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

Outside the 2 windows behind his back, the gray wind cooed and wooed with impetuous gusts the Apple tree in the front garden, who angrily waved away the inconstant any lady's man… It's time to insert the inner frames for winter… In front of him, thru the velvety-lilac night, the kidnappers were still galloping mutely with their capture. Although she might be happy to be stolen and not stay by the old vizier with his fat eunuchs…

~ ~ ~

It's weird, the extent of how fully everything around was befitting me. And so it would be on all the following days of the vacation… In the evenings I'd be visiting my aunt Alexandra to overeat her pancakes, and once even a chicken. Some rich villager was my aunt.

In the mornings after breakfast, when my uncle, the blacksmith, went by bicycle to his smithy, I ventured to roam over the fields, and after the midday meal, I was cutting logs from the hillock of firewood dumped next to the house, for the winter.

A beautiful Russian woman Valentina, by her husband's last name – Zhelezina, my cousin and the mother of Maxim, the outstanding student living in the house of his grandparents, would encourage me to visit her house, where she kept the younger ones – the hooligan Volodka and post-toddler Tanyooshka, who still did not want to part with her pacifier.

She would retell me the village gossips, and her life in Moscow, where she was courted by a Frenchman, and in Kustanai, where she was married to a German from the local colonists.

Her current husband would take me to the village store, and I would drink bottled beer and listen to mujiks' talk of nothing but with so native intonations that it takes your breath away with the sentimental sympathy.

And by that time my aunt would have already bestowed a black padded jacket, which was the obligatory outfit for anyone there, except for kids and teenagers, so that I did not stick out like a sore thumb in my checkered jacket…

Some ante-biblical simplicity of life, and at the same time with so many admixtures… An old woman came to the store to exchange potatoes from her garden for kolkhoz kopecks, her utter poverty showed thru but the mujiks around were next to bowing, caps in hand, before her. She’s a relic of their past – the embodiment of the old-regime landowners, yet they needed that relic and would create it from a poor retired teacher if only her facial features were delicate enough…

Returning from one of the supper evenings at my aunt's, I, for some reason, stopped in my tracks at nothing around, and for a long stretch was staring in the dry tall grass. What for?. The next evening my aunt affirmed that, yes, my grandmother Martha's hut had been exactly in that spot.

On the last night before leaving, I came with the farewell visit to Valentina's house. My checkered jacket turned out exactly her husband's size, they were obviously impressed with such generosity and were calling the jacket "a suit". To Valentina, I presented my suspiciously feminine bag. I did manage to get rid of it after all…

We went out into the darkness of the street without houses. Everyone understood that we would never see each other again. Valentina embraced me and wept. I stroke the shoulder of her padded jacket and said, "Boodya, sister." Then I shook hands with her husband Zhelezin and went away.

It's so strange, in my whole life, I never heard or used that soothing word of "boodya", it came out all by itself, spontaneously… I come from here, it's where I belong, sad pity I’ll be of no use for my own…

~ ~ ~

People started making wry faces at me as early as the bus station near the Izmaylovo Park, where the Ryazan-Moscow bus arrived. At Zhulyany airport in Kiev, where I disembarked the midnight flight from Moscow, the hostile attitude to me from the folks around increased exponentially to confirm the correctness of the old saying – people judge you by your zek outfit.

The public opinion on my account was voiced in the morning by a passenger on the platform in the underground metro station, "Where the fuck do you barge thru among the people?"

I differed from them by my being a black man. The black padded jacket, black pants, black army boots. Only the "cock" hat on my head fell out of the ensemble with its brown and blue stripes. It would seem more or less excusable were I loaded with some kind of luggage, but a black man with his hands in his pockets is outrageous, it's a challenge to the social order, it's a cheeky bomzh… We bypass them with an unseeing glance, so that to avoid any eye contact—save, God!—or we bark, "Where the fuck do you barge thru among the people?"

True, in those days we did not know the word bomzh yet, and for such sort of people, they used the term bych. "Where do you barge, you bych?.. Get out of here, fucking bych!"

The word was brought by the seamen who had sailed abroad. There, in the port cities, the drifters spending nights on the beach, collecting the scraps and offal left by vacationers were called "beach-combers". Our people did not care for the whole word and borrowed only the first half of it. So the folks without a certain place of residence and of obscure occupation got labeled byches. A short, biting term. However, it died out.

Firstly, those who did not speak English and never went to the sea began to slip into synonyms, substituting knoot (which in Russian means "whip") for bych that in Russian also means "whip". And, secondly, abbreviations are always stronger, especially when supported by the state.

(…we are all from the USSR, got it? Whoever does not understand will receive clarification in the CheKa, aka the KGB…)

When the law enforcement organs abbreviated the "without a certain place of residence" that turned in Russian into BOMZh, other terms had no chance for survival.

In the great and mighty Russian language, you cannot find a synonym to bomzh. The nearest to it "tramp" or "bum" smack of mothballs and infantile lisp of the Indian cinema…

Once upon a time in Russia there lived peddlers, aka offenny. In order to survive, they invented a language of their own. Dark for uninitiated, the Offenny language went into oblivion together with its carriers – no one bothered to compose its dictionary.

The current fenya of the criminal world is also for initiated but has nothing to do with the defunct Offenny except for echoing the latter's name. Considering fenya the language of Russian mafia is not correct because from Russian it borrowed only grammatical structures, and the vocabulary is fairly international. Kicked out of secondary school, half-educated students when continuing their careers as jail-birds poured in fenya the bits and scraps of words they heard at foreign language classes. That way fenya feathered its hat with atas! (from the French "l’attention!"), haza (from the German "Hause"), havvat (from the English "have a"), as well as manifold borrowings from the languages in the family of friendly and free brother nations fused into the common, unsplittable, USSR.

