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

I did not want to expose the fella to an unnecessary strain and never mentioned any desk nor shelf, but the ungrateful bonehead utterly refused to believe even in a piece of plywood.

When the attendant opened the cell door, I pulled out those 50cm ? 60cm and walked away, yet the militiaman for a considerable stretch kept at the cell agape, peeping into the void of its dusty innards. He, to use the favorite byword of our team foreman, Mykola Khizhnyak, was inspecting it like a magpie the piece of busted bone. A trivial magic trick, dumbo…

And at times the briefcase was filled with also things for laundry because Eera had instructed me to bring the washing over. I readily obeyed because it felt like we were, sort of, becoming a family, even though in the mother-in-law's washing machine but still somehow, yes….

However, the first family celebration was no success. You had turned exactly 1 year old, and I invited Eera out to a restaurant. She refused because Gaina Mikhailovna was not in favor of our going to restaurants.

Well, at first, Eera a little hesitated: to go or not to go? But I failed at persuading her because of my tongue-tied manner of speaking. Most often the fits of tongue-tiedness befall me at some casual, everyday, situations, I just cannot explain obvious things. "Well, you know, let's go, eh?"

Some impressive appeal, you bet… And in the meanwhile the mother-in-law, leaning against the jamb of the bedroom door, trots out neat arguments, slick as a whistle, that it takes a decent woman at least 2 days to get prepared for going to a restaurant.

"Well, what? Come on, let's go, eh?"

And a suchlike pitiful crap instead of saying, that it's our daughter's first birthday which would never happen again and that sometimes an impromptu might be a better hit than hatched events.

Tongue-tiedness is a real curse. It calls for some abstract topic for me to be quick as a wink at turning a repartee…

When Brezhnev for the first and final time was passing Konotop by the train made of just a couple of cars, they put up his portrait, 2 months in advance, in a tin shield taller than the station itself. The giant close-up of dear Leonid Ilyich—Mind, Honor and Conscience of our Time—with all his Gold Star medals of the Hero of the Soviet Union on his jacket breast. In case, he would glance from the bypassing car and see how totally we loved him around here.

Only they forgot to warn me on the day of his traveling by, and I walked from the Settlement along the tracks until a militia sergeant stopped me, and told I could not go to the station.

Okay, said I, I was going to the Under-Overpass and not the station which I could easily bypass by taking that service path so that to keep my jeans clear of the fuel-oil-smeared rails.

The guy in the militia uniform loved and respected Brezhnev no more than I did. However, taking into account the concomitant circumstances—a person without a uniform trying to prove something to a uniform-rigged guy who, moreover, had an order—he asked me an absolutely well-grounded question, "Are you sick?"

To which, without a moment’s delay, I gave it out proudly, "I am incurably infected with life."

Yay! I liked the sound of it myself. The sergeant, from awe and admiration, could not find what else to say but did not let me pass all the same….

That is why I had to celebrate the family holiday alone, although Eera and Gaina Mikhailovna predicted in a duo that nothing good would come of it.

Yes, the prophecy was slap accurate. All I managed to get in the "Polissya" restaurant was a shot of vodka – the last in stock, so they told me. I was encouraged to buy a bottle of cognac instead, but I'm not a drunk to put away a half-liter cognac single-handed. So, I concentrated on that lonely shot and meditations, for a snack, on the futility of arguing with Mothers and that under the conditions of all-pervading matriarchy there certainly had to be a system of communicating vessels between my mother-in-law and the unfriendly waitress.

In the "Seagull" restaurant, located farther off from Red Partisans, I bought a fluky bottle of champagne and also a parsley salad… On my way back from the celebration, the champagne, naturally, hit my bladder.

In those days I tried to do everything right (in the hope to avoid the inevitable). That was, like, sort of insurance – the righteous guy's wife couldn't cheat on him…or what? There, of course, was no guarantee but, if not to consider the matter too closely, the assumption inspired some puny hope… As long as peeing in the sidewalk was wrong, I headed for the toilet in the Bazaar whose gate turned out to be locked for a long time before my coming, and I had to climb over. That also was not entirely correct, but not too noticeable in the dark.

By the time when in the corner of the empty and dark Bazaar I approached the iron-sheet door to the toilet, it already bore a block-letter inscription "On Repair" drawn in chalk. Meanwhile, the champagne reached the peak in its fight for freedom, so I had to pour my indignation at the dictatorship of the communicating vessels out on that same door. Without impairing the inscription though.

