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

I was sorry for her, and I was sorry for the killed; I wanted to say or to do something only I did not know what I could say or do. So I got up from the folding coach-bed and silently clicked the switch. The light of the 3 electric bulbs under the ceiling smashed everything into spiky shards. Instead of the frightened girl Gaina, an elderly woman stood by the wardrobe with an absurd hole beneath her collar, and unforgiving glare from under a strand of her dyed hair. Who had asked me to bust the spell? Thus, I proved to be the standardly unacceptable bastard of a son-in-law…

In fact, I never felt any particular antagonism to the mother-in-law, yet I cannot help but note that your grandmother, at times, allowed her feelings to have the upper hand over her intellect… She was unswervingly anti-Semitic. Perhaps, the years spent in the well-to-do German family were telling on her attitude to them those Jews. Folks tend to imitate the sentiments of people around them. The former Dean of the English Department, Antonyouk (who lost the position because of his guerrilla pencil-raids against the names of Bliznuke and Gourevitch in the Whatman sheets on the wall) remained a hero in her eyes. She was indignant that there were Jews all around wherever you cast a look and resented her husband's indifference to her choler caused by the escalation of Zionism.

Sitting with a newspaper in front of his massive nose and, when it's completely forgotten what exactly had been told to him, he would wake up to give you a reply, "A? Well…yes, sure." And then again his nose would drowsily get buried in the paper. That's a supporter in life for you!

In her ardent struggle against Zionism, she even went to see a newly appointed Rector – to open his eyes to the crying shame of each and every institute's Department being seized by the proliferating tribes of Israel.

(…it's ridiculous to approach Rector of the NGPI, named Arvat, a Jew from Odessa, with complaints of Jewish domination at the Nezhyn institute.

“ Eine l?cherlich Wasserkunst!.”

Or how was it turned out by Rilke?..)

But life did not stand still, Eera's belly was growing with the waves from your knees and heels rolling over it. Rather firm heels you had at that time, my nose remembers that. And one day Eera in a scared tone of voice told me to call her mother… Gaina Mikhailovna entered the bedroom.

"What is it, Mummy?"

On the statuette-like smooth and impeccable skin beneath the already very large belly, there stretched shallow groovy marks.

"Tightening."

"Does it pass after the childbirth?"

Her mother lowered her head with a frown, but nothing was said…

~ ~ ~

The final examination session started but, instead of questions, they told Eera to give her Grade Book right away and entered their evaluation mark…

Late on the evening of June 14, Eera's water broke and we walked to the maternity hospital. They were surprised there that your mother came for childbirth on foot and took her to the prenatal ward, and then they brought her clothes out and passed to me. I took the clothes home and at once started back to where I left Eera, where I could no longer protect her.

About 200 meters before the maternity hospital, a bulky KAMAZ truck with switched off headlights loomed by the sidewalk. Only the triple ember-red beams atop its cab shimmered like blood-smeared scales in a dragon's crest. When I got nearer, KAMAZ suddenly sprang at me, shooting from the long puddle in the road a splash-mesh of dirty foam. I jumped up in time to make it miss… The foam-mesh croaked and died in hissing disappointment; I landed on the wet sidewalk.

Get lost, filthy dragon! Back to your lairs! There's no time for trifling with you, a more potent mission awaits me tonight.

The KAMAZ submissively roared away, heading towards Red Partisans Street…

In the waiting room, they told me the childbirth would take place in the morning and I walked outside. The maternity hospital comprised a long one-story building with the entrance from the butt wall. Near the middle of the sidewall, there stood a rounded gazebo constructed of iron pipes, it was wider than that at the construction battalion and without the pit in the center to receive cigarette butts.

I entered under its tin canopy, sat on the beams of the bench inscribed alongside the circumference of the cemented floor, and started to wait. I had nothing to do without Eera in the empty narrow bedroom of her parents' apartment.

A belated couple walked from the gate to the entrance of the maternity hospital; soon after the man went back to the gate alone. So, not only we were arriving on foot; probably, because such a day it was.

The full moon shone in all of its glory high above the hospital roof… I smoked a joint, and the moon turned into a distant exit from a long tunnel with pulsating walls.

The wide-open window of the delivery room looked straight at the gazebo. I figured out its purpose from the fine mosquito net which dimmed the light when they turned it on inside, and screams of a woman in labor broke out into the night. It was not Eera shouting, not her voice. Maybe, the one from the couple who came after us.

