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

…and that is Natasha with her nose up in the air, and the eyes on something else happening to the right, and the ribbon tie in her pig-tail got undone as always…

Besides photography, Dad also was a radio fan, that’s why he subscribed to The Radio magazine full of all kinds of charts.

I liked the smell of melted rosin in the kitchen when he worked with his soldering iron, collecting this or that scheme from The Radio. Once, he assembled a radio receiver a sliver larger than the FED-2 camera case. At first, it was a thin brown board with radio parts soldered to it, then he made a small box of plywood, polished it and varnished, and hid the board inside. There were just two knobs outside the box: one for adjusting the volume and the other for tuning to a radio station. Then he sewed the case for the receiver from thin leather, because he could work with the awl and knew how to alter a common thread into stitching one by twining it and applying wax and pitch. Finally, he attached a narrow shoulder strap to the case so that you could carry it and still have your hands free.

Later on, Dad made a special machine fixed on a stool to do bookbinding, and bound his The Radio magazines into volumes, one for each year. He had just golden hands.

And Mom, of course, had golden hands too because she cooked tasty meals, sewed with her Singer machine, and once a week did general washing in the washing machine “Oka”. At times, she trusted me with squeezing water out of the washing by turning the crank of the wringer fixed on top of the machine. You stick a corner of a washed thing in between its rubber rollers and when you start turning the crank, the washing is pulled thru the wringer, which squeezes brooks of water back into the machine basin. And the thing crawls out behind the rollers thinly pressed and wrung out.

But hanging the washing was a job for adults because there were no linen ropes in the Courtyard and everyone dried their washing in the attic of their house. Only Dad could lift the heavy basin with half-wet things up the vertical iron ladder and thru the hatch above the landing.

However, with his strong, golden, hands, he once created a long-term problem for himself. It’s when he made a “bug” inside the electric meter, so that it would not rotate, even with all the lights on and the washing machine buzzing busily in the bathroom.

Dad said it reduced the bills for electricity, but he feared very much that the controllers would catch us “bugging” and punish with a big fine. Why create so much worries for yourself because of saving on bills?

As for Mom, she never did unreasonable things, except for those yellow corduroy shorts with suspenders, that she sewed for me in the kindergarten. Oh, how I hated them! And, as it turned out, not for naught – in those hateful shorts I was when the red cannibal ants molested me so severely…

~ ~ ~

At one of my solo forest walks, I went out into a glade and felt there was something not quite right, yet what namely? Aha! It's the thin smoke that never belonged to the usual woodland picture. And then I saw flames, almost transparent in the sunlight, fluttering, charring the bark of trees and creeping over the thick carpet of dry Pine needles on the ground. So, it’s the forest fire!

At first, I tried to trample out the flames on the needles, but it did not work. Yet, a small Juniper with multiple dense twigs severed from its roots turned the right thing for quenching the underfoot flames and was efficiently killing the fire on trees trunks.

After the tiresome fight and glorious victory, the burnt area turned out not enormously big, about ten to ten meters. My shirt and hands bore smudges of black soot, yet I didn’t mind because the battle dirt is not dirty. I even ran my sooty hand over my face to ensure it got smeared too so that everyone could see at once – here’s the hero who saved the forest from the death in the great fire.

Unfortunately, I met no one on the way home. Walking the empty trail, I dreamed of being written about in The Pioneer Pravda, where they published an article about a pioneer who signaled with his red tie to the locomotive driver about the damaged railway ahead.

And only entering the Courtyard, I met, at last, two passers-by. They looked at me alertly but none of them asked, “Where does this black soot in your face come from? It looks like you've been fighting a forest fire, have you?”

At home, Mom yelled at me for going around so dirty, and no washing machine would do to keep my shirts clean. I felt unjustly hurt but suffered silently…

On summer evenings, the children of Block and mothers of those kids, who as of yet were to be looked after, went out of the Courtyard onto the surrounding road of concrete. Everyone was waiting for the platoon from the Recruit Depot Barracks to come up to the road for their usual drilling promenade.

Reaching the concrete surface of the road, the soldiers started to march in parade step. As if in a magic transformation, they seemed to merge into a tight-knit united critter—a closed squad—that had one mutual leg comprising the entire length of the marching flank, the leg fused of dozens of black boots that simultaneously broke away from the road and fell down one step farther, advancing the whole formation for that one step. It looked so fascinating a creature!

Then the sergeant-major tagging with by the squad’s side abruptly shouted, “Sing off!” And from the midst of the compact mass, throbbing in time to the mutual “plonk!” of the boot soles against the concrete, a young vibrating tenor rose solo to be followed a few steps farther by the thunder of the supporting chorus:

“…we are the paratroopers,
the wide sky is all for us…

The squad went on and on to the corner of the next block with its inhabitants waiting for it to march by them too, and some children from ours followed it as a running tail, while the young mothers looked in the wake of the soldiers marching to the sun half-sunk in the woods, pervading with its parting rays the evening wrapped into the calm, all-embracing serenity because we were the strongest, and so safely protected by our paratroopers against all the NATO spies in the anteroom to the Detachment’s Library…

~ ~ ~

They brought long iron pipes into the Courtyard. When you hit such a pipe with a stick, it rang loudly and longly… Much longer, actually, than needed and for all my effort I could never play the drum roll with which the Whites marched to their “psychic” attack against Anka and her machine gun in the movie “Chapaev”. Day after day, coming from school, I tried, again and again, filling the whole Courtyard with ding and dong, yet in vain, it sounded nothing like that roll.

