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

Ivan and Gaina, among many other sons and daughters of the Soviet land, were brought to a French port city, where, by the way, they met each other, and were taken to Leningrad by a steamboat. The fate favored them because the overwhelming majority of the Soviet war prisoners were taken to the East by trains. On the border with the USSR, where the railway track gauge gets different, they were walked to the awaiting echelons of freight cars and brought, over the vast expanses of our Homeland, to the camps of Gulag in Siberia and the Far North.

What for? Just in case. So that their memories of what they had seen in German captivity would not spoil the picture carefully engineered in the brainwashed minds and collective memory of the Soviet people.

"Nothing is forgotten, nor anyone…"

Provided that the unforgotten matter had undergone retouching corrections by the censorship… Even I, a chump brought up on vivid examples from Soviet literature and cinema masterpieces, lost plenty of stereotypes when I got accidentally exposed to my mother-in-law’s talking on the phone to her friend, who also passed the inferno of the German captivity.

"…and do you remember how on February 23 we bought champagne and went to congratulate our pilots?.."

Ta-dah! It turns out that on the Day of Soviet Army and Navy not only secret agent Stirlitz was using alcohol in the fascist Germany, but the captured Soviet aces as well…

In Leningrad, Ivan and Gaina arranged for their marriage and directly enlisted to work in one of the Soviet Central Asian republics. That was a wise move. The subsequent purges and combing for former prisoners of war, and other citizens who had seen a non-Soviet way of life, did not reach them out there. In the Soviet camps, they would not have to eat sunflower seeds. Our camp system, aka Zona, is the most human in the world and it does not protract your sufferings with humiliating prizes for sports achievements…

After the central press announced the elimination of the consequences of the cult of Stalin's personality, they moved to Ukraine and settled in the countryside, just in case, and from there they rose to Nezhyn.

(…once my father tried to explain to me that the progress of life is going on in a spiral. I did not understand him, even though his index finger drew circles in the air to assist the grasping…

The fate of Ivan Alexeyevich can serve as an argument in favor of that theory. In our life, we walk in a circle of the same events, but they, because of the spiral-like proceeding of life, acquire new aspects and details, so we don't recognize them when they are repeating themselves, we just move by and on, and farther.

I do not know whether my father-in-law had ever been drawing any parallels between the seeds he won in the 100-meter dash and his position at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant. In both cases, it's grain disposal. But then, what would he need such a Geometry for?.)

Before stuffing a joint in front of the pier-mirror loaded upon the table in the bedroom, I, first of all, switched off the radio. The rare seeds dropping on the table top from the dried-up cannabis heads were shoved into the hip-pocket of my jeans. The Ryazan-peasantry layer in my genes balked at riddance of them right away which proved to be an unnecessary atavism because sowed at springtime in the Count's Park they didn't grow up…

In the fourth year of study I became an almost exemplary student, my classes attendance increased enormously. I couldn't bear staying in the apartment when Eera went to the institute… At the lectures, I submerged into the endless story of Joseph and his Brothers. It became deeper and more palpable, sort of a bass-relief of tranquil streamflow, in the wake of a joint smoked in the restroom during the break.

Under the unbearably long ding-donging final bell, I went down to the side hall on the first floor filled with the students' coats on pegs along its walls and helped Eera into hers. Then among the strident hullabaloo of donning students, I looked for a tiny piece of white fuzz on my coat, and took it off; only after that inspection, I put my coat on and we started home.

That white thread of arachnid yarn appeared on the gray fabric of my coat each time after I had a joint at the educational institution. Yes, in place of the sheepskin coat I wore a demi-saison camel coat bought from Alyosha Ocheret when he was in his final year. I did not share my discovery of the fluff phenomenon with anyone, but for myself dubbed it "God's marking a rascal"… Sometimes, to check it experimentally, I refrained from a joint at the break, and then the fluffy piece did not appear. That’s why, before putting my coat on, I checked it searching for the white mark. It never skipped its duty…

My love for Eera grew ever deeper. Sometimes she asked me not to gaze at her so steadily, especially in public, but I still hoped to stop the fluid moment.

