Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
…seems like we’ve run into another vicious circle with no chance to be resolved at the round table in m/u 41769’s stoker house, sorry for interrupting your trudge…wipe your snots and just keep walking…some business you're a specialist in…
And he walks, stepping on the tails of the transparent bands of scampering grains of snow. Each step is no different from the previous one, none of the steps changes a jot of the road, and neither the low leaden sky, nor the walls in windbreak belts on both sides get changed in any way.
…all and the same…that same all…everything moves to stays the same…
Occasionally, a concrete kilometer post with figures in a blue squarelet of tin approaches gradually to fall behind. A few hours of such uninterrupted walking, even without any load, and the ache, slight but nagging, would seep into the shoulder bones. He knows that. But not on this day. The district center is at most 15 kilometers from the village, as said by his uncle. And from the town there starts the transport services of a developed civilization…
Something looms at a distance on the roadside; some huge object. Fixing his gaze on that motionless strangeness midst the general chaotic stir, he is nearing it, trying to guess from afar: what could it be?
…some machinery…aha…and what kind of it?…
…who knows, they're tinkling out lots of them for agriculture…let's get closer and then…
A weeny burning sensation breaks up in his bladder.
…would you but wait a bit with your urges?..yes, machinery, yet from another sphere…
He stops by a tangerine-yellow road roller.
…how could you possibly get to it, poor thing?..feels chilly, eh?..no doubt…way too accustomed to asphalt tropics…bituminous heat and stuff…what are your plans for to survive the winter?..no escape to warmer countries, too heavy on the rise, besides, it's too late…and no tool to dig a furrow for yourself, not your specialization…anabiosis remains the only chance, buddy …freeze into the surrounding environment like them those cold-blood earth-water animals…though not a bed of roses too…
He pours his empathy out onto the scattering of small-sized gravel, then zips the fly up and steps over the uneven dark spot in the road, which a couple of hours before was tea prepared by Uncle's wife for a meal.
…everything flows, everything changes…one and the same tea can’t be poured out twice…
~ ~ ~
It was his second visit to the village where he was now walking from. The first time though he did not come himself but was brought by his Dad. The days in that summer lasted forever, unhurried, like the slow stream splitting the village into ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’. The knee-deep water in the quiet creek was rolling soundlessly along the sandy bottom. A little bit upstream you got into the green-shaded tunnel in between the walls of dense Willow thicket. Whitebait brushed ticklishly against the shanks. It feels creepy, especially when you are 12 and they told you some scary stories about leeches and "horsehair".
And beyond the village, quite at a distance, maybe at an hour's walk, there was the river Mostya not too wide but enough for a swim. And he was swimming to the opposite bright grassy bank and pushing the red-and-blue ball ahead over the water, watching the blurred spot of his face reflected in the wet, spinning, sides of the ball. Or was that ball and the green bank by some other river of his childhood? Yet, the fact remained that he entered the Mostya river as well. 20 years before…
Twenty years later, on his second visit, he did not enter it. It was too cold for swimming. Late autumn. Emptiness reigned in the wide sway of the fields. Empty was the village with small hillocks of crushed bricks – ruins of houses overgrown with rank grass. “Khan Mamai's horde was here”. The remaining huts were silent, squatting lowly as if pressed down by the ocean of faded sky. At the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
"Looking for whom?"
"Sehrguey Mikhailovich Ogoltsoff."
"And who are you?"
"Sehrguey Ogoltsoff."
"So, the nephew?" guessed she quickly.
"Exactly," he agreed, holding a smile back.
She invited to go over into the room and was sorry that the uncle had just left for work after the midday break, and she didn’t forget to praise the scrawny cat thoroughly washing his face all the morning to predict arrival of guests. Then she returned to the kitchen and the four-meter-long thread-chain doubled in-and-out the small teremok-hut time-piece on the opposite wall by the ceiling, gravity-driven to produce slow ticks slicing hollow silence in the empty room except for the table between 2 windows, below the clock, under the worn-out oil-cloth hanging over the plywood doors in its box and the crowd in the black-and-white cluster of close and distant relatives, and their special friends of sundry sizes, persistent stares from the silent iconic faces similarly mute and petrified for the ceremonial shot, in the corner left free by the Russian oven comprising half of the space.
