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

(…there is still a whole lot of questions that I won't find answers to. Never…)

~ ~ ~

Later that autumn, I was sent to the railway station of Vorozhba to work at the construction of the three-story Communication House where the walls and the roof were already in place and my responsibility was laying the partitions. While there, I got another proof that the body of a human being is much smarter than he himself…

At both ends of the building, there were inside staircases with only one of them completed. Newly arrived at the site and not fully acquainted with the details of the current situation, I started up the right one until noticed that the steps between the second and third floors had not been yet inserted and just the pair of channels for the eventual montage of stairs were tilted up to the landing in between the two floors. Feeling lazy to traverse all of the rather long building to the other staircase, I decided to climb up the channel by the wall, whose width of 10 cm seemed enough. So, I turned sideways and, facing the wall, made a couple of careful steps upward.

Then I discovered my mistake – the channel ran too close along the wall whose surface kept my center of gravity dangerously off, too far over the void below, an offset for another inch would send my body into a dive precipitated, according to the laws of physics, by the free-fall acceleration, onto the debris interspersed by crooked spikes of rebar-rods, deep in the basement.

The undertaking did not seem worth it already. However, having moved up the channel I could not back those two steps already in the reverse direction, there was not room enough to even turn my face without losing balance, because of the shifted off location of my gravity’s center. So, I clung to the red brick wall as if to something most dear to me and viewed an unforgettable transformation: my hands turned into separate tiny asynchronous octopuses, each finger lived its individual life bending in all directions, searching for holes in between the bricks. As they got rooted in the wall, I pulled myself upward and then cautiously shuffled my feet up the sloping channel. After many a repetition of that trick, we got out.

But I remain dead sure that were the mortar slushed to fill joints in the brick courses with the proper righteousness and not in the hasty style of "off we drive!" no unknown reserves in the human body would get me off the hook.

From the ensuing surge of adrenaline simmering thru my system, I realized why cliffhangers love mountains so much, yet I, personally, would not risk it every other day….

In winter, they excavated all of Professions Street. The rumors had it as if that was done for sewer construction, but it looked like a foundation pit about a kilometer long, and four to five meters deep. The chasm was randomly crossed by a thick underground telephone cable suddenly got in the open and hanging in the air across the pit, from one wall to the other. And deep down there, a bulldozer was moving earth and leveling the gravel heaps dumped by KAMAZ trucks. Only along the concrete wall of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, there remained a meter-wide ledge with a path over the heaps and hillocks of the spoil…

With a cellophane packet in my hand, I was walking along that trail oscillating up and down when ahead of me I marked a schoolgirl who walked in the same direction. The yellow-and-gray tartan in her coat fabric, made me realize that I should not go any further; that was not my way. Fortunately, a telephone cable was sagging nearby towards the opposite wall in the pit. I stepped on it and walked without slowing down; I did not even mind the bag in my hands. Yet, after a couple of meters, the usual story happened again – I started to doubt if I really was a tightrope walker to stride telephone cables.

(…because of the like hesitation, Simon, handled Stone, aka Peter, instead of a leisurely walk over the water started to go down into it…)

The cable went a-jitter, shallow swings turned into the sway of growing amplitude. I shot up my arms and fell. Luckily, when in the dive, my hands grabbed onto the cable. I caught breathe for a couple of seconds, then let it go and, like a parachutist, landed on the pit bottom.

There, I leaned over the face of a prostrate prostitute in a broad-brimmed hat with red lining who stared upward past me. How come the prostitute in the snow? Why was I there? It's an easy one about the hooker, she simply slipped from the bag in the fall. And it was right I got there – my way was finished on that cable, another one was starting from that depths…

So I went along the graveled bottom of the pit to its end in the distance with the ramp for KAMAZ trucks to drive down but not at this early hour. When back on the surface, I proceeded to the station square to be in time for our bus and go to work and, after the working day, I got off our Seagull by the bus station to buy a ticket, and to run, waving it, into the already starting bus, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!" Because Eera told me about her country trip to the Hare Pines forest so as to train her conjugal fidelity despite the champagne in the glove box. Because what else did I have to do? That's why I went to Romny…

It was completely dark and cold in Romny, but I found a hotel. The receptionist did not know where to accommodate a guest with a cellophane packet in his hands, so she allotted a room with 4 beds for me alone. Although she could combine me with that pair of business travelers that came from the same bus in my wake.

