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

To quote the great sage Gavkalov, in charge of a truck crane at SMP-615 (of whom later on), “what is all too good is not good at all”…)

So, I asked if Zampolit reported of me as an accomplice in a bank robbery, to which Captain grinned but all the same wished to know why the commanding officer was so negative in his estimation.

Well, I didn’t attempt at jejune justifications or puerile lies, nothing of the sort. I told him the whole truth about how it all happened. It’s only that I substituted myself for the projectionist at the construction battalion club and part-time postman collecting daily mail for the battalion personnel from the city main post office, whom Zampolit trusted with running errands and passing presents to his (Zampolit's) young passions.

By the adjusted version, it was I who accidentally laid up one of the girls who was silly enough to blab it before Zampolit and now, in his jealous fury, he besmeared me with the stamp of a drug-using rowdy…

After that talk, the halo of my dream of becoming a spy on the USA soil grew dim. It dawned on me that I might have been needed for only local use, in the capacity of a snitch, another "Gestapo's ear inserted into Everyman's pocket".

The future confirmed my gloomy boding… There were no more talks about intelligence service school (which bullshit served to hook the fool) instead, twice a month, I came to the room in the station militia corridor to report that I hadn't heard any political discussions among the students of the NGPI.

On the one hand, I felt guilty for letting Captain down and the hopes he pinned on me, but on the other – what could I report? Was the KGB really interested that Igor Recoon, both a Konotoper and my course-mate who entered the institute straight from school, fell in love with the fourth-year student Olga Zhidova from Chernigov?.

All his evenings Igor spent in her room while her roommates exploited the feelings of the young enamored, sending him with a kettle after water from a tap in the washroom.

Once he was checked on the way by my roommate, the fourth-year student Marc Novoselytsky. "Made an errand-boy of you, eh?" asked Marc with his usual mocking grin.

"So what?" the yesterday's schoolboy did not give in, but defiantly threw up his sharp schnozzle with the tea-colored glasses on it and kept chewing, in the attitude of a big-time indie dude, his bubble gum.

"In love with Olga Zhidova, eh?"

"So what?"

"Wanna marry her, eh?"

"So what?"

"How can you marry her? She was my lay!"

"So what?"

The youth withstood even that deadly blow, yet the treacherous kettle slightly lowered its spout in his slackened hand, letting thread-thin trickle onto the gray concrete floor. Poor boy…

My roommate did not lie, of course, and he explained his action as a good-will wish to save young Igor from a fatal blunder. Yet all the same, that Novoselytsky was an ornery bastard, notwithstanding his being a Jew…

In short, I had nothing to curry favor with the KGB and mend my reputation ruined by the finking Zampolit.

(…still and all, if only they ignored what he had rolled on me, and if they winked at the baptizing of my daughter, as well as being so rude to the unknown KGB officer at the foot of Komsomol Gorka Hill in the Stavropol city, then—you never can tell—I might have easily risen to the presidency in present Russia, even without a spy school… My mother always said that I was mighty clever.

As it is, I poisoned my student years with my own hands. Seeing Captain twice a month excruciated me like an incurable toothache. However hard tried I to suppress the thoughts of a pending meeting and think of something…anything else…they returned to beset me like the thoughts of the inescapable end keep coming back to the terminally ill.

Midst the heated revelries in the young-Lomonosov style, there'd pop up a sudden thought that in three days I was to go to a hateful interview which broke me out from the current merriment and made me switch over to morose ruminations that "seccol", aka secsot, which was just an abbreviation of "secret collaborator", sounded much more disgusting than chmo.

And there was no escape – they had my application and reports telling on no one in particular but signed "Pavel". So even if I, say, got to Zona, another "zampolit" would approach me and order to keep on knocking on the inmates if I had no wish of a certain part from the KGB archives to be leaked to the resident master-thief, aka Zona's pakhan.

My life got screwed and cramped up like that of Sindbad the Seaman when in some of his travels a nasty old man nestled around his neck strangling and kicking with his legs for the slightest disobedience.

But why the KGB Captain remained nameless? He told me his name-and-patronymic but I am hanged if I can recollect it.

Not that I'm afraid of the KGB, or whatever is its new, post-Soviet, name – no; it's just a case of permanent brain cramp at that point. When I try to recollect, his name eludes me… Not that I strive in earnest though…)

~ ~ ~

In those times, there were two restaurants in Nezhyn – "Polissya" in the square in front of the Bazaar, and "The Seagull" in the hotel of the same name to the right from the City-and-District Party Committee behind the Lenin's back on the main square. The third one was on the first floor of the railway station but in the afternoon it worked as a canteen, so I count it out.

