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

Shabashka is some product manufactured at workplace to take and use it at home or, at least, a bundle of timber pieces acquired and chopped at work for burning in the stove of the worker’s khutta. Hauling the shabashka home is the period, sort of, to mark the end of a working day.

How do you estimate my etymological efforts?. Well, and since I’m here, perhaps, it’s time to crawl into this one-person Chinese pagoda of mine. What I do like about it are these folding bamboo rods. Some cleverly designed gizmo – a dozen half-meter tubes assemble into the pair of three-meter-long elastic poles to stretch the tent over them. And this mosquito net at the entrance works fine – zip it up, and no mosquito can fly in. Buzz outside, bloodsuckers! Fig at you!

Now I’ll take off my shirt and pants, get into this sleeping bag “Made in Germany”, get warm and all the king’s men can’t make you feel cozier.

It feels good when such an ancient civilization and so technocratic nation, from East and West, work for you. Although, when you come to think about it, these 2 are only manufacturers who put to use the ideas accumulated by the humans as a whole. Any widget, even the most sophisticated one, rolled out by this or that advanced nation is the mutual achievement of mankind, to which the Amazonia Indians contributed also by the mere fact of their existence. But they, just like me, have to pay for things from public domain.

Look at this zipper here: you know who invented it? Me neither, but hardly they were the Liang Jin dynasty or, say, Kaiser Wilhelm…)

~ ~ ~

The stage is a complex mechanism, in addition to the block system for operating the curtains, besides the electrical board full of fuses, switches, buttons to control its diverse illumination, you will also find up there, high above the stage, a whole cobweb of metal beams for hanging drops, lamps and side wings.

At concerts, we not only stood beside virtuoso accordionist Ayeeda, and not only shot the breeze with Moldovan-Ukrainian peacocks made in the Ballet Studio before their dance was announced, no, we were also exploring the mysterious world of the backstage. There was discovered a vertical iron ladder to a short catwalk, from which you could climb the beams under the roof and cross over to the opposite side of the stage, where was another catwalk but without any ladder, so retrace your Tarzan-walk thru the flies you, short-sighted Chung!.

But still, what possibly could be there – behind that lumber partition stretched high above the stage from one wall to the other? Ha! The attic must it be! Over the auditorium!.

And thus was conceived and matured the plan for getting free access to movie shows at Club – thru the attic to the catwalk, down the ladder to the stage, wait for the lights to go out, dive under the screen, take a vacant seat, sit back and enjoy the show!

On the first floor of Club, next to the movies list painters’ room there was a door eternally ajar to the Plant territory where the Club wall got furnished with a comfortable iron stairway running up to the very roof that had a dormer for easy access to the attic. So, it only remained to penetrate the plank partition which separated attic from the stage. Kuba, for some reason, refused to participate in moving the problem of penetration out of the way to free cinema and the realization of so brilliant a plan was left to me and Skully.

Before long, one dark and windy winter night, we smuggled the ax from the Skully’s shed to the Plant territory over one of frequent stiles in the concrete wall. Without any delay or obstacle, we approached the Club building, climbed to the attic and looked around…

The extensive space harbored some incomprehensible metal disk in the middle, about 2-3 meters in diameter and somewhat-less-than-a-meter tall, under a one-piece cover also of metal, a kinda jumbo casserole lid. Moving it tad bit aside, we discovered that the disk was hollow and its round bottom much deeper than you might suppose considering the object from outside. The frequent narrow slits cut the bottom in a spoke-wise pattern reaching neither the hub not the rim in the unknown contraption. The location of the "casserole"-disk as well as the outline of the slits in the bottom suggested that it was from where the giant chandelier adorned with dangling pieces of milky glass hung into the auditorium. The guess was promptly confirmed by the burst of dogged assault-rifles rounds interspersed by booms of explosions coming up thru the slits—a war movie down there turned an accomplice in our not strictly legitimate intentions.

