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

The next morning, we went for a swim in kopanka. I did not feel like entering the water, so I just walked around the pond and lay on the beach.

Twoic swam it from end to end. His blue eyes radiated a melting glow of satisfaction when he came ashore nearby me with water trickles dripping from his trunks.

"This look was in his eyes when getting off her," thought I. The thought brought pain and even though not so acute as I expected, yet more replete than I would like…

~ ~ ~

She approached me on the beach and started a talk about the Morning Star dropped on the sand next to the pink coverlet on which I was sitting. If I really read or it was it just a trick to lure girls. What that big article was about, for example.

So, I had to retell for the examiner what happened to a 19-year-old youth, a member of the family of smugglers. They regularly flew from Pakistan to England, swallowing a heap of small tight packages before the flight. Stomach served an ideal repository, the specially trained controller dogs at airports couldn’t sniff out any drugs. Upon arrival, at a safe house in London, the whole family underwent the stomach lavage and—rah-rah-rah!—congrats on the successful shipping.

The fizzle happened on the flight when one of the small packages burst in the stomach of the young man. They used to tamp too much into one package and, on the arrival, the guy was taken from the aircraft straight to the hospital with a severe overdose. They washed the drugs out of his stomach and saved his life. And that was the end to the family business. Some sad, in general, story…

She sympathized and shared that she was also a nurse… Basically, a good profession for a girl about 30, who did not look a movie star, yet everything else was in place. My trunks could witness to the fact because, when finishing the story, I had to pull my knees up to my chin to look like a civilized gentleman and not a heated gorilla in the zoo.

Then everything went on like in a fairy tale, she told me her address in At-Seven-Winds, and we arranged my coming to her place on Tuesday with a visit of friendship and reciprocal understanding. She strolled away along the sandy beach, and I had to stretch out on my stomach, so as not to attract the public attention by my swimming trunks stuck out in anticipation of the day after tomorrow…

That day came at last and, after work, I rode from the station square to City. In The Flowers shop there happened nothing to my liking and I had to buy a kinda crossbred of daisies and sunflower. There still remained a hell of a lot of time before the appointed hour, so I took a walk back to the station and then along Club Street to At-Seven-Winds.

In Zelenchuk Area, Vladimir Gavkalov, the truck crane operator from SMP-615, who looked like Eera's brother Igor, crossed my path.

"Sehryoga!" yelled he on the run, "You've lost your way! The bathhouse’s in the counter direction!"

I did not like that whisker of a bouquet myself but valiantly carried it on.

And all the same, up to At-Seven-Winds I got half-hour ahead of time and decided to keep my long-standing promise to myself that one of those days I’d come on a visit to that family of tall Birch trees in the vast area of construction sites… Following the trail trod in the tall grass, I approached the group of the white-trunk beauties.

Stupid bitches! The tenants from the nearest street who made a garbage dump under the trees… Scrunched between the closing in cloud layers, the sun went down like a bulb, without a sunset. Clenching my teeth at the ugly discovery, I took my stupid bouquet to the address, for the principle's sake.

"Oh!" she said. "Even with flowers!"

And I, both immediately and too late, got it that it should have been vodka… Then we chattered about nothing in the kitchen of her one-room flat. After tea, there happened an incident – the big jar of strawberry jam slipped from her hands and thwacked against the floor. It took her a considerable time to collect the large sticky puddle and wash the floor in the kitchen.

At about eleven she started sending me home. I had to drive a fool that everything there was locked and latched already, and the wolfhounds set free to run around. She, like, took pity and granted me half of her double bed, on the condition that I would behave.

When she put the light out and also lay down, I endeavored to continue the relationship in the most natural way, which move was met with unyielding resistance. I would never learn nothing! Did she call me for to wallow in demonstration of her chastity? I dropped trying and felt I didn't really care, just like about that sealed post package on my bookshelves.

