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

But even those, at the moment of wrong-doing, were simply order-executing tools. Whose orders? Who were they toiling for? Well, if I had the answer to that question, would I be still living here, eh?

One thing is clear, though. Between the tool engaged at the operation end and the don of mafia there lies a chain of several links making the "who" practically untraceable. Because, if we paraphrase the favorite expression of my Uncle Vadik, which he picked at the history classes in School 13:

"a zombie of my zombie is not my zombie"…)

Hearing your heartrending cry from the bedroom, I rushed there and was just in time. You were wriggling in the carriage under the open leaf in the window, and your grandmother, drooping over you, went on with her incantation, "Little angel! Little angel!" While you were getting torn apart in screams.

"Gaina Mikhailovna! She's not an angel but a girl!"

In her responding glance, there glinted the malice from the one who had sent her, but lacking arguments to refute my statement, she silently left.

I knew for sure that prevailing upon a baby whose infirm psyche hasn't got adequate training, who, as of yet, too feebly orients herself in the world, was wrong, especially persuading her that she was an angel. And more so under the window open widely! Like, inviting – fly to where it's nice, where angels like you frisk and flutter around happily!

I started to convince you that you were a girl named Lille and nothing of an angel at all. You still kept crying but not so desperate as before when the soul was being wrenched in efforts to escape the mortal body.

Yet, what was the matter? I put you onto the bed and unwrapped the swaddle; you cried on, arching your infant torso… The reason was found in the soles of the tiny feet both wearing the stretches of whitish arachnoid fiber like those rascal-marking fluffs on my camel's-hair coat. I rinsed them off. Blinking your blue eyes in surprise, you calmed down. I swaddled you back again and took over to the carriage where you peacefully fell asleep…

Ironing your swaddles was my responsibility so that I would keep everything under control, watched closely. And it was also me to hang them, after washing, out over the common linen ropes in the apartment-block yard.

The ropes ran from the central pillar like spokes from a wheel hub. It’s where I learned that I had allies in this world because alone I would hardly solve the problem of hanging swaddles the right way. I mean it, really, which way to put them on the rope – face down or back down? I put the first one this way, the second upside-down. And that very moment, a white dove came from above, lit on the central pillar and cooed in protest.

Aha! Thank you, friend! I'll keep to the instruction!

Since then I was hanging a whole load of swaddles homogeneously…

Zhomnir suddenly lost all of his interest in my translations from Maugham. He cut off his usual cheerful threats to take them one of these days to "matchmaking" in Kiev. Instead of encouragements, there came languid explanations that it was necessary to take into account the ongoing changes in conjuncture. That the following year there would be the centenary of another English writer. Translations from that one would be much easier to shove thru. And Maugham, actually, was a gay person…

Well, let's say, rendering the story about a young suicide pianist, I was able to figure out his orientation by myself. However, in what gutter would this here best of the worlds be today without the gay composer Tchaikovsky? Either Maugham or nothing!

Alexander Vasilyevich shrugged his shoulders…

In the living room at Red Partisans in the presence of Gaina Mikhailovna, I complained to Eera about Zhomnir's double-dealing. They both knew about my ambiguous ambitions to become a literary translator. Eera started pathetic exclamations while my mother-in-law, without any comment, went out to Tonya's bedroom and returned with a powder box. She opened it, powdered her face in front of the mirror in the wardrobe door, and took it back in the same tacit manner. That's all.

In the evening, Zhomnir rang the doorbell and invited me to go out with him into the yard. His bicycle leaned against the house wall by the staircase-entrance. Under the dark foliage of the thick Cherry crowns behind the common linen ropes, twilight was already gathering and creeping towards the hung laundries. From the neighboring apartment block sounded The Eagles' Hotel California:

"Warm smell of colitas rising up in the air…"

I did not know at that time what a tragically creepy end the song had, and simply was getting on high from the concluding guitar break…

Zhomnir obviously envied the atmosphere around, but then he started to talk business. As it stood, my translations had ceased to be mere scribbling, yet still remained in a ballpark, kinda a beta version. He did not insist on changing the author, but let them be upgraded to the alpha…

He left, and I respectfully admired the skills of the old school. With all their ignorance about the textual formatting of the world, and with the naive belief in bewitching thru the cooked sausage, yet just a single powdering was enough to overpower Zhomnir and seize him by the gills! Well done, mother-in-law!.

Apart from the baby’s security considerations, the swaddle ironing was needed to pass the time… Eera, as a mother with a newborn, was exempt from working off for her diploma. I got an appointment somewhere in the Transcarpathia. The exacter location was not of much concern to me because I did not plan to work at school in any place at any time. So, Gaina Mikhailovna (since I was so brave) came up with an idea to follow the example of Komsomol members from the earlier generations who recklessly went to erect new cities that were not yet on the map. And, by the way, there was an article in the newspaper that nearby Odessa they started to build a new city-port of Yuzhny…

It was decided that I would go there as soon as you became one month old because it was still not easy for Eera to keep you single-handed. Thus, I was whiling away the pre-launch month with the swaddles and walking the carriage, where you were sleeping in. Only I had to keep to the strict instructions and never-never move the tulle cover fixed on the raised top to screen the baby inside. And after the month expired, and you passed your medical examination, the tulle could be removed and substituted with a traditional safety pin for keeping safe from evil eye…

My brother Sasha came on a visit from Konotop, and you had your debut visit to the Count's Park. Eera and Slavic joined us also. By the park lake, Slavic and I sparked a joint but my brother never blew jive.