Well, and who else could met me climbing out down the gate but a militia patrol? Welcome to your native planet! Of course, they did not buy it that someone would go over the closed gate when there was so much of sidewalk in the dark around, and I was taken to the sobering-up station.

The doctor there, to check my stage of intoxication, offered to perform several forward bends.

"Heels together, toes apart?" inquired I conversationally. But that capillary vessel complicated the task, and I had to do the bends with my feet pressed close to each other.

Then the doc asked how much and which stuff namely had been consumed, received clear information and, with a shrug, handed me over to the lieutenant.

The lieutenant wanted to know my place of work and, learning I was not local, asked for my mother-in-law's number and called Gaina Mikhailovna to identify my voice over the phone. Then they just pointed at the door, refusing to give me a little lift, and threatening to lock me up if I attempt to do any more nuisance of myself.

Thus, despite the die-hard opposition by conspiring females and their henchmen, your first birthday became a truly unique event – the one and only time when I got into a sobering-up station…

~ ~ ~

The development of my marital relationship with Eera moved onward thru gradual and quite predictable stages. At first, when after a working week I came to Nezhyn and excitedly pressed the coveted nipple in the doorbell, Eera in a flash opened the door for me. I hugged her in the hallway, and we kissed.

She even smeared my wrists with glycerin to treat the skin cracks from the frost at the construction site. "Oh, what a silly fool you are!" said Eera and I felt happy, although the cracks smarted.

At the following stage, the kissing got cut out. Still later, instead of embraces, we exchanged the casual cues, "How d'you?" "Fine." And that is correct because something had to be said anyway.

The relationship did not stop at that, and the door started to be opened by my parents-in-law, mostly by Ivan Alexeyevich. Sometimes, I had to push the doorbell button twice already…

In the winters when my hands' skin condition became of no interest, I stopped freezing it. Probably, I grew more experienced, or else the skin realized it had no chances of being treated with glycerin anymore.

At our final kiss in the hallway, I instantly realized that something was wrong. Instead of her lips, Eera somehow guiltily set up her neck, and there wafted a whiff of fox. It's not that I had ever sniffed a fox, yet directly got it – the vixen funk. Later on that visit, she told me that she had been home alone, the doorbell rang and it turned out to be one of her classmates from school. He knelt before her in the kitchen, embraced and kissed her knees, but she told him to leave and nothing happened.

And there, of course, happened another fit of covert agony, but even choking in the steely grip of jealousy I still managed to keep my heartbeat bursting absolutely out of time and, when it numbed and breathing gradually normalized, I somehow began to live on further…

From the hallway, I proceeded to the bathroom to wash my hands, and then entered the living-room to say "good evening" to everyone absorbed in TV watching, and to sit down at the table abutting the windowsill.

The table center was allotted to the TV but, beside it, there remained enough of the oilclothed room for the plate, fork, and bread laid by Eera so that I could have a supper. I did not block the screen and did not bother anyone, if only aesthetically – by my chewing profile on the left from the TV… Then I took the plates to the kitchen and washed up, as well as all that crockery-cutlery stacked in the sink after the meals on that day. I was not ashamed to wash up even when Tonya's husband, Ivan, was entering the kitchen. On the contrary, I was proud that Gaina Mikhailovna trusted me with the task and that after a couple of strict proficiency tests I was approved for the job of a weekend pearl diver.

First of all, I boiled a kettle of water on the gas stove, because it took too long to heat it in the boiler, for which it was necessary to bring firewood from the basement. The process of washing up took place in a large enamel bowl put in the sink. Civilization had not yet come up with detergents and other useful things for washing dishes then and, for a start, with a bar of laundry soap I rubbed a large piece of gauze to give it rich foam. And in the end, of course, I rinsed them all under the tap, in strict keeping with the requirements of technology shared by Gaina Mikhailovna. Washing up helped me to pass the time. I even liked it, especially in that part of operation, when the turned on gas was hissing and burning its blueish flame under the kettle bottom.