He sat leaning against the backrest of the couch, beneath a narrow arched window to the front garden, checking the interior in the single room with a brick stove opposite his feet, from which a smooth gray pipe of asbestos-concrete rose up and, by the ceiling, veered to the kitchen wall.
Next to the stove, stood a broad bed with paint-coated legs and siderails, carrying a pyramidal tower of cushions next to the plush carpet pinned up by small nails over the wall, in which, on some of the thousand-and-one nights, the young man abducted a bashful beauty on his plush stallion, and his accomplice followed them, with a parting glance over his shoulder at the minarets in the sleeping city. The plywood hide-out of brown wardrobe idled connivingly in the corner for their arrival.
On this side, next to the couch, stood a table beneath the second of the arched windows, with chairs pushed under it and, by the blank wall to the neighbors', a television set on a high shelf.
From under the TV to the kitchen door a rug-mat stretched, following the directions of the planks in the ceiling overhead, naked and blue… She tinkled plates washing up in the kitchen, occasionally coming to the door of the room to ask if his parents were healthy, and where he worked, and what's his job. By the cautiousness of the questions, he got it that she knew. As if it could be otherwise. His father, since retired, was visiting his native village almost every summer, bringing along his granddaughter too. He surely shared his troubles with his brother.
The kitchen’s entrance door banged, "Grandma! Two fives!"
"You’re back?" responded she with tender strictness. "Take off your jacket. And do not shuffle that way. Go say 'hello' to the uncle, (to the whispered question) your mom's cousin."
From behind the door handle, the boy's face with a strand of hair sticking up in a cow-lick above the right corner of the steep forehead slowly peeped in, with the childishly serious look.
After a prolonged "hello-oo" he disappeared to go on with the inaudible questioning of his grandmother.
"Lenochka's dad," answered she laying the table. "Remember her staying at grandma Sasha's last summer?"
She invited the guest to the table. Supping the meal, the schoolboy looked at the window with a dejected stare. Could you remember what they see with such wide-open gaze those seven-year-old aliens until another question about school brings them back to their senses?
Well, at least the unknown uncle from nowhere was eating silently. The boiled potatoes with fried onions the boy rejected, as well as the tea.
The grandmother sent him to the village smithy to tell his grandfather about the guest, who with a polite ‘thank-you’ returned to the couch… Full of lean satiety, he sat in the congested sleepy silence wrapping the house.
Outside the 2 windows behind his back, the gray wind cooed and wooed with impetuous gusts the Apple tree in the front garden, who angrily waved away the inconstant any lady's man… It's time to insert the inner frames for winter… In front of him, thru the velvety-lilac night, the kidnappers were still galloping mutely with their capture. Although she might be happy to be stolen and not stay by the old vizier with his fat eunuchs…
~ ~ ~
It's weird, the extent of how fully everything around was befitting me. And so it would be on all the following days of the vacation… In the evenings I'd be visiting my aunt Alexandra to overeat her pancakes, and once even a chicken. Some rich villager was my aunt.
In the mornings after breakfast, when my uncle, the blacksmith, went by bicycle to his smithy, I ventured to roam over the fields, and after the midday meal, I was cutting logs from the hillock of firewood dumped next to the house, for the winter.
A beautiful Russian woman Valentina, by her husband's last name – Zhelezina, my cousin and the mother of Maxim, the outstanding student living in the house of his grandparents, would encourage me to visit her house, where she kept the younger ones – the hooligan Volodka and post-toddler Tanyooshka, who still did not want to part with her pacifier.
She would retell me the village gossips, and her life in Moscow, where she was courted by a Frenchman, and in Kustanai, where she was married to a German from the local colonists.
Her current husband would take me to the village store, and I would drink bottled beer and listen to mujiks' talk of nothing but with so native intonations that it takes your breath away with the sentimental sympathy.
