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

"The stooping sky beheaded dull jumble of the world…"

and then sort of:

…the shaggy clouds cut thru the Helmet-Skull unable to fend off welter-onset at the brain beseiged…"

In short, complete bullshit with surrealistic stink, or else I would be dragged into them those surreal quicksands and drowned tracelessly for good. So, it's only on the train that I came back, in between the Plisky and Kruty stations.

As for those psychedelic scraps, Zhomnir later placed them in the faculty wall newspaper next to Translator, he liked them way too much.

But all this not about that but about the lecture turned out by Scnar, it’s only that the memories of that grass keep distracting me, kinda like red herring, sort of. That time Rabentus provided me with a pinch for a couple of joints and, fully aware of what kind of thermonuclear dope it was, I did not abuse it anymore but showed moderation…

Well, now, in such a state—from moderate to quite quiet—I slowly floated to the lecture, kinda zeppelin, because making for the hostel seemed awfully long and winding way at the moment. And we then sat down, so as to make room for Scnar to read it from behind the lectern. And I grew more and more admired what a classy thing it was! The plywood all so yellow and well polished, and gleaming pleasantly because of that, you just couldn’t take your eyes off that varnished thing.

But then I suddenly couldn't get it – the peaceful flow clicked out of the groove and very obviously too, replaced with some affronting discrepancy. Scnar switched over to Latin!. I concentrated but – yes! – exactly Latin… And he was jetting it out even more fluentlier, in a way, than Lupus the Latinist, only that he sounded somehow hollow, and kept his eyes directly upward, like, to you I call de Profundis! I cocked up – was that Scnar, or not Scnar after all?

That’s why I started to watch more closely and noticed that above behind the lectern of all the Scnar there remained nothing but a bust. I mean it, atop the yellow box there stood the bust of Scnar even without his arms – just only shoulders. Yet the head continued to speak on all the same. And on his upper lip there notched a tiny cleavage, which began to grow deeper and darker, so as to turn into the toothbrush mustache of Adolf Hitler. Well, go and fuck yourself! In a Soviet institute, Hitler's bust reads a lecture and, on top of all – in Latin! Good fellow Scnar! Not every lecturer would have the nerve to pull such a trick. Without him, I would still think that if there's a lecture it's necessarily bullshit. Them those stereotypes, they are really die-hard customers, you know…

And with Zhomnir I studied at his home… On finishing another of translations, I brought it to his place, we sat at the table pushed to the wall in his living room and he was shredding it in a dragon-like style – here's flat, there's bland…

Yes, I felt it before his picking the holes out, that those were bosh places, but why? And what was the workaround?

"That's your problem. Find it."

"Maybe, then put it just so and so?"

"No! That’d be out of all scotch and notch!"

To please him was simply impossible, he would always find what to find fault with. And because of that, the work with Zhomnir was a good school not to give up…

To come up for air from the clutches of the Ukrainian language, aka mova, I asked Zhora Ilchenko for one of the books he brought from India and started translating it into Russian. Not a too thick book, some two hundred pages, authored by Peter Benchley, a writer in the third generation, that is both his grandpa and his daddy earned their living in the same trade. The book was titled The Jaws, about a shark-cannibal. On the whole, a professionally mixed vinaigrette – a little scrap of everything: bitten-off limbs, a love triangle, a short yet impressive visit by mafia to persuade the sheriff be subtler and show more respect. True, the final scene of the shark's assassination was unscrupulously copied from Moby Dick, but who nowadays reads Melville?

While rendering all that in Russian, I finished off a pack of thick copybooks. The translation was completed in Konotop, in winter. So, it was the night from Saturday to Sunday, or else during the winter vacations… The clock on the kitchen wall was showing some of the small hours. Putting the final period, I draw it as big as half-page – I wanted to finish off the ink in the ball-pen but it never ended. Then I turned off the light and lay on the folding coach-bed in the living room. Behind the 2 windows, there stood a whitish night dimly fluoresced with the snow. And it seemed that the night was leaning heavily against the window panes, just about to break in. I tried to get asleep as soon as I could, for I never liked horror movies.

