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

The next day at the aunt Nina's khutta, she and her aunt performed in duo what I had already heard from Olga solo, about a fresh start from a clean leaf. Then the aunt went to her work. Olga and I drank a glass of hooch each and for about an hour were killing each other all over the kitchen and the adjacent living room adorned by the upright piano.

After we dressed, Olga asked – what now? I replied that the question had been answered and, alas, not by me. She started to cry and said that she knew what to do next, some pills appeared in her palm which she began to swallow. I managed to wring the most of them, yet she still managed to consume some.

I rushed out of the khutta, ran along Budyonny Street and past the Plant Park to Bazaar where a payphone hung at the intersection. Luckily, the receiver was nor cut off yet, and it worked. I called the ambulance.

Probably, it's not every day they were called for a suicide attempt but their vehicle overtook me on my way back. When I came to aunt Nina's, Olga sat limply on a stool in the middle of the kitchen giving reluctant answers to the doctor and nurse in white coats. She had a large mug in her hands and on the floor by her feet there stood a big basin used at the stomach lavage.

The crisis was obviously over and I left without going into details. It was unlikely that she would take another try, and from my own experience, I knew that gastric lavage brings about a general reassessment of values and a fresher perspective on any situation…

Two days later, I was told that they had seen Olga boarding a train of Moscow direction with some kind of a black-haired guy. Most likely, that was the one she'd been cheating on with my active participation two days before…

~ ~ ~

In a week, I went to Nezhyn to the fourth-course graduation party keeping my promise to Nadya. The party was arranged in the hall of celebrations on the first floor of the canteen. Nadya was the most beautiful there, in a long dress made of light chiffon, like a bride at her wedding, only pink.

In the end, everyone went to the Oster bank behind the hostel to build a fire from the thick copybooks with lecture notes scribbled thru all their four years of study. Fyodor and Yasha did not add their share to the fire because I had never seen anything like a copybook near them, another reason was their absence from the party.

The full moon was shining, the bonfire kept devouring by its nationalistically yellow-and-blue flames the pages of once-upon-a-time so necessary notes. The former students stood gazing at the fire—each for themselves from now on—and in the dark tall grass around, the teacher of theoretical grammar wandered in circles. He was a dwarf, no taller than up to your waist, but they said he was very clever. One of the graduates, the ugliest of all and, as gossip had it, dull and rude, agreed to marry him so as not to go to a village to work off for her diploma. She was a villager herself so she knew exactly what she was losing by such her choice…

For our farewell wedding night with Nadya, we went up to her room where there even were blinds on the window. We had goodbyes, and slept a little, and woke up for new goodbyes in breaststroke, and dog paddle, and backstroke, and front crawl and freestyle… When the pale morning light began seeping thru the white blinds and she reached for giving the first blow job in her life, I wearily pulled back. Let at least something remain for her tomorrow’s husband to be first at. All of us—the cuckoldry brethren—have to be generous to each other…

~ ~ ~

When a mujik has nothing to do, he finds hard labor for himself. The khutta at 13, Decemberists Street amply provided an inexhaustible source of what to fill your leisure time with, and my father harnessed me into the infrastructure reconstruction… Brick-paneling the earth-pit cellar under the kitchen, replacing the fence and the wicket, constructing a summer shower next to the shed, insulating the outhouse in the garden, paving walks by the brick so as not to wade in mud after each heavy rain. Mujik’s summertime brims up with tasks and cares…

For breaks, I visited Lyalka. He lived by Peace Square on the second floor in a red-brick five-story block between the Peace movie theater and the Department Store, right above the ice-cream pavilion "Snowflake".

His father, in his youth, had a criminal record and, when reaching the venerable age, became an ideological inspirer of the following generations of thieves. Returning from Zona, they shared warm recollections about Lyalka's dad coming to the court in a jacket over a tank top to instruct them to keep their tail up when in Zona, bandying words with the judge and having to forcibly leave the room. I was too late to meet him. But his mother-in-law, Lyalka's grandma, was still living like a hermit in the bedroom with a view of the pitch-mounted roofing felt atop the "Snowflake". She shared the room with the decrepit but malicious lap-dog Bayba and Lyalka's mom.

Lyalka replaced his dad in the line of moral support to the guys departing to Zona. He did not attend the court hearings but he knew on what day they started to the place of serving their time and came to the station for a goodbye thru the bars of a special car, aka stolypin….

The balcony in Lyalka's flat went from the living-room into a wide quiet courtyard bounded by the five-story buildings, with occasional Apple trees and the desolate khutta locked up with crosswise nailed boards – the incubator for growing criminals. In the dovecot above the khutta, Lyalka's younger brother, double-handled both Slave and Rabentus, held pigeons when not in Zona.