"He gazed at her the way a dog regards a crystal vase,
the stare was answered by a look of crystal vase considering a dog…"

Occasionally, we visited the hostel for a pool at Preferans. Because of Eera’s being in the family way, we did not smoke while playing; only Twoic at times, with an air of a schooled hussar cadet, asked her for kind permission and smoked to the envy of me and Slavic… And Eera, sitting with absent air on a bed by the window, would finely jag with scissors a Belomor-Canal cigarette taken from me…

She did not make a secret of her pregnancy, and still in the second month ordered from Lyalka's mother an elegant loosely fitting sarafan-shift of brown broadcloth.

Once, already in springtime, she left the hostel first, while I was tarrying in the lobby with Twoic. When I went out on the porch, Eera stood near the corner of the building in a quarrel with a student of the Biology Department drooping from a window on the second floor. Unfit to grasp the meaning of the sarafan, the dunce of a sophomore tried to pick up an unknown beauty. I demanded of him an apology to the lady but received an insolent refusal.

While I was climbing up the staircase, Twoic joined me but there were three more guys in the room. There followed a muddled battle with varying success and steady reinforcements to the inmates arriving from the neighboring rooms. I recollect a moment in the scrimmage with me standing on someone's bed while one of the opponents kept his stupid mug in front of my shoe toes begging for a kick, but I restrained myself because he wanted it too openly.

Pretty soon, I was overpowered and leveled with the floor, immobilized by the weight of 3 adversaries, yet hearing that somewhere in the corner, Twoic was still fending off the outnumbering enemy forces. And then the door flew open – Eera stood on the doorsill with a wooden ruler in her hands and issued a shrill cry, "I'll stab them all!"

I was so impressed by the absurdity of the situation—Eera's pirate warcry, that unknown ruler in her hands, and you in her belly—that I laughed. All the present followed my example.

It is not possible to fight in earnest with whom you've laughed along right now. I was helped to get up and we left…

~ ~ ~

Being unfit to immobilize the flowing moment, I had to change priorities. My task became to protect her; protect from the babel turmoil in the crowd of students putting their coats on; from the insidious viper bites of her begrudging bosom girlfriends with their snaky forked tongues, "Hi! You do look ugly today!" To guard against her fears of the things to come – they said, the paramedic Kerdun in the maternity hospital was so cruel, every woman in labor was complaining of her afterward. And protect from so incomprehensible but negative Rh factor in Eera herself…

Protecting from all the world, ready to attack at any moment from where you do not expect, calls for being alert; so, I kept low and was on a constant look-out. That position led to my alienation from the hostel, from the course-mates, from the institute. Only with Zhomnir I still kept in touch. He was the scientific supervisor to my term work The Means of Irony in 'The Judgment Seat' Story by W. S. Maugham. Besides, I needed him as a means to stake off some place for me with Eera in this hostile world. He promised to take my translations for a "matchmaking" to one of the publishing houses in Kiev, where he had connections. But it had to be a collection of 20 to 25 stories in Ukrainian… So, I kept visiting his place, and he was saying in jest that his wife, Maria Antonovna, fell in love with me.

The 2 of them lived in a three-room apartment on the fifth floor in an apartment block of those along Shevchenko Street, because their children had already come of age and separated. The sons moved to Russia, and the daughter lived in Nezhyn at her husband's.

The Zhomnirs used only 2 rooms for living, the third one Alexander Vasilyevich turned into an archival study furnished with a desk, a chair, and stacks of shelves, up to the ceiling, made of mighty planking and filled with a welter of cardboard folders, books, magazines, and paper sheets, and all that stuff splashed out and piled in heaps even on the sill of the naked curtain-less window, the only one in the room… I liked it.

And I also liked Eera's story about the Zhomnir's inhuman behavior… His family lived then in the same apartment block with Eera's parents and, at renovating his flat, he divided the floor area by the number of his family members, painted his share, placed the brush in a jar with water, wished the labor successes to the rest of the family, and washed his hands…

His wife, Maria Antonovna, a noiseless woman with her hair gray to radiant whiteness, presented me with a book of poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva and made me fall in love with her poems. Before that, I believed that poetesses were only good at lace weaving, which is adding frills to rhymed lines. Marina was not like that, she knew how to rape words, when necessary.

