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

However, to the Vysotsky’s trade-mark The Gypsy Girl our team, almost unanimously, preferred his The Ballad of Gypsum:

" I lay prostrate, all plastered over,
My every member's well pre-packaged!.."

As for the helmet, it was not lost, it's just that I gave free rein to my gentlemanly urbane nature. Walking among the construction sites in At-Seven-Winds, I saw by the nine-story block 2 female plasterers from PMK-7. They picked some flowers in the fresh grass, most likely, dandelions because of their yellow color. When asked for a cellophane packet, I, with a wide, hussar, gesture, threw them my helmet to use as a basket for collected flowers. Then I pointed out the brown trailer of our team, so that they knew where to return the headgear to. I saw them for the first time and it was the last time I saw my helmet…

Of all our team, only I wore a helmet, that's why the superintendent Ivan demanded of me that explanatory note. But calling "verses" what I scribbled for him is nothing but a staring flattery, just so vers libre, at most…

Well, about the shirt, yes. With that shirt, I ran into it flatly. That time I imprudently indulged in my inclination to self-invented rituals because it was the first day of summer. Now, was it possible not to observe the event? In summer, even wearing nothing but a tank top under your spetzovka, you still swim in your sweat; a shirt in summer is a redundant element.

That green shirt of some kind of finely creased synthetics I donned for 6 years. Yet, that bitch of a shirt did not want to wear off, and I had to sweat in it as in any other synthetic crap, despite its being finely creased. And so, on June 1, I got out of the trailer in kinda green artistic wrap atop of my black spetzovka worn, in its turn, on my stark naked torso. I made for the team's current workplace and buried the shirt in one of many loop-holes in the floor slabs among the unfinished walls… There were no garbage bins at the site and to simply drop the shirt into the latrine’s ochco did not seem right – we had been so close, sweat mingling, buddies for so many years…

Then I went up to the third floor in the next section and laid the traverse wall with ventilation ducts working alone until Peter Lysoon appeared to call me to the trailer. Along the way, he somehow kept his eyes off me and spoke on esoteric botanical topics.

All those strange symptoms flew out of my head when in front of our trailer I saw a UAZ-van with a burly militiaman next to it in his red-band forage cap accompanied by psychiatrist Tarasenko… Our team, together with overseer Karenin and superintendent Ivan, formed an uneven semicircle facing the visitors.

Tarasenko announced to the standing audience that my behavior had always been abnormal and today I stepped over the line by burying my shirt into the hole in a concrete slab. Then he democratically asked the crowd if they had noted any additional anomalies about me.

The people responded with silence. One of our women endeavored to clarify that the shirt was completely worn out and Tarasenko, so as to avoid meandering discussion of a tangent topic, ordered me to go into the trailer and change.

I obeyed unquestioningly, and then I climbed into the van with some drunk in its hold, and we were taken away… During the stop near the Medical Center, the drunk began convincing me to jerk the claws in different directions – the militiaman couldn't chase 2 at once. I kept quiet, realizing that it was better 45 days under syringes than the rest of my life on the run. Then a young plain-clothes guard joined us, bringing one more drunk and, along the trodden familiar road, I was taken back to the city of Romny.

On the way, we made a stop in some roadside village for an additional load of 2 old ladies in black and a troubled man who anxiously swore to all of the present, in turn, that he did not remember anything of what was yesterday.

Upon arrival at the psychiatric hospital, we were led in different directions and, for some reason, I was X-rayed in a supine position. Maybe, they were just testing a newly installed equipment… I did not see any of the drunks anymore, in the madhouse such cases belonged to unit 3, while I was an adherent of the fifth unit…

And again the Area became the arena for daily brainwashing applied to my ass, followed by the overcrowded wardroom for the night repose… Of the acquaintances among all the categories higher than that of the absolutely free, I saw only Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, but he slept without ever waking up.

As a veteran and for the sake of philanthropy, I turned to the head doctor with the plea to substitute my iminazine injections for iminazine pills. She promised to think it over and, 10 days before the expiry of my stretch, she canceled the concluding stab from the 3 injections in my daily quota. And right now, her name popped up in my grateful mind – Nina it was.

