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

"Did Lenochka not tell you?"

"No."

"She will then."

It was a summons to the local People's Court over the lawsuit by a resident of Nezhyn, Citizen Eera, to dissolve the marriage since the family, in fact, never existed, and I was regularly taken to psychiatric hospitals diagnosed with schizophrenia…

In the queue for the soon-to-be divorcees on the second floor of the People's Court, I was the second, after a couple of ample-bodied local people disappointed in the institution of marriage. They looked like a pair of fluffed-up dove-pigeons, absolutely not talking to each other, and taking pains to gaze the opposite ways.

A girl, a little over the age of 20, invited them to enter for the procedure.

For several minutes from behind the door, there was heard a dialogue of varying loudness but of the same illegibility.

Then the couple went out of the door, still not looking at each other, blushed in their complexion, as if leaving the steam room in a bathhouse. One after another—the man first—they left…

In the room looking like a corridor, two tables formed the letter "T". The judge was sitting in the center of the crossbar table equipped with 2 lay judges, one for his either side. They were a thirty-year-old fair-haired man of military uprightness and a woman well over her forties who had already let all of it go at all. The girl-clerk got seated at the second table where it adjoined the upper one.

I liked the judge at once – a handsome man about 35 who looked like judges in Western movies. His jacket was off and he even opened his waistcoat for a couple of top buttons to represent a true embodiment of the Western democracy.

I decided to play along with him and, sitting on a chair a meter off the “T's” base, assumed the attitude of a kicking back cowboy – the left leg stretched out with its heel planted into the floor, and the right heel resting over the left foot.

"Don’t sprawl! Get seated as you should! Forgotten where you are?!" barked the fair-haired.

"If you demonstrate how to sit at attention, I'd be happy to ape you, Comrade Lance-Corpo.."

"Well, okay!" intervened the judge like a ref in the ring calls “break!” before the boxers turn the noble art of crushing each other’s visage into an unruly fang-and-kick street fight. "Let him sit as he likes."

Then he read up the lawsuit of Citizen Eera about the absence of a family and my diagnosis. He finished off and addressed me, "What can you say in this respect?"

"My wife is always right. Each and every her word is the holy, purest, truth," averred I solemnly.

The girl-clerk registered in the papers that not only the Caesar’s wife could be beyond any suspicion.

Then the judge used his home-made trump with which he had started, pumped, and heated up the previous pair of divorcees, "But wasn't there at least anything good in your marriage?"

"Why not? We were the sexiest lovers at the institute."

With a sidelong glance at the flash of innocent flush in the girl clerk's countenance, the judge announced that was enough and the court didn't need any more evidence.

Thus was dissolved my wedlock with Eera.

~

~

The Solitary Barge Hauler

My cheeky snubs to the judge at the people's court arched my chest, but not for long. All slipped back into the same ineluctable rut: "O! Woe to me! What for? I loved so much! I was doing my best! Why me?" The unanswerable questions swapped for sticky, meek, and fond dream that one of these days Eera would come and everything would be fine again… The fact, that by the divorce Eera had, with straightforward logic, cleared her way to further life without me around, did not diminish the longing for the unreachable, neither shooed off the hope that everything will, somehow, turn fine all the same…

However, uninterrupted suffering is a rather tiresome occupation and, gradually, I formed a firm opinion that the divorce had to be, after all, celebrated. But in what way? I knew no rituals for the occasion and could only improvise. One thing was clear though, I needed a day not like all other days. And it was for such a day that I went to Kiev.

The Indian summer that year transgressed all the limits of common sense and, even though it was the first week in November, I ventured there in my jacket. Taking into account the fall's depth as reached in the calendar, the dark gray waistcoat went along with the jacket. It did not belong to any three-piece suit but was sewn back in my school years by that same sharp-nosed tailor in her shop next to the bus station… Such was my rig (plus a shirt and pants) when I emerged from the metro station on Khreshchatyk Street and moved slowly along its wide sidewalks grown with gorgeous Chestnuts.

I went down to Red Army Street cobbled with polished flagstones, and walked farther down its slope to the Foreign Book store to make myself the event-marking present, which caught my eye pretty long ago, during the last year's business trip to the dairy reconstruction. On the way, I had to keep in check a nagging worry: what if they had already sold it? However, I was almost sure and I didn't get much surprised making out the bright red jacket of Chamber's 20th Century Dictionary on the same very shelf.

The salesman, observing my festive outfit—from under the waistcoat, there also peeped the open collar of my faded red shirt—asked politely if I indeed would want that particular book.

(…I was not surprised by his doubt – in that year of the then-current 20th century, not every fella could afford a book for 31 rubles 60 kopecks. Except, of course, for a bricklayer celebrating their divorce…)

I left the store with the thick volume tightly wrapped in their special lavender-colored packing paper. It had to be left in an automatic storage cell at the station. Yet, how to get there? On the subway again? No, it was another kind of day. And I approached the curb with flocks of taxis shooting by… From the station, I also dropped to "The Hunter" store, at the address given me by Grynya, who wanted some special fishing rod from there.

