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

And all that turmoil raged against the background of wild screams from the rebellious farmers in the Central Asia, because the TV was feeding series of The Man is Changing His Skin and they kept rushing discontentedly from one edge of the screen to the other. Hence the voices. The rioters were taking the full advantage of watchers being busy with personal sorting out in the bedroom. Then the dehkans grew so impudent that even jumped out of the TV, and continued their scrambles all over the oilcloth on the table.

And I knew that you could expect anything from that TV… One Sunday, my mother-in-law cooked soup from a raw bone and put the plate for me next to the TV where some mafia clan members were forcing a judge to commit suicide. And, when he put a bullet thru his temple, the brains splashed out smack into my plate – oops! What was there to do with my mother-in-law standing vigilant behind my back to control if I would show the proper respect to her cooking? I had to lap it hot…

Yet, no one would escape the just retribution, and now, when the TV and I remained eye to eye, I clicked it onto another channel. It turned out a neatly mellow violin quartet of chamber music. What a relief!.

But then the father-in-law jogged from the bedroom for recharging. And he felt that something was amiss, not as stimulating as expected. He did not immediately realize that it was because of the cello. What could a cello possibly do in a Central Asian bedlam? Unfortunately, he got it what was what, and clicked the channels back, directly into the wild grateful wails of dehkans, "Ala-la-ah!" He swallowed it, like a sip of energizer and, with replenished ammunition, rushed back to the interminable battle…

Since that night, on my arrival, after the hallway and the bathroom, I made straight for the kitchen. There I laid the kitchen table to have some havvage. And I never opened the fridge, so as not to give Gaina Mikhailovna the pretext for her undertone mumbling reprimands to Eera.

While I was eating, you would come running to the kitchen with agitated chatter in your own, as yet not very understandable, language… However, I again have run ahead of the events…

~ ~ ~

To keep Eera, my Eera, to ensure that she would be mine and mine only, I went down the path of righteous life.

(…they do not sell the code of righteousness at the news stalls because no one needs them. Without checking it by code, anyone knows whether they did the right thing or not. Even if your wrong-doing can be bolstered with tons of excuses and justifications, or even called for by written law, and all around glamorized your deed, "well done! good fellow!" you still know, deep in your heart, that you'd better not have done that and, at that point, you'll be right, because you can't deceive yourself and you know all along what's right from what isn't.

They finish their empty praise, disperse, and now you're left to live on and wade thru your own disgust at yourself and futile blinking at the scruples or, maybe, tries at drowning them in more and more atrocious yet commendable wiles…

Honestly, my quest for righteousness sprung from a personal interest: if I kept doing everything right then nothing wrong would happen to me, otherwise, it would be so unfair. That flimsy guesswork served the main prop to pin my hopes on. I never felt like looking under the hood of my loose construction and only tried—and real hard too—to do everything right…)

That's why it took bricklayer Peter Lysoon 2-3 hours less than me to finish the walls of a bathroom-toilet unit. No wooden insertions? Who cares? Spit a spat, and go on laying the unit walls. When the carpenters come to install the doors, they would think of something to do about fixing the problem.

The partition laid up with a "belly"? So what? Say: "they'll lap it up!" and leave it as it is. The plasterers would come and solve the issue with an additional mortar layer.

But that's not right. Therefore, my specialization in the team was gypsum partitions, and that of Peter – bathrooms. However, nothing was dogma and there always happened moments for a harum-scarum "off we drive!" and forced castlings.

Yes, doing everything right is a time-consuming undertaking, but that's not the whole story because choosing the path of stringent righteousness you can't constrict yourself to the limits of current life, you start to strive for fixing wrongful deeds committed in the life past, which goal calls for open repentance…

When I came to the institute hostel, former freshman Sehrguey from Yablunivka was finishing his fourth year of study, and still lived in Room 72. I returned to him the thick English-Russian Dictionary by Mueller.

"Ho-ho! How come?"

"I stole it from you."

After a moment's confusion, everyone in the room burst into a loud laughter, willy-nilly joined by me.

(…what's funny there? In his story Jane, Maugham explains that there's nothing funnier than the truth…)

Nobody laughed though at the library of the Plant Club when I returned a couple of books stolen there and confessed that one more was missing and that I was really sorry and ready to reimburse. They discharged my unrecorded loans, forgave me without compensation and did not even cancel my reader form…

2 weeks later, my father started to upbraid me for behaving as if I was not all there. He stuck the forefinger out of his fist and fiercely drilled the air nearby his right temple.

I translated his gesture into the parlance of the Holy Script, "Go and take him for he's out of his mind."

