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

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The Genesis

More likely than not, your ken of your own lineage on the paternal side feels kinda rickety, right? In the same breath, I feel comfortably confident in your Mom’s family tree being properly watered and presented to you in detailed feeds by your grandmother. About 2-3 generations, if not deeper.

The reasonable belief that my pedigree was a taboo subject when you were around took a firm root after a surprise letter from your mother breaking the sudden news of my death. Not too sharp though, the impact was softened by a kind roundabout introduction: you were told that your Dad was dead and I should prevent exposure of the child’s fragile psyche to any chance running into the revenant ghost of her drifter parent…

As a spook of quality, I politely kept to my grave ever since. Yet, when in a pub a fella next to me got in the mood for bending my ear with a plaintive tale of his being nobody these days while in his prime he walked the bridge of a nuke submarine as her Chief Mate, I felt a solid right and no scruples to cut his lamentation and drive it back that I used to be a famous pilot tragically killed at the shakedown flights of a jet fighter starting the newest, highly secret, brand… For which unparalleled achievement I was honored, by the way, with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Gold Star medal. Posthumously, of course, and that’s a sad pity the decoration didn’t find the hero because those lazy sons of bitches never search in earnest…

The bullshit, to be honest, was not an instance of my snappy creativity but a commonplace mass-product because in that romantic epoch, when a single-mothered kid exacted the reasons for the incomplete composition of their family, Mom dished out the traditional stopgap, “Your father was a pilot and he crashed.”

The brute facts of life were saved for her bosom lady-friends, “He was a junior bookkeeper, guys, and spread me on his office desk, O, my! Never will I forget that fucking abacus trundling back and forth under my ass…”

Nonetheless, don’t expect of me a fine-grained presentation of your roots because my knowledge of the matter is way too shallow and fuzzy because the interest in eugenics was truly frowned at then in no less degree than now…

The name of your father’s mother’s mother was Katerinna Poyonk and she was brought from Poland by your great-grandfather, Joseph Vakimov, a commissar in the 1-st Cavalry Army of Semyon Budyonny, as a trophy, or maybe a keepsake of that period in the Civil War when the Budyonny’s cavalry all but turned Warsaw their spoils.

Their relationship was legalized by the then Civil Registry Office, aka ZAGS, and eight years later my mother, Galina, was born to be followed by her brother, Vadim, and their sister, Lyoudmilla. In recollections of those three, Joseph was very clever. He knew Jewish as well as German languages and was embracing the position of a Regional Trade Auditor in Ukraine. During that period Katerinna had a separate pair of shoes for each of her frocks.

Seven more years passed and, in the late thirties, Joseph got arrested. However, they did not put him before a firing squad to purge away like millions of other “enemies to the Soviet people”, supposedly, some clever way was found to buy his life back. He was only deported to a very northern, but still European part of Russia. The family joined him in exile and in the early forties, they all returned to Ukraine to settle in the city of Konotop which soon afterward was captured by the German Wehrmacht.

After two years of the Nazi occupation, when German troops retreated driven westward by the Red Army blows, my grandfather disappeared from home one day before the liberation, together with his bicycle—rather a valuable item in those times.

The next morning, heavy bombardment made Katerinna and her three children flee as far as the suburban village of Podlipnoye, where a shell fragment cut an apple tree branch right above my mother’s head (a telling detail, if not for the odd inches I wouldn’t now be composing this letter to you). By noon, the advancing troops of the Red Army liberated both the village and the city. Katerinna came back to Konotop where she brought up, as a single mother, her children – Galina, Vadim, and Lyoudmilla…

Another ten years passed and Galina, the eldest of the three, thru a postal acquaintance met Nikolai Ogoltsoff, a petty officer in the Order of Combat Red Banner Black Sea Fleet. “Postal acquaintance” meant the postman delivering a letter which starts, “Hello, unknown Galina…”, and concluded by, ”…Send me your photo, please!”

So, on his next year furlough Nikolai, instead of customary visiting his native Ryazan Region in Russia, arrived in the Ukrainian city of Konotop where the width of both his bottom-bell Navy pants and his chest in the deep V-cut demonstrating the striped vest, and the golden-lettered legend “The Black Sea Fleet” above his forehead in the ribbon around his marine uniform visor-less cap whose 2 black tails ended with imprints (also golden) of anchors (one per a tail) hanging loosely from the back of his head, and one more shining anchor (this time of brass) in his polished belt plate impressed the quiet lanes in the town outskirts where he’d been sending his letters in envelopes embellished on behind with the line of his own design, “Fly with my greetings, come back with the promise of meetings!.”

