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

In addition to the rubber doll from the village store, I collected a whole set of gifts for your birthday. There were those glossy plastic what-you-call-them, which electricians insert into the junction boxes. They looked like little ninja turtles, although before the production of that cartoon there remained more than 20 years, for which reason you couldn't determine that they were ninjas, yet the similarity of those bits of plastic to turtles was evident at once.

Besides, there were white ceramic checkers as well. Every item in the set had a double, except for the doll.

(…it's, like, a soldier at the front line collecting a present from shot cartridges. However, our team was indeed at the forefront of the world mastered by humans. Birthday presents from the edge of the ecumene…)

It was important for me to get to Nezhyn at a fitting time when no one would intercept and spoil the celebration day. The local train from Konotop, moreover on your birthday, was too easy to ambush with the “it” in a black-and-white tartan and then a slight swishing touch against my jeans would be enough to derail everything. It was wiser to approach from the rear, where I could not be expected from.

The bus Kharkov-Chernigov suited the purpose ideally, but it passed Konotop at five-thirty in the morning. That's why I did not go to bed that night, so as not to oversleep. I was just walking about Konotop in different directions.

When I walked along the concrete wall of the Meat-Packing Plant, there was a crowd of cattle driven thru the roofed gallery up there, to the slaughter work floor. With what human voices they were screaming! Worse than in "The Western Corridor". And they absolutely got it – where they were driving them and why…

About midnight, I was at the Kandeebynno lakes and decided to take a swim. I stripped down and entered the water in the altogether. And who would see? The dark currant bushes on the shore, or the stars and the moon? They had seen more than that. So I plunged ahead. And the darkness around was vibrating with the grunts of mating frogs…

One plasterer, an elderly female, though sporting long taut braids, told me how she was going to commit suicide in her village on the night of this very kind, and the air was filled with the buzz of insisting whisper, "Come on! Here it is, the pond! Go into!" But I did not have any voices, only the frogs.

And then I swam towards the moon. It had just risen over the fish lakes and didn't have time to grow small in the sky. The huge full moon a sliver up from the horizon.

I swam with sidestroke, soundlessly, but still pushed waves ahead of me. Smooth evenly rounded waves, like those lines printed in the handkerchief with the sailboat. Only there they were blue on white and here it was thin silver lines against the black darkness. Besides, these lines were moving, like the waves of ether, until pondweed by the opposite bank began to cling to my feet. It felt scary, all slimy mermaids came on thought, and I returned, swimming on my back so that to watch the moon all the time.

My hair was wet after the swim, and I slowly strolled to the station so that it would dry on the way. At the station, there were huge clocks on the front and back walls of the building, and 2 more inside, in the halls. That's why I went to the station.

I did not have a watch, when I tried to wear one or another on my wrist it would stop in a couple of days, or they started to show the wrong time and should be taken to repair, or replaced with a new one…

Along the way, I remembered that unfortunate guy from the Arab Nights fairy tales, who shed tears all the time and kept tearing the clothes on his chest because he loved a beautiful sorceress, and she loved him too but warned that a certain door in her palace should never be opened, yet he opened it—out of pure curiosity—and got into another dimension with only sand and stones around, and no way back. So, all that remained for him was to cry and beat himself in the chest…

About 2 years before that, I went with Eera to the Desna River. Just 2 of us, she and I. Gaina Mikhailovna was keeping you on that day.

We went there by the morning bus of Chernigov destination. But how would we come back? Come on, something would turn up… When I saw the Desna thru the bus window, I asked the driver to pull up and we got off to the roadside. Then we were going over a field. In another field nearby, women in white kerchiefs were raking hay into mounds, from afar you could not make out what century you were in.

Then I carried Eera on my back over a channel to a long spit of sand overgrown with wide green leaves past which the enchanted Desna flowed calmly. We spread a blanket over the leaves and spent all day there.

When I had to take a leak, I swam to the other bank, the river was not too wide there. Eera strictly warned me not to drench my head. I remembered that and, all the same, I could not help plunging headlong from the bluffy opposite bank. And now all that was left to me was to cry and tear that T-shirt of blue acetate silk on my chest…

The rest of that night I spent sitting in the square between the station and the first platform. The benches there were not very comfortable, lacking the backrests. Seated on one of them, I met rare night trains together with the trolleys of the on-duty workers from the luggage office, into which the workers of postal cars threw out boxes and bales of parcels. And from that same bench, I was seeing off the groups of passengers yawning from the night chill. Have a good trip!.

When the black box in the front wall of the station lit up 05:00, I walked to the waiting hall to collect the cardboard box with the birthday presents from the automatic storage cell and went from there to the bus station. It's close by, almost immediately behind the Loony park…

The Kharkov-Chernigov bus did not pass thru Nezhyn, but from the turn of the highway, nearby the round building of the traffic police post, there again turned up something, so that about 9 in the morning I was already in Nezhyn. At that hour, the local train from Konotop was only approaching Bakhmuch. But I did not want to be a bolt from the blue, that's why I called Eera at her workplace from a payphone booth.

What a beautiful voice she had! So mellow, so dear. I said that I wanted to see you and give a birthday present, and she answered that, yes, of course, and that you were at home with her mother.

I went to Red Partisans with a joyous tide in my chest because Eera on the phone sounded quite friendly, and even somehow pleased.

The door did not open, only the peephole darkened momentarily, then brightened up again. I pushed the doorbell button once more, but this time shorter, and I heard footsteps cautiously departing from the hallway. I also heard your voice complaining about something from the doorway to the living room, and how your grandmother was shushing you in a whisper.

