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

"A year ago dining at your restaurant, I was 1 ruble short and promised the waiter to make up later. His name was Nikolay, he had a clever round face. Pass it to him, please." And I outstretched a ruble banknote, she silently accepted it…

Besides, I found another place to pass the time for free – the Central Library named after V. I. Lenin. You obtained a ticket there without any money if your passport was on you… That's a really grand place that Central Library after Lenin, yes, indeed, some crossbred of a theater and a metro station, the temple for book-worshipers, in short. Even the door was as tall as a church gate, and bore the inscription on its handle: "pull". And so I did. And behind the door, there was a big vestibule with a porthole in the blind wall, where they gave a free ticket if you had the passport, and then another door to the hall so very awesomely huge.

It turned out to be the cloakroom, yet adorned with white columns and the view to the distant stairs of milky white marble in the far end of the hall. And all around there swarmed the friendship of peoples from the whole of planet in full swing – all kinds of Burmese and Senegalese, yet the Whites also flashed thru. But it seemed to me as if the cloakroom was somehow, like, out of balance with the cloakroom attendants on the right side keeping a-trot between the hangers and the marble barrier, uploading bundles of coats, hither-thither, back and forth, yet the line to them never shortened, while the attendants on the left stood idle and beastly dying of ennui. I felt sorry for them as well as for the trotters, so I turned left and dumped my demi-saison coat upon the white marble barrier of the slackers.

The snooty footmen hardly paid any attention whatsoever, but then one of them looked down his nose at me and in a lordly manner deigned to explain – their half in the cloakroom was for academicians only. Some f-f..er..frightful mix of segregation and discrimination, as if my camel would graze fur off their coats! In short, I thanked the snob for the tip and walked over to the other side which was for mere mortals…

Before the stairs of milky white leading up into the height, there was a narrow gate that I hadn't made out from afar. They checked your ticket at that gate and gave more slips of paper, and only then let go up between a pair of militiamen, standing by so as to instill respect for order.

Up there, high above the cloakroom, stretched the galleries of endless ranks of catalogs in boxes which looked like automatic storage cells, only of wooden color, not metallic. I shuffled thru the cards wired in narrow drawers and found Freud, his lectures published in 1913 on the occasion of some of his jubilees, to commemorate it with the conjuncture publication of just 60 pages. I wrote out all the indexes and other marks of that booklet and went to the reading room to enjoy an hour of pleasure. Greetings!

The attendant scanned thru her glasses my application slip and squeaked up, like, she was calling for the militia when jumped by muggers: Freud?!!

Exactly, says I, I wanna see what the guy was about, be so kind, please.

That's when she rubbed my silly nose in. To have access to the mentioned book, says she, I had to be a PhD of relevant sciences, apart from being also a permanent resident in the Moscow city (the free ticket testified that I wasn't), and the last but not least, I had to produce a document asserting that gods of the Soviet scientific Olympus allowed me to open the book in question.

My jubilation ceased with a fizzle and in a state of a dejected calm, I climbed down the pasteurized stairs to collect my camel and go… I went out into the street, feeling, like, engulfed with the most profound calmness, as thick as bullet-proof glass; no desire to go anywhere, no wish to want any single thing.

Reaching as far as the underpass to the metro, I leaned my behind against the parapet and once again eyed the pompous building of the Central Library after Lenin. My mind was perfectly empty and somewhere in the background there echoed the lines from Shevchenko:

"… learn what is foreign, keep what is yours…"

Damn, folks! Where am I? The huge temple, the giant letters: Central Library Lenin. What was his ultimate goal? So that workers could read books! His famous bequeath had been drummed into our heads, dinned in the ears, rammed down the throat:

"Learn, learn, and learn!”

And, now what? 4 years before the Great October Revolution, in 1913, any worker could drop into a bookstore and buy those 60 pages of lectures, if so was his wish. After the victory of the mentioned revolution, in the Central Library after Lenin, they told me: "Fuck yourself! there's no book for you because you are a worker!"

