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

"I'm just an errand-boy," clarified I, "They asked me to take it to your publishing house, so I brought it here."

"Who?"

I opened the file to show the sticker on inside of its back cover with my Konotop address. "This friend of mine," said I.

It was below his position to talk to a messenger who was not sent by even somewhat petty baron but came from.. what was it? Konotop, or something he never needed no slush from… I coldly replied to his official goodbye and left the room.

The next evening, in Konotop, coming from work, I saw on my shelves a weighty postal package wrapped in their usual mustard-brown hard-duty paper. I had no reason to open the parcel. What for? By its size and familiar weight, I knew what was inside. The annual report for the past 6 years of my life, comprising 472 typewritten pages of 35 short stories by W. S. Maugham, translated into Ukrainian.

Strangely, the posted parcel hadn't reached Konotop before I came back from Kiev. And it was also odd that the unopened package with unread stories left me so frostbitten indifferent.

(…as it turned out, those 6 years did not fit into the feudally regulated grid of book publishing system.

"Who sent you to our reality laid out in so nice rectangular way?"

"Sorry, I've knocked on a wrong door…"

Quoting the habitual byword from my Uncle Vadya: “Farewell, dear peers and peerixes, sirs and sirixes!”

And he was a great connoisseur of vassal dependencies from The History of Middle Ages school textbook …)

~

~

The Ivory Tower

Instead of a volume of short stories by W. S. Maugham in Ukrainian (a single copy from 150 000 published) a weighty parcel rested, dead as a doornail, on my shelves. All that depended on me for accomplishment of the undertaken project was done in full, which stripped my further living on of any goal whatsoever. Life still rolled along the rutted trail, even if aimless and unplanned already. However, when you drop asking the useless question "what for?", then a Thursday visit to the bathhouse with the steam room, concluded by 2 bottles of beer, would suffice to motivate living for another week. Marvel at monks in the Tibet, who rough it up there though deprived of even the mentioned stimulants.

In my, not quite Tibetan, yet well-structured way of life there felt an undeniable lack of carnal pleasures. I caught myself thinking this thought on the evening when, coming after work to 13 Decemberists, I cast the customary glance at the mingle-mangle crowd of shoes and slippers about the shoe shelf on the veranda. The in-depth self-interrogation, which followed the hot trail of the glance, made clear that my eyes attempted at zeroing in on the high-wedge Austrian high boots absent there. Of course, it was not the eyes' fault that made in Austria footwear was so durable and unwilling to wear out from my recollections. Yet, what high boots might possibly come to the veranda in summertime, eh? And for what reason would she ever come to Konotop, let alone 13 Decemberists?. Such rhetorical questions helped to make me a laughing stock before myself, but could not prevent nightly ejaculations…

In the dead of night, my sleep was interrupted because I threw my head up and dropped it sharply onto the wooden armrest above my pillow in the folding coach-bed. However, the pain and blood from the broken eyebrow did not obscure the fact of soaked underpants. I peeled them off, used to wipe my loins, and threw behind the other armrest by the wallpapered wall, they could sit there till the morning. Then I got up, made a couple of steps thru the darkness to switch the lamp on the tabletop.

Bypassing the mirror on the way back, I averted my face – no good in adding this grim nudist to other blobs stored in its db—a toddler amazed by a too silent playmate behind the glass surface, a dude giving crick to his neck in a sidelong glance from his upturned face at his hair not yet reaching his shoulder blades, a young couple seated on the sunlit davenport fucking happily in the company of their reflections, soundless yet frisky. Out of the mirror’s sight, I stooped and yanked the blanket aside. Hell! A damp dark spot blotted the wrinkled landscape in the crimson tablecloth, which since long had lost its fringe and become the folding coach-bed’s cover.

"That's right," said I to myself. "That's exactly what you stole it for." Then I pulled, folded, and tucked the soaked spot so as to prevent body’s contact to the jism, and lay back down to sleep the night thru.

