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

I put the paper on the side of a concrete pipe, 1.5 meters in diameter and 1.5 meters long, and they signed it without reading. "And now?" asked Grynya, "Are you changing or what?"

My stance to black Saturdays was always firmly negative but what else had I to do? I changed into the work clothes, took my shovel and went to scrape the upshot truck-dump with the mortar stuck to its insides, replacing Vera Sharapova. She was sharp and since long noticed that so was my way to drive off my jealousy fits…

At night, back to 13 Decemberists, I was lying prostrate in the unfolded bed-armchair amid the pitch-black darkness in the living room.

Lying all the time on your back is tiring. I wanted to change position and turn over, but I did not allow myself to stir because I needed to become inconspicuous, yet movements might betray your location. When motionless, I kinda became a part to the bottom of a boundless ocean, nothing but that oceanic immensity remained in all empty world. To become a part to such absolute void, you should keep smooth and streamlined and make no rips, so that nothing would cling to you and just go on floating its way. But what enormous emptiness!

(…there is a no direr curse than the old folk curse "emptied be it for to you!"

The purpose of any loss is to make you feel emptied, deprived, drained, devoid of…

Love comes to us as a protecting reaction to the endless void rotations of the life's mill-wheel, its returns to the starting point as empty as it left it.

Love comes as defense from despair, when you're empty of an idea what to do about the useless flukey gift—your life—when you find no means to kill off the eternity measured out to you. When you feel at loose ends, when you have nothing to live for except the aimless living on.

Love comes to free from empty search, brings meaning into your life – to serve! points the direction – to serve!

Love is selfless, self-denying slavery and zealous service to the object of love – a two-legged mammal, or a collection of stamps, or… doesn't matter… it depends on how lucky you were…

And suddenly, a kinda bolt from the blue, the fetters shattered, you're told, "Off with you! Enjoy your freedom!" And you find yourself in the void where there is no purpose, no sense, where you have to just live, like a crystal, like a blade of grass, like a rain-worm.

We are not slaves, slaves are not we!

No! I want back! To where love was… it would fence from the horror of facing the emptiness, would give meaning to the senseless repetitive fuss.

Love will be the one to make decisions. I will obediently execute the orders!.

Love is the sand where to bury your freaked out ostrich head…

Damn you, love! How empty it feels without you!..)

Surviving in vacated vapid void is not a trivial problem. Of course, there is always a choice. Why survive if you can stop the torment at any moment? However, never in my life had I even played with the thought of suicide, not formatted that way. Well, and since there was no choice, I had to solve the problem.

There is just one and only solution – systematicy. Nothing else can serve to overcome emptiness. Whether you're systematically jamming vodka, or systematically jogging in the park does not matter much as long as you keep maintaining a certain cycle…

Luckily, I already had some investments that provided certain means for spanning the void. The five-day workweek, that's for one. My participation in SMP-615 public life – two. And also, visits to Nezhyn for intellectual communication with Zhomnir, once in 2 or 3 months. Who would ask for more?

Any system, so that to work, would need some sort of a carrot to tip for spinning the wheel, to reward for successful conclusion its vicious circle, to stimulate diving into the next, exactly same, rotation.

On Thursdays, I visited the bathhouse with 2 tours into the steam room. Bars of soap and sauna whisker, aka a bunch of dried birch twigs for self-whipping midst the burning hot steam, were on sale at the bathhouse ticket office on the first floor. Leaving the bathhouse, I left those instruments of pleasure on the gray marble tops of low tables in the common washing hall on the second floor, taking home only the changed underwear for the subsequent laundry.

On my way from the bathhouse to the place of residence, I consumed 2 bottles of Zhigulevskoye beer and bought an issue of Morning Star from the news stall in Peace Square, for reading with a dictionary until next Thursday.

On Mondays, I did washing in a tin basin on the bench in the yard, in winter the washing was done in the summer-room section of the shed.

The ironing day depended on the weather conditions around the clothesline, which was stretched from the porch to the shed and not to the wicket anymore; better late, than never.

Weekends were harder to fill, but once a month in Peace Movie Theater they showed another of action movies starring Belmondo, or a comedy with Pierre Richard.

Summer Sundays were no problem at all, I spent them on the Seim beach lying on the pink, with red circles, cover for wrapping babies. That very one which on weekdays was spread over the tabletop when ironing the dry laundry. That cover stayed at 13 Decemberists after one of your earlier visits there. It was rather short and my legs, in part, stayed outstretched over the bare sand, but who cares?

3 times a Sunday, I had a swim for the buoys, where there were no screaming bathers. I lay on my back over the water, with my arms and legs wide apart, and pronounced the self-made ritual formula,

"Oh, water! Ran into each corner of mine!
We be of one blood – thou and me.”

(…to assemble such a phrase I had to involve Fitzgerald and Kipling in collaboration, but they did not mind my plagiarism…)

Then I swam back to the screams and splashes, got out the water to the coverlet to lie down and turn from side to side in the scorching hot sun, at times reading Morning Star. On the beach, I read it without a dictionary, underlining the words which later had to be written out in a copybook.

