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

…well, suppose, after work, I would come to the office and little by little…

Yes, this one also went straight to the sea bottom, because the new boss of SMP-615 was so jealous. He viewed the SMP-615 administrative building as a kinda personal warren or, say, chicken coop, and would not tolerate any bricklayer horsing around even after work. The icebergs of unforeseen details threatened the plan from all sides and brought the navigation to a halt…

We worked in the locomotive depot at the construction of the three-story administrative building, when my sister Natasha, at a chance meeting on a streetcar, shared that Eera, by the by, was going to get married in Nezhyn. Doubts in any information from my sister were senseless, you simply had to take it for granted… The news in passing way of crushed me for more than a day.

Yet, I recovered, thanks to our foreman Mykola Khizhnyak's suggestion that I dismantle the trestles alongside the finished partition on the second floor… When the laid partition gets as tall as 1.2 meters, you have to install the cradles by it, bridge them with timber and continue laying bricks from that trestle, up to the ceiling. The cradles brought from the SMP-615 base were too few for all the team, and we were substituting them with ratsookha (that is how our team streamlined the word "rationalization).

Ratsookha was a series of pallets stitched with nails in twos with each pair working as a cradle. Because the pallets were shorter than needed, on top of the first decking we added further ratsookha to be bridged with boards forming the next level deck. The whole contraption looked like a house of cards, was more flimsy and shaky than the legitimate trestles, but it worked. The trickiest moment came with dismantling ratsookha trestles. Some of the boards in decking were nailed to the pallets, others not, and they all were high above your head so, when you started to knock them off and down to the floor, the scattered fragments of crushed bricks and layers of mortar spilled and dried over the planks up there were pouring down as well. Few people on our team liked dismantling trestles. And for me, it was, sort of, a chess nut to crack or guessing, like a sapper from an action movie, which wire to cut to diffuse the bomb. Only the falling fragments should be dodged in time as befits a seasoned chess-player… However, for that particular dismantling, I sent all chess to hell.

Furious, like a berserk Viking running to battle in just a flax linen tank top shirt, with a long iron breaker I pulled the boards away from the nails screeching and squealing in protest. When the top deck collapsed on the floor I, in frenzied swaying over the mess of boards under my feet, continued slashing and slitting the cradles of the stitched pallets with the sweeping blows of enraged breaker, while roaring like a wounded beast: "A wedding?! Here's a wedding for you!." My nostrils rounded, and sprawled in passion, pumping, in and out, the dust from the thick cloud whipped up by toppling crashing trestles.

It does feel good to ravish in ecstasy of cutting all the tethers, cutting loose and letting yourself go, at least sometimes… with quivering wings of your nose, taken away by the tsunami wave of raging wrath, forgetful of all at all in this delightful, mad, godlike demolition of anything on earth or in the heaven. Daamn! Get it!. Of which divine pleasure I’m, alas, deprived. Because even while raging in the unruly leveling of what was there to destroy, I still was fully aware that all that was nothing but a mere aping of Odysseus’ action in a recent movie adaptation of his wanderings. He similarly pulled his lips over the clenched teeth, when on his return home he started knocking off, one by one, the suitors to his wife Penelope. As for the wedding which "here's for you!", that also was a quotation from the same movie.

Anyway, just in a few minutes in place of the trestle, there was a heap of boards interspersed with torn up pallets. The cloud of dust hung in the air over the battle field and, in the corridor, the foreman's wife, rigger Katerina, standing still near the doorway, listened intently – what wedding was I about?.

My sister Natasha never reported on Eera's new marriage. Seems like the flash-team of Odysseus and me did a shamefully good job at derailing quite a natural course of events in the life of an innocent, unfamiliar, female, whose only error was being same-named and living at the place once dwelt by my Eera. Just another folly of mine…

(…as it turned out, I was neither a wolf nor a hooey-pricker, but an ornery dog in the manger. Like those kings that sent their divorced wives under the home arrest in a monastery. Yet, if the monastery has a proper gardener with a good lever, as depicted by Boccaccio…

Oops, I am again at it, this time carried away inventing rationales for royals as if I don't have problems of my own…)

But it was also Natasha who showed me a solution to the titanically insurmountable problem of turning the manuscripts into typewritten text. She said there was a typing pool on the street connecting Square of Konotop Divisions and the Sennoy Market and, maybe, someone there would agree to type those translations of mine…

