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

He came up and for about a minute stood over me lying on the bench, with the Edgar Poe mustache, in a blue T-shirt and the Soviet three-ruble banknotes sticking out from the breast pocket on it. Then he left, keeping as quiet as he was when approaching. For the sake of principle and training, I did not open my eyes to see who it was.

In the morning, I woke up on the same bench rather chilled and stiff as a board but, unlike the great American romantic, alive. A flock of ravens flew croaking in the dawn sky, flapping their wings. Seemingly, the same ones that coasted above Nezhyn heading north-east on the Day D. It did take them a long time to get over to Odessa. A feather dropped from the wing of one in their squadron and, somersaulting in zigzags, kept falling down.

The face upturned, I followed the jerky trajectory and walked to intercept it, not heeding the dug up beds with sickly flowers. At the meeting point, I outstretched my palm towards the black dodger, caught it, and went back to the asphalted walk. There I dropped the catch tenderly into a trash bin saying, "Not while I'm around, please."

(…a lesser-known German poet from the first half of the 20th century once cared to bemoan his own unworthiness, otherwise, he would not allow for the world's self-massacre.

Few of the venerable laureates rise to so a deep comprehension of a poet's responsibility for the fate of the world. Inertly cling they to the trivial standpoints and rituals of their time, yet if you think about it closely…)

However, just to think is not enough, it's also necessary to think out, as Valentin Batrak, aka Lyalka, cared to say somewhere…

On reaching the deadline for my return to take you and Eera over to Odessa, there, in fact, was no place to bring you to. However, with the word given, I had no choice but come back, and at least explain the reasons for the postponement of the move. I had no money for the travel, neither anyone who I addressed for a loan. The urgent need brought about the idea to exchange the wedding ring for money at the pawnshop.

While I found it in the city, it was already open with the line starting outside the front door… The pawnshop was one long room with barriers along its three walls. In the sheet glass partitions atop the barriers, there were small rounded windows one of which even had iron grating. It was to that very window, the farthest one, for all that crowd to queue. At the time when the pawnshop closed for the midday break, I was at some four meters from that window.

In the breast pocket of my T-shirt, there was the ring that I hardly managed to rip off the finger the night before. Even the soap and water from the washstand nearby the hostel were of little help. Along with those self-inflicted tortures, I remembered the projectionist booth in the Plant Park and once again felt sorry for Olga.

The pawnshop opened afresh and, on waiting in the line for one more hour, I apprehensively handed the ring in because the person before me failed – her earrings did not pass the check for genuine gold. My ring proved acceptable though and I received 30 rubles, as well as the pawnshop's ticket…

The following morning, I came to the New Bazaar and bought a blue plastic mesh-bag, and 4 kilos of apricots to fill it with, they were not fully ripe though. Then I went to the booth with flowers and said that I needed 3 red roses.

For the flower girl, it sounded like a clandestine signal word, and from some special place behind the counter she took out minikin roses of dark red, exactly 3, on long sturdy stalks. "You meant these?"

"Sure."

From the New Bazaar, I went to the airport—not much better than the one in Stavropol—and stood in the line till the midday break. When the ticket office window was closed, I remained standing nearby, like a statue with the 3 red roses in my hand, and only put the apricots on the floor under the window. Keeping 4 kilos for an hour seemed too much of a strain for my hand.

After I bought the ticket, there remained 4 hours before the departure and I was already tired of life with my hands busy holding something. I took the flowers and the fruits to the automatic storage cells, but I could not leave the roses inside because I felt sorry for them; they would surely welk in there with the air and light cut off. Looking around a small corridor, I found the janitors' room and asked for permission to leave the flowers and apricots there. They agreed and I went out into the city hands-free, but I did not venture too far.

At six I came after the roses. The janitors were washing the floor in the corridor, and one of them told me I'd better wait. I insisted on getting them right away to be in time for the plane departing in half-hour. She grinned and, without further arguing, let me take the roses sticking out of one of their tin pails filled with water. The janitor only warned that they had treated themselves to the apricots a little bit.

I went to a long shed on the edge of the take-off field and, together with other passengers having tickets for that flight, waited till midnight because each half-hour the loudspeakers announced a delay of the flight to Kiev. My delayed fellow-travelers also tried the apricots and approved.

