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

"You'll see."

It's inconvenient to talk turning your face up in two directions. I got up and put my hand on the back of the chair, "Okay, I'll just take the chair back."

"They'll take it without you."

And the 2 of them instantly gripped my biceps – each one from his side with both hands. Gently and slowly they led me towards the Volga.

At a distance, the monitor group of 2 locksmiths and one welder stood watching from the shade in the doorway to the production building, a lost and found preparatory sketch by Repin for his famous "The Arrest of a Propagandist".

The archangel on the left, responding to my meek compliance, loosened his grip a little. He already, like, just strolled along comradely embracing my arm with his palms.

I shouted to the driver, "The one on my left is shirking!" The grips from both sides immediately hardened and soon the 3 of us were sitting in the back seat, with me in the center. Like, a f-f..er..I mean, festive king on the coronation day.

While Svaitsikha was opening the gate—the first and last time that I saw it locked—I shouted to her to take back from the porch the chair I had borrowed from her workplace. And the Volga drove to Konotop.

After some other gate, they told me to get over into a small UAZ van with no windows in the back. One of the burly guys got in with me, the vehicle revved ahead but soon we stopped again. Thru the opening to the driver cab and the following windshield, there were seen the Poplars nearby the City Medical Center.

After a prolonged wait, the back door swung open. On the sidewalk stood the psychiatrist Tarasenko. "Yes, it's him." After those his words, the door slammed shut again and I was taken to Romny. Without any voluntariness on my part…

~ ~ ~

Your looks depend on how favorable is the disposition of the mirror you are looking in. I noticed it more than once. In some mirror – wow! I'm really gorgeous! While in another – is that ghoul I?

The most in-love-with-me mirror I had ever met, was the pier-glass in the hall of the fifth unit of the regional psychiatric hospital in the city of Romny. It showed me what a terrific handsome man I was, after all. And without any cinematic sweetness – just a comely man and that's it.

In those three months in Odessa, I looked like Konkin, or he was made up to look like me when starring in "No way to change the meeting point". And it did not matter much, who's like who, the main thing that there, from the pier-glass, at me was looking a man of unusual, for the stereotyped standards, handsomeness by the Titian's brush. The red pajamas in pin-thin yellow stripes, brown soft hair slightly lightened by their sunburn, but the main advantage was the color of the eyes. Some singular, inimitable, color – that of melting honey.

And let Captain Pissak, composing my verbal portrait in front of the ranks of the First Company, say, "Look at his eyes! They are lynx eyes!" But no, Captain, the pier-glass would not lie – they were good!

The only pity was that no one saw it except me. The hall was empty, and the corridor was quiet. A dozen shut-ins stayed in the observation wardroom and all the rest of the fifth unit for the entire daylight hours were kept—with the break for a midday meal—in the Area.

It's summer, after all!.

When, in the Experimental Unit by the Repair Work Shop at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, we, the Unit’s locksmiths, in the end of working day were awaiting for the final, most slow-go, concluding, half-hour to expire and, leaning our backs against the vices, were yakking of this and that though, in general, of nothing, some younger locksmiths agreed that it would be nice to get back to the army again, but only now, already knowing what's what and, surely, not for the full hitch of 2 years, but, like, for a week, or 2, or maybe for a month…

To me, a soon-to-be draftee, such conversation seemed unconvincing, yet now I'm ready to agree, that the same phenomena might have more than one and rather different appearances.

At first sight, thru the roundly perplexed eyes, things look one way, but when you watch them from the height of the accumulated experience, they acquire quite a different aspect. And 1 month is just a trifle. They do not lock you up for less than 45 days in the madhouse. 45 days is half of a season: half the summer, or half the spring, or whenever they pinched you and made a shut-in.

As a regular at the fifth unit, I knew that already as well as some other nuances, however, I hadn't yet been there in summer. For me, as an unmitigated recidivist, they no longer cared to spend expensive insulin. That time I was not treated there, but getting punished with iminazine. 3 executions per day multiplied by 45; I knew what mess they would turn my ass into in the subsequent half-season… And, as a cheaper patient, I was placed in a larger wardroom, Number 8. The more the number of sick people spending the night around, the higher chances for hearing their screams from their nightmares, or witnessing a showdown lighted by the inexorable electric bulbs.