…probably because the loss of jam was too great a shock… the three-liter jar would have seen her for at least thru half the winter… or maybe an ominous sign for the superstitious… and I don't care those morons have made their stupid dump there… when from one or another construction site I watched them waving at me it somehow eased… like a promise of something nice… when they eventually will cut them down and replace with a five-story block the trees will all the same be waving their tops like saying "Hi!" thru the heat haze… it will stay by me while those smarties remain stuck in their garbage heap for life…

In the dead of night, I awoke because light cautious fingers were feeling my cock thru the underpants. The nurse, after the failure to get raped, was checking why so. She'd better ask the sand on the Seim beach… But those frisking fingers of a stranger checking my flesh… It had already been somewhere… Only I couldn't recollect where and when before falling asleep again.

In the morning I left, declining the proposed tea with sugar. What was her name? She should have one anyway… it was some easy name, yes, sure… see? I even snap my fingers… now… well… er… perhaps… something like… mmm… yes…

~ ~ ~

The dance-floor in the Central Park of Recreation was all that still remained there for me. And I visited it not as a belated shooter in search for lame game but simply to get blues. A session of nostalgia priced 50 kopecks.

I was one of the first to enter the round enclosure of the dance-floor and get seated onto the timber bench of beams running along the tall pipe-grates in the peeling-off coat of silver-gray. The large black boxes of the loudspeakers on the stage thundered with trendy records because "live" music became bygones. Between the numbers some, like, DJ switched the mike on and announced what had just been played and what was coming next. At times, he attempted at making a clumsy cockamamie joke, fortunately, not too often.

I sat quietly, the back of my head leaned against the iron pipe in the fencing. The twilight closed in but high in the sky the flocks of swifts still revolved beneath the clouds touched by the parting sun rays. I recollected their carousel on that day when you turned one month old, and we brought you for a checkup in the children's polyclinic, in the hand-me-down carriage under the tulle cover to throw off the evil eye. Only those swifts kept chirping shrilly when circling above the roof of the department store, while these near the fading clouds were not heard because of being so far and high.

Then the sky became dark, the night fell, and I still sat on the bench and never danced because I knew my place which was among the other thirty-and-over-year-olds outside, under the lamp in the nearby alley. You might stop there for a couple of minutes to watch the jumping joy of the next generation before going back to your settled life with a davenport opposite the TV…

I sat quietly as becomes a foreign particle, listened to the music and watched, point-blank, the young stock mass getting gradually denser in front of the bench… that girl's neck is longer than that of Nefertiti… very nice, like a lithe stem of dandelion… And I admired it without getting aroused. Then she did not show up for a couple of weekends before coming back with her neck drooped guiltily and obviously shortened, and I knew that she got cut off at the entrance examinations to an institute…

At eleven, in the general throng, I left the park for the streetcar stop by Peace Square. Those who lived closer diverged from the common flow in pairs and groups. People from far-off neighborhoods discussed: to wait or not to wait? Streetcars at that time of day were an avis rara…

Once the stop was occupied by a glass-eyed mujik of about 40. He eyed the approaching youngsters with a scornful stare, akimbo, his palms on his buttocks, in the attitude of a Nazi officer by the death camp gate bearing the inscription "Forget all hope you who come in here". The scared pairs and small companies got silent and bypassed him to timidly cram in the remaining half of the long stop. Triumphantly stood he, feet planted wide apart into the conquered living space alongside the track rails…

I stopped in front of the victor, barely two meters away.

…so, Sturmbahnfuhrer, dueling of attitudes, eh?.

Mine came all of itself, from the newsreels of the Victory Parade in Moscow, 1945. Besides the dumping fascist banners to the Lenin Mausoleum, there were also footage stretches filming civilians, girls for the most part with their faces so sad. Almost all of those girls from the past assumed the same posture – their left arms hanging alongside the body, the right raised across the stomach to grip the left elbow.

Facing the glass-eyed, I replicated their stance. Only my right hand was clutching higher than by those sad girls, around my left biceps and because of that my hanging down left arm became a kinda trunk already, sort of a dangling proboscis at rest. The opponent was not fit to withstand even 1 minute. He dropped his head in desperation, clasped his hands behind over his butt in the traditional zek attitude, and began to pace in shortened steps across the asphalted width of the stop, as far as the walls of invisible cell let him go.