At the midday-meal time, I left the beach and went to the store in the nearby village of Khutor Taransky. It was a casual khutta under a thatched roof, but with a thick iron strap fixed across the door with a weighty padlock.

Store Manager, an elderly burly squaw, who prided herself on having seen even Sakhalin Island, unlocked the door for just one hour. When she dropped the iron strap on the porch, the door opened into a room with 2 dust-covered windows in the same wall with the door and wide, two-tier, shelves running along the remaining three walls, above the 3 wooden counters.

I systematically bought one item of canned food, a pack of cookies and a bottle of lemonade. After opening the victuals with the opener borrowed from Store Manager, I took the meal out to the empty street of 4 silent khuttas and deep sand in the road, sizzling from the heat. There, next to an old crooked Elm, I sat on the wide bench of a cracked but mighty board turned gray by the years of exposure to the whims of weather going its unchanging season circles around the tree over the bench by the thatched khutta of the store.

The assortment of things on the store shelves never changed. Buying a can of "Tourist's Breakfast", I saw that next Sunday I would have "Sprats in Tomato Sauce" for the meal, and a week later "Zucchini Squash". The can with the sticker "Adjika" instilled obscure apprehension because I kinda heard somewhere that it was bitterer than even wasabi, yet it was still a month away. Maybe, I'd combine it with the small jar of cherry jam from the following shelf, eh? Will make a complex dinner.

In the end, I wiped the aluminum spoon with the wrapper from the finished off cookies, and hid the spoon at the back of the khutta, in the thatched straw over the blind wall, the way Anti-Soviet kulak bandits were hiding their barrel-sawed shotguns… Even Marcello Mastroianni hardly could have dreams of so sweet "Dolce Vita"…

And right in that khutta, I bought a doll for your birthday present. There were only 2 dolls on the shelves – a girl and a monkey, both of rubber. Each one had a tiny squeaker in its back to make a sound when squeezed. The pair of motorcyclists, who somehow managed to overcome the deep scorching sand in the road on that day, advised me to but the monkey, but I preferred the girl, as I had been planning all previous Sundays, in a bright dress—also of rubber—to her knees.

I could buy a present from Department Store in the city, of course, but all the toys there were made of plastic. Besides, I wanted it to be a gift from that enchanted khutta with its cool shade, kinda sanctuary amid the summer heat…

~ ~ ~

Although I am not sure if any system would save me without adding our team to it. This isn't meant to say that the team members surrounded each other with caring attention, tenderness and moral support. Like hell, they would! In our team, as anywhere else, they were all too glad to have a good laugh at your expense. And everyone had a family and kids of their own, as an outlet for their tender care. Except for ruddy, pug-nosed, Peter Kyrpa, handled Kyrpanos, but eventually, he also got lassoed, and corralled, and broken in as a family man by Raya, from the team of plasterers. And yet, from 8 am to 5 pm our team, even with each one distracted by their personal problems and concerns, became one family. For all the hole-picking jokes in each other's qualities, you wouldn't become a victim of a detrimental practical joke like piercing your brains by stench of smoldering wool, or any other injury-prone idiocy.

Did bricklayers use taboo words in ladies' presence? Both yes and no. I have never heard a four-letter word addressed to any woman on our team. Never. But when the crane operator puts a pallet of bricks on your foot, you report it to the whole world—and very loudly too—without paying much attention if there were ladies around.

Were women on a bricklayer team using taboo words? Both no and yes. At the moment charged with trauma threat or loss of life, they’d rather shout "Oy! Mamma!" or issue shrill incoherent shrieks. Whereas at the intervals between shoveling mortar into the boxes for bricklayers, or rigging the brick pallets with the prickly steel cables, Katerina could casually share the folklore song:

"Fuck yourself, you fucking dumbos,
you're more stupid than they said,
No way to marry your daughter?
Go fuck her in my stead!.."

I have to admit, that mute replaying this particular obstreperous folklore piece in the brain convolutions of my inner self sometimes worked as a painkilling palliative.

But, after all, is the foul language the only thing to frown at in the world? The bricklayer Lyoubov Andreyevna once complained to the head engineer, who accidentally dropped in at the construction site, about the insulting words of our foreman Mykola Khizhnyak, by which he identified all women indiscriminately: "Inside-out insoles!" Up to now, I haven't got the slightest idea what it could possibly mean, but she somehow got hurt. Probably, because she was the most beautiful woman on our team, only sad at times.

It is sad for a woman to know she's beautiful and, at the same time, not to know what to do with her beauty and just watch how it flows away in vain.

She had a husband five years younger than her. Before their marriage, he was walking around with a knife hidden in the top of his high boot, and she made of him an exemplary family man and a safe member of society. But she still remained sad, especially in winter frosts, when the mortar in the boxes would develop a centimeter thick ice crust while climbing thru the air to the seizure line. "Oy, Mamma! How my poor little hands did get numb with the cold!"

And that parasite Sehryoga would readily respond from the other end of the line, "Serves you good! Your mummy-daddy kept telling 'study well, sweetheart, so as to become an accountant!' And what was your answer? 'No! The shovel is my one and only love forever!' So shut up now and love it until you get dark blue!"

"Parasite!"