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

I had a lonely dinner in the kitchen because Eera told you not to disturb your daddy when he's eating, and took you away to the living room. Then I went over to the bedroom, so as not to disturb everyone watching TV in the living room. Besides, there was no place to get seated because your aunt Vitta had come from Chernigov to stay with the parents for her vacation.

You also came to the bedroom and we grew a bit noisy, Eera came in to pacify us and make out the beds for you and me. Then she turned the light off, so that you would fall asleep sooner, and returned to the TV box because there was a replay of the New Year release of "Kinopanorama".

I stayed sitting in the dark in front of the new dressing table… I did not make any plans and everything went somehow by itself… After the sound of your breathing showed that you were fast asleep, I waited for another 5 minutes and then took you over to the folding bed-armchair. Then I undressed and lay down on the matrimonial double.

I lay for a long time with my hands under my head. The traffic along Red Partisans Street almost died out, but the noise of the rare cars became even more unbearable and so the glare of their headlights creeping over the window curtains… Poor Tonya. How could they possibly live here?.

Then I began to think about Eera and me: how could we come to live like this? Ladies first, yet for the simplicity’s sake it’s much easier to start with me thanks to my straightforward accountability because there left nothing in me but a mixture of insatiable hanker and jealousy, bitter and sharp. All other feelings got successfully quenched to avoid distressful pangs, but these two proved being stronger than me.

Now, what about her? At the institute, she was lucky to pull such a winning trump from the pack. All the girlfriends pined away from envy. Then the girlfriends went away to work off for their diplomas where appointed, and the trump's reputation got drenched. Here enters mummy with the gold ring: you're so young, a good man still will come round the corner, better if he were a military pilot, whose salaries far above the miserable 120 rubles.

So, what in the end? We just have what we have…that Soviet Pushkin, the sycophant of a literary collaborator, had called it lust…stupid nerd…lust comes when there is no more craving… And again there rose the snarl of a car engine coming from afar, nearer and nearer, from the Airfield-Area.

The creeping light crawls up over the curtains, arching its back, drooping forward, yes, we've found the way to smooth out the pesky wrinkle in the final phase of natural flow and dodge the snapping interruption of the ebullient passionate raptures for the sake of birth control the way like Arthur Clark's astronauts' jumps from one spaceship's lock to the other's without their spacesuits thru the void of cosmos with a side bonus of semen application for the lotions of more beneficial effect for the skin than that of mummia, ginseng, and even fabulous ojb grass because the inquisitive digressions of those loving to love their beloved lovingly will beat any Kama Sutra, I always knew that without reading a single line from it but is it worth the while?. well, I don't know… I've always loved them as they are, without acrobatics, S&M role-playing and stuff… just, "C'mon, babe, let's do us feel good"…straight thrill, you know…no frills and long live vanilla fucking…

All you need is VF!

All you need is VF!

VF is all you need!

rrata-ta-ra-ra-ta-ta

(All together now!)

All you nee…

but wait-wait-wait! how about suggestive music backdrop? mirrors in the ceiling like in those Roman poets' bedrooms… I kicked poetry already… a-and the initializing blow job, or finalizing for that matter… ready to go without?.. well, it's a game for 2 after all, whatever baby wants, she should get…as a noble self-made gentleman, I can't withhold her pleasures, eh?…

Here's another car's wailing… they are just wrenching your soul out when passing by… Poor Tonya, how could they live here?.

Then thru the door to the living room, there came the voices wishing goodnight each other. Eera entered the bedroom. In the light of the streetlamp behind the window tulle curtain, she picked the needed vial up from the bevy by the dressing table mirror and went out again. The unyielding hardon made me tense and strained.

It took a long time before she returned and closed the door, then she bent over you on the bed-armchair to check if I was asleep. You slept like an innocent baby and never woke up at what followed.

Eera lay by my side under the blanket, felt with her hand my shoulder, abruptly recoiled, and cried out, "You?! Get out of here!"

"Come on, quiet…"

"Dad!"