And by that time my aunt would have already bestowed a black padded jacket, which was the obligatory outfit for anyone there, except for kids and teenagers, so that I did not stick out like a sore thumb in my checkered jacket…
Some ante-biblical simplicity of life, and at the same time with so many admixtures… An old woman came to the store to exchange potatoes from her garden for kolkhoz kopecks, her utter poverty showed thru but the mujiks around were next to bowing, caps in hand, before her. She’s a relic of their past – the embodiment of the old-regime landowners, yet they needed that relic and would create it from a poor retired teacher if only her facial features were delicate enough…
Returning from one of the supper evenings at my aunt's, I, for some reason, stopped in my tracks at nothing around, and for a long stretch was staring in the dry tall grass. What for?. The next evening my aunt affirmed that, yes, my grandmother Martha's hut had been exactly in that spot.
On the last night before leaving, I came with the farewell visit to Valentina's house. My checkered jacket turned out exactly her husband's size, they were obviously impressed with such generosity and were calling the jacket "a suit". To Valentina, I presented my suspiciously feminine bag. I did manage to get rid of it after all…
We went out into the darkness of the street without houses. Everyone understood that we would never see each other again. Valentina embraced me and wept. I stroke the shoulder of her padded jacket and said, "Boodya, sister." Then I shook hands with her husband Zhelezin and went away.
It's so strange, in my whole life, I never heard or used that soothing word of "boodya", it came out all by itself, spontaneously… I come from here, it's where I belong, sad pity I’ll be of no use for my own…
~ ~ ~
People started making wry faces at me as early as the bus station near the Izmaylovo Park, where the Ryazan-Moscow bus arrived. At Zhulyany airport in Kiev, where I disembarked the midnight flight from Moscow, the hostile attitude to me from the folks around increased exponentially to confirm the correctness of the old saying – people judge you by your zek outfit.
The public opinion on my account was voiced in the morning by a passenger on the platform in the underground metro station, "Where the fuck do you barge thru among the people?"
I differed from them by my being a black man. The black padded jacket, black pants, black army boots. Only the "cock" hat on my head fell out of the ensemble with its brown and blue stripes. It would seem more or less excusable were I loaded with some kind of luggage, but a black man with his hands in his pockets is outrageous, it's a challenge to the social order, it's a cheeky bomzh… We bypass them with an unseeing glance, so that to avoid any eye contact—save, God!—or we bark, "Where the fuck do you barge thru among the people?"
True, in those days we did not know the word bomzh yet, and for such sort of people, they used the term bych. "Where do you barge, you bych?.. Get out of here, fucking bych!"
The word was brought by the seamen who had sailed abroad. There, in the port cities, the drifters spending nights on the beach, collecting the scraps and offal left by vacationers were called "beach-combers". Our people did not care for the whole word and borrowed only the first half of it. So the folks without a certain place of residence and of obscure occupation got labeled byches. A short, biting term. However, it died out.
Firstly, those who did not speak English and never went to the sea began to slip into synonyms, substituting knoot (which in Russian means "whip") for bych that in Russian also means "whip". And, secondly, abbreviations are always stronger, especially when supported by the state.
(…we are all from the USSR, got it? Whoever does not understand will receive clarification in the CheKa, aka the KGB…)
When the law enforcement organs abbreviated the "without a certain place of residence" that turned in Russian into BOMZh, other terms had no chance for survival.
In the great and mighty Russian language, you cannot find a synonym to bomzh. The nearest to it "tramp" or "bum" smack of mothballs and infantile lisp of the Indian cinema…
Once upon a time in Russia there lived peddlers, aka offenny. In order to survive, they invented a language of their own. Dark for uninitiated, the Offenny language went into oblivion together with its carriers – no one bothered to compose its dictionary.
The current fenya of the criminal world is also for initiated but has nothing to do with the defunct Offenny except for echoing the latter's name. Considering fenya the language of Russian mafia is not correct because from Russian it borrowed only grammatical structures, and the vocabulary is fairly international. Kicked out of secondary school, half-educated students when continuing their careers as jail-birds poured in fenya the bits and scraps of words they heard at foreign language classes. That way fenya feathered its hat with atas! (from the French "l’attention!"), haza (from the German "Hause"), havvat (from the English "have a"), as well as manifold borrowings from the languages in the family of friendly and free brother nations fused into the common, unsplittable, USSR.
