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

Beltyukov and I lay on our beds, side by side, and talked, looking up into the ceiling. He was a sociable guy and somehow resembled Vitalik from the construction battalion or, maybe, not very much so. Then our conversation turned into incoherent exclamations: Beltyukov shouted about the dominance of fucking matriarchy, and I kept proclaiming that all people were brothers and how could you possibly not see it!? Meanwhile, my head was tilting back to see my backbone, only the pillow was always in the way.

It signaled the nurse to put aside her ledger, and give us a shot of glucose intravenously to ward off the upcoming dive into the fatal phase of coma. Then they untied us and gave a glass of water with a thick sugar solution because the mouth was burning awful hot. That does not mean that Beltyukov and I always shouted the same thing, yet such were the core themes of our slogans at uncontrolled chanting when under insulin. On Sundays, they did not inject us that shit…

The hardest to recover from was the shot of sulfur. Normally, it is injected to drunks in the form of punishment, however, the head doctor might have been having some special experimental considerations or certain optimistic hopes. She wanted to do her best, probably. It's also a shot in the rear, with the effect spreading over deep into the bone tissue. 2 days following the injection, the patient treated to it has to drag his leg because of feeling a sharp pain as if your join was finely smashed.

The shot of sulfur broke my will. Dragging the leg, I shuffled to the dining room to eat the lard from the delivery, but when the chmo dispenser shut-in handed me the cellophane packet, it smelled like my briefcase in the sixth grade, when I forgot to eat the ham sandwich at school, and it spent there all winter vacations. I had to throw the rotten lard away…

My relations with the fellow shut-ins were even and correct, as anywhere else, I staunchly stayed an undeclared renegade. Naturally, those derailed out of reach and submerged into the vagaries of their private worlds, did not notice me, while shut-ins capable of thinking, as far as possible, showed certain respect caused by the sympathy and compassion for my exposure to the insulin injections. Only one young guy, Podrez, for some time was fawning over me without any reason but then, in the queue to the dining room, he hit me in the stomach, I couldn't guess why.

2 minutes later, Beltyukov, in the same queue, found some fault with Podrez, pinioned him and kept immobilized. He did not say me anything, not even with his eyes, but there was no need for hinting that Podrez was fixed by him for me to jab the guy into any spot at my discretion. But I did not hit, I feel sorry for the mentally ill, notwithstanding my hurt stomach.

A far more terrible blow dealt me the loss of the book in English. On the white desk in our wardroom, there remained only the copybook with the since long finished translation and the pen stuck in between its pages. I was upset unbearably because the book was borrowed from Zhomnir, who had borrowed it from another teacher at the Department of English – the ever-smiling Nona. But when I, in that terrified state, turned to the head doctor, she, with the indefinite indifference, responded that the book would not go anywhere.

And she was right. 3 days later it was returned to me by a shut-in who collected it from the nutty kidnapper at Wardroom 7, he failed to keep it concealed any longer.

(…I understand the thief's sentiment. At those times they did not know in the Soviet Union how to produce such glossy paperbacks for books, and all of a sudden—wow!—a gaudy close-up of a female face against the background of the fifth unit. Who would resist?..)

He did not spoil it in any way, and only the backside of the cover bore light touches of a pencil by which he tenderly poured out his adoration, slightly reminiscent of a sketch of the cerebral cortex, or whimsy curls of whirling smoke. It even might have been some formulas of the unknown scientific language from beyond the future, only that I have given up already moving down that road…

The shut-ins were all so very different. At first sight of some of them, you could immediately see they had a yo-yo stream of consciousness if any at all, but with some other, you’d hardly say he's nuts.

In general, there were all kinds of sorts, with quite neighborly types among them, like that brunette fat man. However, one day, lying on the hospital couch in the hall, he confessed to me his murder of someone else and, usually so very cheerful, he grew at once all gloomy. Maybe it was a lie because the murderers were kept at the second unit whose paramedics were brutes accomplished and his confession was simply a day-dream like my bumping Gray off in the stoker-house of VSO-11…

Yes, there happened incurable liars around. One of them, with a fat tattoo of "Kolya" on his hand, without any invitation started convincing me that his name was Peter, and after that, he took an obvious offense at me although I had not expressed any doubts.

As for Tsyba, he amazed me by his erudition enumerating the unsuccessful suicide attempts of Hemingway until he found out that a pistol was the most steadfast means for the purpose. And before that, I listed him among the unmistakable half-nuts…

There was a seemingly normal gaffer, whose queerness you could guess only from his sentimentality, he got devastatingly hurt hearing that we all lived in a madhouse. Always. For life. The madhouse thru and thru, both indoors and outside, no difference.

"Do not say so, at least here it's a mental hospital."

Such a delicate soul…

Or, say, that mujik whom I for a long stretch considered dumb. On the contrary, he was very inquisitive, it's just that he prepared his questions all too carefully. It took him a month before he approached me and, eye to eye, asked about the sorest spot, "And your wife, was she a chaste virgin?"

Firstly, no dumb have such words in their lexicon and, secondly, I hadn't checked her ears, quoting Rabentus.

And the dumb, on hearing that, began to cry. He fell silent again dripping noiseless tears.

