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

~ ~ ~

In a late spring evening on the station square, someone had a breakdown. Maybe, the heart needed a time break or something, but the man collapsed onto the asphalt. However, the ambulance was quick and pulled up by when the females' "ah! oh!" were still floating over the small crowd around the vacationer.

Going to the railway station thru the Loony park, I missed the beginning and only watched the final act – the ambulance departure followed by dispersing of a group of people. However, the pedestal of the Lenin monument in the park was still sending back tiny echoes of "ah!" so reconstructing what had just been there was as easy as summing up 2 zeroes.

Along the alley opening to the square, one of the incident witnesses was nearing me, pensively pacing in the counter direction. When we get close to each other, she suddenly repeated "ah!" rehearsed shortly before, uplifted her arms, a kinda dancer in The Swan Lake ballet, and fell on me.

What else could I do? Naturally, I caught the fainter in her fall, by the armpits. Then I gentlemanly dragged the swoony swan onto the bench of green beams in the low wall of trimmed bushes.

She sat silently, her head bowed, and I gallantly kept shut up, in the same deep shadow under the tree blocking the light from the lamp up the alley. Seated next to her, I fed an inaudible sermon to myself on pointlessness of the slightest advances by a guy of my pitch-black past, especially in the city where everyone knew anyone else. Who’d need a goner’s courting?. Who’d care for a mentally compromised freak let loose till next pinch up for a yearly session to get his head tweaked at the Romny madhouse?

When our reciprocal silence became too monotonous, she put her hand on my shoulder to say in a wearily meek tone of voice, "Thank you" and left the bench.

I dismally looked after the blurred spot of her long light cloak moving away up the alley, and I thought to myself: "Moron! Couldn't you prop the girl by your arm around her waist? And let her decide whether to put her head on your shoulder or say "don't!" and leave? No? You're too smart for that, you made the decision for both! Okay! Now stay with your fucking stream of consciousness, with your libido, and the endlessly long nights, like by that princess on a pea!"

"Had an encounter with Katya in the park, brother?"

"What's the buzz, Natasha?"

"Come on! Katya's from our accounts department. She told me herself how she nearly fainted in Loony and fell on you."

"She took me for someone else, or him for me."

"Stop fibbing to me!"

"I wish I were as lucky as that jackass with Katya-girlies dropping on him in parks!."

~ ~ ~

On the payday, I got off our Seagull at the bus station and turned into the post-office to send 30 & 30 alimony. Then I crossed Club Street back and proceeded alongside the Loony park towards the railway station.

"Hey! You're from The Orpheuses, right? Ogoltsoff?

…a young man of my age, heading to the station with a woman by his side, his wife, probably… "Yes, it's me."

"Do I know you! You studied in Nezhyn and I knew your wife Olga!"

…no, never met him, and he was not alone to know Olga after she became my wife…

He looked around as if seeking some piece of hard and weighty rock to swat against my skull with. Then he pointed his finger at his companion who unswervingly stared aside.

"See? Got her teeth into and having me in all the holes!"

…yea, I see it alright, man, having it in all the holes… some relic from the antediluvian life… you wander around beset with snotty sorrows for the flute of Eera and they still pop up with their news bulletins on Olga…

"Yea, I see. Say 'hello' to my wife Olga."

"Damn! You're some f-f.. fool driver!"

Leaving them to each other, I turned off Club Street into the park along the walk coming up to the Loony Palace of Culture, but I bypassed it on the right and walked on behind the white back of Lenin to the side exit from the park, then past School 11 to the terminal of Streetcar 3 by the Under-Overpass. At Bazaar stop, Skully and Vladya boarded the streetcar.

"Hi!" said I. "How are you?"

Skully nodded warily and they both also said, "Hi!"

The rumbling streetcar was carrying us towards School 13. I gave a little chuckle.

"What are you laughing at, Sehrguey?" asked Skully with an unheard of correctness. That's some news! For the first time since we’ve met he called me by my name, skipping both my school and lahbooh handles. Yes, and with that pompous circumspection, kinda lord-speaker addressing a peer from the opposition faction.

“Ah!. Just remembered Vladya's verse. Remember, Vladya? We were writing poems during classes. Once I composed a piece with Vladya in it; he was blowing the horn and clanging his sword in a battle with another knight. So he turned out an answer:

“Don't ever try
To put on me
The wreaths of military glory.
As for the bugle, I wasn't that horny…
But low and cozy in the ditch…”

"Well, now, do you remember, Vladya?"