(…however, back to my malyava, aka letter (fenya’s term from the German "mahlen")…)
The champion for the public fundamental morals, who offended me in the metro, had no notion that under the appearance of a black man there lived in me a vulnerable tender soul as well as the digestive tract of a delicate constitution. I did not suspect it myself until I felt how, after the mentioned insult, I gradually became "mournful in the belly" because the intestines began revolting after the traumatic discovery that in public eye they were a constituent part of a bum.
About the Maidan, which then was named Square of October Revolution, it became clear that I could not hold back the pressure of the tides that stormed the ampoule (which follows the large intestine) and that there remained no hope for reaching the greens by the University, with the only public toilet known to me in the downtown part of Kiev. Fortunately, I remembered the Ministry of Education with their ministerial toilet on the second floor, and not too far from the square, it’s only that the intemperately intensive rioting within my system called for additional suppressive efforts…
I flung the tall entrance door open and rushed, in a concentrated jog, up the marble stairs.
"Hey! Where?" shouted the attendant from the chair to the left from the entrance.
"Plumbing system check," reported I over my shoulder, without slowing down the businesslike strides…
When all the sorrows subsided, I left the restroom, polished like a malachite jewelry case, and descended the wide white stairs, with the demeanor of archangel Gabriel in dignified idle stroll and, maybe, even gleaming blissfully.
I wanted to share the Good News and, turning my face to the attendant, informed benevolently, "Hey, look! The check says it's okay around here. Yea!." And I went out into the blatantly atheistic Karl Marx Street, between two dense walls of the like, severely administrative, buildings.
(…Karl certainly knew it's only thanks to the collective efforts that Man managed to become Crown of Nature. Because single-handed you can neither kill a mammoth not fly to the moon.
But how fragile the state of unity is!. How willingly and readily we do split ourselves, humans, by the color of skin and hair, by caste, faith, party affiliation: they are not us, we are not them, we're higher prized, at least for 1 ruble…
Some unsolvable mystery – how the assemblage of ape-shaped boobs keeps able for collective achievements, given their chronic proneness to self-castration?..)
~ ~ ~
My visit to Kanino kicked off the rise of national self-awareness within me. For a descendant of Novgorodian ushkuynik robbers and Tatar raiders, who for centuries were raping Ryazan womenfolk, taking turns with less stable, accidental, bands of fuckers, it was not appropriate, and even disreputable, to earn my living by giving hugs, on a daily basis, to the stinking undisinfectioned shit of rags when shoving them into the press box.
So, for the first time in my working career, I applied for firing me on the strength of my own free will. Now, in my workbook, the disparaging Article 40 got obscured by the perfectly acceptable standard record "dismissed on the application"—who would look any deeper?—and I went to hire on in the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.
Everything went without a hitch, I had smoothly past the medical checks but at the final stage, already at the personnel department, I suddenly heard "no go". Why not?
As it turned out, there remained no quota for me. The head of the personnel department exposed it in detail, that there were tacit but strict regulations forbidding to hire a person with higher education to become a workman among the workforce of fewer than 1000 undiplomized employees. In the plant collective of 5000, there remained no extra thousand to allow for my case, some sons of a bitch with diplomas arrived before me and exhausted the quota.
(…the disappointment did not kill me, I somehow used to cope with falling through, nevertheless, it was a significant shock to realize the existence of the "shadow" legislation, ignorance of which did not exempt you from its application…)
So I went to the city outskirts opposite the Settlement, to the "Motordetail" plant where I was hired on as a bricklayer in the Construction Shop Floor. The bastards with diplomas had not infiltrated yet the large modern enterprise.
If we subtract the havvage in its canteen, the plant "Motordetail" stood out as a crystal-like embodiment of dream model for an industrial enterprise and a casual walk over its Construction Shop Floor was enough to confirm the statement. The spacious locker rooms attractively paneled with tiling in brown colors of the spectrum were combined with as spacious (and also tiled, not just cemented) shower rooms. The recollection of the said conveniences, waiting for you at the end of the day, would warm your heart during the working hours.
