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

Then the nurse customarily pierced the pad of my finger and squeezed it and, instead of the usual bead of blood, it gave out a tiny jet of it, no thicker than a needle, like milk sprinkling from the squeezed nipple of a breastfeeding woman. I had never seen such a thing in my life!

And not only I was surprised – the lady's jaw dropped and that, let's say, probe wanted to pop out too. Just like an alky who had outstretched a cup for a fill but they splashed a whole three-liter jar of hooch over it. What a loss of precious stuff!.

As for reaching to the blood with their fangs, that's just a grandma's fair-tale for sillies. To fill their tanks they use some subtle, inconspicuous and, even though not fully understood by me, yet quite efficient, technology…

The glassy-eyed of the blurry type, who attempted at utilizing me, was a Volga driver that brought his boss to the hostel. In the corridor, there also was a rarely opened office of the mining engineer, visited by those coming to arrange the transaction of taking cubics from the pit.

That day, as always, I came from the mine to hostel for the midday meal and was washing my hands at the washstand on stake, not far from the entrance.

The glassy-eyed did not know me because of being an outsider, and he kept sneakily closing in, holding in his hands the weapon – an artifact that looked like a length of aluminum wire twisted in a special way, about 20 centimeters long.

Noting that blurry glassiness in his filmed eyes and the cautious way of his slinking nearer, I realized that I was done. The distance shortened, yet the moment when he already could reach me with his thing, a gray kitten jumped out from the tall grass and rubbed his scruff against my black spetzovka pants. And at once the glassy-eyed stalker lost any interest in me, lowered his weapon and returned to the car. The unknown rescuer-kitten who I never—before or later—saw around, disappeared into the grass…

But more often I had to rely only on my own prudent circumspection. As on that narrow beach under the cliff of Chabanka.

I wanted to take a swim in the sea and had already entered the peaceful slow waves but stopped – two fishermen in swimming trunks with fishing rods in their hands stood ahead. Between them, there was enough space to swim forwards, but I realized that the rods were the barrier blocking the way to the sea. And only seizing the moment when they simultaneously pulled their fishing rods up, I plunged in and swam away from the beach.

I swam for a long time, sometimes laying on the water for rest and wondering why my father told me that seawater supports a swimmer because of the salt dissolved in it. It made no difference to lying on the freshwater… Then I swam on, mostly on my back, facing the warm bright sky, until I felt a dab at my shoulder.

I looked back and saw a jellyfish in the water, semi-transparent and as wide as a basin. I gave it way and went on ahead, but then I began to come across more and more jelly-fish – you bypassed one of them to just run into another. Popping up a bit out from the water, I looked forward and saw a whole shoal of them which had turned the calm sun-driven waves into some jellyfish soup crowded with their translucent bodies. I didn't get the nerve to breast that soup, I turned around and swam back to the already distant shore…

The shingle beach of Chabanka had some sandy stretches in it. On one of those spits, near the water's edge, I wanted to write "Eera" but the waves did not allow. They ran up and leveled the wet sand before I had time to write out all the letters, and I only scratched my finger to bleeding with the tiny shell fragments mixed with the sand, before I gave up…

But my first meeting with the sea was on the beach of New Dophinovka where I went after work, along the shore of the sea inlet that reached the hostel. The water in it was shallow and very transparent. I walked until saw some worn-out tires in the water, dropped there from the shore by some morons. So I took off my pants, went into the shallow water, and dragged the tires onshore, but after one more bend of the inlet, I saw there was an entire trash dump in it – life would not be enough to drag all that debris out, and it was evening already. Then there started a thicket of reeds stretching to the highway and along its opposite roadside there unfolded the wide vista of the sea and sea alone…

But if going to New Dophinovka by the country road, there sometimes were huge ships hovering in the sky. The ships, of course, stood in the sea which merged with the sky at the horizon, that’s why you saw a field with a ship above it and, still higher or next to its bow, the immense red ball of the setting sun. Those ships were so large that they, probably, do not fit in the harbor and had to stay right there in the sea-sky…

~ ~ ~

With Slavic Aksyanov, at first, I had normal relations, even though I saw that in his past life he served as a Nazi officer in a death camp while at present he was too keen on producing baloney sensations by hoopla talks. And I even helped him to saw boards for the family couch…

The distance from Chabanka to the mine was about two kilometers, approximately same as from New Dophinovka, but with no windbreak belt alongside the country road. And in the open fields, some arrogant flies always started to follow me, a whole swarm of them keeping buzzing around and never lagging behind. But I did not want to bring a "tail of a follower" after me and give out the location of the mine, so I found a nice way of putting them off the track.