Yet even screwed anew, I did not feel myself a looser, I never was it either, it’s only that being possessed by trust to people I got fooled most of the time thanks to my readiness to believe, which they vaccinated me with ages ago but I’m still lazy to ditch the bullshit…

So there I stood, getting rooted into the parapet, with some calm, crystal-like, silent torpor closing in on me… But then a scraping din began to gradually reach from the outside world, I woke up and saw a dozen of workers removing the snow with their shovels along the sidewalk. The sun shone brightly, and its comrades-in-arms scrubbed the asphalt and looked at me as if waiting for something.

And what could I share? I had just got the fuck myself. Or maybe they wanted to scrub along the parapet too? Okay, thank you, mujiks, right you are – clinging to this shell-shock transfixion for any longer would make a gooey show.

So, I tore my roots off the arid granite in tiling blocks and joined the flow down the steps to the underpass, to hide myself from those shining peaks…

On the previously agreed upon morning, the bus came and the senior recycler signed the papers brought by the guide to confirm that they had been driving us for three days all about the capital, presenting its historical sites and peerless pearls of Moscow architecture. And everyone was satisfied and happy:

guide Olya, who enjoyed 3 days of paid leisure;

the shoppers with their loads of hunted down deficits;

the bus driver with the three-day ration of gasoline which could be put into circulation;

and, most of all, I, with a spare coin in my pocket worth 15 kopecks.

Technologist Valya did not exaggerate – you could have Moscow for 3 days for 3 rubles sharp…

~ ~ ~

The only backwash of the excursion was that I owed the factory those 3 days, I mean 3 daily norms of 32 bales each. Technologist Valya said not to worry though and just produce 2 or 3 surplus bales every day until I made up.

I never liked to be a debtor, so on the third day after coming back from Moscow, I brought to work a newspaper-wrapped snack, aka "brake", to keep me during my fit of Stakhanovite shock work.

When the factory bus took everyone to the city, and Popovka women went home on foot, I faced the slow-go creaky wailer of a press, and the hillocks of rags grown up all around it during my Moscow recreation, whose mass wasn't noticeably reduced in the working day-shift ended just now… Like an enthusiastic champion for the victory of Socialism in a singled-out country, I worked the second shift, then the third, and even managed to sleep in the locker room for about 20 minutes before they came back by bus for the new working day….

In summer, another presser started to work by us and very timely too because Misha the presser went on his annual vacation. The newcomer had some kind of a long oriental name because he was a Tajik, but I could not pronounce it in any way. So I dropped the attempts at unfamiliar phonetics and started to call him simply “Ahmed”.

Ahmed was short and swarthy, and never parted with his happy smile until he tried to enjoy a midday meal in the canteen at the "Motordetail" plant. Returning from there, he stretched out on a bench in the locker room to groan pitifully, while the women from Popovka stood around the sufferer gravely shaking their heads and sharing all kinds of Stone-Age health-care recommendations… After the payday, Ahmed began to come to work with "brakes" wrapped in newspaper and his digestion normalized, upholding my belief in power of printed text…

On his first working day, it was I who passed to him the wisdom and niceties of the presser profession. After exhaustive explanations on the purposes of all the 3 press buttons, followed by live demonstration how a skillful presser was expected to lock the box’s door with the hook outside it, I started to share to Ahmed my delights caused by the statement of a certain German poet that all seagulls, when in flight, look like the capital "E". And why? The name of his beloved was Emma! That’s a good fellow, ain't he? Eh? What a smart eye!

Enthusiastically grabbing a scrap piece of wire from the floor, I scratched capital E's, a flock of them, in the gray plaster coat of the nearby wall scarcely lit by a bulb over the press…

(…and now I'm asking myself: why to harass the innocent guy, dumping on him the needless facts in disregard of his poor command of Russian? The answer is simple: so is the human nature. The desire to teach is embedded in our genes.