And three days later my parents, forgetful in the rush to notify my grandmother, registered their marriage in the Konotop ZAGS…

(…did Regional Trade Auditor Vakimov set up innocent people after his arrest?

Affirmative. The show had to go on. So you signed anything they put before you of your good will or you signed it as a cripple if not killed by the tortures and beating under the name of interrogation.

Did he collaborate with the Nazi occupants?

Knowledge of the language would give him such an opportunity but then you should suppose he did it gratis, without bettering his housing conditions or procuring a new pair of shoes for his wife. The bicycle also a telling clue—Germans, still having more than a year of war on their hands, could find room for an able-bodied collaborationist in the bed of a truck heading westward… Seems like he was dead scared at the prospect of another round of interrogations when riding his bike—trying to cross in a bath-tub the wuthering ocean of War.

Was my missing grandpa Joseph a Jew?.

Being a commissar in the years of the Civil War, proficiency with the language in question, why, the name itself might serve a bunch of circumstantial evidence for the assumption. However, the high percentage of the chosen people’s offspring among the revolutionary leaders of the period does not remove the possibility of exceptions. The language could have been picked up while being an errand-boy and/or shop assistant at a store of some Jew merchant. As for the name, let's not forget that even such a hardened anti-Semite as Comrade Stalin was his namesake… Still and all, my mother, when introducing herself, preferred to change her patronymic, taking root from an Old Testament handsome character, into its Russianized rustic form: “Osipovna”…)

Her dark mellow eyes Galina inherited from Katerinna Ivanovna (or Katarzyna Janovna?) whose affinity with the tribes of Israel seems doubtful enough.

Firstly, in the red corner of her kitchen there hung a dark lacquered board with some glum-bearded saint (I can’t say of which religion or nationality, could be a Catholic as well). Besides, she fattened a pig in her shed, Masha was her name, for slaughter.

But, again, the icon might have taken root as a camouflaging part of the interior in the time of Nazi occupation, while the restrictions of kosher diet can be overruled with the common Ukrainian proverb – “Need teaches eating cakes with lard”.

Of course, all these unanswerable questions will arise after the return of your ancestors from their marriage registration at Konotop ZAGS, but we are not to tag on them all that way, we are taking a U-turn so as to trace the line of your grandfather’s father’s origin.

~ ~ ~

That line is simple, straight, and down-to-earth. In a word, Mikhail Ogoltsoff was a peasant.

In the depths of the Ryazan land, there is the district center of Sapozhok and at nine or eleven kilometers from it (the distance depends on who you ask the question), lies the village of Kanino. My father liked to brag that in its fat days the village had about four hundred households.

The shallow ravine with a sluggish soundless brook rolling along its bottom splits the village into two halves. Back in the blessed days of yore, the stream banks served the grounds for the long-standing folk amusement “Battling Walls”, aka collective fist-fight. The men from one half of the village devotedly punched the other-half dwellers, smashing their teeth out to mark some of church holidays or celebrate a mild-weathered Sunday. Yeah, once upon a time folks knew a thing or two about stimulating entertainment…

And so it went on for centuries before sinking into oblivion. Only vague memories remained of Alesha the Saddler, the legendary fighter and obedient son. But his Dad was a truly uptight geezer! “Where to?” would yell he at the scion. “Too filthy rich you are, eh? Back to work and no nonsense!”

And the mighty three-and-thirty-year-old son would stoop his hefty shoulders over the unfinished horse-collar poking it with his awl while all of him was out there, at the lists by the stream, from where little boys ran panting in with the updates, “Oy, Alesha! They are pressing indeed! Ours give in already!”

Yet, the warning snort from his father would keep Alesha silent and concentrated on his toil until many “a-heck!” and “plunks!” of a dogged retreat in the street reached the hut. At that point, Dad would no longer keep his temper down. Springing up to his feet, he would run to Alesha and deal him a huge box on the ear and yell, “Fuck it! Ours bite the dust but this dickhead still sits home!”

