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

The exhaust pipe of his truck was trained to give out loud bangs but he withheld the fun for riding along the city sidewalks, to rough the passers-by. Bang!!

"Oy, Mommy!"

The buddies tried to explain me about those engine backfire bangs and the carburetor, but such things always were above my head…

On one of the first days in the new place, I went to the wooden toilet on the frontier of the site territory. When urged to take a leak we loosened bowls at any nearby nook, so I wouldn't go that far for such a trifle. Yet, because of the frost using the detachment sorteer harbored not a little risk. The whole floor there became one solid yellow skating rink too slippery for walking and even when a-squatting over an ochco your high boots’ treds slid slowly apart on the smooth ice…

While defecating at that faraway ruin of a toilet, I felt like having some odd auditory sensations. I kinda heard…well, not quite voices…rather, echoes of voices. A distant, cohesive buzz of voices, some low even hum with no splashes nor distinct words.

Then I took a letter from the inside pocket of my outfit jacket, which I never re-read but kept on me. Without looking who the letter was from, I used it as toilet paper, stood up, buttoned my pants and suddenly saw the source of that noise.

The shabby walls and stall partitions were scratched in toto with inscriptions. Names, dates, settlement names were written and snicked, with pencils and ball pens. Some climbed on top of others because there was left no spare space around… The territory had obviously been used as the Stavropol Collection and Distribution Point of Draftees, betcha, and they, already fallen thru into the two-year-long eternity, smitten, swept, engulfed by it, were hurriedly leaving on the deals in rotten whitewash their parting scratches:

"Sakha, from the village…"

"Athos, from the settlement…"

"Drun, from the city…"

They were already there—swallowed up—because their voices were not heard, but turned into some mutual wordless hum, yet the hands were still finishing their farewell to themselves:

"Andron, from…"

(…in the construction battalion, the universal urge to leave a meme of oneself does not disappear, but becomes anonymous. You would not see there the classical "Vasya was here", they used one, common, mark for all at once:

"Orel, DMB-73".

Read it as, "Drafted from the Orel-City (or region) demobilized in 1973".

With graphite, chalk, paint on walls, on pipes, on the tin, on anything. In every construction site or building erected by the Stavropol Construction Battalion about a year or two before 1973, there was such a mark.

Then there came Tula, DMB-74 .

The time would come for Sumy, DMB-75 , and Dnepr, DMB-75 but it still was so far away…)

~ ~ ~

The Orion took part in the city musical contest. We performed 2 numbers there without securing any place. As it seemed, the whole affair was started for the sake of a local singer. A young guy could sing without a microphone filling the whole auditorium with his voice. That's some singer!

(…I have never heard him any more neither on TV nor over the radio, they had no vacancies there, muslim magomaevs and iosif kobsons kept their positions for decades…)

The second of our numbers at the contest was "The Indian's Song" from the repertoire of Tom Jones. No one knew what about he sang in it, but in the Soviet adaptation the song bemoaned the bitter fate of American Redskins (as it turned out later, Tom had nothing to do with the song sung by Raiders):

"They took the whole Cherokee nation,
Put us on this reservation…"

At the contest, the Orion’s "brass" group comprised already two horn players. Ensign Jafar Jafarov had been transferred to our battalion I can't say where from or what for, because I didn't care. He came to the Club and announced that he was playing a horn…

Jafarov’s eastern appearance imparted a pleasant impression of softness. A rounded face with the soft swarthy skin, the soft glint in his black, olive-like, eyes, his soft smile when he uttered his, "I swear to you by my Mom!" And he really played the horn which he was bringing to the Club for the rehearsals and carrying away in an unexpectedly hard case… Kolya Commissar started to blow his horn much better with Jafar around…

Gray, the tamer of Karlookha, became a frequent visitor to the Club too, not as a musician though, just because it was a secluded spot in the everyday conbat life. At work, he fucked it all from the very beginning of his service and was just doing another two-year time at the construction battalion. As if it was much fucking different from a penitentiary colony… just that conditions were a bit easier and the spetzovka in khaki color instead of indigo.

Brought in the morning to a construction site, he ventured to the city and returned only for the evening truck home. At times, he was locked up in the clink, but even Battalion Commander, notwithstanding his chronic brain leakage, clearly realized that suchlike correctional efforts would be lost on that well-developed, stiff-lipped jail-bird. The bald patch of a scar in his left eyebrow somehow humanized the crisp face thrust in wolfy way forward from his broad shoulders… In his life, Gray was treading along the guilelessly straight, unpretentious, path of a hereditary thief.

At the Club, he shared stories of his recent adventures in the city, or roughed Commissar. That was not right, because both Commissar and he were from the same draft, but for Gray, the Zona Code overweighed that of the construction battalion.

On the eve of becoming a pheasant, Commissar decorated all of the rear of his right hand with a gaudy tattoo depicting a craggy ridge of fuzzy mountains and the sun rising from behind them in a spiky halo of sharp rays, and all that freshly shining world had a firm foundation of instructive inscription running below, "The Northern Caucasus". When on the stage, Commissar assumed such a stance that his tattoo would face the audience and, blowing his horn aloft, he squinted proudly at the sprawling masterpiece of an unknown author.