To visualize this trite truth, look out of the window into the yard and watch the everyday picture: a mujik raised the hood over his car engine and right away a slew of advisers surround him to flash their personal crumbs of ken.

That desire is uncontrollable as proved by the case of the barber who spied the ass ears on King Midas: "I know something! Hearken to me!"…)

Among the wastes brought and dumped at Rags, there at times happened usable things. So, loader Sasha stored in his locker about half-dozen sweaters with and without the rain deer file across their chests; and each day he was sporting another one from his collection…

Volodya Kaverin did not care for small fish. He hunted fur cuffs and collars from discarded coats so that having hoarded enough of them he would order to sew a fur jacket for him or, maybe, a fur coat. 3 collars had been collected so far, and twice a week he used to take them out of his locker, like, to air the goods and, giving them a shake, in turn, he'd proudly ask you, "It should work out a nyshtyak jacket, right?"

Vanya, in his locker, was keeping a ceremonial tunic of Lieutenant-Colonel of the Soviet Army with golden shoulder straps and stuff…

When I was sent on the errand to buy vodka from the liquors store on Semashko Street, they at once equipped me with the kind of jeans of which I could be only dreaming when I still cared for such things. It’s only that the maple leaf or, maybe, some kind of a flower embroidered on the right leg was some excessive, in my opinion, detail of design…

The line to the store started way far from it, and it was a pretty tangled line looping with incomprehensible twists over the sidewalk, for which fact such lines were handled "Gorbachev’s loops". But it was not advisable to share the handle too loud because, as the rumors had it, the KGB sec-cols were present midst the thirsty part of the population to pick up fresh jokes and take note of especially dissatisfied citizens.

On the strength of those rumors, I demanded a camouflage outfit from the recycling colleagues, and everyone agreed that, yes, it was necessary, though they did not manage to find me normal jeans without that effeminizing flower on the thigh.

Despite the costly disguise, I still was identified by the pair of errand-boys from SMP-615, however, they chose to keep aloft.

(…to enter such a line after the working day, and reach the store before it was closed was unthinkable. That's why the enterprises and organizations were necessitated to develop an interlayer of ‘errand-boys’ among their employees. The co-workers covered their absence doing the job "for the guy not there"…)

With its progress, the line ofttimes was shaken by grave rumors that vodka at the store was running out. And indeed, the movement stalled. But soon a truck arrived at the store back and volunteers full of unconcealed enthusiasm dragged inside the wire boxes of 25 bottles each…

I returned to the recycle factory with vodka, at half-past four. 2 loaders, in turn, had been pressing the bales to fulfill my daily norm. Because of inexperience, they produced the bales with underweight. Valya, the bale weigher, expressed her dissatisfaction with loud yells from inside her booth, while half-deaf Misha kept cheerful silence and sprightly dragged the lightweight bales away. His barrow rolled to the Hut outdoors with noticeable acceleration – moving a-pace with the rest of our boundless Homeland of Great October, loader Misha was entering the crucial phase in the reconstruction, aka Perestroika…

~ ~ ~

And with all the deficit of terry towels, the running-water pipe over the tin trough in the washing room, where everyone washed the layered dust off their hands before the meal, there hung no less than a dozen of such towels, angled from among the rags. However, my personal towel was brought from 13 Decemberists, and I kept it in the locker room, hung separately on the heating pipe in the corner by the right window. I was afraid that if left in the washing room, it would be used by inattentive folks like any other piece of garbage hanging there.

How come I had such a deficit? At some of my visits to the village, Raissa Alexandrovna, appreciating my labor achievements about their khutta, paid in kind, presenting me a towel and a brand new briefcase. It was a very nice towel, white and fluffy, not for the whole body though, just for the face and hands, judging by its size. And it had a blue squirrel sitting in it in profile with a bushy tail, also very pretty.

Yet one day, coming back from the midday voyage to the remote canteen at the "Motordetail" plant, I noticed that someone's dirty paws had horsed around the tender squirrel in the corner.