Nothing more remarkable happened, except that I learned how to provide first aid in case of epilepsy fit. It is necessary to grab the epileptic by the legs and drag away from the Area into the shade under the canopy. There he would go on beating his back against the ground, yet with gradual reduction of the tempo until his excitement finally die out. Some halfwits consider it useful to slap flies with their dirty paws from his face, however, that does not have a telling effect on the course of the seizure…

On that narrow trail under the railway embankment, Petukhov did not tell me just one thing – why I was so closely followed and kept under the unremitting control. But there was no need for it because I knew the reason as well as he did.

My arrest took roots in the reconstruction of the maternity hospital, a long two-story building by the crossroads of Lenin Street and the descent from the Department Store. Each construction enterprise of Konotop performed their part in the works. SMP-615 was responsible for several partitions and bathrooms in the right-wing on the first floor. 4 plasterers and I were sent to accomplish the task. We managed it in just 1 week.

When the women were already plastering the partitions laid by me, in the corridor appeared a man in a clean suit and a necktie. Beholding the 4 yummy females, the visitor began to spread out his peacock tail against the backdrop of the wretch of a hand, for which he took me.

I politely asked him to keep his ardor in check and not cough in all directions.

"Hey, you! Know who against you're ramming? I am the First Secretary of the City Party Committee."

"And I am a bricklayer of the fourth category."

"Okay! You'll have it!"

He left and a half-hour later our chief engineer flew into the corridor, out of his breath, because he was also the chairman of SMP-615 party committee. "How d'you dare use foul language at the First Secretary of the City Party Committee?"

The plasterers unanimously testified that there was not a single taboo word on my part which information did not console the chief engineer though, but he left.

That's all. Nothing could be simpler – a male with levers of power at his command versus a male in a mortar splattered spetzovka. The only thing that really hurt me was the accusation of using the derivatives of "fuck" because in all the years at SMP-615, I righteously refrained from using such words even deep in my mind…

~ ~ ~

The autumn came and, soaping myself in the bathhouse, I suddenly discovered a bulging stomach on me, kinda rigid fore wings of a May beetle, and similarly unyielding. Soon, my mother noticed that I was turning double-chinned. After one of the late evening dinners at 13 Decemberists, she put her hand on my shoulder to victoriously announce, "You're getting fat, Brother Rabbit! Relax, so it should be, you're from our breed."

I did not answer to the smile in her round face under which—I knew that without looking—a much rounder figure was expanding, so I just kept silent. I did not want to be of such a round breed and turn a blubber guts. I would not succumb to their iminazine! Some radical measures were the must.

If, for a start, we consider those same dinners at 13 Decemberists, my mother skillfully piled no less than two servings of rice or potatoes onto a plate. At the same time, everything was so delicious, that you imperceptibly ate all of the humongous portion.

Repeal of bread became the first step in my struggle to keep lean. Okay, I eat as much as you care to load, but I'm not obliged to eat bread along with it, and I will not. So, I cut it out from my diet even at canteens.

As for the "will not" that was a sham, because I always liked bread, especially rye bread, moreover when it's warm. I was able to finish off a loaf of such bread at one sitting, without any spicing stuff, except for the byword learned from my father: "Soft bread and mouth wide make the heart rejoice at every bite."

A month later, marking that the breadless diet was of no help, I just dropped going to canteens at the midday break which move brought equilibrium to the previously impaired balance. Breakfast in the canteen plus two servings at the late evening dinner stood for traditional 3 daily meals. As for the midday havvage, I devoured, by our team's definition, Vsesvit, brought once a month by me to the bricklayers' trailer for reading at midday breaks. As a result, by the New Year Eve, in the same city bathhouse behind Square of Konotop Divisions, I proudly observed my sunken, like on a healthy wolf, stomach. I always preferred that form… Some concave-bellied Narcissus.

(…there are lots of words you seemingly know because you have heard, read, and even pronounced them more than once. Sure, I know the word!.. until asked about its meaning. But overly inquisitive bastards are of seldom ilk, and you continue to interpret seemingly known words the way you vaguely feel they should mean, sort of…

The word "asceticism" is one of the brightest examples of how people do not understand what they themselves are about. 90 percent of the population, to whom the word, like, yes, clear, would imagine a man of wildly lambent eyes above a hirsute ungroomed beard, weary with his self-inflicted tortures and privations. This is just as wrong as applying the word "athlete" exclusively to sumo fighters.

