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

The suggested increase in the family seemed unnecessary not as a threat of deterioration our living conditions, but because of the awkward crying difference in age between the would-be parents and the suggested baby. So Father effaced his ingratiating smirk, dropped the subject and never picked it up again. A couple of weeks later, I accidentally heard Mother’s casual gossip with Aunt Lyouda, “I used the pill and the same day draft beer casks were brought to the stall, I rolled them in and – that’s it.” That way the proposed quantity changes in our generation of the Konotop Ogoltsoffs were canceled, yet Mother stayed looking fat forever…

Her stall, a round sheet-iron hut under a tin roof, was advantageously located in the main alley of the Central Park of Recreation opposite Peace Square. The heavy padlock from the back door was taken off and brought inside to start trading thru the front window whose square ledge served the counter jutting over the asphalted walk in the shade of mighty poplars.

Besides the draft beer running from the faucet which she connected by a removable hose to the dark wooden casks, in turn, the goods on sale included briquettes of packed cookies, loose candies of a couple of cheap sorts, cigarettes, lemonade and bottled wine – the Ukrainian fruit-and-berry “White Strong”, the dark-red Georgian “Rkatsiteli”, and some wine of uncertain origin named “Riesling” never asked for by anyone. “White Strong” was going out like hotcakes because of its price – one ruble and two kopecks for a half-liter bottle. Cigarettes also did not stick around for long, yet the main trade-pulling engine was draft beer. When there happened a delivery delay and they did not bring beer casks from the trade base of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, Mother began to sigh and complain beforehand that the trade plan for her stall in the current month seemed hardly doable and they again would cut her salary…

My life rollicked on along its tracks which somehow bypassed the Central Park of Recreation, although my sister and brother occasionally boasted of dropping to Mother’s workplace for free lemonade. However, there occurred one day which I spent at the stall from its beginning to end because of the secret service agent Alexander Belov, under the guise of Johann Weiss…

In those abysmally past times, to get subscribed to The Novel-Gazette was next to impossible. The monthly justified its name being turned out on inexpensive newsprint and in two columns per page, yet the thickness of an issue was on a par with The Pioneer or The Youth magazines. Albeit absent from the subscription lists at the post-offices, The Novel-Gazette could still be found at libraries or borrowed from one or another luckier person who had asked it from the previous lucky beggar who, in their turn… If some novel happened to be too long for one issue, it was continued in the following month. At times, deviating from the magazine name, they printed collections of stories or (quite rarely) poems, but no more than by a couple of authors per issue.

Now, getting the word of mouth that in The Novel-Gazette they had recently published The Shield and Sword by Vadim Kozhevnikov, I rushed to the Club Library and was told that all the three consequential issues were already lent out, and they had to put together the queue-list of those wishing to borrow the masterpiece. No wonder, after Mother casually mentioned some colleague lending her all the issues of the epic spy saga for 3 days, my accustomed routes got torn from where they were embedded and with the inaudible tectonic bang swayed over, re-cast, to reach their new terminal by the standard snack-stall between the hefty trunks of drowsy poplars in the center of the City Park of Recreation shadowing the main, asphalted, walk where I arrived the very next morning soon after the opening hour…

The initial issue I read in the stall, sitting on a wire box of empty bottles, before I got smart enough to move over onto a nearby bench outside, returning only to exchange the issues or act the Sale-Assistant in Mother’s absence while she went to the park toilet when I even sold something.

By the end of that day, I had lived thru the career of the Soviet intelligence officer Belov, aka Johann Weiss, starting as a private in the German Wehrmacht up to an officer for special missions in the intelligence service of Abwehr.

The trade during that day was rather sluggish, because 2 days earlier the stall ran out of draft beer, and the empty casks piled up outside the back door. However, by the onset of twilight, when I moved back to the booth to finish off the final issue under a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, at the very end of the Second World War, the flow of consumers began to increase.

That’s it!. And, with the collapse of the Third Reich, I stacked all the 3 The Novel-Gazettes on a box by the door and saw that the trickle of customers had turned already into a tight swarm across the outside counter-ledger. There cropped thick growth of hands held up, kinda in the Nazi salutation, only balled about crushed ruble notes and handfuls of kopecks.

Mother turned to me and said, “Wait a little, I’m closing in half-hour, we’ll go home together.”

I sat leaning my back against the door, so as not to be in the way when she reached for goods from here and there in the stall’s narrow innards.

The said half-hour later, the flurry by the stall in the park alley did not subside.

“Maman! A pair of Strong Blondes and a smaller one of cookies!”

“Auntie! Auntie! A pack of “Prima” cigarettes!”

“Sister! A bottle of white!”

“White is over.”

“And over there? In that box?”

“It’s Rkatsiteli for one ruble and 37.”

“Alright, come on! Let it be it, we’re not racists!”

Finally, the Georgian was over too, the crowd dissolved. Mother dropped the window shutter but had to open again for a latecomer that tattooed in a trot under the yellow lamplight from the posts over the asphalt up to the shut stall. Grieved by the fact that everything was sold out, he bought a bottle of the uncertain expensive Riesling for 1 ruble 78 kopecks, though it was already 30 minutes past the allowed by regulations hours for selling alcohol.

When Mother locked the stall and we walked to the streetcar stop by Peace Square, I asked if such mayhem was there every evening.

“No, Sehryozha. It’s because it’s Sunday today.”

~ ~ ~

And again the summertime Kandeebynno lake awaited us but now, apart from the swimming trunks and a sandwich with a slice of melted cheese, bringing along a deck of cards became the must.

“Whose move?”