Nearby the hostel there stood a long structure of a former cattle farm, which I began to use as the disinfection lock in a spaceship visiting unexplored planets. I entered the building from one end, with all the buzzing flies swarming around me, and marched to the exit at the other end. The whiff of the manure from once upon a time allured them; confusedly, they rushed in all directions in active search for fresher dung, while I walked out into the air, with the food bought in Chabanka and without a single buzzing follower behind my back…

Now, Slavic asked the foreman for permission to use some floorboards from the old farm and make a couch for himself and his wife because he was expecting the arrival of his mother-in-law. Then we went and pulled out the boards for the project; a rather decent material they were, only nailed way too deep, but there was a breaker by us.

With the material procured, we started to discuss the measurements of the planned furniture item. By that time, I had already had a certain, fully developed, numerological system in which the meaning of some individual figures was brought to a complete clarity, thus, for instance, 22 corresponded to "death", 24 to "wife", 10 to "sex", and so on, and all that remained there was just to combine their meaning the way called for by the situation. Minding the purpose of the product, I offered him the best solution for its length – 2 meters and 10 centimeters. Which read that 10 for 2 is the very thing for a young family. But he balked!

"I wanna have 2 meters and 30!"

Okay, you know better what you want… He schlepped a "goat"-trestle from somewhere, the kind used for sawing firewood, and we started. A board on the "goat", two marks with the tape measure and – off we go!

When we stopped to catch a breath, his wife, Lyouda, was passing by to the hostel entrance. Pointing at the "goat", she with unhidden disgust announced to Slavic, "Don't you hope, that I ever lie upon this thing!" Full of indignation, she went away and I got finally convinced that she was not a native to this world. What normal woman has never seen a "goat"?

Apart from that, she could read thoughts… I once entered their room, where Slavic was eating soup and watching television. I said I was not hungry, and sat by the door to wait for him to finish off his havvage. And in the corner behind his back there stood a refrigerator, with a stand-up mirror put atop of it face down. The mirror frame had a pair of plastic legs to keep it upright, when not in the supine position.

From the chair by the door which I was seated on, the puzzle collected into a coherent picture: Slavic, eating the TV with his stare, ladles the soup into himself, the two green legs sticking out of his hair in the form of curved horns, kinda lyre only without strings, of course. Then I thought to myself, that is, inside my mind, "So, you're not only a Nazi but a cuckold too!"

Lyouda read that thought, and went directly to the refrigerator, she turned the legs down and gave me an eloquent look. Like, we need none of your comments on the skeletons in our family cupboard!.

Well, in general, when Slavic fired up the shakedown flights on that aerodrome of a couch in their room, there cropped up some inconsistencies in the game. Three days later, he dragged it out of the hostel in the tall grass and shortened with a hacksaw. That’s what the trial and error method is about…

"What's he bungling at?" asked a Makhno bandit another when they were passing by.

"As if it's not clear. A machine-tool for fucking, what else?"

"A-aha!"

Well, what else is there to expect from mujiks? They just can't bring it over in a subtler way, blurt out as is, without numerological refinement…

And when his mother-in-law arrived, he started to have fits of frenzy. He visited my room and made faces. The purpose of that fleering was clear to me without any explanations – he wanted to drive me mad…

Once Ivan, the driver of Machine 1, called me to share a midday meal with him and his assistant in their shaft. His wife worked in the canteen of some military school in Odessa, where they also trained Negroes from the countries of awakened Africa. So those Afro-Africans were not too hungry after their sleep, judging by the amount of provision she brought home from there. When Ivan removed the lid from that aluminum pot, it was brimming with meat on ribs, without any garnish though. The 3 of us—Ivan, his assistant and I—hardly managed to finish off that hecatomb, leaving a pile of bared bones on the sand by the 5-liter pot. And then Slavic came up to borrow some spare part for his stone-cutting machine; on seeing that cannibal still-life, he distorted his mug in earnest, bitten by the recollection of everyday oats from his mother-in-law, most likely.

