The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

Later, Eera told me that Valentina had born Tolik after working at a canteen in Kiev, or maybe she found that job after the delivery, I'm not quite sure on that point because it’s where things get always somewhat messy, I mean them those canteens.

Valentina's current life partner of an Armenian was not messing around with the instance of upbringing. We rode along the highway, and after a couple of kilometers stopped on the roadside snow. The driver turned on the tape-recorder and took out a bottle of foil-necked champagne.

(…the beauty of Armenian music does not open to listeners right away. At that time it was still incomprehensible to me but I kept patient – he, who gives a ride, orders the music…)

A patrol car stopped on the road, and two militiamen in greatcoats and, despite the winter, forage caps approached the Zhiguli. The Armenian stepped out to negotiate and make it clear that everything was safely controlled. In the meantime, Valentina started to resent that I and Eera were staying in a so shabby khutta, and undertook to bring her indignation to the bride's parents, who were some kind of her relatives. As a result, the second night we spent in a large, freshly renovated house in the well-to-do part of Borzna.

The moon could not peep into our room there, only a dim reflection of the moonlight made its way to us thru the glazed door of the adjacent veranda. The bed frame was way too creaky, so the mattress had to be thrown on the paint-coated floorboards. Not too bad, in general, but I liked it better in the shabby khutta…

We were taken to Nezhyn by the Armenian… Along the way, I was, for some reason, thinking about Tolik, the Negro boy. Catching sight of him, old women in Borzna dropped their jaws and kept crossing themselves behind his back. How does it feel being not like anyone else?

(…the grandfather of Pushkin was an unalloyed Ethiopian but, at least in his childhood, he saw normal people…)

When we got out his car by the hostel, the Armenian asked me to tarry a second, and after Eera went along, he inquired if I knew the address of the beauty with theatrical traits, he kinda heard she was at some college in Nezhyn. I neither knew nor wanted to know it…

Eera and I went up to a vacant room on the third floor and after half-hour swaying and seesawing the more accustomed bed frame, she said she felt something she never had experienced before.

Well, and thank you! So it was not in vain, exerting myself all that year and a half. Or was it that she just pitied me?.

~ ~ ~

As mentioned already, in February I went to the hospital for more than a week because of my staunch faithfulness to principles. After a week of treatment, my sister Natasha found me there. On the whole of Decemberists Street in Konotop, there was just one phone in the khutta at Number 26. I did not know their phone number and even if knowing it I'd hardly call. One and a half weeks were not two years…

I left the wardroom and at the end of the corridor, we went one flight down the stairs leading to the basement. Natasha took out her filter cigarettes, I stuffed a joint into a Belomor-Canal, and we mixed our smokes.

"Well, and how are you?" asked my sister after I reported about Pill going crazy.

"And I also have Eera," said I, and hurriedly began to convince my sister that Eera was not like everyone else, not in the least.

"Well, well," replied Natasha indefinitely…

When I was discharged, I suddenly felt that the struggle for just cause cost me some real straining. On the way to the hostel, I even had to untie the ear-flaps of my rabbit fur hat and let them loose. Never before, even the most severe frost could make me do so, I only rubbed my ears against the turned-up collar of the sheepskin coat, and demanded from the saleswoman at the stand on the station platform to sell me a bottle of frostbitten beer and, despite her exhortations, drank it in small sips thru the ring of ice growing, thickening, narrowing the orifice in the bottle’s neck… And now? You could hardly put your finger on anything more hazardous to your health than hospitals…

In spring at full swing, I was approached by Vitya from the Music-Pedagogical Department. That same student with the ancient Roman's curls of short blonde hair on his head, to whom in the first year of study I was lending my guitar, and who later gave me the key to the vacant room on the fifth floor. Now he came up with a request on behalf of his friend Volodya.

But why didn't Volodya speak up to me directly? After all, we were together in the United Mus-Ped and Anglo-Fac CJR team and took the honorable third place from the available 3.

Well, he, like, was shy. In general, his wife got pregnant and now he had to give blood for the abortion, but he himself was still in the middle of the treatment, tripper, see?