"They are simply white spots
Those cryptic black holes…
…lure the quest to lose way in tornado-like whirlings…
…with the black semen splotches in the white of bedsheet…"

And also using public means of transportation in rush hours became a real trial at times. I did not mind being squeezed from all sides by passengers packed tightly in the streetcar to give you the shape of the concave quarry pip in the Ace of Diamonds, as long as they don’t shove you against the rondure of a young female ass, which is grossly unfair. Damn! The situation fires up a breaker-like boner on your part, which fact can’t be concealed by the raincoats on both of you. Yet, with no room to step back in the crowd of passengers pressed in like two barrels of herring into one, all there remains to do is just swaying together with the streetcar in its swift run and keeping a despondent stare stuck to the window, like, I have nothing to do with that swelled thing. But if not yours, then whose?

"Blessed be the curves and bends
And other twists of tramway tracks,
The accomplices of the sweetest touches,
Quite decent, almost accidental…"

It's hard to list all sorts of things exposing sexual starvation, shortened by the scientifically bent folks to the term "libido". And they highly recommend the application of that damned Libido medicine for those engaged in creative professions, like, to give a sharp rise to the engaging drive in your manufactures. But what the f-f..er..I mean, frolic was I supposed to do with that f-f..er..funky Libido, being neither Vincent van Gogh nor Walt Whitman?!. And that f-f..er..well, feverish libido could seize me suddenly not only in the means of public transportation, or in erotic nightmares, but even at the workplace. Only that at work, the creative orgasm was reachable without the physical erection.

For instance, during the finishing works at the 100-apartment block, an unfamiliar young plasterer seemed very attractive to me. A passing glance was quite enough to see the rural beauty’s immunity to any intellectual pursuits, but the purity of the blush, the tempting outlines of her breasts and thighs (discernible even thru the deforming spetzovka) disarmed and captivated me so that I decided to gush up Song of Songs of my own, using the plasterer for a model…

Normally, the plastering works are started at a construction site after covering the floor slabs with the layer of expanded clay. Expanded clay is a good thermal insulation material, but it crunches underfoot until it is covered with the screed at the subsequent stages of finishing works.

Turning a couple of times to my cautious steps over the expanded clay—I neared the doorway to make the details of the supposed masterpiece more precise—the model asked Trepetilikha, who was plastering a jamb in the same room, "Could that bozo stole my trowel?"

"Not a chance," replied Trepetilikha. "This one if even stumbles on your trowel would never pilfer it."

Given the dimensions of my libido at that period, the new Song of Songs would have easily surpassed the Solomon's creation, and only the cynic suspicion of my involvement in the theft saved the world literature from the upcoming reassessment of all its values.

"From the highest cliff
Over the sea, blue and boundless,
Off I dumped my libido
To get rid of it
Yet… O, my!.
All of the vast blue sea
Drowned in my bluesy libido.
Oops!."

Hell!. Two divorces and three stretches in the Romny madhouse leave you with a damn slim prospect of developing a stable relationship, or any at all for that matter.

But you cannot lace up a blizzard… Good news, it's not whipping my face, but pushing from behind towards the station in the early morning twilight. Thick streams of snow pressed into dense mass by the squally wind drive the twilight back towards the darkness.

Knee-deep in snowdrifts I flounder on by the supposed service path alongside the railway track. The concrete pillars holding the contact wire above the rails serve the milestones not to get lost in the desert of floating snow. It's better not to look back – the stream of blinding snow instantly sticks like a chilly mask all over the face. Besides, there's nothing behind to look for – whatever has been there is just gone.

But why do I see her naked body as white as the churning white foam of this frenzied blizzard? And she's not alone – having a sex with someone. Not me…

I turn my face back to the snowy slaps, to wake up, not see. In my brain, I switch on the splashes of the organ from the House of Organ Music, they are tattered, crisp and not precise, yet distract…

… I must be a pervert indeed…no normal one would have a hardon watching his wife fucking somebody else midst this snowstorm…

…what wife? You don't have no wife!.

…okay, not wife then – the love of the lifetime…

…shut up, asshole!.

I shook my head in desperation and, with a groan, wandered on. A hard glancing blow from behind grazed at my left shoulder calling to order. The local train from Nezhyn making thru the blizzard for the station.

…the trains are always right, they don't have deviations…

…look, the blurred lights ahead, above the fourth platform…

…from there in the common throng makes thru the blizzard to the station square, to our Seagull…

…everything is okay, I'm just like everyone else…