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

Deputy Director of the Nezhyn Bakery Plant.

However, the factor of your presence, even though not born yet, mitigated the caste prejudices which, by the way, had long since been abolished by the Soviet system. Still and all, even in the era of the developed socialism in our country, throughout our pre-wedding trip to Kiev, I had my anus impaled on the stake, a kinda admonishment for the cheeky pariah.

Kiev was needed to exchange the coupons from Nezhyn ZAGS for goods in the metropolitan bridal salons. True, the divorce-stamp in my passport nullified any discounts for a wedding ring for me, yet my sister Natasha promised to lend me the neat gold ring that she wore, for some odd reason, on her thumb. As for the stake, it was not seen from outside, but caused horrible pangs within the rectum and turned my gait into drag-and-shuffles of a semi-palsied old man or that of a young Cossack raider who was removed from the said impalement-stake after a slightly belated amnesty. "Mercy, Cossack-brothers! Finish me off!"

Poor Eera! Would any girl in her dearest girlish dreams ever dream of such a companion to a bridal salon?. Never! By no means! No and no, over again!

To me, the hellish torture suffered on that trip served the palpable reminder of the truth from Heraclitus: never enter the same river, for your ass' safety sake!.

Alas! The wisdom of the previous generations does not make us wiser until we (quoting the famous letter of Ukrainian Cossacks to the Sultan of Turkey) get seated on a hedgehog with the personal stark naked arse.

Nevertheless, in Kiev, the bride got rigged for the impending happy occasion, and I bought brown shoes made by the Dutch company "Topman". The footwear was a bit too loose, but the realities of the era of deficits taught us grabbing any chance bird at hand, and a month later the shoes become a fitting hand-me-downs to my father-in-law. That's for whose sake I was dragging that stake!.

Soon, I felt better and we started looking for a suit to dress the groom. We combed thru the department stores of major railway stations between Nezhyn and Kiev: Nosovka, Kobyzhchi, Bobrovitsa – to no avail. The suit was hunted down only in Chernigov, far from the electrified railroads, and it imparted quite a decent look to me.

A week before the wedding, I left the hostel and moved to the three-room apartment of Eera's parents… The eldest of their 4 children, Igor, was a Major of some sophisticated troops stationed in the city of Kiev. Victoria, their next child, lived in Chernigov and worked in the city museum there.

Then came Tonya, who graduated the NGPI and was sent to teach Russian language and literature to kiddies in a Transcarpathian village, where she met a local boy, Ivan, whose courting (in a simple and unpretentious style of a Bandera man) kindled reciprocative feelings in her… Unable to reach over the language barrier, he knocked on the door of the young teacher late in the evening and, when it opened, his shotgun was mutely pointed at her chest. Like, be mine or nobody else’s.

Ivan's brothers were in time to disarm him, but the depth of feelings in the romantic lover did impress Tonya, which her attitude deserved her a chance to survive among the superb views of the Transcarpathian nature. She married him, gave birth to a pair of lovely children, returned to Nezhyn and, together with her entire young family, lived in one of the narrow bedrooms in the three-room apartment of her parents.

For their night rest, the parents enjoyed the folding coach-bed by the wall in the living room which also served a passage to both bedrooms. Opposite to that blind wall, there was a wide window behind a tulle curtain separating the windowsill occupied by a couple of neglected aloe flowerpots from the abutting table with the TV box on its top.

The curtain also veiled the backs of the chairs squeezed in between the table and the windowsill so that the chairs pushed under the tabletop would not take up space until needed. The chairs had plush-covered seats and they were from the same set with the table which, if you removed off it the electric iron, the messy pile of central newspapers, the TV, and the checkered oilcloth, presented its dark glossy varnish and could be folded out for a celebration feast.

When there was no festivity, those chairs from the set that found no place under the folded-back table were put in the corners of the living room, draped with the clothes for household wear and keeping heaps of those same newspapers, and all sorts of whatnots dumped upon their seats to keep them out of the way for a minute or two and forgotten there for a couple of months.

Besides all that, the living room also contained a wardrobe with a big mirror in its door, and a varnished hutch whose front was of two sliding glass-sheets protecting from the dust two shelves of crockery inside. Upon the hutch, there stood, lamely leaning its frame against the faded wallpaper, a repro of "The Unknown Beauty" by Kramskoy and scornfully observed from under her ostrich feather the dump around, including the "The Major's Matchmaking" repro fixed in the opposite wall.

There was no balcony in the apartment, thanks to its being situated on the first floor, but there was a boxroom niche in the tiny passage between the living room and the bedroom filled up with Tonya's family.

