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

So, they yanked me off the bench into their tight circle and warped out of the dance-floor, and they at once went back to the general sorting out in progress. On that day the blades from Depot Street attempted at staking off the Loony as their sovereign turf.

At the park exit, I met my brother with his brow broken. We had to go to the Station for him to wash the blood off under the tap in the men's room…

To mark the most obvious things is the hardest of tricks. I had been raiding weed plantations as far as the Kandeebynno itself, while in the neighbor's garden, right over the fence splitting our plots, there grew a dense coppice of cannabis. That's what a limited outlook means. I was looking into the distance and couldn't see under my very nose. The situation called for the restoration of historical justice which I did at night and, to cover the tracks, heaved the weed looted from the neighbor's garden over his fence to the next lane, and from there back, round the corner, to our wicket and up to the attic in the shed… The quality of tested samples was simply excellent. I shared some part of the booty with Lyalka for him to get on high, and feel that not for nothing he was warming me up in those two years…

You strike a lode and there comes another. In Nezhyn, in the plot by an inconspicuous khutta in the Count's Park, right across the road from the Leninist Komsomol cinema, there stood 5 ample bushes of weed without any fencing whatsoever. No saint would pass by and withstand the temptation…

But then there arose a serious problem: how to store the abundant harvest? To keep it under the bed in the Hosty?. Very funny, indeed.

I walked around all of the hostel looking for a suitable nook but in vain. And then in the washroom on the fourth floor, I saw a desk with a drawer. I did not know how came it was there, or for how long it would tarry in the washroom, but being desperately pressed for finding any storage place (I couldn't just leave the weed in the park with the rains setting in, couldn't I?) I just dumped it in the drawer. As a precaution measure, I turned the desk and pushed it with its drawer close to the wall, so that no one would horse around. Then, as necessary, I was visiting the washroom to pinch off a few heads for the current consumption…

From the patronized collective farm, my course-mates returned in a state of complete shock, dumbfounded, all lost in the deep contemplation about life's purpose, meaning, and requirements. That is, was or was not their former understanding of and approach to those concepts correct? As it turned out, during their patronage assistance 2 of local guys there had a knife fight. Because of whom? Because of Tanya who was studying at my group.

A year before, those ruthless bitches of my course-mates asked me to pretend I fell in love with her. Just for fun, because she was most inarticulate and unattractive. And I—the stupid moose—was quick to execute what asked. "Tanya! I love you with all of the depth! And what is your shared feeling?" For 2 days I pestered her at the breaks until she asked to leave her alone. It looked like she was going to cry, I got ashamed and shut up.

Well, now, how do you like it, ladies? Who was chosen by the guys as the prize for their berserk passion? That's why the girls were now following her with furtive looks of envy and respect. And she walked the corridors with pensive pride as if she got it something about herself which she had never expected. And her glances at me became not as negating as they used to be. What if I had not been just sporting last year? Thank you, dagger guys, for the alibi…

But I still was worried about the cannabis stored in so inappropriate manner. A desk drawer in the washroom was anything but the right place for it. Any block with elementary literacy level on the subject would inevitably get attracted by its poignantly alluring fragrance and deduct the source of the whiff because the desk somehow did not belong among the tiled bare walls and sinks of the washroom. Besides, the Phys-Math students might start to ask themselves unnecessary questions as to why I started to frequent the washroom on their floor.

So with the first snow in November, I took weed out for relocation to another place of storage. My plan was to hide it in the dormer on the Old Building roof because I noted a mighty welded ladder leading up there from behind the building…

Late in the evening, Slavic, Twoic, and Eera accompanied me to the Old Building backyard, like, the state commission at the launch of a manned spaceship from the Baikonur site.

I passed my overcoat and hat to Eera, thrust the package with weed under my shirt and started off… At the initial after-launch stages all went on in a standard mode. The ladder vibrations stayed within the safety gauge, it’s only that the iron rungs were icy cold making the lift endless. In the times of Gogol, they built the floors two-three times taller than presently.

At the point of entering the roof, there cropped up unforeseen problems. The ladder did not reach the roof itself, ending under the eaves. It was necessary to catch hold of the tinplate above the ladder and go over its jutting edge onto the roof. Of that moment I recollect the uncompromisingly dark night, in the surrounding void, there were just 3 of us – the tinplate, the darkness and I…

The roof itself was rather slippery, although not overly steep; I had to plant my steps onto the low ridges of seams between the sheet blocks. Getting to the dormer, I found its window sealed tightly with thick planks nailed from within. Thank you for your visit!.