The epic provincial backwaters inspiring tender sympathy by a mere thought of it… of the monument bust commemorating the home-geezer whose sail-boat at the dawn of XIX-nth century hove at sight nearby the Antarctic shores, yet the silly innocent penguins couldn’t discern the entire taxidermic impact of the appearance of that strange wooden ice-floe over the dark polar waters carrying a herd of strange penguins gaggling in non-Penguin lingo… of the cathedral closed for renovation works ever since end 50’s… of the firstborn of the Soviet combat-tank industry, the model of 1929, at the Shevchenko Park entrance without any podium, right on the asphalt sidewalk: fill in the diesel fuel and – full ahead!. Even the square before the Bazaar was, actually, just a wide street tilting from the bridge up to the department store…

The restaurants we visited quite seldom, and not all of us because Yasha and Fyodor shunned the facilities. On such occasions, they were substituted by Sveta, the official bride of Marc. The white tablecloths on the tables, and the wide green runner from the entrance up to the screen in the corner, concealing the window to the kitchen, showed at once that it was a restaurant for you and not a shabby bar. And, as it's appropriate for a restaurant, we had to wait thru a long wait before the waitress would bring the ordered goulash and potatoes.

To whittle the span down, Sasha Ostrolootsky would start rubbing his set of spoon-fork-knife lined in a close formation next to the up-turned cone of a napkin upon the tablecloth. Like, he was so well-bred and cleanly. Good news, he didn't stick his pinky finger out at the procedure, some prudish Marquis de Orphanage…

Sveta kept nagging Marc with her "What's that, Marik? I didn't get it!" but in a lower kind of voice… Finally, from behind the screen, the waitress appeared with a tray in her hands… Whoops, taken to another table…

But here, at last, and for us too. She moved the plates from the tray onto the table. Sasha in a well-trained manner poured shots of vodka out from the small and round, like a flask for Chemistry experiments, decanter. Shoot off!

And after the second shot, you were already a participant in a witty conversation of the amicable table-mates. Your fingers toyed so smartly with the fork. The music from the loudspeakers behind the screen was no longer sounding too crude. Your unobtrusively gaze swept over those present in the room. Which one to invite for a slow dance on the green runner?

Marc knew them all, which Department, say, those two girls were from, and in what year of their study. If that was someone not from the Institute, then Sveta, as a local guide, presented all their intimate details. Weren’t we the cream of the libertine crop then, eh?.

In the end, Marc would pay for all from his soft brown purse. Back at the hostel, we reimbursed for our shares…

But for his love to teach you, Marc would pass for quite a decent dude. Coming back from the shower on the first floor, he made sure to peep into the lobby to thank the watchwoman, auntie Dinna, for the hot water. And then he started to drive it home to me that although she had nothing to do with the water, yet now she was prepared to do him favors. Because it's like promising something to someone. Nobody might be positive if you were going to keep your word so that they would get indeed what was promised, however, the person you bestowed a hope on starts looking into your hands and, because of the anticipation, they would pull for you.

(…it seems to me, he was just echoing adages by which his father kept screwing his head on since Marc's early childhood. Jewish wisdom transferred from generation to generation, eh?.

That's from whom the KGB learned hooking fools by promises of a spy school…)

Paying for his free lectures in kind, I presented him The Otranto Castle which book he saw on my cabinet-box and got impressed.

It was borrowed from the library at the KahPehVehRrZeh Club. So, I had to return the book first and a week later I stole it from the shelves. Nothing could be easier, in the privacy of a passage between the stacks of shelves, you stuck a book under the belt in your pants, put your sheepskin coat aright, grab another book on the way to the desk of the librarian, and leave with two books of which only one is registered….

The home-made feasts whooped up in Room 72 cost us much less… While Yasha and Fyodor were dispatched after Calvados in flask-like bottles of foreign looks, Ostrolootsky and I went to the kitchen.

On each floor in the Hosty, there were two kitchens, located by the entrance to the corridor from each of the staircase landings. Each kitchen was furnished with two gas stoves, one water tap combined with the sink, and three rows of boxes on one wall, like those in automatic storage cells, only made of veneered chipwood instead of iron… On the window sill, we were peeling potatoes, lots of potatoes.

Sasha had nice sporty looks in his jacket whose zipper was always swayed up to the utmost with the slider tastefully dangling from under his chin. "Well, that'll do. Let’s chop them…Okay…Come up to the door, just lean against it. Yes, that’s the way…Now, let’s check what we have here…"

Ostrolootsky opened a box door and unloaded a piece of butter onto the huge frying pan, "Oh, and here some nice onions too, excellent!." He frisked thru the boxes with such elegant ease that I did not immediately realize that we were robbing the provision, aka "torbas", of the girls from our Department. All went so deftly and smoothly, the tongue wouldn't turn to call it looting.

(…well, while Sasha might be justified by his half-starved childhood in an orphanage, what about me? How would I look into Robin Hood's noble eyes after that wicked depredation?

And yet (with all the remorse in its place) I haven't ever eaten anything as delicious as that potatoes fried on pillaged butter…

However, Calvados turned out to be a lousy swill. And even quenching the hangover by it was disgusting…)

Zhora Ilchenko came back from India after working at the Soviet embassy there for a year or so. One should be a hard-working student to grasp enough of English for the job in just one academic year at the English Department of NGPI, or there cropped up some other reasons which I did not care to consider. Anyway, Zhora Ilchenko came back to finish the studies and get his diploma together with the rest of the students who he had started his learning with.

I did not know Zhora and only saw him from afar in the Old Building corridors. He had a crisp, rapidly thinning black hair and a mustache emphasizing the red of his lips.