(…however, back to my malyava, aka letter (fenya’s term from the German "mahlen")…)

The champion for the public fundamental morals, who offended me in the metro, had no notion that under the appearance of a black man there lived in me a vulnerable tender soul as well as the digestive tract of a delicate constitution. I did not suspect it myself until I felt how, after the mentioned insult, I gradually became "mournful in the belly" because the intestines began revolting after the traumatic discovery that in public eye they were a constituent part of a bum.

About the Maidan, which then was named Square of October Revolution, it became clear that I could not hold back the pressure of the tides that stormed the ampoule (which follows the large intestine) and that there remained no hope for reaching the greens by the University, with the only public toilet known to me in the downtown part of Kiev. Fortunately, I remembered the Ministry of Education with their ministerial toilet on the second floor, and not too far from the square, it’s only that the intemperately intensive rioting within my system called for additional suppressive efforts…

I flung the tall entrance door open and rushed, in a concentrated jog, up the marble stairs.

"Hey! Where?" shouted the attendant from the chair to the left from the entrance.

"Plumbing system check," reported I over my shoulder, without slowing down the businesslike strides…

When all the sorrows subsided, I left the restroom, polished like a malachite jewelry case, and descended the wide white stairs, with the demeanor of archangel Gabriel in dignified idle stroll and, maybe, even gleaming blissfully.

I wanted to share the Good News and, turning my face to the attendant, informed benevolently, "Hey, look! The check says it's okay around here. Yea!." And I went out into the blatantly atheistic Karl Marx Street, between two dense walls of the like, severely administrative, buildings.

(…Karl certainly knew it's only thanks to the collective efforts that Man managed to become Crown of Nature. Because single-handed you can neither kill a mammoth not fly to the moon.

But how fragile the state of unity is!. How willingly and readily we do split ourselves, humans, by the color of skin and hair, by caste, faith, party affiliation: they are not us, we are not them, we're higher prized, at least for 1 ruble…

Some unsolvable mystery – how the assemblage of ape-shaped boobs keeps able for collective achievements, given their chronic proneness to self-castration?..)

~ ~ ~

My visit to Kanino kicked off the rise of national self-awareness within me. For a descendant of Novgorodian ushkuynik robbers and Tatar raiders, who for centuries were raping Ryazan womenfolk, taking turns with less stable, accidental, bands of fuckers, it was not appropriate, and even disreputable, to earn my living by giving hugs, on a daily basis, to the stinking undisinfectioned shit of rags when shoving them into the press box.

So, for the first time in my working career, I applied for firing me on the strength of my own free will. Now, in my workbook, the disparaging Article 40 got obscured by the perfectly acceptable standard record "dismissed on the application"—who would look any deeper?—and I went to hire on in the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.

Everything went without a hitch, I had smoothly past the medical checks but at the final stage, already at the personnel department, I suddenly heard "no go". Why not?

As it turned out, there remained no quota for me. The head of the personnel department exposed it in detail, that there were tacit but strict regulations forbidding to hire a person with higher education to become a workman among the workforce of fewer than 1000 undiplomized employees. In the plant collective of 5000, there remained no extra thousand to allow for my case, some sons of a bitch with diplomas arrived before me and exhausted the quota.

(…the disappointment did not kill me, I somehow used to cope with falling through, nevertheless, it was a significant shock to realize the existence of the "shadow" legislation, ignorance of which did not exempt you from its application…)

So I went to the city outskirts opposite the Settlement, to the "Motordetail" plant where I was hired on as a bricklayer in the Construction Shop Floor. The bastards with diplomas had not infiltrated yet the large modern enterprise.

If we subtract the havvage in its canteen, the plant "Motordetail" stood out as a crystal-like embodiment of dream model for an industrial enterprise and a casual walk over its Construction Shop Floor was enough to confirm the statement. The spacious locker rooms attractively paneled with tiling in brown colors of the spectrum were combined with as spacious (and also tiled, not just cemented) shower rooms. The recollection of the said conveniences, waiting for you at the end of the day, would warm your heart during the working hours.

I knew my job and was used as a bricklayer-loner for non-standard tasks in separate spots of application. They would equip me with a pair of helpers to fetch bricks and mortar and—off we drive!—the drum brickwork of wall in an underground water well, or erecting chimneys over the roofs in two-apartment cottages…

I liked the frequent change of tasks: each one required a special approach and circumspection which kept your mind from slipping into sloth and your spine from growing stiff. And for the periods of relative calm between the missions, I was sent to the team of bricklayers at the construction of the 130-apartment block for the plant employees in the neighborhood adjacent to the plant. The team there were no aces, but it was they to live in what they built…

Neither in the locker room nor with the team was I a dream gossip. When asked of something, I would reply and then again keep silent while indetectably talking to myself in my mind… Besides, my helpers were replaced way too often. Their rotation was seen to by Narcological Department 2, shortened to Narco-2.

Narco-2 constituted the crucial part in the conveyor production of slaves.

Slaves in the epoch of Developed Socialism? Well, let’s not forget the spiral-like advancing of the historical progress. The system worked as follows: a militia van rushed into a village and grabbed a pair of mujiks indicated by the village council chairman as prone to alcohol consumption. (And who is not?)

The catch was brought to Narco-2 for the treatment of alcoholism. Anyone entertaining an indecently high opinion of his human rights got a shot of sulfur and, until the end of the treatment, he carefully avoided risks of picking up the subject any more…