By spring, my sister Natasha read those notebooks, and then leased them to someone else and they dissolved, leaving no trace, in nowhere…

Well, all that's fine; but when about the most important?

Eera…

~ ~ ~

My relationship with her at the reunion stage can be characterized with just a single word – "torture". Trying real hard, one might extend it – "torturing torture". Firstly, taking our relationship up again in Nezhyn ran into a number of stumbling blocks.

Why resume? But I was in love, damn it! It was love at first sight on that tread thru the wet stalks of corn. And it should be kept in mind that, by my nature, whenever I fall in love it is forever. I mean, falling in love, then falling out for just to fall in again, and out… no, such bouncing is not for me. Yes, my father was right applying to me his winged byword about my Laziness-Mommy being born a moment before me. Besides, the return to Nezhyn fully confirmed the accuracy of my choice – with all the multifacedness, multinosedness, multileggedness, multibreastedness of the assortment, Eera was the second to none. Starting with the clothes: in the era of totalitarian shortages, she managed to look dressed in a soigne European way, as in the movies of Italo-Franco-German production. Turning to the undergarments: yes, unprecedented lacy slips under – I've never seen so delicately feminine lingerie in my life. Getting over to the item of most vital importance, the body itself: such bodies as hers, I saw only in the bathroom at the Object, when sitting next to the fire burning in Titan and considering the Goddesses, the Dryads, and the Nymphs of Hellas in the black-and-white illustrations interspersing The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece.

However, her gait was quite modern – the German-like resolute pacing coupled with the sway of her right hand. She had a round face with high cheekbones and a nose with a weeny hump, wide, yet not turned out, lips. The light brown hair of the ideal length, in my favorite hairstyle. I liked to watch her, approaching along the street that lead up to the Old Building, and to follow how in the distant circle of her face the fuzzy, as in the full moon, lines began to merge into my Eera's features. But all that came about not immediately…

At the beginning, Eera trusted in the sinister prognosis by Olya. And even Vera, who had so sympathetically been preparing the bed in Bolshevik for 2 of us to bathe in the fiery stream of lascivious carnal pleasures, dubiously shrugged and hesitated – O, my, they tell so heinous things about him! That's why our initial encounters in Nezhyn didn't look encouraging at all. I even started to suspect that all that happened between us in Bolshevik was just a "collective-farm affair" of a teacher's daughter that used me. So, I pissed off.

After some time, a group-mate of Eera, Anna, came to the Hosty with the errand from Eera who waited for me in the room of their Department hostel by the main square. I followed the messenger cursing on the way my shameful lack of the most elementary male pride…

Eera was lying on one of the beds, for some reason without a sweatshirt, wearing only her skirt and beautiful, as always, lady's undergarment. The girls whose room it was tactfully left us alone. I sat down on the bed next to her, doing my best to conceal how captivated I was by the beauty of her torso and the strangely pale face.

She said that she had had a pregnancy, and a young surgeon-gynecologist made the abortion at his home, under anesthesia. Is abortion done under anesthesia? At home? Young?

(…certain thoughts are better never being thought at all…)

Feelings of guilt and compassion only added to my love. I couldn't help it, I put my arms around her shoulders and, lifting her from the pillow, pressed to my chest. "I love you, Eera. You always know that I love you."

(…and again I run into my being born at the wrong time. I behave like an ancient Greek from the times when the birth control was females' responsibility – certain herbs, special amulets, you know.

And in the modern enlightened age, the weaker sex has already saddled us and mounted, while still pretending to be weak…)

The start-up misunderstandings (thanks to the kind care of her girlfriends), were further aggravated by unwanted predicaments at establishing normal sexual relations at the first stage of our love affair. Not because of being short of favorable conditions for having sex, on the contrary, when Eera visited Room 72, my freshman-cohabitants, on their own accord, went to the first floor of the hostel to click the TV channels in the hall with the box, or sit over a bottle of lemonade in the refreshment room. The problem had deeper roots…

Not right away, but I noticed that after our having a sex Eera got in a plaintive mood, and on the way from the Hosty to her home she spoke of sad things… How sadly was the wind dragging the autumn leaves across the stadium, visited to say goodbye to track athletics, because of a ligament injury after 2 years of training… How sad it feels, when at a festive table your parents got so absorbed in an agitated discussion of who of them was more right or wrong, that they do not notice you taking already the third plate from the table, and detachedly letting it fall to the floor over the scattered splinters of the first 2 – snap! – before mom and daddy wake up and finally turn to you…

The further, the sadder. The mood changes were replaced by overt sabotage! How else to classify it, if at having a sex your partner wriggles out from under you? It took me a hell of a lot of efforts to elicit the reason for such an unconventional behavior… Well, because she felt something like an urge for uncontrollable urination.

