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

"No!" said I, "let I'll be paid the worth of my labor."

"You won't get such an amount then."

I did not believe him and the next day applied for a day-off and went to the Mining Management in Pole Explorers Square. I was shown the door of the chief accountant office, Weitzman was his name. No sooner had I stepped into his office than the phone on the desk rang. He took off the receiver, "You are listened to."

(…just like that, word for word: "You're listened to." Clear, smooth, distanced. Without sticking his neck out for a fraction of a millimeter. That's some Weitzman for you!.)

I depicted the essence of the matter in hand, he got it at once and took out a thick book in a gray paperback The Unified Norms and Tariffs, and he found in it where it was about loading and unloading of loose coal and gave me to read. There it stood in black on white, that even if I were shoveling that coal in an area north of the Arctic Circle—to be paid with the highest northern coefficients applied—and with each shovelful of coal I were circling 3 times around the hostel, before heaving it into the stokehold window, so as to gain the bigger distance of moving the load—then, by the rates from that normative bible, I was entitled to the payment of 1 ruble and 20 kopecks.

(…and it was revealed unto me, who did not know the truth hitherto, that to foremen, supervisors, engineers, etc., etc., should the workmen bow low for the lies added to work orders. Without the addition of false figures, the working class would die out long ago, together with their families. Pray for your benefactors and bread givers, O, workmen!

But what bastard composed all those rates and tariffs? I’d like to share my shovel with them in a brotherly way…)

His diggings were near the Hunchback Bridge in Odessa. There he lived in a house of his own, together with his wife and their son, fifth-grader. He treated me to a glass of home-made tomato juice. (Ahem…) Everything as expected – some red, thick, brackish liquid. But could I say "no"? Margarita also drank it, at the annual ball of Satan, in Moscow. Yet until now, I brew the black tea after the recipe he shared… That evening he also shared his recollections about working in the Arctic, where, after work, he put a pair of bricks on an electric stove and seated his wife atop of them to bring into the working conditions for the night…

One time the impure attempted at a putsch, they wanted to change the layout of world stratification. The day before it, the mining engineer Pugachov popped up at the hostel and opened one of the locked doors in the corridor. Like, distributing to the miners some food products to be paid for later, on their payday.

I walked along the corridor and Slavic Aksyanov shouted to me from that room, "Come on, get it too!"

There were five Makhno devils inside the empty room and a box of "Prima" packs upon the desk without a chair; Pugachov was meting out from 5 to 10 packs each.

Food products, eh? Ammunition supplies! "No, thank you, "Belomor" is my smoke."

Going out, I still heard Slavic motivating the devils, "No fear! Youth will write off everything!"

The next day not a single traffic lights worked in Odessa. It was a day of complete bedlam; people were shouting at each other, and the trolleybuses were jostling and jumping like mad. There was no shooting, of course, because the putsch took place on a different level. However, by my estimations, it failed, as long as I was in time to buy The World Atlas, a thin booklet in a soft green paperback…

In Odessa of those days, the most stable and widely used expression of approval was "you can’t but love!"

"What’s your thought about Sonya's latest groom?"

"You can’t but love!"

And, instead of "no" they were saying "dick to mama!" Yet, with Odessa-Mommy around, it sounded even patriotic.

"So, The Black-Sea Footballer won yesterday, or what?"

"Dick to mama!"

In the small park on Deribassov Street, there grew some unseen trees looking as if they had cast off their own bark. In the evening, the brass band played there, almost like in the times of Johann Strauss, but seldomer. And in some other park, in the daytime, I dived into the pool from the five-meter-tall tower, the air whistled in the ears during the dive. A little later two guys jumped off as well, holding hands, but it was a heels-first cannonball dive and one of them had black socks on. That way those jumpers were effacing my footprints to put off track any possible followers…

At the intercity phone calls station on Pushkin Street, they played a good joke on me. That time I made the order and waited, then went out thru the porchless door wide-open onto the sidewalk. The moment I lit a cigarette, the loudspeaker inside shouted, "Nezhyn! Is anyone waiting for Nezhyn?!" I threw the cigarette into the trash bin by the door and ran back. "It's me! I am waiting!"

To which the telephone operator said on her microphone, "So, wait then!" The crowd in the hall split their sides. That again, they were saving me from something.

Some cat was waiting there too. They announced his number connected, "Chelyabinsk on line! Enter Booth 5!" And before going to where was told, he uttered with a bitter disappointment, "Eew!"

That's an enlightened one! By the booth number alone, he knew beforehand the pending talk’s outcome!.

I got to know Odessa very well. On foot, for the most part. I found the Public Library Nr. 2; and Privvoz Bazaar, where the porters in blue smocks pushed station trolleys in front of them, shouting "Feet! Feet!" so that the crowd would give way to them warned by their shortened "Watch your feet!". There, in Privvoz, an old gypsy cast a curse on me with their witchcraft art; I did not get it what for, but she should know better or maybe I just popped up at the wrong split-second…

Factory of Gastric Juice; who would ever imagine there were such enterprises?!. When I was passing thru the yards of five-story blocks, mujiks at their "goat" game would bang the bones louder against the tables to shoo off the cats, so they would not run across the sidewalk in front of me. Also auxiliary allies…

To Odessa I was going by bus, only a couple of times on foot; it's only 20 kilometers or so all in all. And one time I walked from Vapnyarka to New Dophinovka along the seashore, over the cliff. In one place there stood some military installation behind the fence of barbed wire. The sentry yelled from there it was forbidden to pass by their site, approached and demanded to present my papers. I showed thru the wire my handkerchief with the sailing boat in the circle. He realized at once that the level was different, "Okay, get along…"

From up the cliff, the view was very beautiful. The sea was quiet, almost smooth, yet sparkled and glittered under the sun. Sometimes the wind rushed along to ripple the water and draw various types of galaxies. Spiral, for the most part. The wind was copying them from the clouds that hovered above the sea…

In Streetcar 5 going to the Arcadia beach, I saw Gray from our Stavropol construction battalion. It surprised me a little – four years had passed and he remained looking so young and, for some reason, in the black uniform of a sea cadet, in their cap with the ribbons hanging over the back.