In fact, the root meaning of "asceticism" is conveyed by the word "training". If, cherishing ambitions to win a beer tournament, you keep putting away 3 liters of beer daily, so as to train and keep yourself in proper form, you are an ascetic. As well, as the neighbor's girl that every day rushes violin scales thru your apartment wall. Damn her asceticism with all those f-f..er..flats and sharps!

On the whole, an ascetical ascetic, preparing themselves for future life in heaven, is nothing but a special case among all other sorts of asceticism manifest in manifold patterns, both short and long-term, depending on the purpose of training…)

And what—if I may ask—were the goals that made me so rigorously guard my being thin as a rake, and every weekday write out unfamiliar words from the newspaper Morning Star? As I have tried already to explain, my general plans were always marked by ungetriddable vagueness in their details. I simply felt that this or other something had to be done and, therefore, I did so…

The extracts from the Morning Star called for a keen attentive self-cross-checking. When meeting in the newspaper some incomprehensible word about which I definitely knew it had been met and more than once already, there rose temptation to neglect it because it was exactly same bugger! Okay, and what's the meaning, eh?

To rummage thru the pile of scribbled up copybooks seemed way too tedious, much easier was to look it up anew in Chamber's Dictionary and write it out one more time. As a result, more than once I happened to look up a word whose entry page number I could say by heart, but not its meaning. Some colander of a memory. That's what asceticism does to a person, making you go thru a certain set of actions hardly knowing why you have to…

For me, the incident of that evening was not a temptation, I rather felt amazed. And she, on her part, was not seducing me and only tried to claim fulfillment of parental duty because I was grossly indebted to Lenochka. I never took her in my arms, nor kept her in my lap, nor raffled caressingly her hair, nor fondled her cheek, not to mention other “nors” of what I owed her. We just lived in the same khutta, where she had once been told that I was her dad, yet who would earnestly consider me a father? Just some dry abstract formula, a contactless, symbolic, dad.

Of course, I never gave her the cold shoulder, and at times I could even get carried away by talking to her, but for a child that, probably, is not enough. And for me, as a father, that surely is not enough but just so turned out my relationships with each and every one of my five children…

When Lenochka was born, I simply was not ripe yet for the role of father. Dad at eighteen? With all due respect to Swan of Avon, that’s just ludicrous. Then followed the years at the construction battalion and the institute…

When you were born, I was already fit to be a father, and I loved you selflessly, but not for long enough – my reputation separated us.

I met Ruzanna at her seventh year. She called me "daddy" all along, and I loved her as my daughter but, for the first time, I hugged her when she was departing to Greece, to her husband Apostolos. The consequences of that same chronic, cursed, contactlessness…

Cuddling of both Ahshaut and Emma, born after him, was impossible before Ruzanna, their elder sister, because she'd seen from me nothing of the kind, so caressing them in front of her wasn't right, it would be a glaring iniquity. That’s how the father of five children remained just a formal dad. Poor kids!. Yet, taking pity on them only is not just, what about me, who lived a life devoid of children's warmth and fondness?

Except for that occurrence, when four-year-old Emma busted her head in the courtyard of our unfinished house when trying to repeat the number of Chinese circus actors seen on the TV. The oozing blood soaked her hair and stained my shirt sleeve when I was carrying her in my arms to the former regional, and now republican, hospital. A weightless, frightened birdie clinging to my chest in anticipation of something terrible, unknown, she didn’t cry at all, believing everything would be fine since Dad was by her side.

(…children at that age look up to their father as to God, and later they grow up and become atheists because the Almighty, as it turns out, is just a stubborn wrinkled curmudgeon who does not understand a thing…)

The nurse at the traumatic unit treated the wound, the on-duty doctor prescribed antibiotics and 2 days later, when I brought Emma for a second inspection, he yelled at me for being a penny pincher saving on medicine for my own child! Stupidity is incurable, even a diploma is of no help here…