The prowling circle of light carved in the darkness by a flashlight frisked over the leveled layer of cinder for thermal isolation ahead of our sneaking feet to where the plank partition crossed the attic. Deducting the approximate location of the catwalk screened by the sturdy planks, we started to split and break them so as to produce, by application of the ax, a sizable hole. The wood turned out rather hard, besides, our work was slowed down at lulls in the combat actions underneath.

It’s only after splitting one of the planks in two halves, we realized the additional problem we had run into—the supposed partition was, actually, a double wall of planks with a sheet-iron layer sandwiched between 2 wooden partitions. You can’t cut iron with an ax, that’s why we failed to make a manhole to the magnificent world of the art of motion pictures. The builders of yore knew their job all right, I warrant…

As it turned out, and pretty soon too, the whole manhole plan was not needed at all, because Raissa taught us taking pass-checks from the Club Director.

About six in the evening, Pavel Mitrofanovich was, as a rule, already jolly screwed, and when someone from the Children Sectorians appeared in his office with a humble petition, he tore a page-wide slip off a sheet of paper on his desk and, snuffling his nose so as to keep in check the booze on his breath, wrote an illegible line yielding “let in 6 (six) people” when deciphered, or any other number of those who wanted to watch the show on that day. Then he added his ornate signature running much longer than the previous line.

When the show began, we went up to the second floor and handed the precious scrap of paper to auntie Shura, who unlocked the treasured door to the balconies, suspiciously comparing our quantity to the hieroglyphics in the pass-check…

The Club Director was short and thickset without having a pot-belly though. His slightly swollen, and oftentimes ruddy, face was accompanied by the combed back grayish hair with a natural wave. When the Club stuff together with the amateurs from the Plant staged a full-length performance of the Ostrovsky’s At the Advantageous Place, the Club Director just parted his hair in the middle of his head, smeared it with Vaseline and turned out a better than natural Czar-times Merchant for the play.

Electrician Murashkovsky acted Landowner and appeared on stage in a white Circassian coat, constantly clutching a riding-whip, instead of a handkerchief, in his thong of the disfigured hand.

Even the Head of Children Sector, Eleonora Nikolayevna, partook in the full-length production of that classic play. Her position at Club was unmistakably higher than that of Raissa, who was the Artistic Director of Children Sector and reported to Eleonora because the latter appeared in Children Sector much seldomer. On those visits, as elsewhere, she invariably arrived in dangling earrings studded with tiny bright sparklers, as well as in an immaculate white blouse with a lace collar, which rigging was further emphasized by mannerly retarded movements of her hands, in contrast to the energetically Plebeian gesticulation of Raissa.

The only occasion when I saw Eleonora without those tiny shining strips hanging from her ears was in the one-act play, where she was acting the underground communist caught by the White Guards. The Whites locked her in the same prison cell with a criminal, acted by Raissa, and Eleonora converted her into a Communist supporter before Stepan, Club House Manager, together with Head of Variety Band, Aksyonov, both in white Circassian coats and ballet high boots, took her away to face the firing squad…

If the Club Director was absent from his office, I had to buy a ticket like mere mortals from the ticket office next to his locked door. On one of such occasions, I entered the common auditorium and chose to land into a seat right in front of two girls, my classmates, Tanya and Larissa, because even though in the sold tickets they always marked the row and the place no one paid much attention to those marks.

Sometime before, I secretly liked Tanya, but she seemed overly unattainable, so I pulled wisely up and switched over to courting Larissa. After the classes at school, I tried to catch up with her in Nezhyn Street because she also went home that way. However, she invariably walked together with Tanya, her close girlfriend and also a neighbor in their Maruta Street.

When Larissa was a participant in Children Sector, I once happened to see her along Professions Street to the Gogol Street corner because she did not allow going with her any farther. At that period Tanya also participated in Children Sector activities and there, actually, were 3 of us walking Professions Street. On the way, Tanya kept urging Larissa to walk faster but then she just got angry and went ahead alone.