He vaguely shrugged his shoulders and gave a so apologetic look to the passengers seated and standing around that it was clear right away, he did not keep any recollections of the sort. Not to strain my old bosom friends any longer, I got off by School 13…

On foot went I along Nezhyn Street, turned into Eugenia Bosh Street, and then into Kotovsky Street. My feet knew those streets by heart, I could fully trust them and, at leisure, think about this or that…

…the translator from Vsesvit was good at rendering that Czech's verses… now, how would it look in Russian, I wonder?…probably, something like…

"I walk and smile just to myself
And then the thought
'What would the people think of me?'
Turns quiet smiling in too loud a laughter…"

…no, in Vsesvit it's still better good job by the translator yet the Czech is a hugely better fellow and the Czechs in general are good fellows… if we for instance take Jan from the Bolshevik…

…stop! no poking the Bolshevik's ashes or else we'll have another turn of plaintive weeping to irrigate with bitter tears the dry and petrified sponge which for a year already kicks back dropped in the nook unreachable behind the fridge…

…but this Czech is good indeed… showed them all what the last will of a poet should look like… before him they turned out only primitive two-liners: ah, bury me so that in spring the nightingale's song will sound o'er my grave… but me, please, where the Dnieper's flow is heard from afar… base and selfish consumerism… go and learn from the laughing Czech… everything's instructive and to the point… starting with the tree kind whose roots will suck the juice from the buried body and pump it up right to the flowering twigs so that the bees collect the honey for young beauties to grease their buns when having tea for breakfast in their beds… that's a suave gallant for you! in his unblemished shining armors! who cares that I am dead? says he… it’s not a reason to deprive, he says, the customer ladies of our specialty delicacies!.. yet you can’t blame Czechoslovakia alone for his fanciful kinks because schizophrenia is supranational indestructible and indivisible… although time and again there pops up some or another defector like Freud who cinch their specific vision of the world into the cart of servicing their wallets and open Viennese schools… to keep the pot boiling… for scurvy metal he lost his chance to be a normal schizophrenic as free as the rest of us… the weakling got caught with the lime for dickhead suckers mind well sonny “the longer the line of zeroes in your bank account the cooler you are”… some complete hooey you get from them those zeroes, bro… yet the Cave-Mommy as ever feels so mighty comfortable for the blind… and with the final fall of curtain after the life spent among all kind of neurasthenic ladies with their hysterics and in a company of naphthalenized spiders of scientistical PhDs did you not ask your mug’s reflection in the looking-glass well what now Ziggy have your Poles helped you out?. give back my schizophrenia please set me free… yet what is freedom and how to see its fore from its behind?. as Peter Lysoon cares to put it… freedom from what?. and here you get fixed up with the straitjacket of national traditions… for the Brit Shakespeare it's freedom from time… the connection of times is broken describes he a petty clinical case… while in Ukrainian the very term denotes either separation from God Almighty or else can be interpreted as some incognito "free divine"… doesn't matter though since the existence of both freedom and God is beyond provability… and seeing that tether keeps back no longer whizzing ahead in frenzied rapture… still watch your step buddy the wild is good but smarting chill and wet… and here lies the whole dirty trick impossibility to both give the slip to the commandments getting away from all kind of safety regulations to keep the herd consolidated by and at the same time enjoy the goodies of the in-herd lifestyle with a warm female next to your side and cool vodka from the freezer, see?. more quirky task than cracking the circle quadrature you know…

…what's that? Decemberists Street? so soon? some gag… Mercutio was in the luck to have a friend like Romeo who would snap him back to earth in time… "peace, f-f..er..friend of mine, thou talk'st of nothing! watch around or you'll get over to Tsiolkovsky Street in no time!.""

…strange…why is Lenochka strolling in front of the gate?.

"Dad, you've got a visitor."

"What visitor?"

"I don't know, he says he's your friend."

With the chink of the handle-latch in the wicket, I entered the yard.

On the bench by the porch way, looking up at the lower branches in the Apple tree whose trunk served also the natural backrest, my visitor sat, aka my friend, blowing cigarette smoke up into the leaves.