The room was a usual pencil-box for 4, empty and freshly painted over the paint coats from the previous 20 renovations. 4 thick terry towels hung from the backs of the 4 beds, and the radio on the wall was singing in thick bass a romance about the cold morning, gray morning.

I had nothing to do. I turned off the radio and the light too. Then I lay down and stared at the darkness until I fell asleep…

~ ~ ~

The morning, contrary to the forecast from the radio romances, was bright and sunny, and pretty soon I found the psychiatric hospital. I left the cellophane packet in the snowdrift on the lawn under a bared big tree and, without any luggage, entered the open gates keeping my hands visible.

When the guards got it that I was not visiting anyone but wanted to stay there myself, I was taken to a small office. A young man, who looked like a militia lieutenant, except for a white doctor’s smock, asked about the reason for my coming.

"I want a certificate that I am not crazy." I knew perfectly well that by those words I had burned down all the ships and blown up all the bridges behind me, and now they would lock me up for sure.

"And who says you were crazy?"

"Well, in a streetcar, for instance."

His animation grew exponentially. He started inquiring what kind of a seal I wanted on the certificate – round, or triangle?

"It does not matter as long as it's signed."

So, he called a young doctor and an elderly nurse to take me to the shower, and then to the fifth unit. Before the shower, the nurse sheared off the hair in my groin with a hairdresser's hand-machine. I felt embarrassed, but I did not resist – a strange monastery is not the right place to barge into a-preaching your doctrine.

After the shower, the doctor took me to an interview. In order to consolidate the success, I drove a couple of fools, she only moaned lustfully while scribbling post-haste in a thick notebook. When we went out into the yard, I said that I had left a cellophane packet outside the gate. The nurse refused to believe me, but then she went off and with amazement brought it.

(…and what was there to be surprised at? Who'd get the nerve to lift a packet left, like a bait, in front of the gaping gate to the regional psychiatric hospital?..)

The doctor frisked the cellophane and allowed me to keep it together with its contents: a copybook, a pen, and a book in English with a close-up of a woman in a wide-brimmed slouch hat in the front cover…

The fifth unit at the Romny psychiatric hospital was located on the third floor of the building constructed by the blueprints from the Stalinist times when the installed flights of steps formed a wide stairwell. Halfway up, there was an iron mesh across the well to surprise a would-be suicide with the failure of his shifty schemes. The stairs ended on the wide landing in front of the locked door in between the two long wooden benches by the sidewalls.

Behind the door, as you would normally anticipate, there started a corridor stretching to the right. It started from the window with vertical grates and, past the closed office door tableted "Head Doctor", went away to its other—blind and murky because of the distance—end with a tap and sink in the sealing wall.

In both sidewalls of the long corridor, there gaped rectangular doorways to the wardrooms, that at the first, unaccustomed, sight looked like passages to caves because of lacking any door. The light from the outside world reached the corridor after creeping transversely thru the wardrooms whose grated windows considerably decimated it. That's why, in cloudy weather, the bulbs in the corridor were turned on all day long. That dim illumination served rather to emphasize than disperse the twilight.

Halfway to the far-off end wall, one wardroom on the left was missing, substituted with a small hall of two barred windows. In the hall corner next to the right window, a tall pier-mirror stood atop its empty cabinet, and the partition returning to the corridor from that corner had a white door with the tablet "Manipulation Room" on it. The hall’s left window was blocked by a tall box, like, pedestal for a turned-off TV. The lofty pyramid was abutted by a hospital couch alongside the partition wall with the other white door in the hall, tableted "Senior Nurse", exactly opposite the manipulation room.

The floor in the corridor was paved with middle-sized ceramic tiles of a dark brownish hue conforming to the general gamma in the all-pervading twilight. The floor-tiles gleamed moistly since the privileged shut-ins washed it twice a day with wet cloths on wooden mops…

For a starter, to check how dangerous I was, they placed me to the observation wardroom, opposite the hall with the pier-mirror. At the jamb of the door-less doorway to the wardroom, there stood an armchair whose carcass of nickel-plated pipes, upholstered in brown leatherette, leaned its back against the corridor wall. The slender pipes of legs supported an elderly but sturdy mujik in the seat—a paramedic—rigged out in a white smock and a small white capulet. With one ear turned to the observation wardroom, he faced the distant parts of the corridor where another paramedic sat at another wardroom in the exactly same chair, yakking idly with a young man in the pajamas and army high boots, who squatted with his arms hung over his knees, in front of the sitter.