A rather gloomy madhouse on the whole…

~ ~ ~

However crazy, the shut-ins knew everything, and 4 days beforehand they warned me that on Friday I would be called to the commission where they decide to set me free or go on with their treatment. The commission consisted of the head physician of the psychiatric hospital, the head doctor of the fifth unit and the on-duty nurse. Afraid of saying something wrong, I was amenably falling over myself to agree with anyone, grovelling even before the nurse, "Yes, yes, of course, yes!"

The head doctor said they had prepared me for discharge, but I would only be released if some of my relatives come to pick me off.

How afraid I was that no one would come on Saturday! After all, there had been such a Saturday when I waited in vain. The whole evening after the commission I had to restrain myself so as not to burst into tears. Sobs literally clenched my throat – I would not stand another week of injections…

My parents came together, and from the landing by the door, we were summoned to the office of the head doctor who said that my treatment should be continued with iminazine pills.

My mother thanked her so very much, and my father took out the money from his jacket pocket and handed it to my mother. She came up to the head doctor and put the money into the pocket of her professional white smock, but the head doctor did not even notice it.

(…as I learnt later, the amount was 40 rubles – the combined daily earnings of a team of 6 bricklayers. That day there were 3 discharges, so the head doctor earned my monthly payment in one morning.

As they say in Konotop, it depends on what you've been trained for…)

On the bus from Romny to Konotop, my mother cautiously informed me that my things had been moved from the apartment rented under the great birch tree, back to 13 Decemberists. Though saddened by that news, I had not strength to resist…

At first, our team met me guardedly as a person returning from Romny. However, at construction sites, such attitude wears off quick enough, if by the end of a working day you neither surprised anyone with your shovel over their head nor took a dive from the fifth floor then you're like everyone else.

True, Lydda noticed that I leaned against the pallet with bricks and dozed off in the sun, while the crane was fetching another batch of mortar up, which previously never happened to me. And Grigory commented to Grynya that I was not the same, and pointed at the spanner laid by me over the niche for the electric meters on the landing: one edge 5 centimeters higher than the other.

Grynya answered that they would lap it up all the same because the niche was to be screened behind the frame around the box for the meters.

So I had to put the spanner to rights during the midday break, but before Romny I wouldn't have allowed me such a slip.

And, in general, I became more compliant. The only thing that the treatment couldn't straighten out, was my ill will at falling on all four when laying from the bridging slabs the load-wall on which they rested. Everyone did it on their all four, it's more convenient that way, and safer too. Yet, I still just hunkered when laying the brick course at levels lower my feet, in disregard of protests from my center of gravity. Vitta also at times refrained from kneeling.

(…sometimes, it’s an up-hill job to get rid of the young pioneer inside you.

"Better to dive from the fourth-floor height than lay the wall standing on your knees!"..)

When I went to Nezhyn for a weekend, I took pains to keep my eyes a little squinted, otherwise, people felt creepy at my shell-shocked sight because my lower eyelids drooped as if I'd been forced to watch a documentary series about the death camps, gas chambers, and grim crematoria… I recollected the long article about Clockwork Orange in the monthly Moscow read in the stoker-house at the construction battalion, about how they applied the same technique to him…

Noticing a double chin that started to form under my jaw, I threw the glass container with iminazine pills (the generous gift from the fifth unit head doctor) into the drain pit in the garden at 13 Decemberists. The next day my mother spotted it there and threatened that she would report to psychiatrist Tarasenko my violation of directions from Romny.

"Mom, how can't you see it? Their pills are just a means to make me crazy."

I did not want to lose my leanness, which I always pride myself in, notwithstanding its slight stoop…

Everything became as before, or nearly so… Construction sites in Konotop, weekends in Nezhyn… The eyelids came back to their normal level canceling the need to strain the eye muscles… The translations. The poems…

Those poems started to pop up after the start of my bricklayer career at SMP-615. They were not poems at first, just unattached pieces of irrelevant phrases. Some seemed attractive with the alternating play of sounds within them, others because of inherent ambiguity, or rather being double-barreled so that they could be interpreted in different ways.

While busy with the production process, I, invisibly for my fellow-bricklayers, turned and twirled those pieces in my mind, slit-split them then re-assembled anew, then threw them out of my head to dogs, to devils, to scrap fucks, but the most persistent ones came back after the bum’s rush, and French walk, and kicking-out (consecutively) to stay brazenly there as if they never were away, not for a sec's sliver. Then there remained the only resort – to stick them with a pen down to a piece of paper and forget.

(…in six years there gathered about 30 pieces of those unsolicited self-willed buggers in 2 languages, because each one was coming the way it fancied.

Among them, there happened graphical sketches like that one copied from the landscape around a construction site: "the apple of sky skewered with the blade of beam at sunrise…"; or those marked by their onomatopoeic stickiness: "Carkalomna barcarole…"; or philosophical pieces like that about God devoured the day before; and simply rhythmic chants for marching: "what do we laugh at?."…)

One of the first pieces I showed Eera, and she cocked up at once – who was that Madonna in a padded workman jacket? As if I could know, just one of those queuing in the workmen canteen at the midday break.

As for "To the Tune of V. Kosma" she did not ask anything, it was about her, undoubtedly and clear. Later, she said that they told her it was a good poem, and I stopped showing her any of them. Probably, I was jealous of the unidentified someone, to whom she gave it for evaluation.

When I read to my brother Sasha "The Scythian Interview", his reaction was instantaneous, "You have to be ratted on!"

(…if your poetry piece turns an ombre's train of thoughts in the KGB direction, it holds a worthy idea…)