Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
After another of working days, I returned to the boarding house and got it that the blond was thru his business trip and went home because only my bed remained in the room, and my perverted bag was unzipped and gaping wide, with my last 10 rubles missing from it. And there still remained 1 week to survive on my business trip.
Next morning, it was Saturday, I went out in search of food. I did not make any definite plans, but simply walked towards the distant bridge across the Dnieper. Then I walked along that bridge almost free of traffic even though supported by a looking solidly multitude of steel cables from pylons. On the opposite riverbank, in the field to the right, towered several apartment blocks – the embryo of Troyeshchina neighborhood, but I passed by and on, towards the faraway forest.
The road ran thru the village of Poghrebby and entered the forest where I started looking for mushrooms. I came across of just 2 species, both unfamiliar. Their gills looked alike, but those with pointed caps tasted too bitter, so I had to eat the other sort, with concave caps. The hunger slackened and I went back.
In the field between the village and the distant tower blocks, I hit the mother lode. There was a scattering of potatoes on the roadside. Probably, the truck was loaded with potatoes piling above the sides and, on the way, the surplus poured over when the truck dodged an oncoming vehicle. I stuffed my pockets with potatoes, and on Sunday came to the same spot with the obviously female bag. In the boarding house, at the very end of the corridor, there was a kitchen with a gas stove and a large common pan. Without peeling the potatoes, I boiled a quantity of them for a few days of consumption.
But before it, while I was coming back to Kiev over the bridge hanging from its steel cables, I understood what namely prevented me from living a normal life, it was because of my poetry. Everyone else was living like all the other people, because they did not write poetry, and if I gave it up, then everything would, probably, get to rights…
It's easy to say "it's time to give up", but how? To burn the pocket notebook which the blond generously left in my bag? An overly trivial tack. So I decided to make a collection of poems and put the final full-stop to all that. Such was the plan.
On Monday, I visited the ante-room of the personnel department at the factory and asked the secretary-typist for 32 blank sheets of paper. Exactly the volume of Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx, but just as many pages were needed for all the poems plus the preface. Apart from that, she gave me two uncut sheets, which she couldn't use because of that defect. Yet, the defective double sheet turned easily into a perfect folder for the rest. Returning to the Red Corner room, I asked the artist to make from that folder a cover for the collection of poems titled "Just so?" In the evening at the boarding house, I copied the preface and the poems to the sheets of the donated paper with almost a typeset handwriting.
Next morning at the factory, the artist showed the cover he created – the name of the author and the title against a background of abstractionism-styled beige waves. Then he scratched the back of his head and confessed, that starting the creation he was somewhat tired and emotional, for which reason the author’s name, as well as the collection title, were drawn on the back, instead of the front, cover… Abnormal double sheets were not an everyday find, so I had no other option but to paginate the collection in Arabic style – from the back cover to the front…
It's very convenient to live in the same city with a publishing house, after finishing your work at five, you've got plenty of time to visit them without any absenteeism… The office where some time ago a young man directed me to the specialist on Maugham was already shared by a couple of workers – some young man and an additional young woman. I asked where they were handing poetry in. They were delighted to send me to the first office room round the left corner in the corridor. In that office, on gently breaking the news of delivery a collection of poetry, I heard the familiar response, "Who sent you?"
"Ah! Yes, of course! I was sent from the neighboring office, just round the corner. D'you know them?" That served a sufficient recommendation for the collection to change hands.
I left the publishing house both grieving and laughing.
Grieving? I rejected my own offspring, made them a bunch of doorbell babies, pledging to keep sterile infertility from that moment on, forever and ever.
Laughing? I was free!
(…starting a poem you are doomed to merciless bondage. You strain yourself and plow like a slave until the moment you can step aside and say, "Well, yes, it's, like, rather-more-or-less, sort of, so enough, I can't do better anyway…" …)
Even louder I laughed at the poetry receiver because there was no return address with the collection, only the fictitious name of the author – Klim Solokha. Stuff it in your pipe and have a smoke, salaga!
"…service done!."
"What was their reaction?" asked the artist-designer.
"A standing ovation."