Their mother, Maria Antonovna, a dressmaker from the atelier behind the main post-office, once dreamed of a violinist career for Lyalka and she even bought him a violin for the purpose, which he stacked away in the nailed up khutta when, like, going to a lesson. So, for all her pains, she had only managed to provide him with the inbred love for good clothes, Lyalka's shirts, and jeans, and shoes were always tiptops. But he also loved music, unlike Rabentus whose interests were confined in his pigeons and havvage, that's why he was twice as thick as slender Lyalka.

On that balcony, we listened to the records of Czeslav Neman, Slade, The AC/DC… With the doorbell starting its buzz, Lyalka would go to the hallway and lead the visitor to the kitchen to move them shmotki, some jeans or a shirt with foreign stickers.

At times it turned out not a client but some of his brother's bros, or simply a guy from the city rowdies, like Count-Junior, or Horse, who just was short-cutting thru the yard and got attracted by the sound of the loudspeakers (Lyalka's khutta enjoyed a dynastic respect) and fancied dropping in to share his notions that everything should be fair and founded on justice. For such a case, Lyalka played some hard-hard rock – The Arrowsmith or The Black Sabbath. Those home-made natural philosophers and champions for keeping the world in line with concepts of true justice could not withstand more than one number and they left the sofa covered with a hard inflexible rag because of a sudden recollection of some urgent business awaiting them City.

Lyalka closed the door after them and, rolling his eyes under the forehead, shook his head with a sigh – oh, those boars! – but the traditions oblige. Then he stroke his fair nail-beard and put on the LP of Engelbert Humperdink…

And he also had craving for knowledge and was not shy to show it. One day he did not hesitate to ask me about the meaning of "excess" after hearing the word from me. In short, he needed me like an oasis among all those justice-lovers.

No doubt, the main fusing factor in our connection was the weed, substituted in bleak periods between the creamy seasons with all kind of pills – noxiron, seduxen, kadein – to give their succor in times of need, only you had to know what should go with what and to which proportion…

He was going out with his girlfriend Valentina to the dance-floor in Loony. Valentina had beautiful Spanish eyes, as one of the boars put it in the form of a compliment, "I'd cut and pick such eyes up on the wall."

One evening I danced with her girlfriend, Vera Yatsenko, though I knew that Quak pined after her for years, but Vera was going out with him for a week or so before cutting him dead for months.

After that dances, Quak stopped me and Vera in the park alley. He asked her for an apology and permission to talk to me. She went on in the leisurely crowd strolling to the exit from the night Loony park. Quak and I stepped aside to the trimmed bushes not to be in the way of the current. I could see that Quak was pretty loose, not quite blind but well plastered. He leaned his forehead against my shoulder and, looking at the ground, said, "Sehrguey, I've been with Olga."

Of course, that friendly confession scraped me deep, but I withheld explaining the fallacy of such a perspective – that it was not he who was with her, but rather she who was with him, and that he was not the only one she took use of. First of all, such subtleties were beyond his scope of comprehension even when sober, to leave alone his current state, and secondly, I needed to catch up with Vera Yatsenko…

I saw her to one of the two-story blocks along Peace Avenue and, when we were standing in the quiet dark courtyard, Quak popped up in the gate and revved forward shedding hail of exclamations incongruous with the peaceful night. There was no other choice but to take a couple of expedient steps forward and shut him up with a restraining punch. He fell on his back, but still went on yelling, "So, that's how you meet?! Got prepared?!"

Probably, the drunk really have their guardian angels, but with that preventive blow at the blockhead’s scull my thumb got dislocated and I couldn't box anymore, so when Quak rose to his feet the fight transformed into a wrestling single combat. We reeled over the ground and after the high-pitched admonitions by Vera threatening to call her brother and father to the scene of discontent, we left the yard.

Walking in the same direction, we gradually restored being on speaking terms and briefly discussed details of our recent confrontation, touched, in passing, undeniably succulent attractions of Vera Yatsenko. We never returned to the subject of Olga.

Near the Under-Overpass, he boarded Streetcar 3 departing to the Settlement and I went on, bypassed the Station and proceeded along the railway tracks to Decemberists Street because my shoulder was slightly bleeding, torn by the coal slag cover of the walkway in the two-story block courtyard.

Coal slag is good to keep in check the mud after a rain or autumn drizzle, but as tatami, it falls short of the cinder path.

The next morning I had to tell my parents about my fall off a bicycle – the traditional excuse which causes an understanding smirk in the inquirer’s countenance.

(…probably, the guardian angels are also retiring from their job. Many years later, Quak died the traditional Ukrainian mujik's death – fell asleep in a snowdrift and froze a few meters from his khutta.