Besides, I was trusted with dusting the carpet taken off the floor in the living room out to the yard. It was a shabby thread-bare rug, so one could feel free to beat it thoroughly when dusting. Sometimes, when I was working it over, Eera would go out in the yard and say that it was enough already because the neighbors in the apartment block were human beings too and deserved compassion. And Gaina Mikhailovna once remarked that the method of my dusting showed the temper of a born translator. I cannot imagine where she could have seen translators busy with that job…

At times, I offered some services on my own accord. Like, when Gaina Mikhailovna was very worried about her son Igor being ill and hospitalized in Kiev, because she could not go there and find out how he was, and I suggested that I would go.

Igor was very surprised and could not believe that I had come to Kiev without any other agenda but visiting him. 4 hours on a local train to see my brother-in-law, with whom I did not know what to talk about. If I disclosed having a certain interest of my own, and that in those 4 hours I had finally read The Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Radishchev, would it feel better for him?

Then I had time and again to report to my mother-in-law what her son looked like. Well, he looked quite normal, except for an unmistakably monkish air, like all the other patients there. It was an officers-only hospital where they were given long blue gowns, yet allowed to keep their military forage caps. The combination resulted in an awesomely wondrous costume, especially when you watched the ostensibly strolling shut-ins in peripatetic gossip pairs along the allies in the tiny outside garden – the cape-like Merlin-style blue garbs beneath the khakied halos with the scrambled-eggs of cockades. Some special order of monks: Forage-Cappians…

And I was also entrusted to coat the apartment floor with the glossy red paint. Not at one go, naturally, because people had to live in the apartment undergoing the process of renovation; so it took two weekend-visits. But the kitchen, the hallway, and the corridor connecting them, Ivan Alexeyevich painted in my absence.

He helped me a lot when I decided to make bookshelves in the form of a bookcase without doors and walls. The shelves were, sure enough, designed for our future family library. 10 volumes of The Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language were already collected. I was too late to subscribe to the Dictionary, but many of its subscribers soon stopped to waste their money, and the rejected volumes were put on free sale at bookstores. Apart from the incomplete collection of the Dictionary, there were full Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s works in 4 volumes, a dozen books in English and a hotchpotch company angled at different bookstores…

At SMP-615, I could not find the material required for the project and asked my father-in-law to have the planks planed and cut in the carpenter workshop at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant. So, I supplied him with the list of measurements of what I needed… He brought the bundle of readied plank pieces and dumped it in the hallway of his apartment, then started to convince me it was impossible to make anything worthy out of them. He even called Eera to the hallway to be an arbitrary, "Look, what shelves could be made of these slats?" And those indeed looked very slim but, before asking him, I had thought out thoroughly how to make shelves that would be both light and sturdy.

The project was accomplished at 13, Decemberists because in Nezhyn there were neither conditions nor tools for such an undertaking. And when I sawed out the bridle joints in the planks and spread casein glue over the tenons to stick them into mortices and, when they dried, polished with sandpaper, and covered with light yellow varnish, then even my father approved the shelves.

Eera, on one of her solo visits to Konotop, was not too much impressed though, at furniture stores you could see more baroque items; yes, they're shelves, and so what?. As for Ivan Alexeyevich's false forecasts, it could easily be understood – the workman at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant workshop told him the planks were unsuitable for the project, and he just repeated the opinion of a specialist…

~ ~ ~

But then my initial perambulations about Eera's parents' apartment grew even shorter because I canceled eating in the living room… The decision was made when after my arrival at Red Partisans, it took my father-in-law way too long to open the door and, eventually entering the hallway, I heard the cries of a squabble. It happens, you know, a casual family stank.

I heard angry yells of Ivan, Tonya's husband, in high-pitched tones, then she herself flashed thru the corridor to the kitchen and back to the living-room, where more voices wrangled in a confused manner. Eera peeped into the hallway, "The bread is on the table, you bring the rest of snack along from the kitchen." And she disappeared again to bicker on with Ivan.

On account of my arrival, the theater of hostilities moved over to the bedroom of Tonya's family. From the living room, it was only heard that Ivan took a circular defense in the corner, and his parents-in-law and sister-in-law, individually and then in chorus, cried out to him what particularly they were not happy with. The words remained indistinct, like, Pillutikha’s curses, but I could tell that Ivan was responding with dour short bursts, like a Bandera-guerrilla used to use the ammo sparingly. At times, some of the attackers retreated to the living room to recollect what else they could've omitted to divulge and then again rush back to join the clashes. Except for Tonya, who did not leave the bedroom, but kept monotonously banging off her dismal clue. I did not even look in there, but everything was clear enough, family squabbles do not shine with the diversity of dispositions.