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

By midnight, I was back to the station, unlocked the automatic storage cell and opened my briefcase. I doffed my hat and put it inside the cell, then clapped the gray cap from the briefcase onto my head. After those manipulations, I gently closed the door and even chortled softly imagining the goggled eyes of the next user of the same cell. You open the door and see a solitary hat sitting there without a head inside. Go and think of what to think…

On return to Konotop, I started the farewell visits. To my brother Sasha on Sosnowska Street. To my sister Natasha in the 9-story block in At-Seven-Winds… I did not go to Decemberists 13 though, I was a stupid jackass.

Natasha gave me a rich present of a winter coat of gray cloth with karakul fur collar. Apparently, the size did not fit her husband Guena, I was the coat size.

And I also went to ZAGS to get the stamp in my passport on divorce with Eera. Yet, they sent me to Nezhyn ZAGS, the place of marriage registration. However, at Nezhyn ZAGS they demanded a reference from Konotop People's Court that our marriage was terminated.

“Look," said I, "you made the record of our divorce when she was getting her stamp, give me my stamp on that ground and that's it."

"There is no such record. She never came to us."

That how they stroke me dumb. I had to go to Konotop, to get the reference at the People's Court and take it back to Nezhyn. Shuttling in local trains hither-thither, I thought whether the mileage I had ridden on trains would equal the Equator. And I also thought: why did Eera, in so many years, not get her passport stamped to certify our divorce? Probably, to sprinkle a pinch of spice to her lays, sort of adding fresh twigs to the antler of her absent husband, the cuckold of a geologist.

And then I realized why I always liked the scene of D'Artagnan farewell to Rochefort in the Dumas novel Twenty Years Later.

"Go your way, old devil," D'Artagnan said with a sad smile, still looking after the departed Rochefort. "Go. Makes no difference. No Constance is there anymore…"

I realized, that Constance was Eera and me, only not separately, but together. Constance was us in those silly times when we were still tormenting each other with our love…

Then I went to the city of Sumy. There I took Lenochka to the cinema. The "Fanfan the Tulip" movie it was, yet already with Alain Delon starring in it.

After the cinema we fed the swans in the park, dropping from the arched bridge crumbs of cabbage piroshki, and then we went to a restaurant. Everything there was a discovery for her…

She saw me off at the station and burst into tears for a farewell. She looked beautiful, like her mother, and only the hair she took after me.

~ ~ ~

Next day I went to 25, Gogol Street and left by Sasha Plaksin my black dembel "diplomat" case loaded with dictionaries and a couple of books. We arranged he would send it to me when I settle down somewhere and let him know my address… Konotop saw me off with angry cold and wind, but the coat from Natasha kept me warm, and I went to Nezhyn to return the book of stories by Salinger borrowed from Zhomnir. I locked the sports-bag with clothes and other things into an automatic storage cell at the station and with just my briefcase went to Shevchenko Street.

When the bell rang, the door did not open, probably, Zhomnir and Maria Antonovna walked out somewhere to visit. I went to the city center, to the new "Kosmos" cinema opposite the department store. There was some garbage produced by "Uzbek-film" about Sindbad the Seaman, but I just needed to kill the time.

I sat down and planted the briefcase under the seat. The place on the left was taken by a woman of my age. In the tilted passage on the right, a girl about four was running up and down. Her mother, sitting in the front rows, called for her to come back, but the kid did not listen. She kept capering there, and at each of male spectators entering the hall she yelled, "Daddy!" But he was not among them… A couple of rows higher, to seven o'clock, there were seated 2 military pilots in officer jackets. One of then began to greet my neighbor on the left, but somehow with the owner's air and in a certain double bottom way.

The movie started, and Sindbad switched from the sea to a cave, to fencing a saber next to the ruins of the ancient walls of Samarkand against the background of a high-voltage power line… Finally, that all was over, I lifted my cap from my knees and clapped it on my head. The neighbor on the left dropped her thin gloves into the lap of my coat.

"Take it," she said softly. "Escort me." I angled my briefcase from under the seat and began to squeeze after her thru the crowd.

In a rather dense stream of moviegoers, we descended the high exit stairs outside. The officers-pilots were waiting down in their forage caps. As we were passing by, they did not even dare to peep. Did not get the nerve to. Meaningful dress code works like a charm in the aware milieu. First, the karakul collar, to which they would hardly grow, in the Soviet army such collars were prerogative of Colonels and higher ranked Commanders. Secondly, my gray, brand new, cap in the style favored by zeks after their second term in Zone. Not to mention the equally new briefcase…

She invited me to tea. It was not far, in the five-story block on the slope from the main square. I walked and the location was getting more and more familiar to me. Really? It cannot be…Exactly! She opened with her key the apartment where once the black-haired KGBist arranged a meeting for me and his boss in the stylish gray hair haircut above his tanned face. But now the apartment was furnished and lived in.

We took our coats in the hallway and went over to the living room. On the coffee table in front of the folding coach-bed, instead of tea, she served a bottle of wine, sliced sausage, and chocolate sweets. I drank wine, snacked chocolate and remembered the crane operator Vitalya.

We did not ask each other's names. For what we were there "you" was enough. True, she couldn't resist boasting about having a position at the prosecutor's office. Without specifying my profession, I assured her they wouldn't run me down in her beat.