I knew my job and was used as a bricklayer-loner for non-standard tasks in separate spots of application. They would equip me with a pair of helpers to fetch bricks and mortar and—off we drive!—the drum brickwork of wall in an underground water well, or erecting chimneys over the roofs in two-apartment cottages…
I liked the frequent change of tasks: each one required a special approach and circumspection which kept your mind from slipping into sloth and your spine from growing stiff. And for the periods of relative calm between the missions, I was sent to the team of bricklayers at the construction of the 130-apartment block for the plant employees in the neighborhood adjacent to the plant. The team there were no aces, but it was they to live in what they built…
Neither in the locker room nor with the team was I a dream gossip. When asked of something, I would reply and then again keep silent while indetectably talking to myself in my mind… Besides, my helpers were replaced way too often. Their rotation was seen to by Narcological Department 2, shortened to Narco-2.
Narco-2 constituted the crucial part in the conveyor production of slaves.
Slaves in the epoch of Developed Socialism? Well, let’s not forget the spiral-like advancing of the historical progress. The system worked as follows: a militia van rushed into a village and grabbed a pair of mujiks indicated by the village council chairman as prone to alcohol consumption. (And who is not?)
The catch was brought to Narco-2 for the treatment of alcoholism. Anyone entertaining an indecently high opinion of his human rights got a shot of sulfur and, until the end of the treatment, he carefully avoided risks of picking up the subject any more…
The treatment term spanned from 2 to 3 months. The patients lived in the hostel, ate their havvage in the canteen, worked wherever they would send them.
NO PAYMENT FOR THEIR WORK
All of their payment was withheld as reimbursement for their accommodation, havvage, and medical care. The mentioned medical care was the pills dispensed to the patients after the working day, which they immediately flushed down the toilet.
If keeping a low profile, they were allowed to visit their villages on weekends…
In cities, Step 1 in the procedure was simplified. The precinct militia officer announced to the drunks on his beat whose turn it was to go for the treatment and they knew they'd be better off if falling in line.
(…the first Marxist group in Russia bore the telling name of “Liberation of Labor” and—lo!—with the inexorable historic logicality, one hundred years later, the Land of Victorious Socialism effectively liberated labor from payment for it, and, in the same breath, Narco-2 with the host of same institutions covering the boundless USSR became the brilliant realization of the cherished dream of the founders of scientific communism about erasing differences between City and Village.
Donnerwetter! Who’d ask for better proof that Ewige Weibliche means business and pedantically does its job?.
Both the Russian Empire and the United States of America abolished slavery in the early ’60s of the XIX-nth century, well done! Three cheers for each!.
It’s only that Russian mujiks were enslaved many centuries before the first Afro-American slave was ever born.
I mean, old habits are die-hard customers indeed…)
Each person certainly has their own story and if you keep quiet and don't interrupt them by attempts at narrating some of your own, they will eventually tell theirs to you.
Not necessarily about themselves, maybe about a relative or a neighbor. For example, about a German soldier from an infantry squad occupying a village khutta. Each morning he yelled something to which his comrades responded with their laughter. One of them had a little Russian and explained to the landlady the content of his yells, "Gimme those two bitches – Hitler and Stalin, I'll give them short shrift with my Schmeisser!"
The story was told me by an old woman preparing to retire from the Construction Shop Floor, who, as a small girl, saw Germans living in her mom's khutta.
(…the question is: for how long they would tolerate such an entertainer in the Red Army?..)
Or about a mujik who made friends with a stranger at a beer bar. They went out together and strolled along the street until the new acquaintance had to loosen his bowels. He dropped in a nearby yard with a promise to be back in a moment. On taking a leak, he tried to nick a carpet from the linen rope and was arrested…
As for the mujik waiting for his gossip on the sidewalk, he got four years of prison as the accomplice. Yes, there still occurred some happenstance mistakes even under the most human judicial system in the world…
And the executioner was simply proud to tell his story because he considered himself a hero, not an executioner.
He served at the front Smersh battalion mopping up the areas taken control of, and whenever they happened to capture an RLA soldier, he personally and heroically took the traitor to a nearby wood. Although at the headquarters there was a special platoon with sub-machine guns for the purpose.
Now, they two would walk there arm in arm, only the hands of one in the pair were tied behind his back. And on the way, the hero began a casual talk about the family and kids, so that some of the captives even started to hope for something.