The 2 of us parted at the aforesaid corner, and I went along Gogol Street enthusiastically recollecting Larissa’s sweet laugh in response to my silly yakety-yak. On reaching the ice-coated water pump under the lamppost at the Nezhyn Street corner, all of my enthusiasm evaporated because of the two black figures, contrasting crisply against the white snow, who called me to come up.

I recognized both, one was a guy from the parallel class, and the other – Kolesnikov, a tenth-grader from our school, they both were from somewhere about Maruta Street. In a privately threatening tone, Kolesnikov began to make me understand that if I ever would come up to Larissa again and if he ever would hear or be told that I dared then, well, in general, I should get it what he would do to me. And so he kept rehearsing those general concepts in a circle, with slight variations in their order of priority, when I suddenly felt something snatching at my calf. I thought that was a street dog and looked back, but there was only a snowdrift and nothing else. That’s where and when the meaning of the idiom “hamstring shaking with fear” came to me completely.

He asked again if I understood, and I muttered that I got it. Then he asked if I understood everything of what he meant. I mumbled that, yes, everything. But I didn’t look at their faces and thought how good it would be if Uncle Tolik, the former regional welterweight champion in weightlifting, came to the pump for water. No, he never appeared. On the morning of that day, I fetched enough water to our khutta…

And now in public, before the pretty crowded auditorium, I took the seat in front of the two girls, my classmates, even though being fully aware of all the imprudence of such a move, yet, for some reason, unable to behave differently. I turned to them and tried to start a talk in the general hubbub of the audience present. However, Larissa kept mum and looked aside, and only Tanya was responding in rather a monosyllabic way before Larissa herself addressed me directly, “Stop following me, I’m laughed at by the guys because of you!”

Unable to find a word to answer her, crushed and dumb-stricken, rose I to my feet and walked away along the blind wall to the exit, carrying within my chest the fragments of my broken heart.

When I was nearing the back rows in the auditorium, my black sadness got drowned in the downright darkness because the lights went out to start the movie. To let my eyes get accustomed to the dark and prevent stumbling, I for a second took an empty seat by the passage and forgot to go and carry on my grief and pain because “Winnitoo the Chief of Apaches” was starting!.

~ ~ ~

At 19 Nezhyn Street, the old man Duzenko was no more and that part of the khutta was dwelt already by two old women: Duzenko’s widow and her sister who moved in from her village.

And in the half-khutta belonging to Ignat Pilluta there remained only his widow, Pillutikha. She never stuck her nose outside her den, keeping the window shutters in Nezhyn Street closed for weeks on end. Sure enough, she had to visit Bazaar or the Nezhyn Store but my treads never crossed hers…

In February Grandma Katya all of a sudden was taken to the hospital. Probably, only for me, with my life split between school, Club, books, and the TV it happened suddenly. Trying to get everywhere leaves no time to see things right by your side.

Coming from school, I clinked the latch-hook in the wicket, trotted to and up our two-step porch past Pillutikha’s window with a profile glimpse of her standing figure cloaked in a black shawl hung loosely from her head, her hand menacingly aloft against the wall between her and our kitchens.

At home, I dropped the folder with school notebooks into the crevice between the folding couch-bed and the cabinet under the TV and went back to the kitchen to have a midday meal with my sister-'n'-brother, if they hadn’t had it yet. Mother and Aunt Lyouda cooked separately for their families, and Grandma Katya ate the meals by her youngest daughter, together with her younger grandkids, Irochka and Valerik, at the common kitchen table by the wall between our and Duzenko’s parts of the khutta.

