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

Swollen with the hangover, his red mug semaphores: "The remote flirtation is over!"

Oh, gods! I did roll in the aisles in a fit of horse-laughter! With all the stops pulled out.

Thru his cloudy ignorance, watched the drunk my convulsions, then he looked back at the girl, slap-wiped his mouth with his paw and stiffly shoved off to the vestibule, and then to the next car. His delicate nature revolted against traveling in the same car with screaming quadrupeds.

And you are so right, alky! To each his own. It’s time to knock off the mopish shit…

~ ~ ~

The burial of Brezhnev was performed in an outrageously ugly way. Two mujiks with black mourning armbands simply dumped the box into the hole by the Kremlin wall. Those, who watched the ceremony in the live broadcast, before they cut it for the news program "Time", were simply shocked.

The death of Lyonya, smack-smacking each word when he read speeches written for him, wallowing in tawdry orders and medals of the Soviet state awarded to him every year (except for Honored Mother Medal which decorated only women who bore 10 kids), bestowing triple, loud, wet, smooches on whoever leader of fraternal parties or progressive movements in the wide world he only could put his hands on, became a trial for the Soviet population. For almost 20 years, people got used to life if poor and full of shortages, but without non-stop mass repressions of Stalin's times, without running the hunger riots over by tanks and shooting troopers as under Khrushchev…

Leaving the bathhouse on a late Thursday evening, I witnessed how confused got people, amassing into freaked out flocks and looking around for a shepherd. It was the key to documentaries, where big men in officers' shoulder straps burst to pieces in weeping fits about the death of Stalin… Meanwhile, at 13 Decemberists, as if for fun yet evidently lined with fear, they constructed the Great Paper Wall so as to ward off the upcoming unknown. The material used in fortification was all kinds of scrolls of honor awarded to the family members throughout its existence. They became pin-up blocks, side by side, in the gapless row along the wood slat which kept in place the oilcloth substituting for tile paneling in the kitchen wall… I would never imagine there was such a hell of a lot of those certificates. Starting from the sideboard at the window, their close rank stretched up to the washstand by the door to the veranda. The scrolls of honor received for excellent studying in the third grade, for the second place in the pioneer camp checkers tournament, for taking part in amateur performances were serving now a breastwork against the future. I only shrugged. What's the difference?.

After Brezhnev, there followed the leapfrog of mummies, who came to power for 3 or 4 months, and then the population had again to switch off their TV's for 3 days because there was nothing on except for stiff quartets of chamber music and the news program "Time" reading out telegrams of condolence from all kinds of fraternal parties and international leaders. Because that's what mourning is for.

And at last, after another funeral, a certain Gorbachev got to the rudder, quite a middle-aged man, to cut the spree of classical music on TV, although having a suspicious port-wine stain over his bald head. He began to make speeches about acceleration and reconstruction, pronouncing the sound 'g' in the Ukrainian 'gh' way. Well, let him talk if so is his pleasure, who cares? However, one year before the moment we are now at in this my letter to you, he issued a decree with a long title which, in short, introduced the Prohibition, handled "the dry law" for the clarity's sake. That act showed immediately that the talkative leader had never in his life read works by John Mill, where it stands in black on white, that only those governments resort to the like measures who consider their own people as a band of juvenile sillies. Kinda pushing the latch to lock the veranda door and announce, "You're not going anywhere today."

It was more than I could tolerate and, on the day of the Prohibition coming into force, I got off our Seagull bus by the big grocery store in At-Seven-Winds. There I bought a bottle of wine and drank it from the bottle’s neck, without caring to get out to the street. That's how I expressed my indignation with "the dry law". Some of the saleswomen began to squeak that I should be grabbed and the militia called, but in the queue filling the store there happened no supporters for that law-abiding project. I took the emptied bottle out and gently dropped it into the trash bin on the sidewalk.

With streetcar changes, I reached the terminal in the Settlement, although it was not an easy task. After Vsesvit at the midday break and no snack in the grocery store, the wine did not behave well in the stomach. I hardly managed to keep it under control on the way to 13 Decemberists, where it was finally thrown up into the spill pail in the veranda.

My mother, appearing from the kitchen, screamed in fright, "Kolya! He's throwing up with blood!"

My father also went out to the veranda, but getting the whiff of a familiar scent, waved her fears off, "What blood? Don't you see? Zonked like the last scumbag."