(…long live to our Soviet education system – the best system in the world! It couldn't maim the village schoolkids to such a degree though. They were saved by direct observation of the natural facts of life. A village girl would figure out at a glance what namely you were rolling upon her with. But the luckless city dwellers?.

In one of the color illustrations concluding the school textbook on Anatomy, there was a partial image of penis modestly hidden in between the intestines out-poured from the belly on the general scheme of internal organs. Those appended pictures were studied by the pupils on their own because during the academic year the class managed to reach only the middle of the textbook.

Now, how could the unfortunate daughter of teacher know the difference between orgasm and urination?..)

I'm far from stating that the problem was solved because of my persistent requests to trust her own body, which was wiser than her. In any case, she gave up wriggling out…

All those painful crises in the relationship called for general relaxation, and restoration of the dented self-esteem. These factors led to the emergence of Sveta, who also lived in the Hosty, and Maria, who did not live there but came on occasional visits, and more oftener I went to spend a night at her place…

Despite the fact, that Sveta studied at the Biological Department, she lived on the fifth floor in the Hosty. During one of her visits from up there to the third floor, she got vanquished by my noble continence, like, a knight-errant driven by merciless weather conditions to a roadside brothel…

I had just returned from seeing Eera to the vestibule in her staircase-entrance when they told me there was chicken soup on the table in Room 77. One of the advantages which the student canteen apportions you is that after visiting it you still can find enough room in your system for chicken soup, any time of day. I entered the room and turned on the light.

On one of the four beds, there lay a girl who did not make a secret of the fact that she had nothing on apart from the bedsheet wrapped about her. More importantly, there was a pot on the table and a couple of spoons. Taking the lid off the pot uncovered the presence of the soup, about two servings. I wiped off one spoon, sat on a vacant bed and started eating. The soup was cold, but unmistakably of chicken. The girl protested from inside her bedsheet that she couldn't sleep with the light on. Turning it off, I threw the door open, because eating soup in complete dark is uncomfortable, so I had to finish it off in the dim illumination from the distant corridor lamp. Some delicious soup, I liked it, even though cold. Then I left.

"The less we love a woman,
The more she is turned on…"

Thus, I began to heal the wounds from the torturing love with medicinal visits to the fifth floor in the hostel. Sveta was simply created for that. Not very tall, of a boyish haircut, she had a slender body and generous breasts. She was good at anything, but her special dish was giving a blow job. Besides, Nature-Mommy endowed her with a valueless blissful gift: a mere touch to her nipples did make her go off for fucking crazily, whining, and there went you, in her wake, to boot.

In addition to psychological impediments formed by the Soviet school system, at times I rammed into unbending ideological dissonance with Eera. Like on that occasion when the institute Rectorate ordered a volunteer clean-up in the Count's Park. The girls of my course were raking the fallen leaves in great heaps, and Igor Recoon and I set them on fire.

After translating The Jaws, I knew that burning leaves in the open was a crime against the planet's atmosphere; there was a short passage in the book on that particular point. But could you prove anything to anyone? "Sehrguey, don't put on airs! Everyone does it. We're not in America.”

When in Rome do as Romans do. The Count's Park got drowned in the thick white smoke and we dispersed… Bypassing the Old Building, I saw a girl in sportswear and liked her from afar. I didn't even know why she attracted me so much. Well, the wide white kerchief with big black spots around her neck, that's for one, but certainly not only because of that; and not for the sneakers. I came closer – what the f-f.. damn! – but that's Eera herself!. And, way too deeply moved by the pleasant surprise, I blurted at once about my falling in love with her again a moment before.

"You did not known it was me but fell in love?"