Probably, it went against Gray's grains that Commissar was swaggering with a more ostentatious splotch than his blueish spider-cross (a Zona sign for the initiated) hardly bigger than a ping-pong ball, which cheeky inequality, even in absence of any Zona regulations as regards geographical tattoos, provoked Gray's picking at the cheerful Hornblower.

(…however, wherever I use the word "probably" you don't have to take all that follows for its face value because there certainly might be other assumptions besides it. There can be a whole lot of variants and interpretations, but that "probably" sweeps them all aside and leaves just one, maybe not the truest to life.

Word requires a cautious approach. At times you blurt something out, like, say, "lahboohs (aka musicians) – are one family! We support each other like a wall!" just to run into nagging qualms: oops! I did it again…

Because all those general statements are good for slogans only, like: "Workers of all the countries – unite!"

Or else: "Bipeds! All you need is love!"

Such spiffy words work only until the common interests coincide with the interests of the given, individually taken, mammal but whenever the interests diverge then at once – you get along and let me alone…)

Let's take, for instance, that same Yura Zameshkevich. After locking up the stoker-house he came to the Club. The place where he would safely keep away from the eyes of Fathers Commanders, where he could strum a guitar, serenely drink a mug of chiffeer concocted in the Canteen kitchen (mix a 250 gr. pack of tea and 250 ml of water, bring to boiling) where he's one of us – a person of a subtle soul constitution, an exquisite connoisseur of the music which is something, a loyal friend, a reliable comrade, and simply a brother – a lahbooh, in a word.

But now his wife has arrived to visit him and waits in the checkpoint guardhouse, while he races around looking for a parade-crap and a greatcoat to go with her to the city. He gives his bristles a hasty shave, and gets the Leave Ticket at the Staff barrack, then for some reason drops to the Club with me sitting peacefully in the back row of the empty hall. He briskly jumps in and out of the musicians' and, leaving the Club, grabs my completely unaware cock and all in his bearish grip and raises me up in the air for a goodbye. Of course, I scream!

Then the pain gradually dissolves leaving behind inescapable puzzlement. What for?

(…I have found no answer in the writings of the naive primitivist Freud and his bro-scholars, neither in all the Upanishads and Bhagavatas, nor in Testaments, both Old and New, nor in Quran. Only in The History of Russia from Ancient Times, a brief passage mentioned the case of Dmitry the Pretender hiding at the back of the palace where a Cossack found him and, grabbing at his "secret knot", dragged the usurper out to the raging mob. But there at least you may trace a certain purpose for the deed, in contrast to Yura's… What was there for him in it?.

Some questions are beyond the power of human comprehension, we only can point at them for the edification of the inquisitive, and, with a sad shrug, spread our hands wide apart – alackaday! ‘tis beyond the human plumbing.

By the by, they have even invented a special scientific term for the like cases. When, say, you are so high and mighty that taking a leak you send forth a squirt powerful enough to bore thru a three-meter-thick layer of glacial ice, yes, quite in a breeze, before there suddenly pops up some crap that even you don't fucking know what the fuck it could possibly be at all. Know then that you’ve come across that very opaque doodad which by scientifically bent fobs is called transcendentalism…)

So, what else did we do in the Club besides solfeggio, rehearsals and surly contemplation of certain transcendental enigmas from all their respective angles?

Fooling around with chiffeer mentioned en passant? Its bitterness was a rare delicacy. And vodka happened hardly oftener…

We used a special code-knock at the door of the musicians' for a smooth admittance. To the right rhythm in your tap-tapping, the door would open, otherwise, go where you had come from, or shout thru the closed door what was your fucking message.

One time, after the right code and the click of the lock opening in response, the doorway was filled with the stubby figure of Zampolit, bodyguarded by the Ensign from Fourth Company who had tap-tapped the code, to be sure, the fucking excursion guide.

Our cook-vocalist Volodya Rassolov, handled Pickle, was fast and up to the situation: while the two officers gaped around what's what, he glibly slipped the bottle into the top of a kirza boot from the pair standing by his side. Of course, Zampolit labeled us a gang of drunkards and parasites all the same, but there was no direct evidence already…

But most of all we talked: who was what in his civilian life, what would he do coming back to it (we innocently believed then it was possible to come back anywhere at all in the stream of the flowing, ever changing space) and that Third Company went to kick the shit out of Separate Company, but the black-ass fuckers fought the assault back with their belt-plates, and the pigsty soldier-oversee seemed really be fucking his swine harem…

The champion of talking was, sure enough, Karpesha. In a hushed, brotherly confidential tone of voice, for hours would he spin a yarn about his ten-day furlough when he six times broke up and reconciled with the girl he dated, his former classmate…

Got bored with listening to the same minutiae for the seventh time? Go out into the empty Club hall, get seated next to Robert in the last row of seats, and welcome to the fluctuations of Parisian life. In Paris, everyone knew everything about anyone else. That, for example, Jean Marais was gay. And that's a pity, of course. Although I did not like him starring in "Fant?mas", but as D'Artagnan in "The Iron Mask", he was the masculinity itself. That's what that fucking Paris was doing to even manly men…