Then she went into the bedroom and came back in a long unbuttoned dressing gown. She sat next to me on the folding coach-bed again. I hugged her, ran my hand under the gown collar around her neck until reached and unfastened the bra on her blades. Her face flashed up with joy. We went over to the bedroom…

What followed might be compared to the demonstration performances of champions in figure skating, the simile to match her graceful physique. Like well-trained partners, we accurately and precisely entered all those supports, triple two-loops, and other program elements. Of all the program, that two-loops element was especially advantageous for outlining the shapely curves in her slender body. We moved from figure to figure with fancy changes of tempo and on-the-fly improvisation in combinations, and continued to conquer the hearts of absent spectators with the outstanding degree of perfection in our inimitable performance.

The world around, under, and above got wrapped with the misty veil of the delightfully sweet bliss and stuff of ashes being hauled… It’s only that concurrent with the ripples in the stream of sensuality, but absolutely discordant to the thrills of our carnal delights and skillfully adroit ecstatic raptures, there time and again splashed up both sketchy and irrelevant glimpses of a f-f..er..frisking puppy, Tuzik… full of sportive ardor, he was happily gnawing a rubber hot-water bottle in an unidentifiable nook. Which Tuzik?! What rubber bottle on Earth had anything to do with the triumphs of our vigorously deft calisthenics? All the proceedings were, in fact, a streamlined execution of the program I was fed in thru a novel by Carpentier from a recent issue of Vsesvit. There too, the protagonist, before going to Spain to fight in the ranks of the International Brigades against General Franco, was having sex with his girlfriend 3 times in their farewell night…

In the morning she, at last, made tea, and I called Zhomnir to tell that I brought his book and was on my way to his place. However, I did not go to Zhomnir at once. I returned to the Gogol Greens and entered a hairdresser's in the adjoining cobweb of old streets.

They did not expect to have so an early customer, yet one of the hairdressers agreed to shave me. That young make-believe hairdresser of a gypsy girl nicked my throat for more than once. At each scratching, she said "oh!" and rubbed the cut with pliable alum. And she even had the nerve to grab the fee after!.

I again passed the Gogol Greens and entered School 7. There were classes going on and silence reigned in the deserted corridors. In the Teachers' Room, I said to the few women present there that I wanted to see Liliana Ogoltsova from a second grade, whose dad I was.

One of the women came out into the empty corridor with me and led to the classroom in question. She went in and returned with a girl I did not know, her ashy hair in the pair of tight plaits, wearing a gray knitted blouse with thin transverse stripes in its front, who obstinately kept her eyes away.

"This is the girl," said the teacher, "but she says she does not have a dad."

"That's right," I answered fighting back the anger at I did not know what, which rolled up from nowhere. "Would you call ‘father’ the one who shows up once in 5 years just to say ‘goodbye’?" The teacher tactfully walked off to the nearby windowsill.

I opened my briefcase and went down on one knee next to you so that we were even. You did not look at me. "Liliana," I called, took out from my briefcase the folded Morning Star, and handed it to you. "Pass it to your mother, please."

You accepted the newspaper and stood on silently, staring at the floor.

"All right, Lee," said I, "Go back to your class."

You turned with relief and walked to the door of your classroom. I got up from my knee and watched as the door swallowed both you and the newspaper, where between the printed pages there was an enlarged portrait of Eera standing in the summer stream, and the sparse bunch of all the postcards I received, as well as the telegrams, about how you 2 loved me and congratulated on my birthday or the Day of the Soviet Army…

~ ~ ~

I handed Salinger to Zhomnir and, in return, I asked for James Joyce's Ulysses, 705 pages of dense text without pictures, without divisions into parts or chapters. Zhomnir himself once wanted to translate it, but Joyce turned out way too unsuitable for any conjuncture. I gave my word to return the volume in 10 years.

After a split-second hesitation, he brought the book out of his archive chamber and stretched it generously out. Now I had what with to fill the eternity ahead of me.

"Where are you going?" asked Maria Antonovna.

"To Baku."

With the usual jerk, the train pulled out of the Nezhyn railway station… Everything was behind, ahead was everything. 30 and 3 years.

"It's time for you to work miracles," said I to a saxophonist I knew, when he became 33.

"I have already done miracles," he replied, "And did my time for them as well." And how only do them folks manage to live eventful lives?

I thought that I was going to Baku to pick up a job of a bricklayer of the fourth category, and gradually translate Ulysses after work. As it turned out, I was starting to the Mountainous Karabakh with its war for independence and all the issuing details common for such cases, which I'd rather not dwell on. However, behind the windows of the local train car, there still were running familiar landscapes of 1987, the last year of peace. Before the collapse of the indestructible Union of the Free Republics, there still remained 2 years. Today, they tell me that in 1987 the smack of the new era was in the air already. Alas, I did not scent the brew.

(…what was the underlying reason for the collapse of the USSR? The Union was finished off by "The Guys on the Roadside". So was named the English TV movie of 4 sequels about the life of British unemployed.

The censors at the Central Television in Moscow did not get it that at the end of that week an electrician at the "Motordetail" plant would say: "I have been working all my life, and so has my wife. Our son returned from the army and he also works now. We have a two-room apartment, and their unemployed live in two-story cottages! Fuck!" The magic power of art touched the living strings in the heart of a Konotop mujik, triggering the chain reaction that changed the face of the world.

Has it changed its essence, or was it just a case of plastic surgery?..)

Let some other "I", not a part to my personal monad, strain their brains about this question, because I since long dropped following the brandy lies in this world. Moreover, the predawn twilight, seeping thru the synthetic canvass of my Chinese tent, signals the end to this sleepless night and to this endless letter as well.

You will ask, how did my following life flow, behind the watershed of the Caucasian ridge? You may not even ask it, I will tell you all the same. First, do not ask about my life in the past tense, it still keeps flowing on. I rolled its way as best as I could. Because of the spiral nature of the current, we can only go thru multiple repetitions of what has been and will be.