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

In the morning, we left and crossed the Courtyard to one of the corner buildings, I knew that it was the hostel for officers though I never had entered it. In the long corridor on the second floor, Mom told us to wait because she needed to talk with the man whose name she mentioned but I've forgotten it entirely.

For some time, the 3 of us waited silently on the landing, then Mom showed up in the corridor and led us home. She opened the door with her key. From the hallway, thru the open door to the parents’ room, the Christmas tree was seen dropped on its side by the balcony door, splinters of smashed decorations scattered the carpet around it.

The wardrobe stood with its doors ajar, and in front of it there was a soft mound of Mom’s clothes, each one ripped from top to bottom…

Dad was away from home for a whole week, but then Natasha said that he was coming back and so it happened the following day. And we started to live on further again…

~ ~ ~

When the vacations ended, I found a newspaper package in my schoolbag, the uneaten sandwich stayed there from the last school day in the previous term. The rotten ham imparted the schoolbag a putrid stench. Mom washed it from within with soap and the fetor got weaker but still stayed…

At school, they held the contest between the pioneer grades at collecting waste paper.

After classes, the pioneers from our class, in groups of threes or fours, visited the houses of Block and the five-story buildings, knocked on doors, and asked if they had some waste paper. At times, they presented us with huge piles of old newspapers and magazines, but I never went to the corner building housing the hostel for officers. Instead, I proposed my group of pioneer collectors to visit the Detachment’s Library, where they gave us a sizable score of books. Some of them were pretty worn and tattered but others quite fresh as, for instance, The last of Mohicans by Fennimore Cooper with nice engraving pictures which only missed some 10 pages at the end….

One evening, when we were playing Hide-and-seek in the snow burrows along the far side of the ice rink, some senior boy said that he could lift five people at once, and easily too, with just one hand. It seemed so improbable that I bet. He only warned that the five people should lie down in a compact group for him to grip conveniently.

So, he and I, as opponents, and a few more boys went towards the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the light of lamps illuminating the rink and found a level spot.

I lay down on my back in the snow and, following his instructions, stretched out my arms and legs, for the four boys to lie upon them: one boy on each, all in all, five people.

Yet, he never tried to lift us. I felt fingers of a stranger unbuttoning my pants and entering my underwear. Unable to break loose from under the four boys who pinned me to the ground, I only yelled and shouted them to get off and let me go.

Then suddenly I felt free because they all ran away. I buttoned my pants up and went home angry with myself that I could so easily be fooled. Scored one more visit to the topmast with a teapot.

(…and only quite recently it suddenly dawned on me that it was not a practical joke as with “showing Moscow”. It was the check to verify suspicions aroused by my fancy dress at the New Year party.

However ridiculous it seems, it took almost a whole life span until I guessed what’s what.

And here lies the third but, probably, the most cardinal of my Achilles’ heels – belated grasping…)

On the way from school, my friend Yura Nikolayenko broke the news of the caricature they sketched my Mom in and pinned to the stand by the House of Officers. In that picture, she was tossing: to go to her husband or her lover?

I uttered not a word to answer but for more than a month, I couldn’t go anywhere near the House of Officers. Then, of course, I had to visit it because they showed “The Iron Mask” with Jean Marais in the role of D’Artagnan.

Before the show, with all my innards tightly squeezed by shame and fear, I sneaked to the stand, but the Whatman sheet pinned in it already bore a new caricature of a drunken truck driver in a green padded jacket, and his wife with children shedding blue tears at home.

(…it was unlimited relief at that moment, yet, for some reason, until now I can too vividly recall the caricature of my Mom which I have never seen.

She’s got a sharp nose in it, and long red fingernails while tossing – to which of the two?

No, Yura Nikolayenko did not describe the picture for me, he only retold the inscription…)

In early spring, Dad came home very upset after a meeting at his work. There was another wave of the redundancy purge and at that meeting, they said who else to make redundant if not him?

So, we started to pack things up for loading them into a big iron railway container, as other redundant people before us. However, the actual loading was done by Dad alone because the 4 of us left 2 weeks earlier…

On the eve of our departure, I was sitting on a couch in the room of the Mom’s new woman-friend across the landing. The woman and Mom left for the kitchen, and I stayed back with a thick book which I picked up from the piles of waste paper at the Detachment’s Library and later presented to Mom’s woman-friend.

Turning pages with the biography of some ante-revolution writer, I idly looked thru the seldom inset illustrations with photographic pictures of unknown people in strange clothes from another, alien, world. Then I opened the thick volume somewhere in the middle and inscribed on the page margin, “we are leaving.”

That moment, I remembered the principle of creating animated cartoons: if on several subsequent pages you spell some word—a letter per page—and then bend the pages and release them one by one so that they quickly flip one after another, then letters will form up the word you wrote.

And I inscribed separate letters in the corners of subsequent pages, “I-S-e-h-r-g-u-e-y-O-g-o-l-t-s-o-f-f-a-m-l-e-a-v-i-n-g.”

