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

No, I didn't copy the lines from Pushkin, but the essence and spirit were the same, and only the lexicon was upgraded for a century-and-a-half. In the opinion of the locksmiths at the Experimental Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, such a letter could be written by only a total cuntsucker. They had not read it though, neither had she because the letter did not find her in Theodosia. Olga returned to Konotop to inform me that she was pregnant…

At those rational days of planned economy and growing concern of the Soviet Government and the Leadership of the CPSU about the needs of population, condoms could be purchased even at news stalls, three kopecks apiece. Yet, for me a condom was just a word from the dirty jokes folklore, and I had no idea what "protective care" was about. Then she took the pill and everything got off easy…

Spring came early, amicable and warm… In mid-April, I started the "dacha" season of sleeping in the lean-to. I swept it and moved the mattress and blanket to the iron bed that spent the winter over there.

The same evening in the Plant Park, I invited Olga to "my place". She easily agreed. All the way from the Plant Park to Nezhyn Street I was walking on clouds. We strolled in the dark, tightly holding each other at the waist. Thru the yard of the Turkovs' khutta and the back garden, under the sole window in the ours, we sneaked into the lean-to, and I latched the door.

In the breaks between the rounds, I, obedient to Valle-Inclan's commandment, was restoring the equality between my "hands that knew already everything and the eyes that hadn't had a single glimpse yet…" for which purpose, I lit up matches, one by one, and stopped her shy tries to screen the glimmer of her body emerging from the darkness in the flicker of a tiny torch…

We woke up at dawn and walked thru the deafening silence and strangeness of empty streets to the khutta of her girlfriend Sveta so that Olga would have an alibi for her Aunt Nina. On my way back I met the first pedestrian of the breaking day. It was past Bazaar, the man was walking in the counter direction along the other side of Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street…

I was fine with her, yet I wanted to get rid of our affair. Firstly, not always it was really good. The time when we went to the Seim and I spread her in the Willow thicket, everything turned out somehow flat and not exactly the thing.

We, certainly, rehabilitated ourselves later, when she invited me to the shower at her workplace. Yes, she had already got a job in the city and was delivering telegrams from the Main Post-Office.

(…it is hard to believe, but even way back in the 1970s, in absence of as yet undreamed of mobile phones, people still managed to survive.

Telegrams helped to do the trick. They were delivered on the post-office blanks with the glue-mounted paper ribbons from a telegraph machine which had printed the words, "come Friday ten Moscow-Kiev car seven".

The telegram messages conveyed the raw core of information because you had to pay for each word in it and for each punctuation mark, including the address of the person to whom it was sent… Alms are the insurmountable coach at the laconic style.

But if you had money to burn then, of course, you could write in full – "I AM ARRIVING ON FRIDAY BY THE TRAIN MOSCOW-KIEV AT 10 AM IN THE CAR NUMBER SEVEN PERIOD", and then even add in the end – "I LOVE YOU FOREVER COMMA MY DEAR PERIOD"

And the workers from the Main Post-Office would bring the telegram in their tiny black on-duty handbag, "Sign here on the receipt, please."…)

She ended her work at five, and we met by the five-story hotel "The Seagull" paneled with yellowish stone tiles. On the wide porch beside the entrance to the hotel, there were two more glass doors: The Inter-City Telephone Communication Station, and The Main Post-Office.

We left the porch and Olga led me to the The Main Post's service entrance on the back of the building. She entered first and went ahead alone to the far end in the long corridor, where she turned around and beaconed me. Some doors stood open and there were women sitting with their backs to me, in front of their windows in the glass partitions that separated them from the lined customers.

We descended into a wide basement hall with long low windows overhead and beneath them a row of shower stalls alongside the wall. Entering one of the stalls, we undressed and Olga turned the hot water on.

(…in the mid-90's the scene in the shower, starring Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone in some action movie, was declared the hottest Hollywood erotic of the year.

But they plagiarized it from our visit to the Main Post-Office! Twenty years later.

And now they tell me there was no sex in the USSR. Yes, there was!

Only the term for it sounded differently…)

At the end of our hot f-f…er…well, I mean… scene… there was a certain moment that Hollywood never dare to shoot. That is when along Olga's white taut thigh, in between droplets and paths of the running hot water, there crept two-three whitish-roiled spits… I had certainly seen that frame before but could not put my finger on where exactly… Yes, I became "protective careful" already.

(…a superficial pulp-fiction-founded self-education may often give rise to grave misconceptions.

