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

The driver, who came down from the cab, had a head though; he led me, with care, aside. I did not resist. The dump truck left, taking away the one on the passenger seat, with the viper asp blackness upon his shoulders.

Black traces of tires stayed on the road. They should not be left there – the darkness would follow reading the black marks. I began effacing the traces with the soles of my shoes. Would they last long?

The wind was rising, a spread open newspaper sheet raced frisking from the square to rub against my shank. I made out the headline "The Prince's Tomb"; it took it a really long time to find me. The paper rustled its goodbye and slipped farther on along the asphalt…

The sky became gray… The dog-tired, yet satisfied, cat cautiously retracted her way across the road to the five-story block to pick up her upper-society day life at the lordly loft estate. Woeful laments of suppressed despair and supplicating clank of chain sounded after her.

The new day dawned, but I stood there until a woman in white crossed the square in the distance heading to the left edge of it, unseen from my post. An old woman in black appeared in her wake, pushing a carriage. But I knew there was no baby at all. It was eggs she was pushing along, white and round like billiards balls; dense grapes of eggs.

And I realized that I might leave my post and go on to the square… I walked along empty streets until I turned into the door of a factory check-entrance.

In a narrow room, I asked for water from an old man in black spetzovka, wearing glasses and a workman cap. He gave me a glass of water and we both watched closely if I would swallow the black speck floating on the water surface.

I drank all of it. The speck remained stuck to the glass wall. The man in black told me how to find the nearest employment office…

~ ~ ~

The office was locked, but then a woman with the key came and opened it. I said her that I was looking for a job, and she told me to wait for one more office employee, who should presently come.

Not far from the office there was an open diary cafе. The kopecks I still had were enough to buy a large bottle of milk, but I drank only half of it. Over a tall tumbler of thin glass, I uttered the parting words of Romeo, "Here's to my love!" And then I drank it…

When I returned to the employment office, the second employee was already in place. I knew at once that she was Death, and the one who came first was Love.

Death looked thru my documents and surly announced that I had been divorced already, but Love smiled and said that, well, so what? Then she went out to the other room to make a phone call and I stayed with Death, obviously irritated, who looked a little like Olga. Maybe, because of her dyed hair, only longer.

On her return, Love said that there was a job for me at the Odessa Mining Management, I had to go to Pole Explorers Square and find the chief engineer there, and also remind him about a car she was waiting for but forgot to mention while on the phone. A car for Maria, okay? He should know…

The chief engineer said there was no position for me at the management and only the job of a roof-fastener at a mine which was incompatible with my higher education.

I hurriedly assured him that my education would not be in the way at all, and he commanded me to get into the bed of a truck standing by the porch of the management, which tootled off and soon was out of the city. Apart from me, there was a tall and white, yet shabby, refrigerator in the truck-bed, and a pair of black chains, like from a chainsaw only much longer. They looked like a couple of mating snakes who, with the jostling of the truck-bed over the bumpy road, kept sneaking up along its floorboards, gradually closing in on me.

In the village of Vapnyarka, the truck entered the grounds of somewhat manufacture. The engineer told me to drop the chains from the back and I hurled the damned stalkers into a deep puddle, although there was a dry place too.

"Got crazy?" shouted the chief engineer, but I saw that he liked my exploit.

The truck driver dragged the drowned serpents into the open door of the warehouse… Then we drove to another place in the village and schlepped the refrigerator into a summer cottage in the group of the like cabins, surrounded by a common meter-tall palisade. The chief engineer stuck the cord into a socket for a check, and the fridge hummed in satisfaction.

"I've nearly forgotten," said I, "Maria wanted you to send her some car."

In fact, I remembered those signal words all the time and only waited for the proper moment…

The chief engineer explained how to get to a water tap in the street. I went there, took off my jacket, washed my hands and arms up to the short sleeves, and also my face and neck. Two militiamen with officer stars in their shoulder-straps stood on one side from me, and two army officers in their fatigue uniform on the other. They all waited patiently while I was splashing because I was with the chief, and after that water, no needle would ever be able to pierce the skin in my neck. Then I walked away wiping myself with the tiny handkerchief that at once soaked thru.

The truck left the village and rode on along the highway and very soon the road dived into a steep tilt to the right of which there unfurled a vast limitless field. I could not understand what it was until a moment later it woke up and stirred in movement, and long low waves with white crests ran to the shore. So that’s the sea!.

I took out the pocket notebook and, consulting the watch on my wrist, made the entry on the inside of its back cover:

"July 20, 1979

13: 30: 15

Eera

Sehrguey

Liliana"

The highway went up again. At the top of the ascent, the truck turned left onto a country road, and thru the outskirts of a village went to the field where the road ran along a windbreak belt. Two kilometers farther, after a long gentle slant there appeared and were passed two or three barrack-like structures and, after another hundred meters, the road ended in a wide pit rigged with a narrow-gauge track running past the office-cottage labeled "Mine Dophinovka" into the dark hole of a cave-tunnel in the opposite wall…

Three worn-out armchairs with wooden armrests stood in the shaded room. In the one with its back to the window curtains sat the mustached mine foreman, about 45, of a placid countenance, with the hair thinning away on his pate.

