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

Ivan, a carpenter from SMP-615, somehow liked the line about a cabbage leaf on the knife blade's edge. After 6 months, he asked to recite for him about that cabbage once again; I'd never imagine the bulky block had a sweet tooth for salads.

At times, when at the end of a midday break there still remained 5 minutes before to leave the trailer and go on with laying the walls, the women on our team asked to read something new, and the recital would be concluded by Grynya’s yell: "Sehryoga! They do not shoe horses with fire, there are horseshoes for that! Gelding you are ungroomed!" He was brought up and educated in the village of Krasnoye on the Baturin highway and should know such things better.

When the number of poems exceeded a score, my attitude to them changed qualitatively. Why should they lie around? Ain't it a pity? And I started to send them to the editorial offices of diverse monthlies and publishing houses, just like Martin Eden from the same-named novel by Jack London. And they kept returning back to me, exactly as his ones to him, with typewritten responses, which looked like one and the same carbon-copied answer.

They informed that the material received from me was inconsistent with the thematic orientation of their publication, besides, their editorial portfolio was filled for 3 to 4 upcoming years, yet not a single word about the verses themselves. Thus, Grynya's review remained unsurpassed: "Gelding ungroomed!"

However, the literary collaborator at one of the journals shared, that a similar style was the vogue in the 1930s. Probably, he aimed to point out the deprecated nature of the stuff, but it rather made me happy – they recognized poems as having some sort of style!

(…and what a style it was! In the 1930s the Union of Writers had not been gelded yet with political purges and spy-hunting repressions. In those days people still wrote poetry and not conjuncture-prone materials dedicated to the nearing Party Congresses…)

It gradually began to dawn on me that none of the eggheads, slurping from the trough of literary collaboration, was interested in all those poetic "beam blades in the sky" any more than in prosaic skewers in their personal ass.

The final eye-opener arrived with the response from the monthly Moscow to "Tired Alla". A fleeting glance made it quite clear that the literary collaborator perused the suggested piece in the most serious and conscientious way. The meaning of a certain word in the second stanza was not quite evident for him, so he took pains to check the term with a dictionary… He forgot to erase the working marks of his assiduous pencil in my verse. The word "craving" remained underlined and its interpretation—"lust"—was added nearby.

I did not know which dictionary he used to dig it out, but the result offended me. The ultimate blow was dealt by the name of the reviewer who signed the response – Pushkin! Aw, fuck! The mental picture of Pushkin looking up "craving" in a dictionary made me draw the line under my fucking the brains of editors with my f-f..er..formidable, I mean, simplicity. I realized at last, that I was not a Martin Eden and it was anything but America around.

The realization of my non-American origin and whereabouts cut postal expenses for envelopes and registered letters. Sending such a letter was not big deal though, about 50 kopecks, the equivalent of 2 "Belomor-Canal" cigarette packs and 6 boxes of matches because the cost of living in the Soviet Union was fairly reasonable, and treatment of askew illusions, practically, free of charge…

~ ~ ~

In summer, you came to Konotop again, yet without any carriage already. Our team was working at the 50-apartment block near the Under-Overpass, and one of the riggers, Katerina it was, shouted from the ground that I had visitors. I went downstairs and to the sidewalk outside the gate.

You stood next to Eera who was wearing a red sarafan with white Mongolian patterns. I don't remember what you had on, but I do remember how lovely you were smiling… I carefully lowered my plastic helmet onto your straight fair hair, and its visor slid down to touch your nose but it failed to put out your happy smile… I remember that smile from under my helmet.

In a couple of minutes, you both went on down the sidewalk and I watched, and the riggers, Katerina and Vera Sharapova, they also watched from behind the gate, suddenly so silent and pensive, because such beauty was going away – a woman in red, hand in hand with a child of fair straight hair.

You had just turned 3 years old, and I decided that the best gift for you would be a familiar face among the strangers at 13 Decemberists. I went to Nezhyn and, despite my tongue-tied speaking manner, did manage to convince Tonya to let her son go with me to your birthday in Konotop, provided that my father-in-law would arrive the following day and take him back. Tonya was a really brave woman, she was not afraid of my reputation, drenched beyond any hope for restoration after Romny.