The young folks were amazed at the ease of my victory over the cockroach, and they began to fill the whole stop, taking note for the future, that know-how is power… Yet, to be honest, my deed was pure improvisation, a flukey present from my generation to theirs…

~ ~ ~

Over and over again, clattering wheels beneath the floor rock the car in shallow sways, the local train carries me away from Konotop… But where, by the way, am I going? By all that black-ink darkness outside the window, it’s a late local train, so my trip is no farther than to Nezhyn, which means I’m paying another visit to Zhomnir…

My fuzzy reflection in the doubly-glazed window nods dimly in time with the rhythm of tapping against the rail joints: yea-to-him-and-no-where-else… Why do I go there? Well, probably, there is some reason… Say, typing with his typewriter another story, or maybe a couple of verses…

(…how can I now recollect from such a distance?..)

But all that's nothing but a downright smoke screen, and there's no use to tell lies to oneself. In fact, I am going to feel, again and again, the aching longing for the lost irreversibly. I am going to torture myself on the bank of invisible river, that same river in which, eternity before, there splashed a ripple where I loved and was loved in response… That's why the train rumbles along, thru the night, and in one of its cars I'm sitting on the edge of a three-person seat, while my briefcase basks impudently, smack in the middle of it.

It's a rare occasion when the car is empty; well, almost so. About 20 meters from my place, in a seat on the same side from the aisle, a girl is sitting. Because of riding backward, she’s facing me with her head leaned against the black window glass. At such a distance I cannot make out the features of her face, it's just a girl, alone in an empty car of a night train, with a bob cut of blond hair. She does not care about my presence, but looks quietly thru the window, where the picture of nocturnal darkness is sweeping by behind the dim reflection of the lamps in the ceiling of the empty car. Of course, it is empty. I am of no account, I sit quietly in the distance and do not stare at her at all. My absent gaze is directed along the aisle into the empty car vestibule behind the glass of the sliding door, trembling and quaking in time with the thuds of train wheels. Though such an attitude doesn't, of course, prevent a sentimental corner of my eye from catching the outline of her blond head and the upper part of her shoulders visible above the series of the seat-backs separating us. Just two in an empty car rushing thru the night…

But—lo!—she wakes up from her sad stupor. The right hand touches her blond haircut. She turns a bit deeper to the window, demonstrating her profile, and then looks straight ahead with her face turned to me.

From my place, I can't see where exactly her eyes are directed, yet I don't need any longer to show interest in the empty vestibule. Now I look at her and admire, with platonic frankness, the face turned to my side and her shoulders beneath the cloth of her cloak. That's all I can do; I will not let her down with too daring jokes or suggestions, like, "You're cute, I'm cool, be my third wife…" But—ah!—she's so nice, I swear! Even at this distanced semi-discernibility…

The clattering of wheels fades into the muffled background substituted with the beautiful melody by Tariverdiev from the soundtrack to the series of 17 Moments of Springtime. It's when the secret agent Isayev, aka Stirlitz, has a meeting with his wife, arranged by the Center at a small cafе in Germany.

She gets seated three tables away from him so that he might admire her after a decade of separation. How's she getting on in the already unknown to him USSR? For ten dangerous years, he’s been away from his country, away from her…

But sweeping away all the thoughts unnecessary for the moment, he only looks observing stealthily the new features in the half-unfamiliar woman. More! Please, more!.

But no, the time is up. Another Soviet secret agent, her escort sitting by her side, looks at his watch. The undercover meeting's over. And he takes her away so that the bloodhounds of the Gestapo wouldn't run them down…

Yet here, in the local train car, Tariverdiev's melody does not abate, we are out of their control, alone in the whole secluded…

BRENNGG! ZPRTYCH !!

From among the leatherette backrests between us, like from a slightly sloped deck of cards, a red joker jumps out. We were not alone!. That drunk has been sleeping between us all along!