After the shopping spree and the subsequent storing of goods, there started the cultural part in the program. That evening The House of Organ Music was filled with the sun shimmer over the sea waves in the pieces by Debussy. Bright sparkling notes in the ripples and splashes of waves dancing happily… As I was a child, my father told me that at listening to such music people were supposed to draw some mental pictures to fit it. I never could follow his advice, the sounds overpowered all clever intentions leaving no space for anything else…

In the post-concert twilight on the sidewalk outside The House of Organ Music, the mid-autumn chill stirred up my hunger. A taxi took me to the restaurant of the Golden Wheat Shoot hotel. At first, I tried to rent a room there for a sleepover, but the receptionist assessed my rig, incongruent with the requirements of calendar, as well as the absence of any luggage, and cut me off with their usual question below the belt: if I had booked a room. They knew very well how to set back vagrant freelancers.

In the restaurant, to orient myself, I ordered a bottle of wine for a starter, and a geezer in a beret on his head immediately landed on the chair opposite me.

(…when there is a beret, but no briefcase by the man, then you are dealing with an electrician…)

We did not have time to drink even a glass when a young blonde bozo got anchored by the third side of the table. For some unspecified reason, he began to bend his fingers into the composition "I'll take your eyes out!" The electrician grew mum under his beret… My holiday program did not foresee any gladiatorial amusements, so I got up on my feet: "All right, young man. I leave this feast to you. Enjoy!"

I went to the waiters, paid for the wine and left. The blonde rushed after me to the lobby, but of the three glazed entrance vestibules, only one was opened to the porch, seeing me thru lots of glass doors he, immersed in heated agitation, missed choosing the right one. I waved my hand for a goodbye and walked away…

Sleeping in a waiting hall at the station would hardly add festiveness for the day. Another taxi took me to the hotel Old Prague, which was the driver's choice. The young receptionist there had also picked up the muchly chewed rag of beforehand reservations, yet suddenly turned merciful and found a room for me. She warned though it was more expensive, which was understandable because on getting up there I found that, besides the room, there was also a hallway with a hatch in it.

When in the suite, I decided that it was enough for trying fate’s benevolence by my attire, and used the phone to order dinner to the room – fish with potatoes and wine, let it be white, please…

Waking up late in the morning, I checked out and went for a walk about the city… When I was bypassing the ancient Golden Gate, a blond young man ran, panting, by, apparently a part to the monad of the yesterday's boob, who got stuck in the labyrinth of glass vestibules at the Golden Wheat Shoot. Seems like their whole monad are going to have their hands full to sweat out the streak of bad karma because of the feast generously thrown to them by me. But the fool ran into it himself, look before you jump, jock…

On the descent to the Bessarabian Market, I decided it was time for a lunch, and turned into the restaurant "Leningrad". In front of me, a group of Negroes entered the same place, however, I was anything but a racist and followed them. Still, I did not like the over-fat scruff of the concluding guy in their file, some piece of obese Africa. In the afternoon gloom of the restaurant, I could not see in what woodwork they managed to blend leaving me the only guest in the room.

I ordered something "in the pot", so it was named on the menu. They brought potatoes mixed with meat and brown souse, but all that in a ceramic pot, as promised. Eating from the pot was very uncomfortable and also too hot. But I guessed to pour a part of the steaming stuff into a plate on the table, and then was gradually adding to it from the pot.

Before going out, I visited the empty quiet toilet by the restaurant and left it a completely different person to that I who had been entering "Leningrad". The lines by Ivan Franko were slowly swirling in the head:

"One by one get severed the hobbles,
Which kept tied us to the life of the past…"

And not only that. The main difference between me getting in and me leaving the restaurant was the absence of the jacket, which I intentionally left in the toilet hanging on a stall's door. It was the wedding jacket in which I was registered as Eera's husband in the ZAGS of Nezhyn. Besides, it was the same one that survived my premature attempt at leaving it in the toilet of the restaurant "Bratislava" in Odessa. Perhaps, the time then was not ripe yet. Was the act on the celebration program list? No, it was sooner an impromptu inspiration, but I liked it.

Eased and relieved, I lightly walked up Khreshchatyk undergoing its preparation for the demonstration on the 7th of November. The troops of the Kiev garrison were a-drilling their parade step to the gleeful marches by a brass band.

Along the sidewalk, they had put endless board stands for spectators, just 3 steps but very wide indeed, so that the happy crowd would watch the demonstration and wave their hands in the show of approbation and jubilant joy. Before the pending event, there remained 2 more days and the steps were still empty. I walked along the middle one, clapping my heels against its thick planks, a man in his prime, in a red shirt under a gray waistcoat, and the sun rays vibrated thru the branches of mighty Chestnuts.

I walked to the metro station and was ready again to face trenches, walls, and partitions. People do need holidays and brass bands so as to live on further…

~ ~ ~

When Panchenko—without even peeping out to check if it might crush someone’s unaware scull—hurled a pig-iron four-section heating radiator from a window on the fourth floor, as if just having nothing better for a pastime, his quirk, in fact, had a quite sound underlying reason. With that hand-made bolt out of the blue, he signaled to all who might be concerned, that the veteran jailbird's balls were still unshaven, and under his eight-wedge cap (the vogue sported by toughs in the fifties) he still was quite a crazy machine. The signal was addressed, first of all, to his superintendent in charge of drawing work orders that determined Panchenko's monthly payment, and to the chief mechanic in whose division he turned a fresh leaf to start a new, honest, life. And it was high time already for a mujik in his mid-fifties. Of course, it did not bother him in any way, that after the second time in Romny I had not the slimmest chance of keeping the position of the trade-union's visitor at SMP-615.