipment brought there a year or, maybe, 2 before and protected from the weather vagaries by a giant all-embracing cover of black roofing felt, because the building for the equipment had not been finished yet. The factory itself huddled in a pair of barrack-like structures, offspring from the era of the first five-year plans, plus a couple of huge arched Quonset Huts made of corrugated white tin, and several various huts and sheds leaning against the wall around the factory grounds.
But at the very beginning of my overhaul career, I was not bored with all that bleakness because they sent me on a business trip to the city of Kiev… The then Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Comrade Shcherbitsky, was going to visit the Kiev Recycling Factory to share his valuable instructions on the development of so important a branch in the national economy. As a result, the recycling factories from all over the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine started sending their workmen to Kiev to spit and polish the metropolitan recycling enterprise in preparation for the high-ranking visit.
When I arrived to make my contribution, the metal structures in the shop floors of the factory had been paint-coated for the fourth time already, and the factory yard freshly covered with the third layer of asphalt… They were the farewell days of golden autumn, the sun smiled affectionately from the calm sky, but the sight of the small Fir trees in stone pots, like, to decorate the courtyard called for the blues to set in. The insufficient capacity of the pots would not allow for the trees to grow, they were condemned to perish unavoidably after the pompous visit…
Before leaving for the business trip, I went to the Konotop Department Store to buy a sports-bag for keeping personal necessities. As it turned out, there was a fit of shortage for such bags and I had to buy a smaller, though practical, one instead. However, if you observed closely enough, it was, like, a female goods item. Might I've been a pervert after all?.
For the stay in Kiev, I was billeted at a boarding house near the "Pipe", on the very bank of the Dnieper river. Before the war, there was a plan to cross the Dnieper at that place by a metro line. They even managed to build a stop of reinforced concrete, which looked like a giant pipe indeed, with the diameter as tall as a two-story house. Later, the circumstances and plans got changed and the "Pipe" was covered with all sorts of "here were Osya and Kisa" and the like historical stamps.
The boarding house was a long one-story timber structure with pencil-box rooms, like in the hostels, only the windows were wider. In the mornings I went out on the sandy bank of the mighty stream to do exercises among the bushes. To watch the Dnieper from so a-near was not like taking looks from a local train flying over it along the bridge. The oceanic mass of water rolling before your eyes was simply stunning.
…and so without a stop day after day… one-two… millennium upon millennium… three-four… bend left… bend right…
In the room, besides me, there lived a blond fella from Southern Ukraine with a graphical story of how he was stabbed on the beach. The homie bros from the same neighborhood jabbed a knife in his stomach and he fell on his back. And then the precinct approached. The guys pretended playing cards, and they just threw an open newspaper over the knife handle sticking up from his stomach. The militiaman started asking about something, and the blond lay and looked, and couldn't squeeze a word out, and flies were landing and racing over the newspaper.
The guys, naturally, "Nah, we know nothing." When the precinct left they called the ambulance because he had not knocked on them…
There was almost no renovation work left to be done at the factory, and the business trippers were just sitting in the Red Corner room, where the young and bearded artist, a local hombre, wrote out the letters of one and the same slogan, day after day, on one and the same long strip of red fabric spread over along a very long table, or gossiping with his friends, also Kievers, who knew ways of getting in for a visit thru the guarded check-entrance.
We changed clothes right there, into fresh spetzovkas given out by the factory, and hung our rigs onto the chair backs. The shower was working around the clock, round the corner down the corridor – some halcyon days in full swing. My fellow-business-trippers were amazed at my talent of sitting in the same position and never strolling about the Red Corner, nor partaking in the mutual idle gossip but only listening and watching in a modest, still, and silent way…