We returned thru the narrow gate by the building of the Musical Pedagogical Department. The gate’s jambs were connected with an iron strip welded some 10 inches above the ground, like a stile impeding the passage of the carriage. I, in spacey sluggish manner, asked Slavic for help to move the carriage over, but no sooner had he reached out for its handle than Sasha barked brutally at him, "Get off with you!"

Slavic coweredly obeyed, and you were carried over the stile by me and Sasha. I felt pleased and proud to have such a brother, and also glad that you had such sort of an uncle who wouldn’t leave his niece to Slavic…

Your next appearance to the Park took place on the arrival of Eera's brother from Kiev. Igor came together with his wife who kept chewing his ear all the time while he, in a soft good-natured manner, smoothed away the spiky wrinkles she turned out of nothing. I thought then it might be because of her PMS but later I learned that she had that PMS for life, without a break.

During the walk, she kept flinging her umbrella open every other minute, and then the rain started to drizzle. When she did it for the dozenth time, Eera also got it about the cause and effect and asked her sister-in-law not to open the umbrella anymore. Igor's wife was happy to be noticed and appreciated, she left the umbrella alone and on our way back there was no rain…

In his family, Ivan Alexeyevich enjoyed the handle of Prince, and he was pleased with it. A natural reaction of a peasant son to getting such a title. And he looked princely too, especially when, well-nourished and imposing, he sat in a white tank top and blue sportswear pants next to a newspaper, wide open in his hands. So the handle was, like, a compliment to tickle his pride, and he certainly deserved it because he was a getter.

In the era of deficits not only wedding suits were hard to be acquired but different other types of products too. So getters was getting them… Once my father-in-law even fetched and dropped in the kitchen a whole sack of buckwheat, by the central heating battery beneath the windowsill.

In the corner to the left from the window, there was installed the gas stove, the titan for water boiling occupied the right corner, so that sack of buckwheat filled the center completing the composition to advantage. And that was a righteous lump of pride too, because other folks had to go for a special trip to Moscow to buy that product, and suddenly in a kitchen of provincial Nezhyn a whole sack of buckwheat!

(…same sort of pride that some people get from a hunting trophy, like a pair of tusks, a sword sawed off a fish, or such thick branching…well, ahem…which, in general, can also be fixed in the wall…)

Okay, getter, if so is your disposition, then tickle your pride for a week, let's say two, or even a month bypassing that f-f..er..I mean, fabulous sack in the kitchen, but it had stuck there already for so long that even the mother-in-law started to grumble just to receive his usual response, "A? Well, yes…" before he buried himself back in the newspaper…

But then in the messy pile of newspapers alongside the TV on the table, a certain headline caught my eye. I did not read the article itself but the headline suggested that there was some archaeological subject. The main thing, I liked the headline for some reason, so short and sweet and to the point. It somehow reminded me of the toilet room cut-outs' exhibition in the Hosty.

I picked the paper up and folded it in a certain way so that only the headline would stay in view. It was bedtime already but I still dropped to the kitchen for a second and with a caressing gesture—there even was some faggish tint to it—I put the newspaper on the sack of buckwheat. On the way out, I put the light off leaving behind in the darkness the sack headlined

The Prince's Tomb

I mean, as a son-in-law I was a regular SOB, yet the next morning the sack faded in the woodwork before my getting up…

The day before I was leaving to participate in erecting a new city, I went to Konotop to see Lenochka who was in the pioneer camp by the Seim. After she confirmed that I was her father, the caretaker of her platoon allowed us to go out of the campgrounds.

In the Pine forest, Lenochka picked up a long gray feather of an unknown bird, and I thrust it into her smooth hair where it stayed as if fixed.

(…Indians are no fools – such feathers make a person the part of the free wild world, establishing involvement, contact, and mutual tacit understanding…)

When we were coming back to the camp civilization, a gust of wind ran up from behind and softly took the feather out of her hair to drop it down onto the thick carpet of old Pine needles on the ground. She did not even notice it.

~

~

The Parade of Planets

On the Day D, aka my departure day, everything hung on a thread, more precisely, on a single cobweb fiber. I got it at once on entering the staircase-entrance vestibule to spark a joint because I never smoked in the apartment, not even vanilla cigarettes. The cobweb thread hung from the upper crossbar in the cracked entrance-door frame, stretched tautly downward by the weight of a burned match dangling from its end… How long could it last?.

It was I, who always stuffed burned matches up in the gap between the frame-top and the whitewashed plaster on the wall because there was no trash bin in the staircase-entrance vestibule. After Tonya's toddler son had exposed my connection to cannabis, I did not care what might be sniffed out by the passers-by in the smoke I left in the vestibule… Would the cobweb thread hold on until I get away?.

I looked from the sultry shade in the staircase-entrance out into the yard. A squadron of black ravens coasted lowly thru the heat-melted sky. Heading north-east, they did not move their wings—made all too reluctant even for the slightest effort—the feathers at their wing-tips stuck out kinda rigid spikes harrowing the hot breeze… Could I get thru?.

Eera was seeing me to the station. When we started for the bus stop, from a balcony in the neighboring five-story block Alla Pugacheva sobbed up after me in her latest hit:

"Please, come back for at least a day!.."