The paramedic took me into the wardroom, chinking on the way the bunch of keys tied to the rope-like strip of his belt against the back of the bed nearest to the doorway, where a young blonde in bright red pajamas lay with his unswerving stare stuck into the crevices in the whitewashed ceiling while hastily beating off under his sheet. The clang was upheld by a burst of sardonic laughter out of the opposite corner, but it choked abruptly.

The third bed from the window was pointed at by the paramedic's stubby finger and I humbly lay down. The bed between me and the window was occupied by a supine young man clutching the collar of his blue hospital gown tightly wrapped around his stuck out neck with closely cropped head on it, whose eyes were intensely peering upward, absorbed in watching transition of stains in the ceiling, one into another.

Soon, he turned to me an inquisitive stare from the bluish circles around his eyes and asked whether my brother's name was Sasha and if I had a sister as well. Not waiting for my response, he squeezed his head between his hands to report that he had been studying with them at the technical school before one evening his father sent him to collect cows when the hoary fog was drifting thru Podlipnoye which instilled a cold into his hatless, unprotected, head and ever since the poor nob aches regularly.

A couple of times he left his story off to holler at a nuts who approached the siderails of my bed mumbling some poorly articulated questions. Then he said that his name was also Sasha, turned away, and fell asleep.

A pair of patients without speech problems exacted from the blond in red a song, and he whined and wheezed out the latest hit from the "Mayak" radio station:

"Save, please, save, please, save, please, save my broken heart,
Find, please, find, please, find, please, find her for me…"

Two hours later, I was classified a not violent case, the senior nurse called me out from the corridor and led to Wardroom 9, closer to the office with the tablet "Head Doctor".

The 9th looked more cozy accommodating just ten beds. It's only that the white desk partly jutted from the left corner across the entrance, but since there was no door it felt like a minor inconvenience. Wildlife shrieks from neighboring wardrooms gradually grew more habitual and ceased to stir upsurges of funk by their primeval jungle force.

In the evening, along the corridor there sounded a cry "to the kitchen!" and then a group of privileged shut-ins, led by a nurse, marched to the exit. A half-hour later they returned in a hurried pace, precipitated by the weight of two huge thermos pots schlepped over in the counter direction. A few minutes later, from the remote end of the corridor, they hollered, "Workmen to dinner!"

Workmen were always called first to the dining room. Instead of pajamas, they wore black spetzovkas and after breakfast and midday meal, they were convoyed away somewhere.

When the workmen left the dining room, in the corridor sounded the next call, "The second party, to dinner!" And, after a corresponding period of time, the concluding call was shouted out, "The third party, to dinner!"

The left sidewall in the far end of the corridor had three locked doors: to the shower, to the dispenser, and to the dining room. Neither of them had any tablet, but everyone knew where was what.

In the shower room, they kept tin pails and wooden mops for washing the floor. Its door was opened by a nurse or a paramedic for the privileged to take their pastime instruments and locked again at once. However, despite so close control one of the fifth unit shut-ins managed to hang himself in the shower room, although not at the first go.

Before feeding the fifth unit, they unlocked both the dispenser room—to place the brought thermos pots there—and the dining room, to have where to call the eating parties to.

The dispenser room was narrowed by the large robust shelving along the wall opposite the dispenser window. The lumber shelves' load was a dozen of gaudy cellophane packets with food belonging to the shut-ins visited by their visitors on the visiting day. Twice a week, they heralded along the corridor, "Delivery! Who has a delivery? To the dining room!" Those who knew that in the dispenser room there were things they did not manage to stove away completely during the visit of their visitors, trod to the dining room to finish the chew. If someone failed to keep in mind or rejected recollections about the cellophane packet awaiting them on the shelves, then more attentive and caring wardroom-mates would remind him and solicitously escort to the dining room to assists in eating the delivery.