The two-story house of the typing pool looked like the “Cherevko's school”. From the entrance, a straight flight of wooden stairs led to the second floor where, in 2 adjacent rooms, a dozen of typists were with amazing speed chirping their typewriters. One of them, named Valya, with a bob-cut blond hair, agreed to type the shortest from the short stories, which I brought along in a thin copybook for a probe. She appointed a day for me to come after the finished text. Taming my heartbeat, I said I had more translations. She replied I could bring them too, by 1 or 2 at a time. I asked her about the payment, but she waved the question away…

For a couple of months, I was visiting the typing pool on the days said by Valya. I approached the house from the opposite sidewalk, in the best traditions of underground conspirators and secret agents. Diving in the wide-open door of the entrance, I cautiously sneaked to the second floor – just only not to shoo off the crazy luck… Passing to Valya the copybook with the last of the stories, I again tried to find out about the payment, and she again dismissively shook her head.

Labor must be rewarded, so I decided to pay anyway, if not with money, then in kind. Near the streetcar stop by Peace Square, on the first floor of the five-story block, there stretched a row of shops, overhanging the sidewalk with their somewhat droopy shop windows. The last in their row was The Flowers on the right, and the first, close to the square corner, The Jewelry. There, after several circles around the glass box-cabinets with exorbitantly expensive necklaces, bracelets, and gold rings, I bought a silver string for 25 rubles. To fix it with a fitting case, I purchased a round lacquered powder box with an ornament for 5 rubles plus, however, that was from The Souvenirs section at the Department Store…

Collecting the typewritten pages of the last story, I gave Valya the powder box and asked to look under the lid. She picked up from it a long thin string of white metal.

"Melchior?" inquired the typist from the next desk. I did not explain anything to anyone: whoever wanted would find a way to check what was of what… That month, the alimony to Nezhyn and Konotop again nosedived to 15 rubles each…

A couple of days before May Day, I again felt like giving in to rituals. From 13 Decemberists, I brought a piece of scarlet cloth, 40 cm ? 40 cm, to the site in the locomotive depot. I nailed it to a two-meter beam from the pile of remnants of former trestles, and it turned a cheerful bunting. So that it was not in the way with the work of our team, I fixed it upon the finished corner of the third-floor walls, and there it splashed happily in the spring wind, above the sun-gleaming river of railway tracks that streamed towards the station.

Peter Kyrpa asked me if I was again for it, and I drove him a fool about the day of the international solidarity of working-class people. He promised they would soon come to nab me again, but our team tacitly dismissed his prophecies. Laying the courses of bricks in the wall, we sometimes looked back at the ripples in the flaunting red above our stooped working-class backs…

On the morning of May Day, in my jeans and a T-shirt, I went out to the veranda to put my shoes on. My parents also were there though for many years already they considered themselves not liable to partaking in them those demonstrations. I sat down on a small stool made by golden hands of my father, to tie the strings on my black leather shoes.

"You're not going anywhere," my mother said, and she moved to block the way to the glazed veranda door.

"You'll stay home," confirmed my father, and bolted the same door with the steel latch produced by him at the RepBase. The happening looked like a home arrest without trial and investigation. Still sitting, I bowed my head and, in a low voice, began a plaintive air:

"Oh, Dnipro, Dnipro,
you're a mighty stream,
With the clouds afloat above you…"

I did not know the following lyrics from that song, so I got up and took a step towards the door. My father seized my neck with the grip of his working-class arms of a hammerer, diesel engine tamer, and skillful locksmith. I always admired the bass-relief bumps of his biceps. My mother hung on my opposite shoulder.

Schlepping their total weight, I continued slow progress towards the door. There, I pulled the latch aside, wriggled out from the suffocating grip of the 2 opponents, and jumped off the porch onto the brick-paved path to the wicket.

"Buster!" shouted my father.

"Scoundrel!" backed him up my mother.

With a victorious sneer, I exclaimed, "Ca-up, Mom!"

(…in our family tradition, at the age of 2 I pronounced "catch up!" that way…)

Since then I stopped speaking to my parents, and I also dropped participating in the May and November demonstrations. Instead, on reaching Professions Street, I turned left and walked to the very outskirts, where the khuttas were replaced with meadows bordered by trees in the windbreak belt along the railroad embankment. From there, the deserted dirt road led me to the station of Kukolka.

I did not go to the station though, but after a couple of kilometers followed the solitary track branching off the main railway. It was never used by trains because of being a reserve track in case of war. Such a case would make Konotop a target for bombardment, as a strategically important junction, and the reserve track detoured the would-be-destroyed city… Following that track thru the empty fields, I reached the forest by the Seim river.