SHE CALLED FOR HELP TO GET PROTECTED FROM ME

I did not touch her, I just lay on my side with my arm bent at the elbow to prop my jaw in the capped hand above the pillow and idly watched, like a beach-goer estimating with an imperturbable air how many bathers were there in the water. Oddly, I became a complete outsider, a listless on-looker because everything somehow turned all the same to me.

Evenly, with unconcerned calmness, I pronounced, "I'm fed up with you."

Said I that? No! Not true! Not fed up! It's not me!

And yet it was I who uttered the words, which were the part of the ritual. What ritual?!. It made no difference because I did not care anymore.

Still leaning my head against my hand, I held out the other one and weakly slapped its palm against the soft cheek.

I?! Cuffed her?! Of course, not. It was not a slap, it was a part of the ritual.

She turned speechless from astonishment, but it was too late. I dropped back upon the pillow and pulled the blanket up to my chin.

The switch clicked, in the raw light from the ceiling, her parents and sister crowded in the doorway. She jumped out of the bed and joined the flock. Vitta started to emit the traditional screams of a family squabble. Ivan Alexeyevich in his pajamas stood with his head bowed.

I saw how difficult it was for him to make the decision. Or take it. What if I was stark naked? Before his princedom harem? But there was nothing I could do to help him. My role was that of an on-looker. Finally, he made a decisive step, even 2, grabbed my hand sticking from under the blanket, and pulled me out. The catch plumped onto the frayed rug spread on the floor. The blanket remained atop the bed.

I stayed sprawled down there while my mother-in-law was reading Prayers at the Departure of the Soul to declare how hugely shameless I was to lay prostrate before the ladies in such an undressed state. Underpants and a tank-top may be decent sportswear for jogging in the morning, but not in the presence of your mother-in-law.

I silently got up and, quite unexpectedly even for myself, made a deep bow to shake off the non-existent dust from the hair below my knees. A ritual makes us follow its canon even if we have no idea what ritual it is.

"We shall renounce the old world of tyrants,
We shall shake off its ashes from out feet!.."

I dressed and went out into the hallway. The mother-in-law followed. To make sure I would not foray into the refrigerator? She was replaced by Eera, alerted, keeping mum. I gave her one ruble and asked to pass it to Vitta, who lent me the sum a week earlier. She nodded. I took a piece of paper out of my briefcase and wrote a note to Vitta with gratitude for the ruble. Even the grave fails to correct a graphomaniac…

The night was quiet and windless. I spent it standing at the nearest bus stop, the way I was standing in front of a ticket office in the Odessa airport locked for the midday break. Only now there were no roses in my hand.

"The Sun was never any match for you,
Brother Rain,
That is true from any point of view,
Brother Rain.
Twining in the dates too rare,
Stuck in love and black despair,
Shedding diamond tears in vain,
Tears of ecstasy and pain
Stop your crying, get away, Brother Rain…"

It was a quiet, indifferent, midwinter, night… In all that night 3 cars passed the bus stop, one of them a Volga. I did not care. Numbness of the senses.

In the one-story building opposite, the light went on and, soon after, off, twice during the night; should be an elderly person going to the toilet and back. In the dark gray twilight, the first bus appeared from the Airfield-Area and took me to the station…

~ ~ ~

At half-past seven, I got off the local train in Konotop. I do not know where I spent the following hour because when I came to the 50-apartment block the black Saturday was in full swing. The growling bulldozer in the shroud of the blueish mist of smoke from its exhaust pipe, was burying itself in the hill of earth it moved in the middle of the would-be yard. Grynya and Lydda had already changed into their spetzovkas and padded jackets. "You did not go to Nezhyn?" Lydda asked.

"No."

I took a sheet of paper from my briefcase with the report to the trade-union committee about spending 3 rubles to visit a patient in hospital.

(…my current public position was visiting SMP-615 employees when they got to hospital, and comfort them with a delivery and for each such occasion the trade-union committee granted exactly 3 rubles.

Though visiting ill colleagues solo, I had later to present reports on spending the amount of 3 rubles signed by no less than 3 persons because the sum was serious…)