But Alesha didn’t hear the whole oration, he's out already, bypassing the battling “Walls” thru the village backyard kitchen gardens because the rules forbid attacking the opposite team from behind, a good game deserves fair play.

“Alesha’s out!” And “the ours” get a second breath right away while the opposite “Wall” show streaks of wavering. Some weaklings start falling down in advance—the rules do not allow to beat a fighter lying on the ground. And Alesha, deeply concentrated, knocks the standing fighters out one after another; and, mark you, without a single f-f..er..foul word… Yep, the village was in the pink then…

The Rural Collectivization in the USSR finished off that innocent merry-making and the well-orchestrated Great Hunger, called to solidify the revolutionary changes in the Russian rustic life, knocked Alesha off, and his father, sure enough, also starved to death…

My father’s mother, Martha, remembered the life under the Czar because at the break of the Great October Revolution she was a girl of about thirteen. Ten years later she was already married to Mikhail Ogoltsoff to bring forth three children: Kolya, Sehrguey, and Alexandra (respectively).

Mikhail lived thru the collectivization phase but the Great Hunger made him pass on and Martha remained a single mother. She cooked soup of saltbush and less edible herbs. Both she and her children were swelling up from starvation but survived.

Then there arrived the era of hard labor at the collective farm, aka kolkhoz, with its miserly paid workdays. Life kept spinning around those “workdays” paid in kind with the same products the villagers produced slaving in the kolkhoz fields, and the collective recreation at the kolkhoz club where twice a month they brought Soviet movies "Lenin in October", "Pigwoman and Shepherd" and other suchlike stuff. To make movie-watching possible, the village lads had to hand-pedal the crank of electricity-producing dynamo machine brought for the show together with the projector and cans of film spools.

In the summer of 1941, Comrade Joseph Stalin surprised everybody calling them in his address over the radio “dear brothers and sisters”. Then he announced the treacherous invasion of the fascist Germany into the Soviet Union, and the village mujiks were driven away to the war.

Germans never reached Kanino though the thunder of the front-line cannonade was rolling in from the horizon. Then in the village came detachments of the Red Army reserve, the mujiks from Siberia with their amazing custom to sit after taking a steam bath in the frosty winter night outside and have a thoughtful smoke in just their pants and undershirts on.

The Siberians left in the direction of the cannonade and soon afterward it ceased to be heard. In the village, pervaded by thick silence, there stayed only women, girls and boys too young to be drafted. And—yes!—the collective farm chairman, a one-armed cripple in the military outfit.

And so it went on and on, not for days or weeks but for months, from year to year. Under the circumstances, there sprang up a veritable sexual quirk permeating the womenfolk. They would gather in one or another hut with a view to inspect one or another cunt from theirs, exchange comments and judgments, evaluate the appeal…

Getting on the scent of this Sapphism Renaissance, the kolkhoz chairman had a crack at eradication of the collective lesbian kink before the rumors of it reached the authorities in the district center, and he called a general meeting of exclusively women and girls in the kolkhoz club.

The male youths participated also, on the quiet. They penetrated stealthily the projectionist booth in the club and, with their jaws a-hanging, witnessed the chairman to cheer the congregation up with all the mighty curses. Repeatedly knocking his only fist against the rostrum top, he took his most solemn oath to cut out that rotten cunt-watching by use of an incandescent iron pry. (I mitigate, in part, the artless charm spread throughout the bucolic figures of speech in the chairman’s proclamation.)

My father never knew if the cripple did keep his promise because he (my father) was drafted into the Red Army. Or rather, in his case, it was the Navy but Red all the same…

~ ~ ~

The WWII was burning out but pigged up the cannon fodder as voraciously as always. Kolya, a youth from a Ryazan village, and lots of other youths from other places got outfitted in the striped Navy vests, black pants, black shirts under black pea-jackets and for a couple of months kept at a recruit depot to drill them military basics and know “Attention!” from “Dismissed!” They also were taught to tell between the bayonet and trigger before, finally, loaded, in their anti-khaki uniform on high-speed cutters for a landing operation somewhere up the Danube river in Austria.

But, for all the speed of the landing operation cutters, they didn’t get there in time because the fascist Germany had just capitulated and there was no one to attack.