To the Seim itself, I went out not far from the local train stop "Priseimovye", and walked to the place on its bank where once, still unmarried, I spent a day with Eera. In that spot, I read an issue of Morning Star, almost completely, bypassing the last sports page, which I always ignored anyway. The newspaper was left in the grass on the bank, in case it might come handy for someone.

The return journey was made along the main two-track embankment. I entered Konotop together with it and for a long time continued walking along the adjacent gardens, right up to the second bridge, where the embankment turned to the railway station. There we parted, and I went on, by the outskirts alongside the Swamp. Already in the late evening darkness, I crossed Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street behind the old cemetery and, going up Sosnowska street, I reached the terminal of streetcar 3, from where to 13 Decemberists there remained hop, skip and a jump.

On the whole, it was like whirling in a wide vicious circle, with a return to the starting point after walking all day. The music from the demonstrations loudspeakers was substituted with self-made marching chants, like:

"So what about
are we laughing
while our shoes
this trail is roughing?"

But all that was in the future, while for the very first time, I did not have Morning Star, instead of which there was a pinprick feeling in my chest on the left. And it did not want to disappear, no matter how often I scratched the T-shirt in that area.

Even at night the annoyance persistently stayed by me, so in the morning I decided to have a session of labor therapy. I went to the locomotive depot, penetrated its grounds deserted and submerged in quietude, because of the second holiday day, and went to the construction site of the administrative building.

At the hillock of white silicate bricks dumpage, I planted an empty pallet and started stacking bricks on it. At times, it was necessary to press my chest with the left elbow, because the pin in there got replaced with a thick knitting needle. When the standard 12 courses of bricks were stacked up on the pallet, I told myself that my case was not terminal, and climbed to the incomplete third floor. There I took the Jolly Roger down from the corner wall, tore it from its mast, and slipped into a loop-hole in the slabs, and buried with dried mortar lumps and other debris…

Kyrpa's threats remained just empty words, I was never taken to Romny that summer. Might it be I had grown wiser? Very questionable indeed. It's just because I had not run into a sore spot of some high-ranking bitch of a cadre… By the middle of May, the needle, or pin, or whatever it was to pierce my chest, gradually dissolved, and many years later I realized that it was the first of heart attacks suffered by me…

~ ~ ~

In my rough plan there cropped up another, but already pleasant, detail, that of assembling the typewritten pages into one complete volume of stories. For that purpose, I bought a folder from the Department Store, with a hard plastic cover and nickel-plated rings inside. They usually use such folders for annual accounting reports lined up on the shelves in the accountancy office; sturdy, respect inspiring rows. To punch the holes for the folder rings in the pages of text, I borrowed the puncher from the secretary of Manager of SMP-615 in the administrative building. The new boss’s complexion grew green when saw me in his poultry farm, however, his sore spots did not qualify yet to be considered high-ranking enough…

The folder with the collection of translated short stories was holstered into a festive-looking cellophane bag and I took it—bugle your trumpets, fanfarade! Roll, timpani, roll!—in the capital city of Kiev, to the book publishing house Dnipro.

In the first room, where I proudly announced the arrival of a collection of translations [Here! Here!] of short stories by William Somerset Maugham, the jovial young man informed that he was not the person in charge of Maugham, and the expert I needed was to be found 2 offices farther down the corridor. If would I like him to have me seen over there? With dignified gratitude, I declined.

In the indicated office, there sat a fat, but still young, man staring in disgust at a skinny pile of typewritten pages inside an open looseleaf folder of purple cardboard, with short white strings in its covers spread wantonly atop his desk… He reluctantly opened the heavy hard-plastic-armored file that I handed him over his desk, and glanced at the title of the first story in the collection.

The Rain

He shut the file abruptly and asked who I was sent by.

In confused bewilderment, my mind revved to its limits: …forbidden to come here on your own accord?…too high circles… I should have been sent by some or another duke***, so that the courtier-receptionist could guess whose vassal I was… to compare the duke's weight with that of his suzerain—marquis***—and know how to handle me… and then one phone call to verify—just in case—for him to decide to which drawer he might safely stick it in… and don’t you cherish no hope, under so polished a shebang, to find a hole for the f-f..er..I mean, freelancer-outsider.

Meanwhile he, just in case, opened the volume once again, someplace in the middle, and immediately slammed it shut.