After midnight, in the crude glare of the arc lamps along the runway, two stewardesses were counting us on the stairs to have no more than 27 passengers because we were an odd load for a potluck flight to Kiev by a smaller aircraft, AN-24. When onboard, it took some time to become warm after the chilly night breeze from the sea during that long wait… Since then I eschew arguing with janitors…

At the takeoff, I was fighting down the thoughts that they might have brought the asphalt while I am away. In course of the mentioned meeting of the trade-union members stretched in the grass, the chief engineer informed that the construction team had come across sharps in their scores. For those unfamiliar with the music notation, he put two fingers of his left hand over two on the right one, crosswise, representing prison grates. Therefore, the finishing works would be continued by those wishing to live in the intended hostel. The Aksyanovs and I enrolled for moving over there, and the Bessarabian family abstained.

The projected hostel was located about 20 meters from the old one, and it also was a former cattle-farm building. Each apartment in the hostel under reconstruction was of two spacious rooms and a single standard window. I chose the one looking on the sea inlet.

However, the walls in our would-be home still had to be plastered, and the window awaited its glazing, but I liked our place all the same, even though it had neither doors nor any floor yet.

Once, they dumped a truckload of hot asphalt between the old and the new hostels to make flooring in the rooms. Aksyanov together with his assistant at the stone-cutting machine were moving the asphalt with a wheelbarrow to the Aksyanovs' rooms, while I hauled it with a pair of pails to ours. They managed to cover with the asphalt both of his rooms, and I only half of just one, yet making the flooring of higher quality, before the heap outside was finished off. That's why, while the plane was gaining altitude, I did not want any asphalt were brought without me around.

Then I started looking out of the porthole. The moon was absent from the cloudless sky, but the stars were shining, thousands of them. And the lights of cities and towns far below were shimmering too, no bigger than the distant stars. And I thought I'd rather for the pilot not to lose his way among all those stars from everywhere. But then, deep in the darkness under the plane wing, I made out separate lights, maybe in some village, whose configuration was the exact replica of 1 from the only 2 constellations I could ever single out in the night sky. The village lights repeated positioning of the stars in the Little Bear, and I relaxed because it's impossible to get off the right course with the North Star in view…

~ ~ ~

At six in the morning, I got off the Kiev-Moscow train at the station of Nezhyn and by the first bus of the day came to Red Partisans. The door was opened by Ivan Alexeyevich who hardly recognized me because I had become so lean. I took the blue plastic mesh with the apricots to the kitchen and carried the dark red roses to the bedroom past the folding coach-bed in the living room, where the mother-in-law was already starting to stir.

Both of you were asleep. I inserted the roses stems into the small violet vase by the pier mirror on the table and looked behind the window curtain. The handkerchief with the anchor was gone from the windowsill. Okay, I could find out later… I undressed, went to bed, and hugged Eera in her long white nightie.

"Oh! You?"

"Yes."

"So scraggy?!"

"Hush, don’t wake up the baby."

Then Eera told me that her sister Vitta was on a visit in Odessa, and wanted to see me at the mine. She reached the village of New Dophinovka, but a villager named Natalia Kurilo advised against going any farther, because of a too difficult road.

"Yes, that Natalia sits at the mine office in the pit up there."

"She complained that you didn't listen to anyone but the foreman."

"How could she know? She sits up there."

"She must know if she's saying… And how is all over there?"

"There all is so… classy… the sea is… well, in general… ships above the field…"

"But you got so too skinny… Have you had sex with someone over there?"

"You crazy?!"

"Quiet! Don't wake the baby! Well… you were doing something right now… you've never been doing that before."

"Ah… I got it from the stone-cutting machine… her disks move that way."

"What's your position there?"

"Some long-named one – the assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator; but, to myself, I call me shorter – a phallic associator."

"What's that?"

"From old Greek. It's a long story."

"And what are the housing conditions there?"

"We'll have two rooms. So big. Tolik from Machine 2 says they are well located. Looking away from the winter winds. And the sea inlet under the window."

"But look at yourself! Thin as a rake!"

"Hush! The baby!."

But all the same you got awake…

"Look, where's the handkerchief that I've left on the windowsill?"