And then he said, "Why do you, bitch, betrayed our Motherland?" And he shot his TT pistol, not to kill though, but make a hole in the liver with his bullet so that the bastard wriggled for 10 minutes before dying of the lethal wound.
After the war, he wanted to become a diplomat, but they explained to him that a Soviet diplomat, being an embodiment of our Homeland abroad, should be flawless. Unfortunately, his body was missing three fingers cut off by a bomb fragment when already in Germany. How would he waltz another country ambassador's wife at a diplomatic rout with such a claw? He saw the point and entered an institute for economics to get the diploma of a middle-rank manager…
I slightly knew his son who was always ready with slogans like "we'll not allow the bitches to trample our native land!", because he flawlessly memorized and kept to his dad's ideology…
In Konotop, the ideology was hardly ever viewed with much of reverence. When in the heat of an argument, folks did not choose some high-flown words. Thus, for example, to upbraid a female, they would say, "You are a Newsya Kamenetskaya!"
Newsya was a city idiot. She silently walked the sidewalks, no one addressed her and she addressed no one because she was a quiet case. But a single look at her hat was enough to see that she was nuts, sort of a red bonnet with a bouquet of artificial flowers. By that bonnet, she was recognized from afar, and small kids in the street would run after her and shout, " Newsya Kamenetskaya!"
But she did not reply and walked silently on. A casual city idiot. The executioner's son murdered her. Late at night, in the Loony park. He did not want his Homeland to be trampled by quiet idiots. Lyalka had to see the purist off in the grated stolypin car from the railway station.
And so as to make sure that the likes of Newsya would never dare anymore infest the sacred sidewalks of Homeland, that son of the Smersh hero…
(…SHUT UP!. Certain things shouldn’t ever be told even to grown-up children!..)
I don't know why, but some of the stories are darker than all the thousand and one night put together…
Yet, even in the tragic layouts, you could always find nooks for optimism!
In that winter the frost was reaching absolutes and if walking streets you turned your head too sharply, no matter left or right, some tiny sounds came from inside – they were your thoughts turned to ice and tinkling against the frozen convolution walls within the gray matter.
And smack in the middle of that pole of cold, you came across a broadsheet on the wall in the plant check-entrance, "Those who wish to partake in a ski trip to the Seim, please, apply at the Tourism Group."
Haven't I told it was a very modern and advanced plant? In the basement of one of the five-story apartment blocks in Plant Neighborhood, I was once making the screed for the rubber covering of a mini football stadium…
I found the Tourism Group's room. They told me: on Saturday, at the check-entrance, with own skis. I brought my skis, the ones I was running in the forest at the Object.
A small PAZ bus at the check-entrance waited for those who did not feel like skiing that morning. Nonetheless, there were 3 volunteers to ski all the 12 kilometers; some girl with a guy courting her, and I. The ski-track in the deep snow was being made in turn.
But what a beauty! Especially when we entered the forest. Because of the frost, the snow became as fine as flour and the sun was setting ablaze each and every of those tiny crystals…
The other two skiers knew the location of the plant recreation camp, but I saw it for the first time. The houses made of timber had steep gable roofs, like in the Swiss Alps. The whole forest around drowned in the snow and only the roofs stuck out because of their steepness. Classy view! My room was just under the roof and from inside I could once more admire how steep it was.
The roommate turned out one of the veteran tourists, not a rookie like me. As I understood, their group was sort of a closed shop at the plant, and the advertisement was just to show to the Management that they were active in attracting the working masses. They did not ever expect there would turn up a curious yokel of me…
On the other hand, the bozo got a fresh listener for his stories about their hiking in the Urals where all week long they walked in the rain. From morning till night. Yet afterward, at every outing that he was taking part in, there was not even a drizzle. That's why in the Tourism Group they nicknamed him "dry talisman". Whenever they ventured without him, they got drenched by the rain and quite the opposite with his participation.
Then he left and returned with a bottle of the medicine alcohol of which he poured me a full cup before measuring out twenty drops for himself. We drank and had a snack sharing the sandwich brought by him. Soon he left again and did not return, and from the first floor there came the sounds of music.