Yeah, clear. Of course, I'd do it for him, no problem. It's they who gave the key to my love affair with Nadya… A glass of blood is such a trifle in spring. And Nadya's worthy of much more than that…

Men's toilet on the third floor of the hostel, besides serving its direct purpose, was also forcing the student body to wake up from their amorphous hibernation. Masses interested in leaflets is not supine any longer. Yet, no ardent KGBist, with all his rats could ever gain promotion on the grounds of headlines cut out from the central press and mounted on glue in the toilet for all to see.

In the Hosty’s toilets, like in any, for that matter, other public toilets, cleanly folks never got seated on the seats but got perched instead, sitting on their haunches above the seats too dirty after all the previous squatters. In that bird-like attitude, the visitor inevitably got facing their stall door from within and that’s where those cut-outs were placed keeping to no conceivable order, bearing no insidious comments. Just a kinda haphazard collage, sort of. However, left one-to-one with the stall-caged creature, those headings gradually acquired some bizarre connotations and warped innuendos. The hunkers subjected to idle consideration began to see some hidden frivolous meaning, never intended by the editorial staff of the central periodicals where the chance headlines were cut from. Squatting over the bowl shed some new light at quite trite, everyday:


"Care of Party Has to Be Answered

Chain is Strong by its Links

Same 45 Minutes Over Again

Quality is the Priority

By Accelerated Schedule

No Amnesty to Bunglers

In the Name of Peace and Prosperity"

The force of, so to say, circumstances awoke your alertness. And that toilet humor spilled from the stalls reaching the opposite tiled wall with two urinals in it…

As usual, I sped past the first of them proclaiming:


"Waters of North to Flow South"

and pulled up by the second adorned by two headings from different newspapers:


"Biathlon Sport for Courageous

Our Aim is Communism"

I pissed and with the final quake to dry my dick up, there came a strange burning sensation. Looking down, I watched as a strange roiled drop crept lazily out of the urethra slot. I froze; what!?. No! It cannot be!

But no mute pleading could cancel the fact that 3 days before, because of the stupid confluence of circumstances, the moment they switched off the light in the hostel rooms, there was no one in mine, except for a fourth-year student whom I laid on the nearest bed. It happened so quite mechanically; out of pure reflex. She had never turned me on, and—as said already—all that was just some stupid coincidence. With her, I felt no more than the Lucy Mancini's partners from The Godfather before she got operated on by Dr. Kennedy's surgeon friend. Like in a church bell…

Itching and burning did not cease; all the polygamy had to be canceled for an unspecified period. Twoic advised me to consult Dr. Grisha who ponderously shook his head, and admitted that several cases of gonorrhea infection had already been recorded in the hostel.

What f-f..er..I mean, flicking gonorrhea?

Yes. The symptoms were very similar, but to know for sure there was needed a laboratory analysis of the semen.

What the f-f..I mean, freak! But I did not know how to do it, I had never masturbated in my life.

Dr. Grisha volunteered to help. We locked ourselves in one of the rooms – he, I and Sveta, well, she was just in case, like, sort of auxiliary contingent.

From his large soft briefcase, Grisha angled a cork-sealed glass tube and handed it to me for collecting the material for analysis. I dropped my jeans and underpants knee-deep and sat on a chair for the procedure at hand. Grisha got seated on the bed opposite, Sveta took place next to him.

He began to drive my foreskin back and forth. The three of us tensely stared at the erect cock with Grisha's hand on it, blurred in rapid flicking up and down… After a couple of minutes of the procedure, Grisha began to often swallow saliva and announced in a strung-up voice that the penis was too dry and in need of applying some moisture.

I did appreciate Sveta's presence, a kinda restraint to his eager willingness to help. And I said that it's okay, never mind, now I knew the way and would try it myself, only I had to take the test tube with me, right?

I zipped my jeans up and, for a goodbye, Grisha gave me a patent medication, some Rifadin in capsules…

Mindful of Maria's promise to cure me in the case of S.T.D., I called her and she told me to come that evening. When I explained to her that I had gonorrhea and needed to extract the semen for analysis, she opened the bed and started to undress. I had to once again explain that I had gonorrhea, but she said it did not matter.