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

…enough! no more quibbling!…say it in plain words – are you a master or a slave?…

…damn! you are a nail-hard customer…okay, I am the master of my cock if it will make you happy…

…great!…that makes 33 % plus… you're cooking on gas, bro!…so on we go, would you devour your neighbor at the demand of your empty stomach?…

…I don’t think so…

…yes or no, sweetie?…

…no!…fuck you!…

…good boy! now, I see myself whom I’ve loved so much…and, by the by, you’re at level 66 % plus…now, to disentangle the remainder of the Gordian lacework…

…but I don’t remember what we were about…

…stop your zigzagging!…it’s master or slave choice…who rules who, you know…

…oh!…I’m more tired than my legs already…well, as long as my system is kept in check by means of…

…enough!…no more words!…”means of” is nothing but an instrument…congrats, Mr. Master-unto-Yoursel…two words of warning though…don’t stick your neck out nor try to change the world because a revolutionary without a supporting party is as ridiculous as a stateless citizen…and if I were you I wouldn’t kick up much sing and dance about God’s being dead 'cause all we need is Master giving us commands…but let’s peep out into the wide wild world…what are you personally out there?…

…I have no slaves!…nor need any…

…easy, corner-cutter…a slave owner is someone else’s slave in 99 % plus…and you know as well as I do that having none does not exempt you…so, whose one are you?… Maugham’s?… John Mill’s?…

…yes, yes, yes!…as well as of that topless nuts who popped up above the fence in the Area…I am a slave to all and everything, yet temporarily, until my expiration date or simply getting bored…

…seems like we’ve run into another vicious circle with no chance to be resolved at the round table in m/u 41769’s stoker house, sorry for interrupting your trudge…wipe your snots and just keep walking…some business you're a specialist in…

And he walks, stepping on the tails of the transparent bands of scampering grains of snow. Each step is no different from the previous one, none of the steps changes a jot of the road, and neither the low leaden sky, nor the walls in windbreak belts on both sides get changed in any way.

…all and the same…that same all…everything moves to stays the same…

Occasionally, a concrete kilometer post with figures in a blue squarelet of tin approaches gradually to fall behind. A few hours of such uninterrupted walking, even without any load, and the ache, slight but nagging, would seep into the shoulder bones. He knows that. But not on this day. The district center is at most 15 kilometers from the village, as said by his uncle. And from the town there starts the transport services of a developed civilization…

Something looms at a distance on the roadside; some huge object. Fixing his gaze on that motionless strangeness midst the general chaotic stir, he is nearing it, trying to guess from afar: what could it be?

…some machinery…aha…and what kind of it?…

…who knows, they're tinkling out lots of them for agriculture…let's get closer and then…

A weeny burning sensation breaks up in his bladder.

…would you but wait a bit with your urges?..yes, machinery, yet from another sphere…

He stops by a tangerine-yellow road roller.

…how could you possibly get to it, poor thing?..feels chilly, eh?..no doubt…way too accustomed to asphalt tropics…bituminous heat and stuff…what are your plans for to survive the winter?..no escape to warmer countries, too heavy on the rise, besides, it's too late…and no tool to dig a furrow for yourself, not your specialization…anabiosis remains the only chance, buddy …freeze into the surrounding environment like them those cold-blood earth-water animals…though not a bed of roses too…

He pours his empathy out onto the scattering of small-sized gravel, then zips the fly up and steps over the uneven dark spot in the road, which a couple of hours before was tea prepared by Uncle's wife for a meal.

…everything flows, everything changes…one and the same tea can’t be poured out twice…

~ ~ ~

It was his second visit to the village where he was now walking from. The first time though he did not come himself but was brought by his Dad. The days in that summer lasted forever, unhurried, like the slow stream splitting the village into ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’. The knee-deep water in the quiet creek was rolling soundlessly along the sandy bottom. A little bit upstream you got into the green-shaded tunnel in between the walls of dense Willow thicket. Whitebait brushed ticklishly against the shanks. It feels creepy, especially when you are 12 and they told you some scary stories about leeches and "horsehair".