Maybe, that’s why several hours later, when the hostel residents were enjoying the coolness of late evening, he wanted to fight me. He even snatched one ingot from the gold stock in the tall grass, raised it with both hands over his head and hurled at me. The action resulted in a really beautiful sight – the full moon pouring its tender light onto the scintillating tracery of dashes in the arc-shaped trajectory chosen by the lobbed ingot for its flight, gleaming lazily with white, apparently aluminum, color against the velvety darkness of balmy night. (Or was I wrong, and the mine was mining platinum, after all?)

Now it was my turn to ran backward in the manner of Alik the Armenian. Slavic's wife, Lyouda, took him home from the arena of demonstration performances…

During my next visit to Odessa, I dropped to a legal consultation. I did not plan it at all, just their office sign caught my eye. Without leaking any names or geographical locations, I asked for a recommendation if pestered by a neighbor in the hostel.

"Turn to the Komsomol Committee of your enterprise."

Well, and those also were not of this world. They are already anywhere, see?!.

But if Supreme Head was Yakovlevich, then who, the heck, could the chief engineer be? It's not difficult to guess – who's Creator's antipode? Prince of Darkness and master of the impure, in all his glory.

That could be easily deducted even from their attitude toward each other – respectful, but armed, neutrality. I recollect them standing in the trunk tunnel and talking eye to eye – correctness itself! The foreman in his black spetzovka and the chief engineer in a summer shirt with a white handkerchief bent over its collar to keep the dust off. If there were a safari helmet on his head instead of the regular plastic one, it would be a ready picture "I'm the master here!" Although, of course, the depths under the ground are his domain.

(…you might protest here: how could be possible a contact between such antagonistic opposites? Do not forget – it was the twentieth century around, in its second half, when everything got so intertwined, confused and tangled that a simplistic Geometry could no longer help out…)

I assumed the stance of a foreman’s sympathizer. I took a liking to him just so, no proof demanded, like, bread’n’fish multiplication and stuff. In fact, his trick about juvenilization of my worn-out passport was more than enough for me.

By the way, the chief under Chief also presented his credentials. One day during the midday break, he came to hold a trade-union meeting. (Ahem!)

We settled under the trees by the hostel. He got seated on a chair and took off his shoes, and socks too. Like, don’t you think all talks of my clove foot are a stupid gossip now? Stuff and nonsense! But I am not the one to be hooked on by illusory chaff.

The devils of Makhno bandits lay down around in the shaded grass under the trees in their black spetzovkas. Only I was in the nylon shirt which I wore in the mine under the spetzovka jacket and every evening washed in the shower.

(…nylon is ideal for washing: you rub it for six seconds flat and it's clean, and then it gets dry even faster…)

In the way of a polite, albeit arch, response, I also took off my helmet. Like, you wanna make me believe you've got no hooves? Come on, admire my hornlessness then!. All the other workers had their helmets on, especially Slavic Aksyanov.

And so it went on for some 10 minutes when suddenly the rooster crowed. Surprise! The chief, who's not Chief, shoved his socks into his pockets, and raced to the nearby country road, thrusting his feet into the shoes on the run. And there, as if from under the ground, popped up a biker in black and in a black-leather ribbed helmet, like those the miners wore in the days of the first five-year plans. And they whizzed off in the direction of New Dophinovka. Not clear enough? Who shoots away at the rooster crowing?

Not that I confronted with… well… the chief engineer, but there happened certain frictions. Like it was when a truck dumped a heap of coal for the winter, and I shoved all that anthracite into the stokehold. At the end of that day, he came from Vapnyarka and asked me, haughtily so, "Well, how much is you want? 3 rubles enough?"

I went amok: half-day in the sun, and he, like as if offering a pittance to a dirty wretch. Okay, you're the prince of darkness, but I am also a chosen, even if not initiated, one.