The supply of foraged potatoes could see me thru the whole week, however, potatoes alone somehow did not satiate, even if sprinkled with the salt found in the common kitchen… The artist noticed when in the Red Corner room I lifted a dried bread roll, forgotten by someone on a windowsill, and ate it, hiding in my fist. He reported the incident to the head of the personnel department.
The grumpy geezer, in the unvarying mask of disdain on the face, came to Red Corner, already empty of the business trippers of whom I was the last one, and demanded explanations for so strange an action.
The money was lost from my bag.
Stolen? Who?
I knew nothing. There had been 10 rubles which were there no more.
The mask twitched in disgust and he walked out. Soon, I was summoned to his office where he informed me that my business trip papers would be stamped for the entire stretch (there still remained 3 more days) but I had to perform an urgent work: a KAMAZ truck had dumped its load of sand at a wrong place in the yard, so the sand had to be moved, yet not by a bulldozer whose caterpillars would mangle the fresh asphalt.
It took me 2 or 3 hours to shovel the sand behind the kinda screen of too small pots with the doomed Fir-tree babies. I was paid 10 rubles for the job, which money I immediately received from the cashier in the accountancy office. The local train ticket to Konotop was 4 rubles plus. So I went to a grocery store, bought a bottle of vodka, transparent as a tear of separation, something there for a snack, and returned to the Red Corner room. Together with the artist, we drank that vodka for the success of the poetry collection whose pages had to be turned backward…
~ ~ ~
The overhaul at the Konotop recycle factory was headed by Yura, one of the 3 workmen at the unit. He loved to laugh and did it ably, exposing the fixture of white metal on his fang. In the white-and-black films they usually portrayed Komsomol leaders looking like him and only the fix did not fit the image.
The second overhauler was Arsen, cross-eyed, but not too much so. He put on the airs of a dignified aqsaqal, despite his young age. The reason for his tremendous pride was having the son who reached the age of 2 years already.
I hit it off with Arsen, but Yura with his stalking horse of laughter kept trying hard to crush me, most likely, because of his aversion to my higher education. I did not tell anyone about the fact, but those 4 years were recorded in my workbook now kept in the personnel department of the factory, and Yura spent lots of time in the administration barrack, readily laughing along with everyone there. The main impediment to establishing friendly relations between us 2 were my quotations as well as sharing news from Morning Star. Arsen, for his part, tried his best to pacify our feud.
Once talking to Arsen, I cited certain lines from the work of Karl Marx On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
(…well, yes, Frederick Engels is commonly considered the author of that work, however, Fritz published it after his dear friend Karl passed away already, giving his buddy opportunity to rummage thru his archives and works in progress not seen yet thru the press. Probably, Engels, like the blond from Southern Ukraine found expropriation of the absent justifiable by inconveniences suffered previously.
Anyway, he openhandedly supported Karl, his wife, and their 6 kids with the money of his father, also Fritz…)
I did not draw Arsen's attention to all those details, keeping down to a short quotation from the work itself. Yura, who happened about, suddenly snapped in demanding that I never ever dare start provocative talks like this in his presence because he was a communist and knew where to give a phone call on statements of that sort.
For the first time in our clashes, the last word remained by him. He dumbfounded me with his threat to halloo the KGB at the founders of Marxism-Leninism. And that's no fun, they would easily run them down, for all I know…
Another time, I was depicting to Arsen the Wagner's ballet about Scottish witches which I attended during the business trip to Kiev. Dancing a solo dance, one of the hexes stumbled and with a wooden knock fell flat onto the stage floor.
"Ha-ha-ha!" cheerfully reacted Yura on his visit to the overhaul room from the administration barrack.
"And imagine, Arsen, in the whole hall there was not a single jerk to laugh at her. She got up and danced on, showed her high mettle, you know."
And Yura also showed that it was not in vain that he spent so much time by the administration. As a result, I was transferred to the factory’s production section, to embrace the position of a presser…
What, actually, was Rags? It served a place where freight cars were bringing rubbish sorted at garbage dumps. Discarded dreck clothing for the most part, as well as waste paper.
Women from the nearby village of Popovka dissected the tatters with the howling disks of their machine tools and sorted the rugs again into soft mounds on the cemented floor in the aisle between their workplaces – cotton tatters, knitted rags, artificial fur collars from winter coats, etc.