I covered the pail with its lid, changed from my shoes into the slippers, and silently passed by to crash onto the folding coach-bed without ever speaking back to point out that in a series of scumbags there is not much difference, if any, between the last and previous ones…

Before the Prohibition, I was a very moderate drinker. My weekly dose of alcohol was the 2 bottles of beer after the visit to the bathhouse, but Gorbachev with his "dry law" literally brought me to that excess. Sure enough, the weeks were not absolute replicas of one another. There happened more liberal weeks when the bricklayers of our team shared to me wine brought to the trailer. But they did not bring it each week, and sharing also was not the dogma. And all that because of the principle, with which I returned from the business trip to Kiev, where I had a discussion with one young superintendent.

We considered the case of a workman lying, purely theoretically, on the ground next to an unfinished, say, trench. The young theoretician claimed that the jack was just bombed, excluding any other possible hypothesis. My counter-argument was based on the fact that the man had his spetzovka on and, consequently, he had just fainted because people do not drink at their workplace, in this case the aforesaid trench. Of course, I knew perfectly well that they drink anywhere and with anything on and kicking against the obvious was a lousy weak standpoint, however, on that particular occasion, I felt like embracing an idealistic stance, on the grounds of an unclear reason…

On my return to Konotop after the business trip, when I was offered a drink in the trailer, I still stuck to the role of a fighter for ideal, declaring that I did not drink at work, although I wanted it. There followed a reasonable argument, that the trailer was not the workplace. I had to make corrections to the principle's formula which ended up as "I do not drink when in my work garb". So, they offered, in the form of a compromise, to change into clean clothes, have a swig and then change back. With time, the procedure was reduced. I simply got undressed and, in my underpants and tank-top, fuddled, just to be polite, and put my spetzovka back on.

In our team, the principles were treated with respect, and I was tolerated in even such a negligee. Only the crane operator Vitalya used to explore and lose his temper, "Why share to him? He'll sell us!"

"No, he's not a snitch."

"When the superintendent drops in and sees his underwear, can't he get it what we are up to?"

But a crane operator was not a member of our team, and Vitalya wasn't even a Konotoper. He came to work from Bakhmuch, and just had that sort of frantic temperament. Once at the midday break, he started to make fun, "Got stuck again into that Vsesvit of yours? Come on, have a drink! But don't undress, I also have my principles."

He giggled, gaily flashed his eyes, grabbing the bottle with his hand missing a finger, and poured only for himself and Kyrpa…

One good turn deserves another. For the next midday break, I bought a bottle of "Golden Autumn" and a bar of chocolate from the grocery store because Vitalya and Kyrpa were playing cards in the trailer.

I slowly stripped myself to the underwear and started sharing to the colleagues an exalted example of the sybaritic attitude to life by taking desultory sips from the bottle for 1 ruble 28 kopecks and nibbling at the bar of expensive chocolate.

(…it was not revenging at all, but an act of purely remedial education…)

Vitalya kept himself in check for quite a long but, eventually, his temperament took over, "Fuck! Snacking the mutter-mumbler swill with "Alenka"! What a pervert!"

But that, of course, was out of envy, in all his life he never tried it that way. And I calmly drank the whole bottle and did not share it even to Kyrpa, who was backing Vitalya's giggles the day before.

(…however, at times, there still creep some doubts in if that indeed was unalloyed pedagogy or, after all, a sort of vengeful exhibitionism?..)

However, occasions of such kind were merely exceptions, rare and far apart, until the Prohibition shattered my indifference to alcoholic matters…

~ ~ ~

On Thursday, I stayed in the steam room a little longer and left the bathhouse at something past seven. Before Gorbachev’s coming to power, I would not even notice it—the blissful don't follow the flow of time—however, the Prohibition brought about rigid temporal limitations for the sale of alcohol. But my after-bath quota?!.

In the beer bar on the opposite side of Square of Konotop Divisions, instead of the usual bright radiance of its fluorescent lamps, a measly yellow spot of a single bulb left on inside. In deject despondence, I was passing by when the bar door opened and two men climbed down the tall porch way of the facility. Well, well, well!. The situation called for closer inspection…

The unlocked door yielded willingly to the light pressure. And indeed, just one 100-watt bulb was lit inside, above the beer tap. Yet, the beer was still flowing from the tap into glasses! Men were grabbing them and retreating to hang on about the tall round tables. If not for the scanty illumination, all was like in good ol’ dry-lawless times!