And beyond the village, quite at a distance, maybe at an hour's walk, there was the river Mostya not too wide but enough for a swim. And he was swimming to the opposite bright grassy bank and pushing the red-and-blue ball ahead over the water, watching the blurred spot of his face reflected in the wet, spinning, sides of the ball. Or was that ball and the green bank by some other river of his childhood? Yet, the fact remained that he entered the Mostya river as well. 20 years before…

Twenty years later, on his second visit, he did not enter it. It was too cold for swimming. Late autumn. Emptiness reigned in the wide sway of the fields. Empty was the village with small hillocks of crushed bricks – ruins of houses overgrown with rank grass. “Khan Mamai's horde was here”. The remaining huts were silent, squatting lowly as if pressed down by the ocean of faded sky. At the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

"Looking for whom?"

"Sehrguey Mikhailovich Ogoltsoff."

"And who are you?"

"Sehrguey Ogoltsoff."

"So, the nephew?" guessed she quickly.

"Exactly," he agreed, holding a smile back.

She invited to go over into the room and was sorry that the uncle had just left for work after the midday break, and she didn’t forget to praise the scrawny cat thoroughly washing his face all the morning to predict arrival of guests. Then she returned to the kitchen and the four-meter-long thread-chain doubled in-and-out the small teremok-hut time-piece on the opposite wall by the ceiling, gravity-driven to produce slow ticks slicing hollow silence in the empty room except for the table between 2 windows, below the clock, under the worn-out oil-cloth hanging over the plywood doors in its box and the crowd in the black-and-white cluster of close and distant relatives, and their special friends of sundry sizes, persistent stares from the silent iconic faces similarly mute and petrified for the ceremonial shot, in the corner left free by the Russian oven comprising half of the space.

He sat leaning against the backrest of the couch, beneath a narrow arched window to the front garden, checking the interior in the single room with a brick stove opposite his feet, from which a smooth gray pipe of asbestos-concrete rose up and, by the ceiling, veered to the kitchen wall.

Next to the stove, stood a broad bed with paint-coated legs and siderails, carrying a pyramidal tower of cushions next to the plush carpet pinned up by small nails over the wall, in which, on some of the thousand-and-one nights, the young man abducted a bashful beauty on his plush stallion, and his accomplice followed them, with a parting glance over his shoulder at the minarets in the sleeping city. The plywood hide-out of brown wardrobe idled connivingly in the corner for their arrival.

On this side, next to the couch, stood a table beneath the second of the arched windows, with chairs pushed under it and, by the blank wall to the neighbors', a television set on a high shelf.

From under the TV to the kitchen door a rug-mat stretched, following the directions of the planks in the ceiling overhead, naked and blue… She tinkled plates washing up in the kitchen, occasionally coming to the door of the room to ask if his parents were healthy, and where he worked, and what's his job. By the cautiousness of the questions, he got it that she knew. As if it could be otherwise. His father, since retired, was visiting his native village almost every summer, bringing along his granddaughter too. He surely shared his troubles with his brother.

The kitchen’s entrance door banged, "Grandma! Two fives!"

"You’re back?" responded she with tender strictness. "Take off your jacket. And do not shuffle that way. Go say 'hello' to the uncle, (to the whispered question) your mom's cousin."

From behind the door handle, the boy's face with a strand of hair sticking up in a cow-lick above the right corner of the steep forehead slowly peeped in, with the childishly serious look.

After a prolonged "hello-oo" he disappeared to go on with the inaudible questioning of his grandmother.

"Lenochka's dad," answered she laying the table. "Remember her staying at grandma Sasha's last summer?"

She invited the guest to the table. Supping the meal, the schoolboy looked at the window with a dejected stare. Could you remember what they see with such wide-open gaze those seven-year-old aliens until another question about school brings them back to their senses?

Well, at least the unknown uncle from nowhere was eating silently. The boiled potatoes with fried onions the boy rejected, as well as the tea.

The grandmother sent him to the village smithy to tell his grandfather about the guest, who with a polite ‘thank-you’ returned to the couch… Full of lean satiety, he sat in the congested sleepy silence wrapping the house.