Eera and I were placed in the second, narrower, bedroom with a large plywood chiffonier from the times of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, and a veteran pier glass on a small table between the door and the windowsill. Along the wall with the carpet of almost the same pattern as in my parents', there stood the hand-me-down conjugal double bed for the soon-to-be newlyweds. It remained only to get married…

~ ~ ~

In the late evening before the bridal, Gaina Mikhailovna offered her services for ironing the trousers of my wedding suit, which task, in her opinion, she could do virtuously because in the years of the German occupation she, a young girl Gaina, was taken from a hinterland Ukrainian village and moved to Germany to work for more than two years as a "guest-worker" in a well-to-do German family by whom she became a past master in the above-mentioned art… Strange are the shuffle-and-deal ways of the knowledge deck, but it was how I learned that

Pants Are To Be Ironed On All Four Sides.

I clearly understood the rule and firmly kept to it all my life, but at that particular moment the unconquered spirit of a young pioneer partisan awoke in me, and I rejected the offer of my the-next-day-to-be mother-in-law. Like, it was not the first time for me to iron trousers thru a piece of moistened gauze… With the ironing accomplished, I hung the trousers over the back of a chair pushed under the table and went to bed.

In the morning I was awakened by Eera's sobs in the adjacent living room. Going out there, I traced back the grim silent glare of Gaina Mikhailovna to see an undeniably hot iron print on one of the trouser-legs hanging accurately from the back of the chair. Poor Eera!

The burnt spot, albeit blurred and lacking the clear-cut outline, discernibly changed the smoky shade of dark gray in the trousers’ fabric to something greenish. I could swear that nothing of the kind was there the night before, but the spot sat on one of the two sides I had applied the iron to. It cost me helluva efforts to persuade Eera not to cancel going to the ZAGS office – we had pulled thru too much of everything to make a U-turn at the last moment. I swore with the most solemn oath to hide the damaged part of my outfit into the folds of her long wedding dress.

Do brides have always to cry on the threshold to their wedding? Poor Eera!

Then there was a very long wait at the registry office, because the witness on the groom side, Slavic, that bitch of my best man, appeared only after my brother Sasha scribbled Slavic's name instead of him. Good news that they did not check witness' passports in ZAGS.

Yes, my brother and sister came from Konotop for the wedding and departed on the same day by the 17.15 local train.

So, at last, in all its glory arrived the dazzle of the breath-taking moment in the nuptials – the happy couple were suggested to exchange the wedding rings in a token of spousal love and loyalty. Softly glided the ring on the Eera's incomparable finger – the yellow of the gold over the alabaster white skin… And now, already not as a bride, but the accomplished wife, picked she my wedding ring from the white saucer to don it on my finger. On slid the ring, in moved my finger…my finger moved in…my f-f…finger moved…

Why that bitch of the ring from Natasha got stuck on my finger joint, I have no idea because at the preliminary tests it, like, was getting over. Under my breath, I promised my young wife that, okay, I'll stick it in later, and balled my hand into a fist to hide the under-donned ring.

"The wedding ring is not a frill… Oh, no!.
Not an empty decoration…"

Poor Eera!.

But what else could she do? The incipient maternal instinct balked at having to bear you without a daddy… The recollections of my meetings with the KGBist in that very ZAGS room as well as the awareness of the iron print on my pants’ leg made me keep my eyes shyly down, however, my brother Sasha on the pictures taken at the registry office looked very well, like a young Sicilian mafioso…

According to the long-established Nezhyn tradition, the newlyweds together with their witnesses (Slavic had already replaced Sasha) took a ride in a taxi. The taxi drove to the station to honk in the square in front of it (the traffic bridge over the railway tracks had been already completed) and proceeded to the city limit by the highway to Pryluky, where a bottle of champagne was burst open, after which we returned to 26, Red Partisans Street, Apartment 11.

The wedding party was a modest one – for the closest family inhabiting the apartment, plus the two best persons. The TV was temporarily exiled into the corner, the table spread out and cluttered with feasting treats and snacks, mostly of salad Olivier which Gaina Mikhailovna had chopped so finely and profusely, filling, in the preparation, half of an enamel washing basin.

And the drinks were fabulous too. Like those from the traditional refrain in the final lines of every other Russian fairy tale, "And I was at that wedding and drank the mead and beer…" subtracting "the mead", of course. Gaina Mikhailovna, like any other properly erudite woman, had since long gained the upper hand over her husband, bent him to her will and twisted around her little finger, using for the purpose the panicky males’ fear of a possible cuckoldry.