When the room got silent and the light turned off, I went to the waiting room. What if the voice sounds different at childbirth?. They told me it was not the time yet…

I never stuffed another joint; the one at the vigil start remained the only that night. When screams started anew, I recognized the dear voice – it was Eera!

After it was over and the light in the delivery room out, I came to the waiting room and they told me it was not the time yet and then sent me to the window of the prenatal ward on the other side of the building. Eera raised herself to the windowsill and from under her half-dropped eyelids, she incredulously looked to see that I was still there. She told me to leave because the childbirth would be at nine.

Of course, she did not know that I was protecting her from this world with its KAMAZ-dragons and merciless paramedics. "Kerdun on the shift?"

"No."

I returned to the gazebo… There I sat squeezing in the cupped hands the quiver in my shoulders to ward off the chill of night…

In the murky predawn twilight, the circle of the gazebo floor was suddenly crossed by a strange dark ball pushing a white cylinder before itself. Only when it disappeared into the grass, I guessed that it was a hedgehog whose muzzle got stuck in an ice-cream paper cone.

The rays of invisible sun touched the white clouds high above; soon it wouldn't be so awfully cold. From the center in the gazebo roof, a fine thread of web plumbed down precipitated by the weight of a big spider on its end. No sooner he touched the floor than the air space of the gazebo was cut thru by a sparrow flying in the direction marked by the muzzle-covered hedgehog. The spider followed them.

(…I can see signs, but—what a pity!—I cannot read them.

Spider, bird, hedgehog… The three Magi?..)

In the delivery room, someone started screaming again. When the screams died down, two women called me from behind the sheer veil of the mosquito net to come up. One of them held the baby in her uplifted hands; something was dangling between the tiny legs.

"Son!" I had time to think.

"Congratulations to your daughter!"

"Navel cord," corrected I myself…

The mother-in-law met me with a smile and congratulations, she had already called the maternity hospital on the phone.

Borrowing money from Tonya, I ran to the Bazaar. It was a serious banknote of 25 rubles, she hadn't smaller ones by her at the moment. I flounced about the Bazaar, buying up bouquets of roses; roses, I wanted only roses, nothing but roses. Until the blank click in the run out clip of 25 rubles.

Then I hurried back to the hospital embracing that bale of bouquets. The one-legged cripple, on his crutches by the five-story block of the mother-in-law, smiled at me happily – he knew where I was hurrying to.

The nurse at the maternity hospital had to call two more of her colleagues to help her to take the flowers from the waiting room to the inner corridor. Later, Eera told me that she was still lying then in that corridor on the gurney and they heaped the roses over the bedsheet covering her but not for too long because they had to take her to the wardroom where flowers were not allowed… Then nurses and midwives shared those bouquets to take them home; one bouquet went to the paramedic Kerdun who came on her shift in the morning. Who cares? The most important thing that you were born.

"…a million, a million, a million of scarlet roses…"

~ ~ ~

(…Egyptologists are still arguing why the beautiful female faces of sphinxes are endowed with those hanging beards…)

The explanation was demonstrated by Eera. Though, at first, she demonstrated you, from behind the windowpane. The white fabric tightly wrapped all around you except for the circle of the face with your eyes in an obstinate squint. The same fabric covered Eera's hair, and half of her face was hidden with a bandanna-wide mask, like by the bank robbers, only white. She took you away somewhere, and then returned to the window and said thru the glass, that your eyes were the bluest blue but that you were already asleep after feeding.

To say this, she untied the upper strings of the mask, leaving the lower ones in place and the released cloth hung under her chin.

(…a beautiful face and an odd beard under it! The sphinxes have just fed their cubs!

That's what the ancient Egyptians wanted to bring over…)

When back at the apartment on Red Partisans, I was struck by the horrific look of the door to our narrow bedroom. How could I not see earlier all that dirt and mud splashes, and that long single hair hanging from a mud clump stuck to the door at a half-meter up from the floor? I heated some water and washed the door on both sides and then the window frame too, from inside. When Tonya gave me the carriage of her children, so that you would have where to sleep, I washed it as well taking into the yard under the bedroom window. And there I realized that it was the right thing to do when from out the folds in the collapsible top I picked out a piece of dried baby’s cack. No, I did not say anything to anyone, no one had anything to do with it, that was a part of sorting it out between me and the world in our single combat…