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

Entering the toilet, first of anything else I spat on the wall to the left from the throne and only then sat down to go potty and watch the slow progress of spittle crawling down the green coat of paint, very vertically, leaving a moist trail in its wake. If the glob of the snailing saliva lacked sufficient reserves to reach the baseboard, I would assist it by an additional spit in the track, just above the stuck locomotive. At times the trip took from three to four spits and some other times the initial one was enough.

The parents were lost in perplexity as regards the spittle condensing under the toilet wall until the day when Dad entered immediately after me, and at the strict interrogation that followed I admitted doing that yet failed to offer any explanation why. Since then, fearful of punishment, I blotted the traces of the wrong-doing with the pieces of cut-up newspapers from the cloth bag on the opposite wall but the thrill was gone.

(…my son Ahshaut at the age of five sometimes peed past the john, on the toilet wall. More than once I carefully explained him that it was not the right way of taking a leak, and those who missed the target should wipe up after themselves.

One day he balked and refused to wipe the puddle. Then I grabbed at his ear, led him to the bathroom, and ordered to pick up the floor cloth, then brought him back to the toilet where, in a rage-choked voice, ordered to collect all the urine from the floor with that cloth. He obeyed.

Of course, in more developed states my parental rights would be grossly jeopardized after the child abuse of so violent a nature, still and all, I consider myself right at that particular development because no biological species can ever survive in their own waste… I would savvy, were the kid just spitting on the wall, however, in the house that I built the toilet walls were simply plastered and whitewashed, no spittle would crawl down such a surface. Later, the money for ceramic wall tiles got scraped up too, yet by that time the children were already adults…)

You feel yourself kinda Almighty when reconstructing the world of a half-century ago, adjusting the details to your liking with no one to rub your nose in it even if you muck up.

However, you can fool anyone but yourself, and I am ready to admit that now, from the distance in fifty years, not everything is falling in just nicely. For instance, I am far from certain that the pigeon enclosure in the attic had anything to do with Captain Savkin. The mentioned structure could as easily belong to Stepan Zimin, the father of Lyda and Yura… Or maybe there were two enclosures?

Frankly, at the moment I am not sure about the presence of pigeons in one or the other enclosure (but were there two of them?) on the day when I ventured to climb up the iron ladder towards something unknown, indistinguishable in the murky square hole of the hatchway above my head. And it is pretty possible that I simply remembered the remark overheard in my parents’ chat, that Stepan’s pigeons also fell victim to his unrestrained booze binges.

On the whole, just one thing stands beyond the shadow of a doubt – the tremulous ecstasy on the doorsill to revelation when, leaving behind my sister’s dismal divination of the pending manslaughter of me by the fatherly hand and, next to her, the silent stare of my brother watching closely each my movement from the landing down there, which diminished at each ladder rung as I climbed into the brave new world that any moment now would unfurl before me beneath the grayish underbelly of the slate roof… A few days later Natasha came running into our room to proudly herald that Sasha had just climbed up to the attic too.

Taking into account all of that, it is quite probable that the pigeons were gone from the attic enclosure, but in the Courtyard, there were hosts of them…

The Courtyard’s layout presented a systematized masterpiece of pure unalloyed geometricity. Inside the big rectangular formed by the 6 two-storied buildings, the ellipse of the road was inscribed and accentuated by the knee-deep drenches along its both sides, bridged by albeit short, yet mighty overpasses minutely opposite each of the 14 entrances to the 6 houses in our Block.

Two narrow concrete walks aligned at right angles to the ellipse’s longitudinal axis cut it into three even chunks, the resultant rectangular in between the walks and the road ditches was further divided into three equal segments by one more couple of concrete walks parallel to the above-mentioned axis to connect the walks also mentioned already.

The intersection points formed four corners of the central segment, from which the rays of 4 additional concrete walks traversed the Courtyard diagonally, each one projected in the direction of the central entrances to the respective corner buildings, the line between adjacent ray-starting points served the chord of a concrete arc-walk described about a round lumber gazebo, 2 of them all in all, so that, on the whole, it presented the model of perfection reminiscent of the Versailles’ design, only of concrete.

(…it is impossible to come across such a purified Bau Stile in nature. No circular circles exist among natural ones, neither absolutely isosceles triangles, nor flawless squares – someplace, somehow, the accomplished evenness would be inevitably ruined by the stubborn awl spiking thru the Mother Nature’s haversack…)

Of course, there were no fancy waterworks in our Courtyard, neither trees nor bushes. Maybe, later they planted something there yet, in my memory, I can find not even a seedling but only grass cut into geometric figures by the walks of concrete and loose pigeon flocks flying from one end of the vast Courtyard to the other when there sounded “…gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil!.” call.

I liked those looking so alike, yet somehow different, birds flocking around you to bang the scattered bread crumbles away from the road on which you’d never see a vehicle except for a slow-go truck carrying, once in a blue moon, the furniture of tenants moving in or out, or a load of firewood for Titan boilers installed in the apartments’ bathrooms.