(…fall in with what your dear wife tells you, and be happy with two glasses of beer on a celebration day if you wanna miss yet that proud decoration of stags…)

Hence that beer and only beer on the wedding table… Tonya and Ivan took turns looking after their baby daughter in the bedroom, while their three-year-old son Igor was irremovably present at the table.

Then the baby was also brought to the living room, and the newlyweds together with their best persons replaced her in the vacated bedroom which, narrow as it was, still let the 4 of them dance under a cassette tape-recorder borrowed from the hostel…

When Eera and I retired to our bedroom for the nuptial first night, I turned on the transistor radio on the table under the pier mirror. The nocturnal sconce on the whitewashed wall at the foot of the bed created a flickering red twilight, like a feeble torch in the wall of medieval castle… The blanket was too thick and hot, and we threw it back, twining in the already legalized conjugal embraces. We were going on real groovy when the door to the bedroom flung open and my father-in-law stepped in to turn the radio off.

Surprised, I did not hide my nakedness, and only ceased the action. Eera also froze sitting… In the mute twinkling of the torch from the niche formed by the chiffonier in the corner, Ivan Alexeyevich, with his eyes cast down, left the bedroom. The prince of the three-room castle. How could I know it was too loud? He could just call out from their folding coach-bed. Okay, babe, let's have another take…

3 following days all the meals were of salad Olivier, but half of it went stale all the same. And who would doubt? No way to finish off such a heap without drinking.

That's how, in outline, people get united in misalliance marriages…

~~ ~

On the whole, I liked my father-in-law, and I forgave him the absence of a minimal kit of normal tools on the shelves in the boxroom niche, as well as his distrust in my ability to repair the electric iron, relic from the Stalinist epoch. Besides, when the three-year-old world-explorer Igor pulled a handful of cannabis seeds from the hip pocket in my jeans left in the bedroom, and scattered the find on a stool in the kitchen, my father-in-law did not aggravate the exposure with unnecessary questions though, in his position at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant, he understood the varieties of grain…

The son of a Bryansk mujik, he, as an 18-year-old recruit Ivan, got caught into the "Kharkov Meat Grinder", where the German Wehrmacht, waking up after the defeat near Moscow, proved that they knew their business by crushing several Soviet armies… Stunned by the power and shocked with the spectacle of the artillery mass execution, Ivan, in the endless crowds of tens of thousands of other survivors, was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.

At that time there was a tacit, unspoken of, agreement between the warring parties to reimburse each other thru banks in neutral countries for the cost of keeping prisoners of war. And only the Soviet Land remained aloof from that arrangement since every captured Red Army soldier was unquestionably considered a traitor to the Soviet Homeland. Hence the difference in the havvage for POWs of different nations.

To feed the prisoners from the Red Army at least somehow, occasional freight trains brought to the camps agricultural products looted from the occupied Soviet territories. Among other food brought to Ivan's camp by such an echelon, there were several burlap sacks of sunflower seeds. The German guards could not guess at the purpose of the arrived product not described in any of cookbooks. When the prisoners demonstrated how to use those seeds, rational Germans were still unable to understand that the final result (chewing of a scanty grain) was not as important as the process itself – gnawing and secreting the anticipatory saliva.

So those sacks just lay around, irrationally cluttering the storage room, until one of the guards figured out how to use the seeds. He organized a sports event: a 100-meter race for a packet of seeds as the award to the winner. Under the scream-and-shout of the guard-fans, the young and tall, although as skinny as the rest of the prisoners, Ivan ran first and received his prize. In the second race, he again was out of reach, but the guard said that he had enough already, and gave the seeds to the second to come. My father-in-law took offense and ceased to take part in the subsequent competitions, but he told me that those seeds were the most delicious in his life…

Sometimes the prisoners of war ran for 100 meters, sometimes they ran away from the camp. Then they were invariably caught, brought back and executed in front of all the other prisoners, which did not prevent the following escape attempts. Which is quite natural because sometimes there comes the feel that you don't care anymore and fuck it all. When such a moment rolled up to Ivan, he, taking into consideration the experience of previous fugitives, did not go east but turned west and, therefore, got to France.

For about 1 year a French farmer family hid him in a barn from German patrols, and when the coast was clear, he helped with the work at the farm. Once the three-year-old son of the farmer, not speaking yet any language, warned him with his gestures about the unexpected arrival of a patrol…

Then the Americans started up the Western front and liberated him. And they moved farther and farther until they brought freedom to the Ukrainian girl Gaina from her unpaid work for a well-to-do German family… When Stalin demanded from his allies to return all the Soviet citizens freed from German captivity, Americans did not argue.