The pipes were buried all too soon and my musical self-education interrupted, but the blocks on the Gorka got furnished with gas. They installed the gas stove in the kitchen and hung the white box in the wall above the sink to light the gas on when heating water to wash up or take a bath. Titan the Boiler disappeared from the bathroom, and firewood was needed no more, our basement section with Dad’s workshop became roomier…

One day in early summer, when the parents were at work, I came down to our basement section and took away Dad’s big ax, because I and some other boy wanted to build a fire in the forest.

We descended into the thicket behind the Bugorok-Knoll and started climbing up the next, lower, hill. On the steep slope, there stood a small Fir-tree no taller than a meter and a half. And from the moment of entering the forest with the ax in my hands, I had had an itch to put it to use. Now, there it stood before me the one-and-a-half-meter tall opportunity. A couple of blows and the Fir-tree dropped on the slope…

I was standing next to it, unable to grasp— what for? You couldn’t use it for making a bow, nor even for a mock-up Kalashnikov gun to play War-Mommy. Why did I kill the Fir so aimlessly?

I no longer wanted to build any fire nor have a walk. All I needed was to get rid of the ax, the accomplice in my cruel barbarity. I took it back to the basement section, and from that time walked the woods unarmed…

(…see? What a lovably prissy boy! Yet, the core in this pathetic self-praise thru self-chastening is true to life. However, don’t run over yourself to list your Daddy among the good guys because I am too unstable for that. One day I might be as tenderhearted as you can wish, but the following one… well, I don’t know…

When my bachnagh (this term in Karabakh Armenian means “husband of a sister-in-law”) was getting ready for the wedding of his eldest daughter, the relatives helped out with anything they could. Not with money though, because he wouldn’t accept it— the expenses for such an occasion are born by the happy father. That’s the tradition.

The acceptable assistance comprises, mainly, cookery work. While the staple set of wedding chow at the city House of Celebrations is paid in cash, the standard snacks might be diversified by additional courses cooked by aunts, grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters of the immediate and distant relatives. Kinship, aka clan relations, is verily alive and kicking in Karabakh. The culinary help in wedding preparations is a sort of love labor performed using the products purchased by the celebration organizer.

However, certain products call for preliminary treatment, and you can’t but agree that slaughtering a dozen chickens on the balcony in a five-story apartment-block is a way more toilsome undertaking, than executing it at a private, albeit still under construction, house. That’s why the chickens were brought to me.

They dumped them in the vast unfinished hallway and left, busy with innumerable other wedding-preparation chores. Jedem – seiner, quoting a popular German saying.

So, those fifteen living creatures lie in dust on the ground with their legs tied, and I am towering over them with a freshly whetted knife in my hand and all of us are fully aware of what for.

Fifteen are not a single one and there is a definite deadline when distaff clan members will come to pluck the initially processed products clean of their feathers. But each of the would-be products, while alive, has its own coloring and age, its personal point of view on what is happening, its individual reserve of energy, which determines the loudness of protestations as well as the protraction of the flutter with the already chopped off head.

You can’t do such a job without being methodical. So I turned into a robot methodically repeating a set of the same movements… fifteen times…

Sometimes, I looked thru the window-opening, still lacking its frame, at a white fluffy cloud high in the blue sky… So clean… Immaculate cumulous curls…

Just so a robot with a kinda sentimental wrinkle in its program.

Since that time, my attitude to executioners has somehow changed. Probably, I understood that nothing in their nature was outside me…

Well, in a nutshell, at that wedding I was a vegetarian.

Coming back to the assertion that in the case of the Fir-tree killing the weight of guilt was on the ax, who pressed me into the destruction of the innocent plant, then there’s nothing new about it, “I was carrying out the orders…”

A commonplace low-grade zombie-simulation…)

~ ~ ~

In the fifth grade, instead of just one Mistress, we had separate teachers for different subjects because our elementary education was over.

The new Class Mistress' name was Makarenko Lyubov … er… Alexeevna?…Antonovna?…I don’t remember her patronymic. Between us, we called her just “Makar”, yes, checks with the handle of the most popular army pistol of 12 charges.

“Atas! Makar is coming!” (In the school lingo "atas!" meant “beware!”)

But all that came later, and for the first time, I met the would-be Class Mistress the day before school, when Mom brought me there to copy the curriculum and get acquainted with my new Class Mistress.

Makarenko asked me to help her about the class wall newspaper on a big sheet of Whatman paper, which had to be adorned with a frame for which there already was the mark of a pencil line five-centimeter offset from the edges. She gave me a brush and a box of watercolors and warned to use only the blue one before going out together with my Mom to further improve on their acquaintance.

Proud of being trusted with so important a job, I started immediately, dipped the brush in the glass of water, dampened the blue and began to paint the strip of the Whatman paper between its edge and the pencil mark, trying not to trespass it. The job turned out an up-hill one – you paint, and paint, and paint but there still remains so much to paint yet. The main problem though was that each watercolor stroke differed from others by its shade of blue, making it hard to keep the uniformly. I persevered in earnest because not every day a boy gets a chance of making frames on a sheet of Whatman. However, by the return of Mom and Mistress, I had only finished about a quarter of the frame.