"And again some frostbitten hooey! Gone nuts in Nezhyn? Is that what you've been sent to the institute for?"

Then I lowered the bar, and switched over to the Ukrainian folklore, "With the father's khutta burnt down, whose attic will the sparrows spend nights in?"

Unfortunately, the widely-known koan was out of the elder's ken and the following half-month or so the 2 match boxes dropped at ready by the tiny gas stove on the table for cooking in the veranda were missing. But then everything settled down and returned to normal.

"I'm ashamed before people! You enter the streetcar and get frozen like a statue with your look nailed to the window."

"I have to knock step dance along the car, eh?"

"No!! Just be like everyone else: 'hello! how are you? fine!' Do not be a renegade!"

And then the Central Television news program "Time" showed an employee at the Moscow Central Library named after Lenin, who confessed that for several years he kept purloining valuable publications from the archival department, under the gray smock of his uniform. I realized that I was not alone redeeming wrong-doings of the past. But what was it to make him follow the path to righteousness?

"The fur-coat form of schizophrenia."

Unexpectedly entering the kitchen, I overheard my father announcing to my mother the diagnosis turned out by Tamara of the 4th kilometer in Chernigov, which, most likely, reached him with Eera’s mediation…

Yet, later on, the sorcerer of Ichnya, after a couple of visits by my sister Natasha there, said he had done his job and I was put aright. Eera became happy with the news, but not I. Life became boring. The overwhelming powerful stream of consciousness, in which I had to choose the fairway like those rafters driving their log rafts down the foam-boiling rapids in the Carpathian rivers, turned into placid shoals. I could still see breakthroughs of the impossible into the world of everyday life—where everyone is like everyone else—but between those insights and me, there already rose that dreary grating from the Bulgakov's novel, its dusty grates canceling all pirate brigantines in the unknown seas. The heat and full-blooded throb of the belonging vanished.

(…it's one thing when you actually ride a log-raft that keep jostling and bumping under your feet, and quite another kettle of fish if you can any moment hit button Pause, and leave everything frozen until you've poured yourself a cup of tea…)

"Gimme my schizophrenia back!" with genuine bitterness pleaded I Natasha, but it was too late…

In Nezhyn, on the platform near the station's building corner, where the round clock hung on the bar protruding from the wall, Eera and I were waiting for the local train to Konotop.

She had the three-quarter yellow jacket on, and the day around was also sunny, a good summer day it was. Eera smiled at me and said, "When I'll be bad, remember me as I am now when I love you."

"Nonsense. You can't become bad."

"Don't argue, I know."

"How can you know?"

"I know. I am a witch."

Her eyes turned sad, and a slight imperceptible cross-eyedness crept into them. It was as slight as my disappointment, for I had once thought she was a devil in love like in the book which I stole for Novoselytsky.

"No worry," said I, "I'm a hexer too."

Although what hexer could be of me? Some sleepy warlock at best… This thought was prompted by the black hardback cover of The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel which I bought in Odessa and was reading in the trailer of our team during the midday breaks.

Well, okay, to call it "reading" would be a rank bragging. I could not wallow thru more than one page in a break, because of inevitable dozing off… I wonder if the translator understood himself what he was turning out, or just rendered on with "a perplexed mind"?.

In that Odessa bookstore, they did not want to sell this book to me. The two saleswomen were playing for time, exchanging accusatory glances. At that time, the cause of their embarrassment was so amazingly clear: they had been expecting a real warlock to pick up the book in coarse black bounds, but now I just do not know what to think… What's the difference who buys what in the world where each one is like anyone else? Be happy to complete the sales plan…

I kept Hegel in my locker. The lockers in our team trailer had no locks, but nothing disappeared from there. Except for the diploma badge and a book by some Moscow literary bungler.

I was reading that stuff borrowed from my mother-in-law's hutch simply out of the sense of duty, and I felt relieved when it got lost half-way thru. Then I brought The Phenomenology of Spirit, in the way of experiment, to check if they would lift it as well, but no! Unassisted, I had to read it to the very end. And then it turned out, that it was not Hegel who wrote it at all, but somewhat Rozenkrantz noting down his lectures. Then he published those notes for them to translate the thing into Russian so that I would slumber peacefully in our team trailer. And thank you ever so much.

(…sometimes I ask myself: did the original lecturer understand what exactly he was giving out? Or was it just his way to make a living with a tricky juggling of a "thing-unto-itself", a "thin-in-itself" and other things in whimsical juxtapositions?…)

But one passage I did understand completely, where there was reasoning that a German bricklayer had to consume a half-pound of bacon and a pound of bread to fulfill his daily norm, while a French one managed to do it with just a bunch of grapes under his belt…