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

Then I also began to doff but warned that I'd collect the semen into the test tube. She agreed. Probably, that her contraceptive coil protected not only from pregnancy but from gonorrhea as well. So I put the test tube on the nightstand by the radio, and we started off…

Thais of Athens treated Alexander the Great to some medicine so that they could have sex all night long. I cannot state that all that night with Maria I had an incessant erection. After another and another of her regular "More! A! Mo-re!" we caught a breath before to proceed anew because I couldn't cum until the grayish dawn twilight behind the window curtains got drowned in the broad morning light. (Was that delay effectuated by the presence of the test tube waiting a-gape on the nightstand? I don’t know, I am not an expert.)

At long last, I backed her passionate "More! I want it! A!" with my atonal grunts, and snatched out.

"No! No!" screamed she. "Into me!"

But it was too late, the attained-by-perserverence moment of concluding convulsions the dickhead shared to the rigid glass orifice in the open test tube. With the feel of duty done, I cum into and slammed it shut. Maria obviously did not like such a final, but so was the arrangement…

Perfectly happy with the accomplishment, I hurried to Dr. Grisha and proudly presented the moisture impounded (with so much a-do) within the tight glass walls.

He took off his doctor’s white smock, grabbed his large soft briefcase, and we left his office… On that day, his briefcase could be observed in different and wide apart points in the Nezhyn city, accompanied by the sensual roll of Dr. Grisha's buttocks on one side, and my gait of morose moose on the other. The test tube made the constant fourth to the company, keeping the still unchecked semen out of sight in the hip pocket of my jeans. It seemed that Grisha wanted to help in earnest. Only the day turned out to be such that venereal dispensary did not work, in some laboratory someone left for somewhere else, in another they had run out of something and so on.

About 2 in the afternoon, our harmonious foursome (Grisha, the briefcase, I and the tube) appeared for some reason at the station where we decided that it was enough because the symptoms matched all the same, without any needless checking.

I dropped the test tube into the gray tubular garbage urn located by the large white bust of Lenin nearby the payphone booth in its thick red-and-yellow paint coat, halfway between the station and the high platform for the local trains of Kiev destination.

Dumping the thing was kinda pity, like, we were not complete strangers anymore after going together thru all we had to since our first meeting, however, there was no good reason to keep it on any further…

I went to the Hosty and then returned to the station because the week was over and I needed to show up in Konotop so that my parents would not worry. There were still 10 minutes before the local train to Konotop and, all of a sudden, I was simply pulled to pay a visit to the bust of Lenin.

What I saw there literally dumbfounded me. From the wide circular orifice of the gray urn, a thick bunch of green pliant shoots was vigorously sticking up. I did not immediately get it that while I was away, they trimmed the bushes around the pedestal upholding the bust.

The local train pulled by and, crossing over the platform to the car, I gave the urn one last and proud glance – bushes or no bushes but that f-f..er..I mean, frivolous semen was full of real pep, by Jove! Of course, when abstracting from certain minor details…

Except for imparting a very vivid color to my urine, the Rifadin from Grisha had no other straight or side effects. Thanks to the capsules, I pissed with gleeful scarlet and, overcoming itching and burning, cursed my stupid rakishness with Lucy Mancini.

Maria treacherously washed her hands of me, like, being offended that I preferred some glass tube to her natural vase…

I got cured by Eera. She simply led me to an elderly woman in the barrack-like children hospital. The woman in white took me behind a screen in the corridor to hide from the looks of the queue. I downed my pants a little bit, stooped, got the bite of a shot in my buttock, and… And that's all! Nothing more was required. That’s how the summer came…

~ ~ ~

How did I spend the summer? Like any other decent, diligent, hardworking lad… First of all, I became a plant breeder. Among the beds of turned soil at the end of the garden at 13 Decemberists, there began to rise and boost the crisp growth of cannabis whose seeds provided the last year's loot from the neighbor. The term "bushes" did not seem right for the plants. They looked more like sprouting seedlings of young trees. And those trees were growing like one united family, rushing upwards, turning into a dense thicket, which, of course, called for thinning out by the selection culling.

From the street, that coppice was not visible, screened by the fruit trees, but nothing could evade the attentive neighbors. The neighbor on the right asked my mother about the purpose of the cultivated crop.

My mother replied, that hemp produced a lot of seeds (such small, round, oily looking, beads, you know) and at Bazaar the canary keepers were simply scrambling to get that perfect food for their feathered singers…

Oh, the ingenuity of maternal love! I'd hardly drive a fool of so subtle nature! Most likely, I'd give out some stuff about compresses and foot baths from varicose veins aggravated by salts deposition. And that would be a dangerous mistake because canary keeping was a rare sport in the Settlement when compared to the plenty of labor veterans with deteriorated health. Is it too hard to imagine an honored vet with a loving teenager relative, who’s ready to sacrifice half of his night repose and bring home a remedy to his Grandpa's ailing from a not too faraway plantation?. Okay, let's drop spooking ourselves with nightmares… Anyway, excessive advertising sometimes might damage the growth of business.

And, by the by, the question was asked by the wife of the robbed neighbor who, in addition to his pension, had also the job of a watchman in the nearby Track Machine Station, aka PMS.

(…and it's not my unseemliness that the organization's name in Russian, when abbreviated, coincides with that of Premenstrual Syndrome…)

I did not have much scruples about expropriating his cannabis because after the raid there was left enough to keep him up till the following season.

(…it's only now, in retrospect, I think of a possibility that he might have had his clients with canaries…)

By that time, it was several years since my mother left the KEMZ Plant and got a job in the RepBase pre-assembly unit. I gather it, they were checking the availability of helicopter spare parts there. Physically, her job was not exhausting and returning home after a day's work, she often shared news about what was going on in the collective comprising only females, except for the unit chief and his deputy.