But even more, I liked feeding pigeons on the tin ledge out the kitchen window. Although it took a long wait before some of the birds would get it where your “gooil-gooil” invitation was coming from and hover with the swish of air-cutting wings in the relentless flapping above the ledge covered by the thick spill of breadcrumbs before landing on it with their raw legs to start the quick tap-tapping at the offer on the hollow-sounding tin.

The pigeons seemed to have an eye on each other or, probably, they had some kind of intercom system because the first bird was very soon followed by others flying in, in twos and threes, and whole flocks, maybe even from the other block. The window ledge submerged into the multi-layer whirlpool of feathered backs and heads ducking to pick the crumbs, pushing each other, fluttering off the edge and squeezing in back again. Then, taking advantage of that pandemonium, you could cautiously put your hand out thru the square leaf up in the kitchen window and touch from above one of their moving backs, but tenderly, so that they wouldn’t dash off with the loud flaps of the wings and flush away all at once…

~ ~ ~

Besides the pigeons, I also liked holidays, especially the New Year. The Christmas tree was set up in the parents’ room in front of the white tulle curtain screening the cold balcony door. The plywood boxes from postal parcels received long ago and presently full of fragile sparkling adoration came from the narrow storeroom: all kinds of fruits, dwarfs, bells, grandfathers frosts, baskets, drill-bit-like purple icicles, balls with inlaid snowflakes on their opposite sides and just balls but also beautiful, stars framed within thin glass tubes, fluffy rain-garlands of golden foil. In addition, we made paper garland-chains as taught by Mom. With different watercolors we painted the paper, it dried overnight and was cut into finger-wide colored strips which we glued with wheatpaste into lots of multicolored links in the growing catenas of our homemade garlands.

Lastly, after decorating the tree with toys and sweetmeat—because a candy with a thread thru its bright wrapper is both nice and eatable decoration which you can cut off and enjoy at Xmas tide—a snowdrift of white cotton wool was put under the tree over the plywood footing of one-foot-tall Grandfather Frost in his red broadcloth coat, one of his mitten-clad hands in firm clasp at his tall staff and the other clutching the mouth of the sack over his shoulder tied with a red ribbon which hid the seam too sturdy to allow actual investigation of the bumps bulging from inside through the sackcloth.

Oh! How could I forget the multicolored twinkling of tiny bulbs from their long thin wires?!. They came into the Christmas tree before anything else, and those wires were connected to the heavy electric transformer also hidden under the wool snowdrifts, Dad made it himself. And the mask of Bear for the matinée in kindergarten was also his production. Mom explained him how to do it and Dad brought some special clay from his work and then on a sheet of plywood he modeled the bear’s face with its stuck-up nose. When the clay got stone-hard, Dad and Mom covered it with layers of gauze and water-soaked shreds of newspaper. It took two days for the muzzle to dry and harden, then the clay was thrown away and—wow!—there was a mask made of papier-mâché. The mask was colored with brown watercolor, and Mom sewed the Bear costume of brown satin, it was a one-piece affair so you could get into the trousers only thru the jacket. That’s why at the matinée I did not envy the woodcutters with the cardboard axes over their shoulders.

(…and until now the watercolors smell to me of the New Year, or maybe vice verse, it’s hard to decide, I’m not too good at moot points…)

If the big bed in the parents’ room was taken apart and brought to our room, it meant that later in the evening they would haul tables from the neighboring apartments and set them in the freed bedroom for guests to sit around. The neighbors’ children would gather in our room to play.

When it got very late and all the visiting children gone back to their apartments, I would venture to the parents’ room filled with the smarting mist of thinly bluish tobacco smoke and the noise of loud voices each of which trying to speak louder than anyone’s else. Old Morozov would announce that being a young man he once oared no less than 17 kilometers to a date, and the man by his side would eagerly confirm that proves it was worth it and all the people would rejoice at the good news and laugh happily and they would grab each other and start dancing and fill all of the room with their giant figures, up to the ceiling, and circle along with the disc on the gramophone brought by someone of the guests.

Then they again would just speak but not listen who says what, and Mom, sitting at the table, would start singing about the lights on the streets of the Saratov City full of unmarried young men, and her eyelids would drop and shut half of her eyes. Mortified by shame at that view, I would get onto her lap and say, “Mom, don’t sing, please, don’t!” And she would laugh, and push the glass back, and say she did not drink anymore and go on singing all the same. In the end the guests would go to their apartments taking out the tables with them and still talking without listening. I would be sent to our room where Sasha already sleeps on the big sofa but Natasha alertly bobbing from her pillow. In the kitchen, there would sound the tinkle of the dishes being washed by Grandma and Mom, and then the light in our room would be briefly turned on for the parent bed parts to be taken back…