On the way back, I suddenly slipped, when nearing the place where I had to get over the tinplate at the roof edge, yet I did not fall, but straightened up, gnashed my teeth and, addressing myself, spoke up to the darkness, "Tickling the public’s expectation, eh? You bitch!" Then I went down on all fours, dangled my legs over the roof edge and groped with my feet for the uppermost rung in the ladder.

Halfway down, I was caught up by the mortifying belated thought that the evaded dive from the roof wouldn't be as bad as crash-landing on someone from the commission in the launch-pad.

(…certain thoughts are better never to be thought at all…)

And again I kicked in a door. Remarkably, it was the same one though Ilya Lipes did not live in that room anymore. It was inhabited by the current fourth-year students and among them Vitya Kononevich, who imprudently borrowed from Zhora Ilchenko The Godfather, together with A Learner's Dictionary of Current English by Hornby, both imported from India.

How insignificant and trivial, at first glance, might seem the things eventually leading to a real jolt in the flow of life! Say, you ask Zhora to lend you The Godfather for a couple of weeks, and then you come to the hostel and see the door of your room kicked brutally in… By the way, this time no shaky fingers were observed, the skills of vital importance get formed surprisingly quickly. Probably, the fact that I was working not for Veerich but for myself had also its telling effect.

The Godfather, a novel by Mario Puzo was stolen not out of idle curiosity (would or wouldn't the action set my fingers a-shaking?), neither for upgrading my door-kicking skills, but just to translate it into Russian. The novel, as well as its author, happened to be rather thick, about 400 pages. With regard to the way of its acquisition, Konotop was a more suitable place for plunging into the translation work.

It took several months of intent labor efforts to render the book turned out at the Penguin Publishing House into a weighty pile of numbered thick notebooks filled with my handwriting, in ink of various hues of the blue. The whole bunch comprising The Godfather I passed to Lyalka and his wife Valentina for reading, of the subsequent movements and general fate thereof I am aware no more than of where swam and how fared the cannibal shark from The Jaws, also in my Russian handwriting.

In the course of the second translation, about halfway thru towards the completion, my father cooperated by sharing his critical remarks… It happened when working about the passage that described a party in the Hollywood club designed and equipped for the recreational activities of Hollywood movie stars, I experienced certain problems with the rendering of the American English collocation "blow job" into Russian. The descriptive variants seemed over-lengthy, while the shorter options looked outrageously obscene. When in labor pains, I tore another unsuccessful attempt at translation out from the notebook and shoved it into the kitchen stove to be used for kindling.

On coming from work, my father opened the cast-iron door to fill the stove firebox with wood, picked the crushed sheet of paper, smoothed it out and studied the lines before asking, "What fucking hooey is this?"

I did not object to his instant estimation for 2 reasons. Firstly, I knew that passages perceived in the form of printed text as eroticism did look vulgar porn when presented in handwriting. It suffices to recall the thin notebook with a handwritten story, circulating among the senior students at School 13, which contained a passage running as follows "…she threw her legs in fishnet lace up over his collar-bones…" It’s hard to say why, but those fishnet legs were immediately and inseparably associated by me with the Parisian Eiffel Tower. Some pretty uphill job it would be to have a sex (as well as to defend erotica) with the Eiffel Tower bestriding you. On the other hand, who knows how those same legs would sway me if met in the orderly line of typographic set. Appearances influence our judgments.

Secondly, I always respected the subtle literary instinct of my father. Thus, from the newspaper Trood, he read only the TV program and, with a fleeting glance at the rest of the headlines, announced his exhaustive conclusion, "Neither rhyme nor reason – kiss a flea in the brick." And he never mistook, crisp and to the point. Besides, he possessed some amazing linguistic ingenuity. Perhaps, because of his Ryazan roots; the land of Ryazan always lay at the crossroads of language contacts.

Well, for example: seated at the kitchen table, with his gray brows taunted strenuously above the plastic rim of his glasses, he's busy a-tinkering to insert some hooey into another one. I cracked along, between the table and the stove, from the door to the window only to take an abrupt turn back to the door. Without taking his eyes from the hooeys in his hands, the father inquires, "Why tyrtyrting?"

No dictionary would present an entry for the word, yet what a juicy verb it is! Brimming with immensely elastic plasticity! Its sound form alone will let you grasp with utmost precision the action's quintessence, as well as the tense inner state of the poor asshole all in a dither. And—most importantly—the word got born spontaneously, right now, while this fickle hooey doesn't want to enter into the other fucker.

"But could one keep back tyrtyrting when the treppa has pibzed already?!."