In the daytime, there was nothing on television but the frozen circle and squares for adjusting image by small knobs at the back of the TV box, if the circle was uneven then the announcers’ faces would be flattened or overly long. That’s why until the All-Union Television started to broadcast at 5 o’clock the TV was turned off and the midday meal was eaten under the muffled drum-roll-like chant from behind the wall to the Pillutikha’s, whose blather at times peaked up into piercing but indistinct shrieks.

Then I went to Club and, coming back, again saw Pillutikha, back-lit by a distant bulb in the room, she never turned on the light in the kitchen where she stood up against the hateful wall. After all the 4 parents of our khutta returned from work, Pillutikha would increase her volume to which the usual comment from Father was, “Ew! Again that Goebbels at her hurdy-gurdy!”

Once Uncle Tolik put a large teacup to the wall to hear what she was croaking about. I also pressed my ear to the cup bottom, the gabble got nearer and sounded already not from behind the wall but inside the white teacup, yet remained as thick as before. Mother advised not to pay attention to the half-witted old woman, and Aunt Lyouda explained that Pillutikha was putting curses on all of us thru the wall. She turned to that same wall and pronounced with perfect poise, “Be all of that back to your bosom!”

I don’t know whether Pillutikha was crazy indeed. She managed to live alone, after all. By the end of the war, her daughter left Konotop for the safety’s sake, to avoid troubles for her cheerful behavior with the officers at the German Company Headquarters lodging in her parents’ khutta. Pillutikha’s son Grisha was doing his ten-year stretch in prison for some murder. Her husband died; no TV by her side. Maybe, she kept cursing so as not to go nuts, who knows…

Grandma Katya never commented or said anything about Pillutikha, she only smiled a guilty smile. On some days she moaned occasionally but not louder than the muffled Goebbels’ speeches from behind the wall… And suddenly an ambulance arrived and she was taken to the hospital.

Three days later they brought Grandma Katya back and laid her on the leatherette-covered mattress-couch, constructed from the remains of the big sofa brought from the Object and put under the window in the kitchen, opposite to the brick stove. She did not recognize nor spoke to anyone, and only moaned loudly. In the evening our two families gathered in front of the TV and shut the door to the kitchen to cut off her moans and heavy smell. The Arkhipenkos moved their beds to the room and it became a bedroom for 9.

The next day the ambulance was called again, but they did not take her away and only made an injection. Grandma Katya quieted for a short time but then again began to sway from side to side on her couch, repeating the same screams, “Oh, God! Ah, probby!” A few years later I guessed that “probby” was a shortened Ukrainian “forgive me, God”.

Grandma Katya was dying for 3 days.

Our families stayed at neighboring khuttas; the Arkhipenkos at Number 15, and we at 21, in the half of Ivan Kreepak. Older neighbors were giving our parents indistinct advice about breaking out the threshold to our khutta, or some of the floorboards inside it. The most common-sense proposal made Ivan Kreepak’s wife, auntie Tamara. She said that the couch with Grandma Katya stood under the window with a half-open leaf above her head, and the fresh air flow protracted the sufferings of the poor thing.

That same evening, Mother and Aunt Lyouda dropped into our khutta to grab more blankets, then they put out the light and got out onto the porch. There Aunt Lyouda neared the kitchen window and closed the leaf tightly. Then she stealthily stepped down to Mother and me—I was holding the blankets—with a smile of a naughty girl on her face, or so it seemed in the dark moonless night.

In the morning Mother woke us, sleeping on the floor in the living-room of Kreepak’s khutta, with the news that Grandma Katya died.

The funeral was the next day. I did not want to go, but Mother said I should. I was burning with shame. It seemed to me that everyone knew that Grandma Katya was suffocated by her own daughters. That’s why I let loose the ear-flaps of my rabbit-fur hat and pulled it over my eyes. And so I went all the way from our khutta to the cemetery, keeping my guilty head low, and looking at the feet of those who walked ahead of me.

It’s possible though that no one ever guessed that such my stance was caused by shame and not because of the strong wind slapping my face with icy pellets.