Day after day they stood in front of their machine tools in dusty spetzovka wear with dangling clusters of safety pins on their chest, which they detected and pulled out from fabrics so that the steely trifles did not damage the disk. Such grapes of pins made them evil-eye-proof forever…
Time and again, 2 loaders approached those rag mounds with a deep box on long poles, like a sedan chair. Their faces were wrapped with bandannas, in the style of bank robbers, so as not to inhale the dense clouds of dust hanging around the machine tools. They piled rags high into their box and carried to the neighboring pressing section, pacing in a precipitated half-trot. That jogging gait was dictated by the weight of the load.
(…once or twice I replaced someone of the missing loaders but was not able to do more than a couple of goes.
"Sehryoga! You must be relaxed when carrying. Relax!"
Yet even after that instruction, I could not reach relaxation with the long pole-handles slipping slowly, unlocking by their unsustainable weight my fingers strained in a vain grip…)
The press was also a box but it had a door and no poles because it stood on the floor, anchored to its place. With the door open, you needed, first of all, to put over the box bottom 2 thin and narrow metal strips, aka shinka, leaving their ends out of the box. Then you had to line the box from inside with a couple of throwaway burlap sacks and lock the door with a hook outside. After stuffing the box with the trash brought by the loaders, you hit one of the 3 buttons on the press side. The electric motor, fixed atop the press shield over the box, started to creak and howl, and crept down the shaft, pushing the shield also down. It pressed the trash towards the bottom as deep as it could. When the pitch of the motor howling rose to whine, it meant the motor had done all it could and didn't have power to squeeze any firmer. At that point, you hit the "stop" button and then the button "up". The shield with the motor started the reverse creeping, up the shaft. Those ups and downs, the press executed really slowly.
Then you filled the hollow, produced in the box by the shield's cyclic travel, stuffing in additional armfuls of trash because the readied bale should weigh about 60 kg. After the third going down, the shield was stopped to keep all that in place while you tied tightly the ends of shinka about the produced, roughly cubic, bale. There remained only to send the shield up and roll the readied bale out of the box. The farther away you rolled it over the floor the better, it wouldn’t now be in the way of the upcoming bales.
About the press, there gradually accumulated a flock of bales and then Misha the loader came with a two-wheel barrow. He shoved the bottom shelf of the barrow under the bale and yanked the handles toward himself. The bale lay upon the handles, propped by the shelf from behind, and Misha dragged the barrow to the exit from the pressing section.
Near the exit gate, there stood the booth of Valya the weigher, with a large luggage scales next to it. Misha toppled the bale onto the scales and, having dipped a short stick into a tin can with red paint, wrote on the burlap wrapping of the bale figures of its weight, which Valya yelled to him thru the glass of her booth because Misha was old and half deaf. Then he dumped the bale from the scales, heaved it onto his two-wheel barrow again, and rolled it out of the pressing section into the open air, and there along the path of crippled concrete into the Quonset Hut for the processed product…
When an empty railway freight car came to the dead-end track by the Hut, the team of loaders stacked the bales into the car and it was driven away, no matter where, probably, to some factories for further processing of recyclables…
In the pressing section, there was only 1 window crusted with the dust accumulated there from the period of the First Five-Year Plan. The illumination was served by dim yellowish bulbs, one over each of the 4 presses. True, one of them did not work after donation some of it parts to the remaining 3 manned by 2 operators in the pressing section.
The production norm for a presser was 32 bales per shift. I hardly turned them out during the working day, while the other presser, another Misha, who lived with Valya the bale weigher, would have finished the norm ahead of time and left, whistling haphazard airs. He was more experienced presser and did not put excessive quantities of rags into the press box, while my bales showed abnormal overweight. Misha the loader would shake his deaf head disapprovingly, scribbling with the dipped stick "78" or "83" on the bales of my production. Then he, with a grunt, heaved the bale onto the barrow and dragged it out, because he was a strong old man. He was silent by nature and never reprove me. But I felt guilty all the same because I could not catch the hang of guessing the weight of the rags stuffed into the press box…
Apart from the midday break, there were 2 more half-hour breaks, just for having rest. We spent them in the common large room with lockers alongside 2 of its walls. In the wall opposite the door, there were 2 windows large enough to make the room light because the dust stuck to them was not quite opaque. 4 square tables with white plastic-cover tops were put in a close row under the windows, forming one common table for the midday meal, with long plank benches along its sides. That was the locker room of pressers and loaders who changed their clothes there. However, in the midday break, the Popovka women also came in because at theirs there was not a table to have a meal at.