Both workpieces drop from his hands onto the table, the father gives me a hard look from over the black plastic rim of the glasses slid halfway down his nose, then he says, "pfui!"

And here lies, by the way, the exhaustive key to the muchly discussed "fathers-and-children" controversy – they reproduce their likes only to pooh-pooh or pfui-pfui when it's too late.

(…coming back to The Godfather…

Unfortunately, there remained no writers in the American literature – Pearson, Salinger, Pynchon and you're plumb at the list bottom. All the rest are scribbling away with their both eyes on selling their production to Hollywood, compilers of cartoon stories and soap opera dialogues.

No! I'm far from blaming them! Not me, not in the least. Basically, we all are like each other and differ in only how deep we manage to keep hidden our hunger to sell us individually. And though being nothing of a Christian, I cannot but admire Mr. J. Christ’s instruction, “Let him who never sinned trigger off the slaughter of the slut,” by which he wholesomely absolved the motley team of the human race for infinite millenniums to come.

Is there any alternative? Absolutely, yes, and it’s all contained in the approbation by which the writer rewards his own efforts in the self-appraisal, “Damn nice artifact! At times, it did amuse me and helped to kill twelve years of my stretch!” which surely won't keep your pot boiling. That’s why I’d better head back from so high a curve and once again pick up the literature for a subject.

Look at the Briton Maugham, the very first paragraph in a story by him is a chord, a fugue tuning up. In his first paragraph, among the surface details, he scatters nodules, which will develop and reach their prime in the following narrative and flow into the denouement containing a flutter of echoes from the first paragraph. That's real craftsmanship. Exactly what the Hollywood jacklegs are lacking. My father would say, "Pfui!"

Puzo is the role model from the same and for the same Hollywood writers. He was the first to get a six-figure sum of dollars for his creation, the accountancy pathfinder, yet his The Godfather suffers from the infirmity common to all the action bestsellers: while the protagonists fight for their survival in the unfavorable environment of hostile mafia clans, you can still read it, but with the start of the prize elephant distribution, that is methodical extermination of bad guys whose only slip was leaving a chance for the equally bad guys to outsmart them because of the author's biased sympathies, the interest dwindles rapidly and evaporates.

The same snafu as in the 19th song of The Odyssey, when the hero returns home from his wanderings and whacks the suitors of his wife, one by one, with aesthetic relishing of the details in what manner the assholes' brains were smashed or guts were ripped out. I couldn't finish reading the song even in a good Ukrainian translation, not because of being too squeamish but simply getting bored…)

~ ~ ~

I marked him a split-second sooner than he saw me. With our stares fused intently, we were nearing each other on the sidewalk by the Railroad Distance Trade-Union building. Both of us knew that only one would survive. Or no one.

With my lateral sight, I detected the rare figures of passers-by, freaked-out, careful to make room for the invisible line between him and me. Steadily, inexorably we kept making that line shorter. Step by step.

The dwindling distance rendered the forthcoming duel inescapably lethal. His hand darted to his right hip, but no sooner his palm touched the handle of his Smith & Wesson than my Colt erupted in a series of shots blended in a thundering staccato… If you are going to survive in Konotop, you have to be the first to draw.

His hands flapped up to clutch his bullet-riddled chest. In unsteady sway, he careened over the spiky line of the ruthlessly short-shorn bushes bordering the lawn upon which he would collapse the very next moment. I thrust my Colt back into the holster, he straightened up, and we embraced.

"Kuba!"

"Gray!"

The passers-by kept bypassing us along the sidewalk… Yes, that's him – Kuba. Grinning with the gold, that had replaced his teeth lost at the bar brawls in faraway ports of the oversea wanderings, but this was him – Kuba.

"How d’you?"

It's strange that everybody changes—they grow fat, they grow bald—but for your old friends. Fleeting eye contact works a miracle, you no longer see scars, or false teeth or any other distracting trifles. You see your friend Kuba with whom you have had bike rides to the Kandeebynno or the Seim, attended Children Sector, rode the "sausage" of a streetcar. It's just that now Kuba has what to tell about the life of seamen plowing the World Ocean…

We are sitting at Kuba's. His old folks are at work, but on the table, we have three eggs in the frying pan next to the three-liter glass-walled jar with transparent, lethally powerful, moonshine, in which the lemon peels float not yet below the half-jar. We drink, snack, and listen to the stories of Kuba the Seafarer.

…that time he was late after the vacation, or rather his boat had sailed away sooner than scheduled. So they assigned him to a self-propelled barge for about a month until some other suitable boat would turn up. The crew consisted of him alone, but he strictly kept the maritime regulations on the barge moored at the far wharf by the mouth of the river.