(…every summer has its drawbacks and, first of all, the influx. Any resident of any resort would agree – on the arrival of those crowds, the standard of living takes a nosedive…)

In summer, the fifth unit served, on average, 40 patients more than in other seasons. To provide everyone with a place to sleep, in Wardroom 8, for example, 2 side-by-side beds served to accommodate from 3 to 4 men a night, depending on how lucky you were. In that half-season, I was lucky both ways.

But there was a huge "but!" – summertime removed the problem of the washed and, therefore, locked toilet because we spent all day in the Area. The Area was a square 40 by 40 meters. The 3 sides of its perimeter, including the one with the wicket in it, presented a robust fence of rough gray boards 2.2 meters tall, nailed vertically side by side. The fourth side was a sturdy 2-meter-tall iron mesh fixed to the concrete stakes. Alongside the fence in the base of the square, there stretched a thirty-meter-long canopy with its low gable roof of rusty tin propped by few and far between pillars of red brick.

Scores of broken iron beds randomly piled on each other formed one high heap rusting in the canopy’s shade. 2, still usable, ones stood close-by the heap’s slope, both covered with a cloth blanket over the spring mesh. When the syringes with midday injections were brought down to the Area, the shut-ins, called by their names, were coming to the blanketed beds to pull their pants down, lie with their backs up, and get their dosage into, one by one.

A pair of armchairs on rusting legs, with their leatherette cover in tatters, were leaned, to prevent collapsing, against the brick pillars – they were the seats of paramedics. At the far end of the canopy, nearby the mesh fence, there stood a couple of short plywood benches with perpendicularly upright backs like those in school desks.

Parallel to the fence opposite the square base, three long, separate, boards were nailed to short stumps sticking from the ground to form 3 consecutive backrestless benches. 3 benches of the same design stretched along the third board fence with the entrance wicket in it.

The iron-mesh side in the square, opposite the entrance, had nothing for sitting nearby, but close to it—in the right upper corner of the Area—there stood toilet of the sorteer type: a box of three rotting tin walls under the equally rusty tin roof. The box’s door was missing for paramedics to make sure that the shut-in inside was not attempting suicide, or otherwise abusing the facility.

The ground surface in the Area was bare and firm, with an admixture of fine clay dust trampled out of it… And that's all?

No! There were as many as 2 "but!" more – the strip of not trampled, green, grass along the outer side of the mesh fence, and the summer sky with white clouds above anything and everything else.

~ ~ ~

The sun was rising from behind the fifth unit’s building and the shadow, thrown back by the roof, started its imperceptible march from the iron mesh to the opposite lumber fence with the entrance wicket in it. While we were taken to the midday meal, the shadow crawled over the fence and we did not find it anymore after the break, and the sun in the sky was still steadily moving on – to the construction site of a one-story building, about 6 meters off the iron mesh fence, and even farther over the site until it disappeared altogether, and the clearly delineated evening shadow started creeping up the wall of the fifth unit, right up to its roof, where it would dissolve in the dusk of approaching night, which meant that now they would take us up to the unit for the end-day meal, injections, and overnight.

But before that, all of us had our feet washed in the vestibule, of course, on the first floor. All 120 people, in turn, would step, one after another, into one and the same tin basin filled with one and the same water. 2 nuts, kneeling on the floor behind the basin, would wipe all their feet, in turn, with one and the same pair of wafer towels drenched thru and thru. Those proceedings had an unmistakable biblical air about them, like, the New Testament feet ablution for the queuing apostles, sort of. Probably, the illusion appeared on account of the measly illumination by the bulb somewhere up in the staircase well…

I met about 10 familiar faces. Tsyba, on the very first evening, hastily approached me in the corridor, gave a brief glance and turned away, "Eew! Not the same!" And he never wanted to communicate with me anymore.

Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, remained sporting close-cropped hair, but he was asleep all the time. In the morning, after our joyful barging in thru the wicket into the Area, he stretched on the bed for injections and only by the middle of the day, without waking up, he conceded a part of it for laying—in turn, with their backs up—of those whose execution syringes were brought down from the manipulation room…

The first one-and-a-half hour in the Area, I usually spent laying on one of the board-benches along the upper side of the square. Behind the fence, there was the area of the fourth unit, whose powerful howling and squealing in no way was less intensive than by us.

Sometimes, I had someone from the slightly inflated standing above me, and muttering to himself it was unfair I had taken up so much space for me alone. Then I had to lower my stumps on the ground and sit up because I could not send him to the 3 board-benches alongside the fence with the entrance wicket in it – that was the grounds of the fully emancipated gymnosophists.

Those communicated with screams, while being cooked in their own juice of free life, inattentive that the skin of their bare bodies, fried in the sun day after day, became cracked and oozing blood, which, eventually, got baked up though… Now, the leader of the community where no one cared about anyone else, bored with the monotony of his swinging back and forth in a seated position, issues a Tarzan howl and plunges for a couple of meters deep into the Area, only for to come back to the board-bench and go on with his swinging. On the way, he kicks off a philosopher of the same well-burned, ceramic hue, who was squatting close to the ground and drawing with his finger on the dust underneath his dangling balls.

"Noli turbare circulos meos!”

Next time, the leader with a single blow will knock another naked neighbor clear away from the bench, who'd never notice that, engulfed in spinning in his fingers a sixteen-centimeter piece of a broken twig and keeping on his own counsel, already on the ground, as serenely as before the passing thunderclap.

The paramedics never intervened into the internal affairs on the benches of the deeply introvert as long as the howl-squeal-screaming in their free territories did not bypass the notch of a permissible level. When it was transgressed, the paramedics, assisted by the volunteers from halfnuts or fully nuts, would pull the stark naked nuts raging at the board-benches and fix him onto the second usable bed by the scrap-metal heap under the canopy…

When the heat drove me away from the Area, I got seated on one of the plywood benches ignored by the crazy public because of their merciless backrests. To spend the whole day on a firm horizontal plane was not an easy task, in the evening you did not know which of your buttocks to use for sitting.

The Area itself was in the state of seething motion: back and forth, to and fro, circles, jerky tags… Where to? Where from? After what?

Along the board fence behind the board benches on which I lay in the morning, there lined a row of backs of replacing each other bozos stuck to the gaps between the nailed boards. Someone giggled into the gap, another one beckoned a fellow-patient, someone else beat off within his not removed pants because the fourth unit kept shut-ins of the opposite sex entertaining similar sorts of mental inclinations, up to the state of stark naked gymnosophists.

These are just my assumptions though because I never approached the gaps in the fence and had seen only one of our neighborixes. Black-haired and skinny, about 30 years old, she emerged topless over the fence, and with a ballet sway of her arm threw a large creamy flower into the dust under our feet. The nuts kicked up a skirmish over her flower, and she was sharply pulled away from the other side of the fence, yet and all, the breasts were beautifully shaped…

3 times a day, so as to stretch my buttocks, hardened by the shots, I left the shade of the canopy and walked around the Area in wide circles. While promenading, I memorized by rote the lines of The Novel- Cartoon, conceived by me still in the wild, but having taken its final shape already at the funny farm.

The content did not exceed one page of text, and it was important for me not to lose a single coma, and prevent substitution of words for their synonyms, because I was arrested without a pencil and paper on me.

The Novel- Cartoon

Maybe, the energy applied for the action was somewhat too much, yet a failure and another try at turning the handle down would cost a dent to the self-respect and bringing nearer to the end.

The warm dense dusk wrapped him behind the door. He doffed the cloak onto a horizontal rod and made between black silhouettes of solid tables and mighty seats for a blurred spot of light in the distance. The spot enclosed the face and hands of a woman at knitting.