I did not havvat there. For the midday meal, I traveled to the canteen of the "Motordetail" plant… After crossing the railway track, I went over the field and turned away from the city limit into the windbreak belt to follow the trail between the trees and bushes there to the terminal of Streetcar 1, opposite the plant check-entrance. The whole journey took 15 to 20 minutes.
It was a very modern plant, and thru the glass walls of the canteen on the second floor, there opened the view on the field from where I was coming. And there were no problems at the check-entrance, anyone in a spetzovka was considered a workman at the plant. The havvage portions at the canteen were small but cheap, and for a couple of hours after you did not feel hungry.
Sometimes, the bale weigher Valya ordered to bring her a custard cake from the canteen. On the way back, when crossing the railway track in front of pulled up locomotives in the head of their freight trains waiting for "the green" to pass thru the Konotop junction, I made attempts at bribing the locomotives with the cake wrapped in a piece of paper. They had such good-natured faces with beards in red paint coat, like the image in the sail on the Kon-Tiki raft. But they remained incorruptible.
“Well, as you please, then!" and I was taking the cake to the bale weigher Valya…
And the half-hour breaks, were for gossip and playing dominoes, the ubiquitous "goat". Besides the mujiks, the breaks were also attended by bale weigher Valya, and a couple of younger women from Popovka, and sometimes technologist Valya came in as well. She was an able-bodied woman, sufficient to fill impulsive poetic dreams, but I had already kicked off those things.
There were 4 loaders in the locker room of whom only old Misha kept silent all the time and never chip in, and even "goat" he played very rarely. Loader Volodya Kaverin with a narrow reddish horseshoe mustache trickling down to his chin, on the contrary, was loud and passionate, but loader Sasha sporting a dark toothbrush mustache soberly pacified his partner's fervor. He was tall, calm, reliable and—what a small place the world is!—married to that very Valya from the typist pool who had typed the collection of short stories by Maugham in Ukrainian.
The fourth loader, Vanya, was chubby and he shaved all of his round face. He sometimes threatened to smash my fucking mug for some of my remarks, but I doubted it – you could see from his face that he was a kind block. Besides, he was a real, big-time woman-hater and, holding the dominoes bones in his palm he used to ofttimes declare all of them were bitches.
"I'm on top of her, pumping, digging, doing my level best and she just lays with her eyes into the ceiling, 'Oy, Vanya! there's such cobweb in the corner!', well, ain't they bitches after that?!"
Even a saint wouldn't hold back a passing remark, "Poor boy!" says I, "Such a humiliation leaves no choice but become gay indeed."
And the loader begins fiddling his customary score about breaking my fucking mug. However, odds are very poor he'd ever keep his threat because behind the firmly knitted brows of a hard-core misogynist, it was hard not to see in Vanya's round face his heart of gold and tender nature.
~ ~ ~
End winter, the factory workers traditionally went on a three-day excursion to Moscow. Not all, of course, only those who wanted to. Technologist Valya asked me if I wanted. I had to admit that I hardly had enough money to live until the payday.
"Don't talk nonsense," she said, "the trade-union pay for food and accommodation. You can go there with just 3 rubles."
That was a challenge to Experimentalist. I signed up for the tour and prepared a three-ruble bill…
We arrived in Moscow filled with the winter dark. The small column of the tourists was headed by Yura who led thru the immense railway station to the square, it was not his first year in those tours. I was the file closer keeping my hands in the empty pockets of the demi-saison camel’s hair coat. A bus was already waiting for us before the station to take to the Red Square.
Arriving there, the bus stopped, and all the tourists went out to pass by the mummy of Lenin in the Mausoleum. There only remained the bus driver, the guide Olya and I.
"Are not you going?" asked Olya.
"I disgust the dead."