From the chair opposite him, the chief engineer with jovial laughter recounted my flinging the chain-snakes into the water. The foreman did not partake in his mirth, and the chief engineer subsided guiltily. His guarded respect to the foreman made it clear who was in charge there.

Seated to the right from the foreman, I handed, at his request, my passport over, a little ashamed that it was so sullied.

He opened it and, without touching, passed his right palm over the pages.

And I beheld how the paper in them brightened getting filled with life as if it had just come from the printing house, and there even appeared some ectoplastic transparent glow from its innards. Both the chief engineer and I watched fascinated, doing miracles was outside our limits. Seemed, like, I, after all, managed to reach the most supreme…

He had long since left the clouds and acquired the form of a foreman at a shabby mine. His name? It shall not be taken in vain. Bypassing the ineffable name, I can only disclose that he had fancied the patronymic of "Yakovlevich"…

Then I said that all my things were lost at a bus station in Odessa, and there was no money by me, but I had to call my wife because she would be worried. The chief engineer at once outstretched a dark-blue five-ruble note to me and announced that I would live in the hostel above the pit.

I needed no explanation that the hostel, as well as the mine itself, were a deceptive illusion for gullible dupes in the world where one should constantly be on their look-out. So I pinched the tiny brownish mote off the bill and gently placed this fuzz-mark on the wooden scarred armrest getting rid of it…

~ ~ ~

Besides doing my jobs – at first, a mine roof-fastener, and later on an assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator, not to mention some short-term labors, I constantly was in the state of ceaseless alerted search for an answer: what's hidden behind the seeming facade all around? My quest for clarity continued also in Odessa, where I often went for making long-distance telephone calls to Nezhyn from the intercity telephone station on Pushkin Street. Where was the money from? I borrowed it in the hostel from Slavic Aksyanov, or his wife Lyouda.

In the, let’s assume, hostel, seemingly, adapted from a, supposedly, cow-farm-house there were four rooms on both sides of a long corridor from end to end of the barrack-like building. In one of the rooms lived the young childless family of Aksyanovs. Their neighbors were a Bessarabian family with a one-year-old baby. An elderly single electrician occupied the room next to them.

I was given a room across the corridor from which, reportedly, they moved the radio set away but left the grates in the window. First of all, I pulled the iron frame with bars out and put it outside in the tall grass reaching the window ledge. Then I whitewashed the walls, and for one entire evening was thrashing them with a tube of a rolled-up newspaper in the battle with a myriad of vampire mosquitoes. The following morning Slavic Aksyanov, looking fairly battered, asked what I was doing there all the evening after repair.

"Safari," curtly said I without going into detail for he obviously got his share in the battle.

The rest of the doors in the corridor were locked, except for the first to the right from the entrance where there was a shower.

The mine workers were brought in the morning by a truck from Vapnyarka and New Dophinovka villages. They arrived whistling and screaming in the truck-bed like devils, but they called themselves Makhno bandits. Every 2 days, a pair of them were filling the large tank of the shower with water from a small hut in a hollow, some 30 meters from the hostel. There was a deep well with a bucket tied with a chain to the iron windlass. Electric heaters heated the water in the tank long before the end of the working shift.

Aside from the barrack-hostel, on the slope overgrown with tall grass, stood a tin-walled outhouse. There was no door in it, and the facility had to be approached with some kind of a warning tootle, so as not to catch a user in the posture of an eagle on the roost… From the doorless toilet there opened a magnificent view of the long sea inlet and its sheer opposite shore.

(…there is a concept of "stream of consciousness" which presumes that a person is capable of making mental comments on anything happening around them, or to think about something extraneous, having nothing, at first glance, to do with those happenings. Following the widely entertained assumption, "the stream of consciousness" was invented by an Irishman named James Joyce, although he tried to bring into play a certain French author from whom he, allegedly, picked up the idea. However, much earlier that same stream, even though not on an overly prominent scale, occurred in the meditations of the failed-to-become mother-in-law of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky.

Thus, "the stream of consciousness" seems to be one of those discoveries which have to take place repeatedly and in different places, just in case, to ensure they would not be missed. The "stream", when boiled down, announces to the human race that a person is really able to exchange thoughts with themselves.

What happened to me in Odessa in that crazy summer of '79 which turned out to be the most beautiful summer in my life, could hardly be called a "stream of conscience". A stream? I pray, desist! No! It was a waterfall and a refreshing one too, tuning up my tensely strained senses on their constantly alerted lookout…

I exchanged thoughts not just with myself but also with any-every-one-thing I came across. Starting from a small pebble stuck in the dust of roadside up to the night stars with their dew-like glint in the sky.