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

(…that's life, huh? You start to drive a fool and unexpectedly run into a frank confession…

By now he gave up the poetry for good and switched over to oratory. In long winter evenings, he puts his felt high boots on and goes out to the meeting of neighbors of his age, under the lamp on the post by the Kolesnikov's khutta. And there they stand on the trampled snow, discussing the news from yesterday's news program "Time", hotly debating whether Muammar Gaddafi's a manly man or the same clown as Yasser Arafat…)

In the way of a compromise, they decided that before leaving for Chernigov, I would go with my mother to local psychiatrist Tarasenko from whom (here my father narrowed his eyes threateningly) no one had ever a chance of getting off-hook. Then I escorted Eera to the station, and all the way there she tried to persuade me not to go to the 4th kilometer. However, my word to Tamara was out and past recalling…

In the large light building of the Konotop Medical Center, not far from the Avangard Stadium in the Central Park of Recreation, people were crowding next to each and every door, and only the door to the office of psychiatrist Tarasenko stood out by its forlorn solitude. When my mother and I entered his office, Tarasenko explained the phenomenon by the insufficient awareness of the population, while there, overseas, every fourth citizen kept visiting a psychiatrist.

Tarasenko's office was equipped with his assistant nurse and the standard medical office furniture. However, the furniture was arranged very strangely. The oddity was created by the positioning of the desk. Besides being put in the center of the room, it was also turned the wrong way, with its drawers to the door.

I was asked to get seated at the desk. My mother sat on a chair by the wall, and the present medical team of two stood on either side of me. I did not like this whole disposition intended to inflate my megalomania—you sit there like Chairman Mao, and those in white are standing around as an errand-boy with an errand-girl. So, I pushed the chair a tad bit back from the desk, turned it 90 degrees and, stretching my legs out, put one foot on the other in the attitude of a kicking back cowboy.

And now Tarasenko and his partner rushed to pull abruptly and slam back the desk drawers, with bang and crash… Getting midst so violent a company, I, naturally, pulled my legs back but kept sitting, yet with my ears pricked up: what the heck?

On making sure that I hadn't jumped out of the door, neither tried to flee climbing up the window blinds, Tarasenko stopped the test and announced that I was as healthy as a bull.

"Tell it to him!" exclaimed my mother, sobbing, "He wants to go to the psychiatric hospital in Chernigov!"

"What for?"

"His wife has sent him there!"

"Is she a doctor?"

"No!"

"Why then? People can send you anywhere. Is he her slave, or what?"

"Yes! Yes! He's a slave!"

(…look here, Joseph Yakovlevich, aka the Beautiful, you were sold into slavery by your brothers and that hurt, right?

How would you feel being sold by your own mother?..)

Tarasenko once again forbade me, already as to a slave, to go anywhere, and I together with my mother left his office.

On the way to the streetcar stop, my mother asked, "Now, you see? Got convinced?"

"It does not change anything."

"If they do something to you, I'll kill her!" said my mother with a suppressed sob.

"Mom," said I, "what kind of a book have you read recently?"

Of course, I knew perfectly well that since long my mother had forsaken reading books, yet you're still supposed to forward one or another clue to politely maintain a conversation, you know…

Because of the check to examine my head before submitting me into slavery, and further inconsistencies in the train traffic timetables, I reached the 4th kilometer by Chernigov late at night. However, the stipulated Monday was not over yet and I started to knock at the iron gate, giving rise to discontent yells from the securities in the check-entrance house. They switched on the light and asked what it was I was at, the name of Tamara became the password. Two more orderlies in blue flannel gowns came up and took me to the waiting room.

There I submitted my clothes and received in exchange pajamas, as well as a pair of army kirza high boots. The left boot was my size, but the right one squeezed the foot inhumanely. Probably, that was retaliation for disturbing them at so late an hour.

Then thru the cold darkness, I was taken to the fifth unit and handed over to the paramedic on duty. He led me into a wide empty corridor-hall lit dimly, because of the late hour, with a pair of shaded lamps in the wall, reflected by the dark glass of a distant window in the opposite end of the corridor. Glazed doors to the wardrooms were lined along the hall’s left wall. The paramedic escorted me into one of the wardrooms, pointed at a free bed, and went out…

In the obscure light seeping in thru the glass in the door, I could make out half-dozen beds laid with wrapped up figures, and ghostly whitish nightstands in between. I undressed and lay down, suppressing involuntary fear…

Apparently, so late addition made the population of the ward to keep low under their blankets, but gradually they thawed out. Someone invisible asked me from out of the corner if it was me. They hush-hashed at him and he fell silent… I refrained from giving any answer. Thru the glazed door, there came a faraway cry from down the corridor and cut off too… I lay—a wrapped up figure as everyone else—rejoicing that I still managed to do it on Monday, and felt the upsurging alertness because I understood who I was among.