The driver slightly creaked his seat turning back from the steering wheel…
Obviously, to the Red Square arrived more buses with the excursionists from different other places in our vast Motherland, because the driver opened the door and 3 more guide girls climbed up inside. They knew each other and in a brisk shoptalk were discussing the internal affairs of their tour operating organization and anything else…
Their sacred tribute paid, the Konotop excursionists came back from the frosty snow-clad Red Square. Elatedly rubbing and slapping the shoulders of their coats and pea-jackets, they filled the bus with animated whoops and the stomps of treds in their footwear against the entrance steps… We were taken to the Veh-Deh-eN-Kha area, to a hotel built in the late fifties for the participants in the World-Festival of Youth and Students. The guide Olya specified details of further cooperation: on the morning of the third day the bus would take us to the railway station because we were more interested in combing thru all kinds of stores than in "look-to-the-right, look-to-the-left", wasn't it so? Everyone joined in the joyous chorus chant that, yes, it was so…
Our havvage was served at the canteen in a separate building and paid for with the stamped paper slips of the coupons distributed among the excursionists… One of the canteen employees recommended me not to leave my camel coat on the hanger by the entrance door to the hall.
"But eating with the coat off is more convenient."
"Look, Vera!" she yelled back to another worker in the canteen kitchen. "There's one more guest from Communism!"
Since I was not interested in shopping of any kind, I mostly walked about the area, had a ride on a trolley bus to its terminal, and even found a newsstand with Morning Star on sale. In Konotop, because of the explosive situation in Poland, that newspaper was often missing even from the news stall at the station. Probably, the editors in England were covering Polish events incorrectly.
3 rubles was not a sum to live in a grand style, but I still watched a historical action movie starring Karachentsev.
(…the ours, in general, can make 15 minutes of a movie quite watchable, but the rest may have been safely skipped…)
To the hotel Polar I went by the grandiose Moscow subway, aka metro. Since it was the daytime, the restaurant guests were some kind of excursionists because they all were sitting side by side in a row along the table assembled from smaller ones, and ate their havvage with their fur coats and overcoats on.
I asked a man in the waiter’s uniform garb to call waiter Nikolay but he only shrugged his shoulders. Then I demanded the head waiter, a tall woman came out in the same stripe-sleeved jacket.
"A year ago dining at your restaurant, I was 1 ruble short and promised the waiter to make up later. His name was Nikolay, he had a clever round face. Pass it to him, please." And I outstretched a ruble banknote, she silently accepted it…
Besides, I found another place to pass the time for free – the Central Library named after V. I. Lenin. You obtained a ticket there without any money if your passport was on you… That's a really grand place that Central Library after Lenin, yes, indeed, some crossbred of a theater and a metro station, the temple for book-worshipers, in short. Even the door was as tall as a church gate, and bore the inscription on its handle: "pull". And so I did. And behind the door, there was a big vestibule with a porthole in the blind wall, where they gave a free ticket if you had the passport, and then another door to the hall so very awesomely huge.
It turned out to be the cloakroom, yet adorned with white columns and the view to the distant stairs of milky white marble in the far end of the hall. And all around there swarmed the friendship of peoples from the whole of planet in full swing – all kinds of Burmese and Senegalese, yet the Whites also flashed thru. But it seemed to me as if the cloakroom was somehow, like, out of balance with the cloakroom attendants on the right side keeping a-trot between the hangers and the marble barrier, uploading bundles of coats, hither-thither, back and forth, yet the line to them never shortened, while the attendants on the left stood idle and beastly dying of ennui. I felt sorry for them as well as for the trotters, so I turned left and dumped my demi-saison coat upon the white marble barrier of the slackers.
The snooty footmen hardly paid any attention whatsoever, but then one of them looked down his nose at me and in a lordly manner deigned to explain – their half in the cloakroom was for academicians only. Some f-f..er..frightful mix of segregation and discrimination, as if my camel would graze fur off their coats! In short, I thanked the snob for the tip and walked over to the other side which was for mere mortals…
Before the stairs of milky white leading up into the height, there was a narrow gate that I hadn't made out from afar. They checked your ticket at that gate and gave more slips of paper, and only then let go up between a pair of militiamen, standing by so as to instill respect for order.