For a long time, I entertained an erroneous opinion that 'masturbation' stood exclusively for sedulous handwork—chafing your cock until you cum. But, no!. As it turned out, even in the Old Testament there was a geezer named Onan, who regularly watered the earth floor in his tent with his seed at the concluding stage of, otherwise normal, sexual intercourse. The final chord, so to speak.

That chord was (using the term by lahboohs, aka musicians) just "a stinky clam", absolutely out of tune, yet served a means of protective care to prevent unwanted conception…)

And, secondly, I was freaked out by Olga's first pregnancy and feared a repetition – who would care? I did not want to get tied up in wedlock, and one dark night on the porch of Sveta's khutta, I even gave it a try at ridding of the delightful cause of the unwanted effect.

I told her that it was time for us to part. She started crying, "Why?."

I lit a cigarette, "We must do it. I have met another."

"Who?! Tell me her name!"

"You wouldn’t know her."

"But tell me!"

"Well…in short…some…well…Sveta."

"Where does she live?"

"Nigh the gypsies' block."

"You lie!"

"No, I don't."

And I lit the second cigarette from the stub of the first, as in Italian black-and-white movies, though I did not want to smoke at all, the second one tasted too bitter and even disgusting. I smoked half of it, felt nauseated and gave up. It was the surrender to both of them: I could not finish off the cigarette, neither could I manage to break up with Olga. The following week, she announced that she was pregnant again and no longer had the pill…

I called my parents to come to the lean-to because we had to talk. They came in, wary and silent, unaccustomed to such invitations.

I sat on the chair under the glassed frame by the head of the bed. Mother remained standing at the opposite siderails of the empty bed, only leaned against them. Father stood next to her with his hand resting on the long box-workbench alongside the blind wall. Then and there, I announced that I had to marry Olga.

"How that to marry?" asked Mother.

"As a noble man of quality, I am obliged to marry her," clarified I, uneasy that the delicate bare-bone “have to” proved not as graspable as expected.

My parents exchanged wordless glances, Father shook his head, Mother responded his clue with a silent sigh. Then they sat down on the bed, side by side, and started a detailed discussion on how we were going to organize the noble man’s wedding…

~ ~ ~

When I and Olga submitted to the city ZAGS the application stating our wish to get married, they gave us the paper for Bridal Salons so that we could buy nuptial tackle at a discount. In Konotop, there was such a salon behind the Central Park of Recreation, however, all they had there was nothing but two dust-coated mannequins of bride and groom with separate blank gazes from out their narrow cage of a shop window. We had to go to Kiev… Lekha Kuzko went with us as an expert, because he had already gone thru all of that when marrying Tatyana, and learned places. In Kiev, we bought rings, the one for Olga was a little yellower, but that of mine – wider. We also bought new shoes for me, and a white silk mini dress for Olga, as well as the wedding veil.

A month later our marriage was registered in Loony. The Hall of Celebrations was on the same floor with the ballroom only in the opposite wing. For the ceremony, we arrived in a hired taxi. At the entrance to the Hall of Celebrations, we were met with loud electric music by the guys "playing trash". I knew the guitarist with a long deep scar in his cheek playing a red Iolanta. He watched me with rounded, not understanding, eyes and shrugged… Ah! To hell! Makes no difference… I never was good at football anyway…

A woman in a dark dress, with glasses and permanent curls in her bob-cut hair, read to Olga and me the rights and responsibilities of a young family, which was a cell in our Soviet society. We signed the form, Lekha and Sveta seconded.

"That is all,
Say "bye!" to dreams…"

The trash playing band broke out with Mendelssohn's march, and a photographer from the photo studio across the road shot us with his camera on the tripod. In the picture ready a week later, there was a hairy yobbo with a not too happy smile and the guiltily scrunched collar of the jacket from the last year's graduation suit. But Olga turned out nicely, only somewhat sad in her face. Probably, she did not want to get tied up at her sweet sixteen…

The music at the wedding party was played by The Orpheuses, for free, sure thing, it was not a playing trash occasion. A couple of boards sealed Zhoolka up in his kennel so that in the circle of ground cleared of grass with the chain he dragged after him throughout his dog's life, they'd put the instruments and the equipment.

Between the stack of brittle bricks and the sectioned shed, there was set up a long table, parallel to both, in the shade of the two age-old American Maples.

Olga and I sat with our backs to the fence of the Turkovs' yard. Two kitchen chairs under us were coupled into one seat by spreading over them the Father's turned inside-out sheepskin coat with long wisps of fleece, not overly golden but black and maroon anyway.