At her workplace, her main function was that of a conflict-extinguisher, sort of, while at the periods of lull she played compliments. That is, after telling someone another of her pleasantries she scored herself a point.

(…it calls for a good self-schooling and close self-control not to get stuck in the repetition of what had been already used to please…)

Sometimes the chief of their unit would shake his head and say, "That's a cunning she-Jew for you! Found again how to lick!"

And my mother would joyously laugh in response, and she laughed at home retelling the compliment which brought her one more point…

My brother Sasha worked at the PMS in a team of repairers. They were in charge of replacing the ties in the railway tracks and ramming the gravel under them with a massive dildo-type hand-vibrator.

Our sister Natasha, while out of work, was taking my daughter Lenochka to the kindergarten and back…

To the request of my father, the personnel department at the RepBase let me have a temporary job, till end summer, at the construction shop floor there. With three permanent workmen, I was demolishing and building some walls within the RepBase grounds. The most straining part in the job was long waits before they brought mortar for us to start our work. There I earned a fig plus another fig and one more fig, but then the work was just to get seated and sit tight, or stand up and stand patiently. Anyway, the RepBase was fully satisfied with my masonry skills.

Having nothing better to do, I again grew a beard and the RepBase workforce handled me "Fidel Castro". My father liked it, maybe because he and Fidel were born in the same year. When run out of the smoke, I went to beg from my father. He was a locksmith at the shop floor with strict regulations about smoking, which only was allowed in specially designated places, like an open gazebo in the yard…

My father was respected on the shop floor for his golden hands and readiness to share the know-how… When coming across a bungler wasting both himself and the stuff to turn out a pitiful throwaway, you can quietly scoff to yourself and go away minding your business. Not so was my father’s ways, because of his intolerance to illiteracy.

With a painful wince in his face, he would stand by, as if made to watch some vulgar act of dicking around, then he'd come up, take the instrument from the dilettante’s hands and show how to go about that particular task, "See? It’s just a lead-pipe cinch, easier than boiling turnips!" That's why he was respected, and they did not take offense at his grumpy mutter, "Really have to do it askew? So they taught you, eh?"

The majority of the RepBase workers came there from the nearby village of Popovka, and too few of then trained in the "seminary". Popovka had integrated with the RepBase so closely that in the village you could come across fencing made of helicopter blades, discarded, of course. But the blade cinched up to the stake with a piece of wire looks ugly, and fixing it by a neat binding as suggested uncle Kolya was completely another kettle of fish…

In the unpaneled half-khutta at Decemberists 13, resided auntie Zeena, a lonely pensioner. She plaited her half-gray hair into stringy maiden braids and tied them together at the back of her head. On the porch at her door, for the most of the year, there also hung a yellow braid of dried onions forming a plaited circle. Auntie Zina did not interfere with the life of the yard and smiled at everyone. Each spring, following the directive of our father, my brother and I turned the dirt in her part of the garden… Once, she was very friendly with Olga, and secretly resented my role in our divorce, but she still kept smiling even at me…

There was enough living space in our brick-paneled half-khutta of three rooms and a kitchen plus veranda, apart from the summer room in the yard under one roof with the shed. Among the inhabitants of all that area, only five-year-old Lenochka was not smoking. The rest of us smoked Belomor-Canal for 22 kopecks, except for Natasha with her filtered Metropolitan for 40 kopecks. She once counted up that the total expenditure for cigarettes by the family was 25 to 30 rubles monthly…

The summer was over and before my first departure for the fourth course at the English Department, my mother asked if I would bring and introduce to her my Eera from Nezhyn. She knew about Eera from Natasha's report and subsequent questioning of me. And she had even seen Eera on the all-out photograph taken at the Borzna wedding. The picture was staged in the photo studio of the district center, where the guests and relatives of the newlyweds were standing in three rows on the long benches of descending height, behind the happy bride and groom in their chairs.

My mother asked me to show who from the multitude was Eera, and I answered, "Find for yourself." In the picture, I stood in the upper row on the right, surrounded by 3 girls, and Eera was in the diagonally opposite corner.

My mother's finger touched her face, "That's her?"

I felt that she, for some reason, would rather be mistaken, but I couldn't lie to my mother. "How d'you guess?"

"I don't know."

(…the first prosaic work in Ukrainian was The Witch of Konotop written by Kvitka-Osnovyanenko in 1833.

Ask whoever you choose, "Why?" and they will answer, "I don't know."…)

Therefore, in September following the serene summer of 1977, the meeting of your mother and grandmother took place at 13, Decemberists Street…

Of course, I had been bringing Eera to Konotop even before that and introduced her to the high life of the polite circle in local society. We visited Loony, where the demonstration gladiatorial performance was staged on the parquet in honor of her visit, I even had, just in case, to block her off with myself nearby the stage. Then Lyalka led us to his sidekick's who, in his treasure box made of a human skull, kept the high-quality Gimp’s weed, named so after its meritorious producer.

The sidekick lived on the fourth floor with his cat, whom he grabbed regularly to hurl against the wall or anything at all. Not everyone brings up their pets by unsystematic fondling. He shared that sometimes at night he got waked up by a gentle touch of her fangs at his Adam's apple. She did not spoil the throat skin though, just held it in a kinda soft reminder who was the midnight commander in the place they shared…

When we were about to leave, Eera discovered the loss of her gloves. The sidekick swore he had not seen any. Burning with shame, I began to speculate about the gloves being forgotten at Loony, yet Lyalka insisted on the search to go on until they were eventually spotted, behind the floor mirror in the hallway. Some cats are more cunning at theft than even such attested pilferers as magpies…