I remembered her poetry in the local train vestibule, coming from Konotop because I remained an itinerant passenger although not every week as earlier. I felt it my duty to Lenochka; she always was a good child and I even loved her in my own way. It's only that I was never good at playing and lisping with kids and grew bored in less than 10 minutes… In the car vestibule, I had a smoke and then, all of a sudden, started to feel the lapel of my camel-hair coat. I didn't know why.

As it turned out, a long tailor's needle was hidden in the lapel corner, stuck entirely in between the fabric layers. Getting the needle out was a mighty hard job. Everything repeated itself with the second lapel.

(…a stabbed-in needle exactly as in that early poem by Tsvetaeva…)

I threw the needles out thru the slots above the glass panes in the doors of the electric train rumbling along to Nezhyn. Where did they come from? Stuck by the jealous mother like in that poem? Or bought together with the coat from Alyosha? And (most perplexing) what made me find them?

(…there's still a lot of questions that I will never find answers to. Never…)

My visits to the Zhomnirs disturbed my mother-in-law. Her main concern and worry were if they ever treated me to cooked sausage there. Apparently, she was afraid that such sausage could manipulate a person, making a zombie of them like in the "The Matrix" movie, produced by Hollywood some thirty years later.

She didn't know that I was from a new generation of robots being zombied and formatted thru printed text. And how would you like, Gaina Mikhailovna, that Zhomnir fed me a book by Hesse, in whose prose one paragraph can flow for a page and a half?

(…the possibility to affect the mundane world putting to use the leverage of text-zombied me was more than once observed and experienced personally.

Like, in the toilet of in-laws' apartment, I find At the Steer Wheel magazine cut up for convenient hygienic use. Sitting on the potty, I read scraps of an article about big Soviet trucks. Then I leave for the institute, get round the corner of the block and get appalled! There is no way to cross Red Partisans Street because of the growling stream of KAMAZ's and BELAZ's. They are rolling in hosts!

Of course, later they tried to put me off the track by irrelevant fibs of repair works on the Moscow highway and detouring of the traffic thru Nezhyn.

So, they waited with their repair until I found the time to read a cutting from At the Steer Wheel?.)

My relations with Gaina Mikhailovna fell into the traditional "son-in-law vs. mother-in-law" pattern exactly, maybe, in part refracted by the intellectual level of the participants to the template… At first, we got along in just a bright and sunny manner, but after a week or so, she suddenly began to fasten up the collar of her dressing gown with a big safety pin. The robe was for home wear with a deep cut, but I did not even notice it until that pin popped up.

The outfit transformation robbed me of the blissful unawareness, because between that pin and the first button under the cut there formed a gap, and any gaping would, naturally, catch your eye. I did not ask her previous son-in-law (Tonya's husband, Ivan, from the other bedroom) if he had observed the like symptoms before my coming to our parents-in-law's, and with what frequency. I just had to put under control the direction of my glances. Although, what was there to see? The woman had gone seedy long before…

Once, we happened to be alone in the whole apartment, just she and I. It was getting dark outside the window. She was standing with her hands behind her back leaned against the big mirror in the wardrobe door, and telling me, seated on the folding coach-bed folded up because of the daytime, how she was being carried away to Germany in a freight-train car crammed with lots of young girls.

Clattering its iron wheels at the rail joints, the car was jostling its live load in abrupt sways. Everyone was frightened by the uncertainty of what would happen next, and they felt very thirsty. Some of the girls were crying…

The train stopped in the field. The guards threw open the doors of the cars and shouted something, but she did not know German then. In a nearby hollow there ran a stream; the guards told with their gestures they were allowed to approach the water.

They happily rushed to the stream, drank and washed their faces. Suddenly there were shouts and sharp reports of a machine gun round – one of the girls had attempted to run away and was killed.

Back to the cars they were all passed by the dead. The killed girl lay on her back with her eyes open and looked so beautiful… Dusk thickened in the room, Gaina Mikhailovna stood with her palms pressed to the surface of the mirror faded away behind her, her head drooping over the killed beauty. Now she was there and felt herself that young mournful Gaina.