Yet, the cartoon did not work out as supposed. In fact, it did not work at all, but I did not care. I just slammed the book, left it on the couch, and walked away across the landing to a room with packs of things lined under its walls…

Early in the morning, a bus left the Courtyard for the station of Valdai. Besides the 4 of us, there were a couple of families going on their vacations. When the bus turned to the road of concrete slabs descending from Block, Mom suddenly asked me who we would better live with: my Dad, or the man whose name I absolutely do not remember.

“Mom! We do not need anyone! I will work, I’ll be helping you,” said I.

She answered by silence… And those were not just words, I believed in what I was saying, yet Mom was versed in the labor legislation better than me…

Down, at the foot of the Gorka, the bus stopped by the turn to the Pumping Station and Checkpoint. The man about who Mom had just asked me, climbed in. He approached her, took her hand, telling something in a low voice. I turned away to look out of the window… He left the bus, it slammed its door and drove on. In a couple of minutes the bus pulled up at the white gate of Checkpoint. The guards checked us and the vacationers and opened the gate letting the bus out of the Zona.

A black-haired soldier grabbed hold of a white-paint-coated rod in the gate’s grate while floating by behind the glass in the bus window.

I realized with absolute clarity that never again would I ever see the familiar gate of the Zona, neither that unknown soldier next to it, however, one thing I didn’t know yet… It was my way of leaving childhood.

~~ ~~ ~

(…and, probably, that’s it. Enough is enough. It is time to roll the potatoes out from among the glowing ashes before they turned firebrands too. Yes, they told me that coals are crammed up with kilocalories, still I am not quite sure about the taste of those critters. Besides, it’s getting pretty dark and I’d rather not overeat at so late an hour. “And leave your dinner”, said some sage dietitian, “to your enemy”. Which is a pretty useless piece of wisdom in my case. Where could I possibly get them those enemies at all? I've been raised and carefully formatted for life in a society where each man is a friend, a comrade, and a brother to any other man…

Damn, but it’s so tempting to share the bullshit you once were fed with (and in ladlefuls too!) up to your ears. So, one day I poured a podcast homily to your step-sister, Lenochka, like, being good and kind is the innate feature of mankind at large, regrettably obscured by their ignorance of how immensely good they are deep inside, a sad pity!

She listened silently and same night my perversive stars flogged me Shakespeare’s “Richard III” on TV. What a treat! She stuck in the tube and watched, mesmerized, how all those good and kind people (sadly, uninformed of their hidden goodness) were strangling and shredding each other and cutting throats for a change. And sure enough, the next morning she watched the rerun too because Shakespeare isn’t a knickknack you can give the shake, it’s classic. Since then, my political line regarding the TV is that of armed neutrality.

Well, so much to emphasize the fact that, if I chance to come across an accidental enemy, I’d sooner give them my last shirt but not my dinner, moreover, the potatoes baked in the fire ashes.

The moment you break their charred crust and pour a pinch of salt into the steamy core, you see the light of Truth that no oysters, nor lobsters, nor any other fancy kulebyaki can hold a candle to them. Oh, no! Not a chance.

For their sake, all freaky nourishment leave willingly I to abstruse gourmets ‘cause we, uncouth and simple-minded garlic eaters, have no use for neither calipash nor calipee – nope! Our modest goal is an ample simple grub and plum dough, we’re not after excessive luxuries.

And were I a younger man but not a Negro advanced in my years and pressed by all kinds of problems which the struggle for life brims with, then to them, and them only, would I dedicate an ode of love and gratitude—to potatoes baked midst the fire ashes.

No wonder, that in the most poignant episode in all the pulp fiction series by Julian Semenov, his main protagonist Stirlitz, aka Soviet secret service agent Isayev, turns up the sleeves of his spiffy Fascist uniform and bakes potatoes in the fireplace of his Berlin apartment to celebrate the Soviet Army and Navy Day.

However, with all due admiration at his culinary patriotism, no, sir, dat’s ain’t da thin’. To really enjoy the taste of baked potatoes, you need to sit on the ground, under the open sky, with an evening like this one here around you…)

In Konotop, Grandma Katya kissed us all, in turn, confusedly, in her kitchen, and cried. So

Mother started comforting her and talking out of snivel, before she noticed two kids’ heads that peeked from behind the door to the room and asked if they were her sister’s children.

“Yes, here we have our Irochka and Valerik. So big kids already. The girl is 3 years old and he will soon be 2.”

When their father, Uncle Tolik, came home from his work, I for the first time saw, not in a movie but in real life, a man with a bald patch extending from the forehead to the back of his head, however, I tried not to ogle too obviously. An hour later he and I went out to meet my Aunt Lyouda. The food store she worked at closed at seven and, coming home, she always carried bags of chow from work.

Walking by the side of Uncle Tolik, I marked the way to the Underpass, which Konotopers were calling Overpass… Some vague recollection retained a long wait in front of a railway barrier, lowered to block off the overpass made of smeared wooden sleepers bridging the gaps between the rail-heads, then the barrier went up stirring agitated commotion in a ruck of people, who rushed from both sides to cross the railway, a couple of horse drawn telega -carts and an odd truck in their midst… That time we were going from Konotop to the Object… In my absence, they built a deep concrete tunnel under the multi-track railway, hence the official name—Underpass—but folks still named it the way they used to—Overpass…