Not everything though. The noise and din of warm friendly conversations were missing. The barman in a white smock kept warning, over and over again, from behind the counter, "Keep quiet, mujiks! And be quick, we're being breaching it."

There's no buzz in booze under the whip-clicks of a stopwatch… Here, in the murky half-dark dungeon room, where you couldn't make out the face of a man standing at the table opposite, we were like the last handful of Knights Templar after their order was crushed and pronounced anathema. Here, we hid ourselves away from the alcohol-free spies and informers. Any low-grade trader could point at you and yell, "Lay hands on him! Hold fast! Call the militia!" We were outlaws…

Honestly, I do not really like beer bars. You stand in the line and watch how tipsy scumbags approach the mujiks queuing ahead of you, "Bro, and a couple for me, eh?" And instead of one line, you have to stand, in fact, thru 2 or 3. Even more disgusting, when already quite close to the tap, you feel a jab in your ribs and a guy who you, like, have seen someplace, giggles and winks at you, "Don't forget? I asked three mugs." No, next time I'd rather go to a cafе where they sell only bottled, more expensive, beer but without those impudent tail-clingers… And on the following bath-day Thursday, I haughtily passed by the beer bar and stomped to the cafе.

"We've got no beer."

Damn! Okay, I can go to Peace Square… But in the cafе next to the cinema there also was no beer. The railway station restaurant remained my last chance. Same story. But it's Thursday!

That way I was made buy a bottle of white wine. The tables in the restaurant were big, for about ten persons each, surrounded by heavy chairs in leather upholstery, yet almost empty of guests. I took a seat somewhere in the middle of the hall and started to pour wine into a glass as I would do it from a bottle of beer – in a knitting-needle-thin trickle. So was my habit.

After the first glass, I was approached by some mujik of an ambiguous occupation who asked for a permission to get seated by. The whole hall of vacant tables, and he liked this particular one. Well, I did not mind.

Landing into the next chair, he shared that he was in transit from the city of Lvov. I answered that Lvov also was a good city, welcome in passing, and all that. And I started to fill the following glass. Embracing by his intent stare the filigree-thin trickle, he announced his recent release from Zone… The couple of guys at the next but one table cut their gossip. I congratulated him on being free at last and drank.

His face got suddenly distorted by the expression of indistinct malice, and he went over to loud threats of having intercourse with my rectum when 2 of us would land in the same prison cell.

(…all that, of course, in the most explicit straightforward terms…)

The wine was finished off, the neighbor at the table obviously did not like me, and I got up to leave. One of the guys that were sitting nearby, was already standing in between the tables. "Bang the bitch!" he said to me. "What are you waiting for? We're in!" An absolutely unfamiliar guy, probably, he had a fit of patriotism.

"You did not get it," answered I. "He's not local. The law of hospitality does not allow for crushing the bottle against his pate. When on a vacation I'll visit the city of Lvov and check what problem makes the travelers from there so impolite."

I do not know if the guy understood my lengthy speech. Anyway, he returned to his table, and I went out, leaving my neighbor in front of the empty bottle by the empty glass on the empty varnish of the tabletop. He had resorted to the ultimate invocation, yet the magic did not work and the bottle did not turn into a scatter of fragments by a wallop against his Ascabar trained pate. But still and all, I cannot forgive it Gorbachev… You may ask what had Gorbachev to do with fucking my asshole? Even in the era of deficit and severe shortages, the bottled beer did not disappear from Konotop. Never…

But he went loose beyond all bounds of decency and judgment and kept amending the Prohibition with new articles to toughen the struggle against alcoholism… In the evening of the day with the fresh, stricter, measures coming into force, I went as usual to the Central Park of Recreation. However, I reached neither the dance-floor nor even the ticket office.

In the central alley of the park, I was intercepted by a muscular stranger with a dark hair and horseshoe-shaped mustache in the style of VIA The Pesnyary. He told that I did not know him, but he knew me because he was from KhAZ, where he worked with my brother… I recollected as one time my brother Sasha admiringly mentioned some former border guard fond of demonstrating miracles of acrobatics at their workplace. Probably, that was him.

The stranger carefully held a white cellophane packet in his right hand, and he did not slap the nasty night mosquitoes but instead blew them by sharp puffs off his biceps bulging out the T-shirt sleeves. Just like me, another adept of non-resistance, or else that way he was trained for frontier patrols – make sure to avoid producing unnecessary sound waves betraying your location.