The local train was overcrowded and for about an hour we had to stand in the aisle, vacant seats appeared only about the station of Bakhmuch. But how happy you and Igor turned when I brought him to 13 Decemberists! A fountain of joyful squeals!.

The following week my vacation began and 4 of us—you, Eera, I and Lenochka—went to the Seim with a permit to the RepBase recreation camp procured by my parents for us. It was a wide grounds whose low plank fence enclosed a few large Pines and several wooden cabins with 4 beds in each and windows on all the sides, like a veranda. When we first went to the river beach, everyone there got just stupefied, they never saw a Greek goddess go, moreover with so snow-white a skin as Eera's.

Another day the 4 of us went hunting mushrooms in the forest plantation nearby the village of Khutor Taransky. Halfway there, we met a pair of horses, but I worried only about Eera, she always was afraid of those animals.

The forest planting was of young Pines lined up in parallel ranks. Long spider webs stretching across the passages between the lined trees made the plantation almost impassable, but there were suillus under the Pine needles layer on the ground. We were combing thru the corridors walled with the Pine trunks, forth and back. You grew thirsty and I asked Lenochka to take you to the camp—the path was wide and it was no more than just 300 meters—because I wanted Eera all too madly.

For a long time you did not want to go with your sister before, finally, you agreed, but a moment later your loud crying rang along the Pine corridor, and Lenochka explained that you did not listen to her at all, although there were no horses anymore.

In the evening, there was a thunderstorm and downpour, but you were not afraid and only laughed because I was lying on my bed and you were stomping on my stomach. Someone's joy might hurt someone else – at your 3 years you were a weighty kid, but Eera cried out to be patient with my own child. I endured a little more and then I hardly managed to persuade you that's enough, please.

It was a good summer…

On the day of your departure, you squared up with the clothesline tied from the wicket to the porch, which certainly was not the right place for it. You took a mop and started knocking it at the half-dried laundry hung over the rope. My mother yelled at you and darkened in the face, but you already were too big to lose your footing, and only the mop was snatched from your hands.

It was time to start for the streetcar terminal, Lenochka volunteered to take you there on the trunk of her bicycle. Eera agreed though I was against the idea. My misgivings increased when I noticed the glances exchanged by my mother and Lenochka. The most frightening about it was that they did not look at each other, but into the ground at each other's feet, while their averted eyes kept a mute dialogue:

"Sure?"

"Yes, do it!"

I do not invent, neither distort reality by wacky fantasies, which is proved by what followed the unspoken dialogue overheard by me with I don't know what.

You left, sitting on the trunk behind Lenochka. Yet, Eera and my mother were ping-ponging empty clues for one minute more, before we left going out into the street. With the bags in my hands, I hurried along leaving Eera behind.

There stayed about a hundred meters to the street corner, when I knew that I was right being so hasty because I heard your shrill scream. You stood by the fence and kept screaming. Lenochka, holding her bicycle, tried to persuade you not to cry, but you did not listen to her and just screamed on and on. The rusty iron pipe stuck up from under the ground in between you 2. The only iron pipe in the half-kilometer leg between 13 Decemberists and Streetcar 3 terminal… Everything fell into place, I got it all. Very calmly, so as not to show that I was aware, I asked Lenochka to go home, no need to see us off any farther, no, thanks.

Then Eera also came up and tried to comfort you, but you cried while walking on to the terminal because of such a big bump on your forehead… We rode by the streetcar in silence, Eera was blankly looking out the window. You sullenly sat in her lap, and I in the opposite seat, feeling crushed. How to live in a world where a grandmother blesses her granddaughter to kill another granddaughter of hers – this beautiful kid with the copper 5-kopeck coin pressed by her mother to her forehead for the bump to dissolve?. Eera was silent on the train too, and I never attempted at sharing what shouldn't be shared…

(…now Lenochka has 2 children, beautiful daughters.

You and she are strangers to each other, and no one of you remembers anything of all that, especially that pipe thanks to the mind’s conventional blessing—forgetfulness

My mother, eventually, became a witness of Jehovah amassing piles of glossy eye-candy booklets for the saved or those who want to get saved. And it's only I am to blame for all what happened then but, upon my word of honor, in that recreation camp I wouldn't stand Lenochka on my stomach – she was already 9 years old…)

~ ~ ~

When I joined our team after my vacation, the pavement before the 50-apartment block was cut with a transverse trench for the tie-in to the main communications under the road on Peace Avenue. However, the carpenters of SMP-615 assembled a robust lumber bridge, wide and secure, with beam railings for the convenience of pedestrians.