“Yours.”

"No fake?”

“Take the shoes off your eyes! It’s Skully who’s been dealing!”

“That’s a good boy! He knows it was work to shape Man out of Ape… Here, two Knaves to lazy Kuba.”

"…and ultimately will shape Man into Drab Horse… Queen and Ace of same suits.”

On each and every beach blanket spread between the currant bushes, heated battles of Throw-in Fool went on to the music from portable radios. The most enviable receiver was, of course, Spidola produced at the Riga’s Radio Plant, with the face dimensions of a copybook and no thicker than a brick. All the body of its telescopic antenna was hidden in the receiver’s plastic case leaving outside only the tip button. Pulling that button, you obtained the shiny nickel-plated rod for fishing in SW, the LW and medium-wave were caught without extending the antenna.

Browsing for radio stations in short waves was a hopeless lick though. Half of the range drowned in a sizzling, hissing, and crackling because the ours choked all those “voices” in service of the CIA—“The Voice of America”, “Liberty”, “Russian Service of BBC” and their likes—by a godawful static. So, on the beach, all the receivers were tuned to “Mayak” – the All-Union Radio Station, which broadcast signals of the exact time and short news account every half-hour, filling the rest of the air by concerts at the requests of radio listeners…

But it’s better not to visit the Kandeebynno alone, and not only because you’d stay without partners for card-playing but merely for security reasons.

Once, not heeding the advice of Kuba and Skully, I swam across the Kandeebynno to the low dam of the fish lakes. A group of guys of my age was there on the bank. One of them asked me in Ukrainian, “Have you seen Peka?”

“Who’s Peka?” asked I in surprise and got an explanatory sucker punch on the chin, a kinda dab bonus for curious dumbos.

They all dived off and swam away. It did not hurt much but left a bitter resentment at such meanness on no provocation. Probably, the blades from Zagrebelya… and how, if one was allowed to ask, had I ever hurt them?

(….in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn’t realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)

The Kandeebynno was not the only place in Konotop for beach-going. There, for instance, was a sizable water-filled gully in the field beyond the Settlement. Sometimes its grassy banks got overcrowded by the guys from all over the city swarming in a flash mob for unknown reasons.

And a couple of times our friendship-knit trinity traveled by bikes to the river of Yezooch in the Konotop outskirts diagonally opposite the Settlement. The dormant flow of the stream slumbering in the shade of thick Willows over the grassy banks was almost imperceptible. And it was deep indeed, so in one place there even stood a tower for high diving. The contraption made of iron pipes had three height levels: 1, 3 and 5 meters.

We climbed the ladder to the three-meter level but it took some time to pluck the heart, and even then it was not a headlong dive but just a jump heel-first. Then we proceeded onto the plank deck at five meters, yet, having looked at the water so too far down there, silently retracted to a lower level. Even Kuba.

When leaving already, we watched an adult guy in a nice “swift-like” dive from the highest level. The only drawback of the Yezooch was its lack of beach-goers, there was no one at all except for us and that lone diver.

And, of course, the most popular place for summer recreation of Konotopers was considered the sandy Bay beach on the Seim river reached after a short, two-stop, ride from the Station by any of the local trains.

Yet, that summer I wasn’t going there. Not because of the ticket price of twenty kopecks, like lots of other guys you could go there as a hidden traveler, aka “hare”, the crowd of Seim-goers was too thick for the conductors to squeeze thru all the cars in just ten minutes. So expenses were not the point, neither the grim harvest of a few drownings reaped by the Seim each summer – teenager guys they mostly were, with their funerals normally attended by a huge crowd, no, I was not afraid of that because nothing of the kind could ever happen to me.

The reason was that everybody who's somebody went to the Seim on weekends – the days when Uncle Tolik and I were gone fishing. Although a couple of times we dropped over to the Bay Beach—just so along the way, the fishing rods cinched to the “Jawa” rack…

Once we even had an overnight stay not far from the Bay Beach. It happened when Uncle Tolik’s brother, Vitya, came from the regional center, the city of Sumy, to propose to Natasha from Number 15 in Nezhyn Street where the Arkhipenkos stayed while Grandma Katya was dying.

Vitya was not balding like his elder brother, Uncle Tolik, no, Vitya’s hair was all in place – light brown, combed straight back in the style sported by young blades at the late fifties’. He was already over thirty, but then auntie Natasha from Number 15 was not a young girl either. On the other hand, the whole khutta and the garden at 15, Nezhyn Street belonged to her and her two parents.

That Saturday, Uncle Tolik and I came for overnight staying with the inseparable bunch of fishing tackle to go off the next morning to fish along the Seim bank. However, at the specified meeting place, we didn’t find the Moscvitch of auntie Natasha’s father who had to bring the rest of the away-night partakers in his car.

To pass the time, Uncle Tolik and I visited the pioneer camp in the Pine forest at about half-kilometer from the Seim. And while Uncle Tolik rode away somewhere else – “one place, not too far off”, I watched a movie in the camp open-air cinema. “A Million Years B.C.” was a classy film about Tumak banished from his black-haired tribe, and another tribe, that of blonds, adopted him because he had piled a dinosaur to save a small blonde kid. When the movie ended Uncle Tolik came back from his “not too far off” and warned me to tell, if asked, that we were watching the movie together.

We returned to the appointed spot, where auntie Natasha’s father had already brought her, and Aunt Lyouda with Irochka, and auntie Natasha’s groom Vitya with his and Uncle Tolik’s third brother. They even had set up a tent already, behind which there loomed the Moscvitch in the dark, lit by a small fire built in front of the tent.