If a person has voices from a psychiatry textbook, they tell him something. I couldn't make out any words but thru the door I could see—and very clearly—you, a four-year-old kid, anxiously looking up at your grandma – who's there? Gray Wolf? Bad Unclie? And I also saw Eera's mother in the six-month perm-wave, with her finger pressed to her lips, "Shush!"

I am not of those who kick into a locked door, and I did not want to scare you any further. I rang to the opposite door on the landing and it opened.

There lived a pair of teachers at the NGPI. Groza-husband, he taught scientific Communism, and Groza-wife, who was teaching me German in my second year of study there.

I left the birthday box with the Grozas and asked to hand it to you personally. As for coming back to Konotop, I could already use a local train. What's the difference? Just 1 ruble 10 kopecks…

~ ~ ~

(…an attempt to live a righteous life results in developing a bad habit by the person. Not a detrimental one but, at any rate, meaningless – you fall in the rut of that business and keep on even knowing that that makes no difference…)

After the final and even ritually confirmed break-up with Eera, giving back The Godfather—the last of the books I had stolen—had no sense, but it was too late because I kinda got addicted. The reason why the book tarried by my side was that I did not know where Vitya Kononevich went to work off for his diploma, but then I learnt that the actual owner of the book was Sasha Nesteryouk from whom Vitya borrowed it.

I had to go to Nezhyn again… However, at the address, provided by Vasya Kropin, Sasha Nesteryouk was no more and the place was already rented to a married young couple. The young man wore a white tank-shirt, his wife a dressing gown, and the apartment richly smelled of grease smoked herring.

What else would you need for happiness, but a separate apartment and a young woman at any time of day?. When they proposed the address of their landlady who, possibly, knew where Sasha Nesteryouk moved, I turned it down and dropped any further search because I remembered that in the last year at the institute Igor Recoon, my course-mate from Konotop, became bosom friends with Nesteryouk. So it would be easier to give the book to Igor and let him pass it instead of me. Anyway, I felt fed up with the path of righteousness.

On the train back, I for the first time was visited by the thought – maybe just so it was necessary? A woman of your own, of course, is a good thing, whichever way you turn it, but why then I did not envy the young lodger? And what was the reason for the odd, ticklish, laughter seizing me at fleeting recollections of the bliss accentuated by the herring, a white tank-top, and stuff?.

Igor's mother said that he was not home and that he worked on the first floor in the building of the City Party Committee.

The building itself was by Peace Square, behind the gray monument to Lenin where once stood the tower of the city television studio before it was dismantled. At the entrance to the City Party Committee, I answered the militiaman which room and to whom I was going, and he let me pass.

The room was empty, but the moment I idly walked up to the window, Igor got in, obviously unwilling to let me see the view outside. He had not changed at all. The same glasses of tea color in a golden frame, and the same smirk under the sharp nose. Only in his demeanor there appeared the air of condescending; clear enough though in a man who got in the tracks of a wide road to a brighter future.

The Godfather hardly surprised Igor, and he promised to pass the book to Sasha Nesteryouk… Probably, it's nice to feel superior to someone who you were looking up to when being a young entrant to the NGPI with your school certificate received just a month before, while that someone had served already in the army. But now the ex-superior was slavering at a construction site, and you had an office in the City Party Committee, albeit having to share the office room with another functionary…

We never met again, yet I was in time to catch a glimpse thru the window in his career-spring-board office and to see the strip of the cracked asphalt in the blind area under the wall, the sun-killed lawn, and the facade plaster "coat" on the blank opposite wall in the opaque gray whitewashing and… nothing else. To whichever heights he was to rise in his future career of a cadre, he’d never see that group of tall Birches among the construction sites of At-Seven-Winds that looked like slender trees in the summer haze of African Savannah. Even if you were pointing at them, he would not see…

~ ~ ~

Still, I was persistently harassed by a sticky hope because when Eera talked to me on the phone her voice seemed so joyful. What if?. And it was none of her fault that my mother-in-law decided to expose me before you as a brutal door-kicker. She certainly had not even consulted Eera, whose voice sounded like my Eera's voice…

To assert those hopes, I went to the Intercity Telephone Station, next to the main post-office. The glass door and walls cut off and left behind me the clang of the streetcars and the everyday fuss in front of the Department Store on the square's opposite side.

The woman behind the glass partition over the counter wrote down the city and the number I was calling. She passed the receipt to me, and I paid for a three-minute talk. Taking off the receiver from the phone on her desk, she told someone to give Nezhyn, 4-59-83.

I slipped the receipt into a hip pocket of my jeans and became one of the few waiting. When somewhere in another city someone was picking the receiver up, they were told that it was Konotop online, and the black loudspeaker in the station hall shouted in a female voice which booth to enter for a talk with that city. Behind the glass inserted in the door of the indicated booth, a light bulb lit up revealing a narrow compartment squeezed in between yellow chipboard plates. The expectant walked into the said booth with the phone on a small plywood shelf in the corner, next to the high stool with the crimson-plush covered seat. I did not know whether the stool was soft or hard, I had never sat down…

"Alma-Ata! The number does not answer! What will you do?"

"Repeat!" From the loudspeaker floated up a distant echoing of long telephone rings in the faraway Alma-Ata.

"Petrozavodsk! Cabin 12!"

What they were talking about was not heard in the station hall, unless they started to shout because of a faulty connection.

"Alma-Ata! The number does not answer! What will you do?"

"Take off!" The person of unfeasible expectations returned the receipt and got their money back.

"Nezhyn's online!”