Up there, high above the cloakroom, stretched the galleries of endless ranks of catalogs in boxes which looked like automatic storage cells, only of wooden color, not metallic. I shuffled thru the cards wired in narrow drawers and found Freud, his lectures published in 1913 on the occasion of some of his jubilees, to commemorate it with the conjuncture publication of just 60 pages. I wrote out all the indexes and other marks of that booklet and went to the reading room to enjoy an hour of pleasure. Greetings!
The attendant scanned thru her glasses my application slip and squeaked up, like, she was calling for the militia when jumped by muggers: Freud?!!
Exactly, says I, I wanna see what the guy was about, be so kind, please.
That's when she rubbed my silly nose in. To have access to the mentioned book, says she, I had to be a PhD of relevant sciences, apart from being also a permanent resident in the Moscow city (the free ticket testified that I wasn't), and the last but not least, I had to produce a document asserting that gods of the Soviet scientific Olympus allowed me to open the book in question.
My jubilation ceased with a fizzle and in a state of a dejected calm, I climbed down the pasteurized stairs to collect my camel and go… I went out into the street, feeling, like, engulfed with the most profound calmness, as thick as bullet-proof glass; no desire to go anywhere, no wish to want any single thing.
Reaching as far as the underpass to the metro, I leaned my behind against the parapet and once again eyed the pompous building of the Central Library after Lenin. My mind was perfectly empty and somewhere in the background there echoed the lines from Shevchenko:
"… learn what is foreign, keep what is yours…"
Damn, folks! Where am I? The huge temple, the giant letters: Central Library Lenin. What was his ultimate goal? So that workers could read books! His famous bequeath had been drummed into our heads, dinned in the ears, rammed down the throat:
"Learn, learn, and learn!”
And, now what? 4 years before the Great October Revolution, in 1913, any worker could drop into a bookstore and buy those 60 pages of lectures, if so was his wish. After the victory of the mentioned revolution, in the Central Library after Lenin, they told me: "Fuck yourself! there's no book for you because you are a worker!"
Yet even screwed anew, I did not feel myself a looser, I never was it either, it’s only that being possessed by trust to people I got fooled most of the time thanks to my readiness to believe, which they vaccinated me with ages ago but I’m still lazy to ditch the bullshit…
So there I stood, getting rooted into the parapet, with some calm, crystal-like, silent torpor closing in on me… But then a scraping din began to gradually reach from the outside world, I woke up and saw a dozen of workers removing the snow with their shovels along the sidewalk. The sun shone brightly, and its comrades-in-arms scrubbed the asphalt and looked at me as if waiting for something.
And what could I share? I had just got the fuck myself. Or maybe they wanted to scrub along the parapet too? Okay, thank you, mujiks, right you are – clinging to this shell-shock transfixion for any longer would make a gooey show.
So, I tore my roots off the arid granite in tiling blocks and joined the flow down the steps to the underpass, to hide myself from those shining peaks…
On the previously agreed upon morning, the bus came and the senior recycler signed the papers brought by the guide to confirm that they had been driving us for three days all about the capital, presenting its historical sites and peerless pearls of Moscow architecture. And everyone was satisfied and happy:
guide Olya, who enjoyed 3 days of paid leisure;
the shoppers with their loads of hunted down deficits;
the bus driver with the three-day ration of gasoline which could be put into circulation;
and, most of all, I, with a spare coin in my pocket worth 15 kopecks.
Technologist Valya did not exaggerate – you could have Moscow for 3 days for 3 rubles sharp…
~ ~ ~
The only backwash of the excursion was that I owed the factory those 3 days, I mean 3 daily norms of 32 bales each. Technologist Valya said not to worry though and just produce 2 or 3 surplus bales every day until I made up.
I never liked to be a debtor, so on the third day after coming back from Moscow, I brought to work a newspaper-wrapped snack, aka "brake", to keep me during my fit of Stakhanovite shock work.
When the factory bus took everyone to the city, and Popovka women went home on foot, I faced the slow-go creaky wailer of a press, and the hillocks of rags grown up all around it during my Moscow recreation, whose mass wasn't noticeably reduced in the working day-shift ended just now… Like an enthusiastic champion for the victory of Socialism in a singled-out country, I worked the second shift, then the third, and even managed to sleep in the locker room for about 20 minutes before they came back by bus for the new working day….