"So what, Kostya, would you like some home-made sausage now?" asked one of the invisible figures of his invisible gossip.

I was tickled with irresistible laughter; how quickly they managed to figure me out!. When Eera and I were leaving Chernigov after our joint visit to the 4th kilometer, Eera bought a coil of home-made sausage at the station. It was really delicious.

Now, the brainstorming team in the darkness entered an expert discussion of that very sausage, and I, amused by their getting on track so casually, tried to choke the laughter and snuffle it away thru the nostrils, biting the corner of my pillowcase, so that they would not take me for a psycho. At some point, I could not keep it down anymore, and they broke off in a freaked out silence…

~ ~ ~

The morning started with the scuffing of mules in the corridor-hall. In a yoke of a waffle tower around my neck, I went out in the heavy kirza high boots and, following the mainstream of the traffic, found the washroom and toilet. Then there was a usual havvage for breakfast.

When doctors arrived from the city, Tamara looked into the huge corridor and called me, by my last name. I approached her with the apologies for being late on Monday; she generously pardoned me and retired back to her parts.

The corridor-hall society was populous, diversified and in a state of noisy Brownian movement. Absolutely unsystematic… Apart from me, only one individual, with his hair closely cropped in zek style, wore high boots. He, for the most part, lay on the floor tiles by the white radiators of central heating installed under the windowsill in the far end of the corridor. Time and again, he was pressing himself against the other patient's backside, who also was lying there. The courting wooer’s advances received a sluggish resistance expressed in reluctant squirms and languid counter pushes.

The mobile part of the crowd roamed around wearing mules, immersed in their individual inner worlds from which they occasionally emerged to issue some incomprehensible exclamations.

A cripple on a low trolley navigated the stream of their wandering legs, propelling himself with hand pushes against the floor tiles. He obviously supervised some part of the society capable of understanding instructions and orders and served the non-static hub for their hangout in the style of a loose black market…

A pair of Messrs. Pretty-Guys kept together. The dark-haired one was selling himself for the master-thief in their milieu of 2.

A young man of Central Asian appearance invited me to play checkers at a table in the far corner. Every eye in his face moved independently from its counterpart as happens when the brain hemispheres do not interfere with the sovereign internal affairs of their neighbor and each one controls their own eye. The guy obviously could not play checkers, and when there remained just one piece of his on the board, I announced the draw and did not play anymore… And I also declined playing cards with the Messrs. Pretty-Guys.

On the other end of the corridor by the window, between the locked door to the courtyard and the glazed door to the passage with medical offices, a white figure of a nurse sat in a chair. She never intervened in anything. She rose from her throne only after the midday havvage to stately walk along with the gurney, arriving from the medical staff passage, to the center of the corridor-hall.

"Medications!" sounded joyful yells from different parts of the crowd. They rushed to scramble around the movable table, grabbing up their favorites from the pills of different color and size, scattered over the oil-clothed top. Soon after, some glassy-eyed appeared in the crowd. The exchange transactions at the black market grew more animated…

To pass the time, I followed the example of Lenin and Dean Reed, measuring their cells with steps from end to end. Luckily, I had much more space and orbited the huge corridor in a sweeping ellipse, from the window in one end to the window by the locked door in the other. Being not the only moving body in that space, I carefully avoided collisions, especially since I paced at a rapid rate.

Some in the crowd paid attention. The blonde one from Messrs. Pretty-Guys started up the Indian drums beat against the cover of a thick book, which he constantly kept in his armpit, accentuating the footfalls of my high boots.

"Why are you driving a fool? You need it?" shouted the dark-haired one in my wake.

"Try it yourself, you'll get high!" yelled I back, scudding off to the next apex in the ellipse.

Then one activist in the Brownian movement by the walls suddenly got it. He issued a happy scream and also started running regular ellipses of an orbit, though not along, but across the hall-corridor.

"Ogoltsoff infected Baranov!" squeaked some rat from the crowd to the queen in her chair. But she did not intervene in anything.

Walking was painful, because the right boot, invented for the torture kit of the Inquisition under the name of "Spanish boot", was two sizes smaller than mine. I managed to withstand just one day, and on the following afternoon, I decided that was enough for playing Andersen's Mermaid and turned to the nurse with the complaint. She gave me a pair of regular mules, like on the rest of inmates, only much more rundown, so my orbiting became painless, yet markedly slowed down…

One compromise because of weakness invites another to slip in and before long your adamant determination tumbles in a crumbled heap. I mean, you start to fix one unbearable sore and there crop up a pack of others crying for amelioration… The button in the pajama pants belt kept slipping out of its too wide loop. I grew tired of living with my hand in a constant clutch at the pants top to prevent their falling down. And again, I had to bring the nurse out of her non-involvement lethargy, with the request for a needle and thread.

No sooner had the repair been over than another nurse appeared from the medical staff passage, and called the roll of those starting to Club. My name was there too…