Sometimes it seems to me that the only place where he still exists is my memories of him…)

Soon I was summoned to the militia station nearby Deli 5 to explain my role in Olga's suicide attempt of which they were informed by the ambulance workers. They took my word that I was neither the instigator nor an accomplice, and let me go.

My mother collected all Olga's clothes and shoes that still stayed in the khutta, both light and warm – for all seasons. It turned out a bulky bale which she shrouded within a white cloth to be sent by the railway post cars. I asked Vladya for help and we dragged that bale along the tracks to the station luggage office. For convenience, we cinched it with a rope to the nickel-plated pipe of a window curtain shaft, like, prehistoric hunters or Aborigine savages carrying killed game home. Only we dragged it in the opposite direction – away, for it was not prey, but a loss.

In the office, I wrote the Theodosia address on the cloth and got their receipt indicating the weight. When we got out of there, Vladya obviously wanted to tell me something, but he restrained himself, I always knew that he was more tactful than Quak.

…certain thoughts are better not to be started…

The curtain shaft developed a bend under the load carried all that long way, and I threw it into the bushes behind the high first platform of the station before going to Lyalka…

~ ~ ~

On September 1, at the ceremonial line-up around the big pensive bust of Gogol between the Old and New Buildings, Rector of the Institute, as always, announced that the classes were starting for all except the second and third-year students, who would go for a month to villages with their patronage assistance. The second and third-year students of all the Departments, as always, shouted "Hurray!"

Next morning, the convoy of two big buses carried their load of sophomores along the Moscow highway to the district center of Borzna, from where they took the bumpy dirt road to the Bolshevik village, yet failed to reach it because of the too deep mud in the final couples of kilometers. The students and half-dozen of overseeing teachers get out of the buses onto the roadside and walked along a narrow path trodden thru the green thicket of the rain-drenched corn stalks towards the village where they were to patronize hops harvesting. Almost each one dragged a "torba", the gunny cloth bag filled with the provision taken along from their respective homes.

My burden was much lighter – the guitar put with its neck across my shoulder, and cigarettes in my pocket, so the walk would be a breeze but for my leaking sneakers. In front of me a red sweater, blue jeans, and black rubber high boots, with a white kerchief-visor on top of all, were schlepping their "torba".

(…I am often amazed at my own self – when meeting an object with their hair longer than mine, the hips wider and rounder, I get taken in completely. I am routed, conquered, delighted and, sticking my paws up, ready to surrender and plead for the victress’ mercy…)

"Hi, beauty, your high boots are size 45?" A haughty look down her nose, "46." Like the "hello" so is the response, a poor try at hooking, but, at least, I was not ignored completely. Overtaking the girl, I looked back to smile at the condensed chill in her face and went on, because winking at chicks never was a habit about me even though, reportedly, they like it…

The village of Bolshevik was one wide empty street of half-dozen khuttas, and some larger buildings hidden deeper in the fog and dank dampness behind the seldom big trees that still dropped rare heavy drops from their foliage. Everyone went into the one-story canteen filled with grave gloom because of the bad weather outside the low windows. Long tables under the tattered oilcloth and the piece of plywood to stop dispensing window indicated the purpose of the room.

After protracted negotiations between the overseer-teachers and local authorities, the students began to settle for their stay in the village… A pair of log-walled two-story buildings split inside into four-person rooms were allocated to student girls, while all the guys were stationed in one large hall on the second floor of the club, also made of logs. Each student got a mattress with a pillow, an army blanket, a pillowcase, and a pair of sheets.

I took the bundle to the club and was deeply impressed by the simplicity in the design of the ad hoc dormitory. The low decking of plank shields created an all too familiar view, like, spending a month in an overcrowded clink at the guardhouse. Some thirty mattresses were spread atop the decking, side by side, so for stretching out, a patronizer had to scramble in his mattress on all fours. Fortunately, near the door, there remained a tall billiard table in its pretty worn cloth of faded green spruced up by random snick-and-gashes. Choosing it for my bed, I did not sell myself for a Zona thief-master but simply noticed that each of the billiard balls in the rack on the wall was dented so brutally that the whole set became a collection of crunched up apples. No sane stretch of imagination would suppose any possibility of playing the game, which turned the table into an odd item in the scenery.

Those were the grounds for my sleeping four meters away from the common bed decking, half-meter higher than I was used to, yet without neighbors snoring into my ears. The table's width allowed for a piece of a broken lacquered cue to be placed next to the mattress, because of the bleak rumors circulating among the student guys about the ill-will disposition expressly harbored by the local youth in regard to the snooty new-comers…