I stood up and quietly asked into his ear, "Gray, is it you?" He did not respond, neither moved the tiniest bit although he heard me, dead sure…

And another time it was my father by a newsagent booth. He did not look like my father at all, I only recognized him by his voice. It was in that exactly voice he told me of the murderer, whom the camp director brought to a new murder.

When he spoke to me, I pretended that I was all too busy examining the portrait of psychiatrist Burdenko in the Ogonyok magazine cover, which hung behind the glass of the booth, so it was the seller who responded to him.

(…confronted with the meetings of such a kind, anyone will start asking themselves: what's going on? But you can't get an answer to it if having no grasp on the conception of monad.

Monad is a made in Germany gadget for philosophizing, which everyone understands to their personal liking. For someone, it might mean a singularity from a set, while for someone else – a whole set of singularities.

For example, when a guy asks his girl, "Tell me! Am I just another one of many for you, or the only one from all their many?" Here, the second "one" in his question is that very monad or, maybe, vice versa…

In some Indian Bible, there is a gaudy picture of a baby that crawls over the grass, a step ahead of him, a kid is running, before whom there walks a man just about to overtake a withered old geezer, and then again only the green of the grass. The picture is called "The Circle of Life". That is, from nothing to nothing.

Now, together, they all comprise one monad because it's the same person.

So, it only remains to assume, that monads can be formed in a different way; for example, by the timbre of a voice; and everything falls into place. It depends on the standpoint from which you are viewing the monad: here – it's your father, while on its other end – a homeless drifter speaks up to you by the stall with Burdenko.

Of course, all that is a bit more complicated than to learn by rote: "if you stumbled with your left leg – everything would be okay, but if it was the right one – don't even try, turn back and go home." However, monad, as abstruse and hardly comprehensible as it is, still explains a lot…)

~ ~ ~

A certain Odessa Preferans player in his youth was a part to the illegal underground. But later he reformed and began to collaborate with the television studio of Odessa as a commentator on the latest criminal news. He even wrote a book sharing impressions from his bandit past, in which he claims that the year of your birth, and especially the summer period, was marked by an unseen, critically baneful, surge of violent crime in Odessa.

It’s a very rare case when a printed text failed to convince me because that summer I was there in person and never noticed anything of the kind. Which speaks in favor of the theory about the existence of parallel worlds. The reformed commentator and I lived in separate parallel worlds, therefore each of us was receiving different impressions from different worlds both of which had in common only the ordinal number of their current year. On the face of it, 2 separate worlds, despite their parallelism do overlap from time to time which explains a couple of criminally tinged episodes in course of otherwise quite quiet summer of ‘79.

In all of my reiterations to and detours within Odessa, I happened to observe just 2 occasions of contact and reciprocative penetration of our parallel worlds. The first one occurred on the morning bus Gvardeyskoye-Odessa when a young slob from the second seat on the left rebuked the driver for a minor change in the route thru the city outskirts.

Upon arrival at the bus station by the New Bazaar, the driver hurried from his cabin into the bus with apologies and technical (to some extent too-too obsequious) explanations. He was forgiven when the other passenger on the same seat spoke for him to her easily irritable companion…

The second interpenetration occurred in the building of the railway station, where I inquired a militiaman about the number of population in the city of Odessa. For an answer, he directed me to the police station on the first floor. The on-duty lieutenant, to whom I repeated the question, told me to wait for a while.

Obedient to his instruction, I leaned against the barrier separating us and watched as the red worms of his lips lustfully closed on, wrapping and twirling, the filter of his unlit cigarette, under the accompaniment of heavy thuds and loud shrieks behind my back.

With a fleeting glance in that direction, I registered a door opened to the next room, where a woman in a chiffon headscarf and the black robe of a janitor aptly wielded the hard handle of her wooden mop to knock the crap out of a bozo draped in only his red underpants. Same red underpants with seldom prints of blue tennis bats as on me, maybe, not as vividly chromatic because of being acquired a couple of years before mine. So I didn’t feel like watching his obviously lost match. Turning back, I dropped my eyes in meek concentration on the top of the high sturdy barrier separating me from the lieutenant… After getting the pleasure due to his rank and position, the officer lit the cigarette, and said that a million was not reached yet, maybe, somewhere about 600 000 people…

That's why, when on my next visit to the city and being late for the last bus to New Dophinovka, I preferred to spend the night in the greens inside the circular intersection in front of the railway station. It turned out to be completely deserted because the underground passage to it was unlit.

Having chosen the most distant from the lamppost bench, I lay down. The bench beams felt so hard that I recollected Edgar Poe killed on a bench in Baltimore, state of Maryland, for $40—a literary fee he had just collected—and partly pulled out the breast pocket in my shirt the advance I received on that day in Pole Explorers Square, like a coquettish handkerchief made of three-ruble notes, for the purpose of self-training and development of my personal courage. The traffic along the circular intersection had almost ceased, but the bench became even harder. However, I kept my eyes shut for the principle's sake because the night is for sleeping. So I was not asleep when there came the tiny sounds of cautious steps over the rounded walk.