I was at the trench bottom, digging, when I saw Beltyukov on the bridge. He strolled up there dressed in a dapper colonial style. I did not want to attract his attention, but he recognized me from above even in my spetzovka and helmet, stopped on the bridge to greet me and introduced to his mother, a lady in an aggressive neckline.

Then they went along. He was nervous and she guarding him way too closely, so that I understood the roots of his bitter resentment at the matriarchy when under the influence of insulin. And I also thought that our meeting in Romny was not his final stay in a mental hospital, that they wouldn’t let him run loose for long because he was wandering up there, defenseless, controlled by so exacting mommy which would imminently bring about the next relapse. Learn from me, sonny! See? I'm below, in the trench, with my helmet on, no SOB of a paramedic buster would ever reach me here. As for my stay in the madhouse, I went there of my free will and got fed up to the ears, when they were making me wiser thru my busted ass…

Accepting another of my translations, Zhomnir, in return, handed me a thick hardback volume. It was a monograph about schizophrenia which he bought when his daughter had problems with it before she got married. Monograph means a collection of articles by different authors concerning some mutual subject. I thoroughly studied the friendly shared volume; after all, that was not boiled sausage with admixed charms to win my love.

(…in their articles, the contributing authors considered diverse aspects of the same subject from different standpoints, each one according to their respective specializations. Thus, a chemically trained writer presents the listing of biochemical blood components in a number of notorious schizophrenics at the peak of their spiritual activity compared to the periods of relative calm in the same persons. Alas, no exacerbation of amino acids level in leukocytes was detected.

Another contributor scrupulously measures anything which turns up to their measuring devices, which data showed equally indefinite results.

The third one just takes a seat next to the bed with a fixed up patient and, while the aberrating fictionalist drives him a fool, he writes down some tremendously fabulous stuff. Like, he was boarding his trolley 47 awfully careful not to touch anyone and all the same there suddenly was a sand desert all around and he had just a tattered cloth round his loins, as anyone else in the pack of similarly skinny, naked, and sunburned fellers, when a band of horsemen galloped from behind a dune and started to massacre the unarmed fugitives sticking them by spears…

Yet, on the whole, it's quite a useful monograph because the authors, despite the fact of their being representatives of the decaying West, had the courage of real scientists to honestly put their hands up and acknowledge, "Okay! I do not fucking know what the fuck is this fucking schizophrenia about!"

"Try to approach her tenderly,
Look deeply in her eyes,
You'll find the treasure you have never seen!.."

Presently, despite the progress in the methods of modern research, all the finds by this particular field of science is just that nicely scientific term – "schizophrenia", everything else is wrapped in the dense mist of uncertainty.

The main trump ace, the touchstone and litmus test, provided by the science, are "the voices" which you meet in any textbook on the psychiatry. If you hear some voices and there is not a living soul around, then you are a schizophrenic. But if them those unsubstantiated voices tell you, "Save France!" then you're the hero Saint – Joan of Arc.

The only weak point in the said monograph is absence of an expert in theology. Suffice it to recall St. Inez, whose body in a jiffy got covered with long fur, so that the rapists were stripped of any chance of breaking her hirsute chastity…

They are enjoying cakes and ale in their picnic in the bed of roses, those specialists in the trade whose luminaries can't see the misty core of what they are, actually, about. To concoct a diagnosis is easier than making a fig. Pour half a glass raw schizophrenia, spice it with a pinch of double-barreled adjectives, shake the ingredients…Enjoy! "Fur-coat form of schizophrenia", the favorite drink of St. Inez!

Tamara at the fourth kilometer on the Chernigov outskirts was not in the know of all of my exploits. For the burned down plantation of cannabis, I could be easily stamped with "autodafic form of schizophrenia aggravated by Torquemada complex" to commemorate that absolutely normal inquisitor who regularly sent packs of heretics to the stake.

As for the term itself, they used (as is the tradition in producing scientific nomenclature) the words from old Greek which, when putting ancient roots together, reads "cracked mind". And now – lo! – "The mind cracked in the form of a fur coat."