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

I went down to the sand spit under the steep riverbank and touched the calm flowing water, it was so warm that I couldn’t resist and entered the river. I did not dive nor swam though and only wandered, hither and thither, along the smooth sandy bottom parallel to the bank bend.

Soon Vitya and his bride came down too. He decided to take a swim, despite all her tries to sway him off the intention, and I returned to the fire to dry up, it was a full night already. Then I crawled to the edge of the high bank over the river and looked down. Against the background of the stars glinting in the river flow, two silhouettes kissed each other – so romantic… Perhaps, my head was also seen from below, against the starry sky, because Vitya cried out “bitch!” and flung his arm.

The pebble, invisible in the dark, hit me on the forehead, I shouted “Missed!” and rolled away from the edge. Of course, I lied for had it missed, it would not hurt that much.

When the romantic couple came back to the fire, Vitya asked me, “Do you know what ‘fingertips’ are?”

I said I did not and he told me to stand up and, when I did, he put his fist under my chin and chucked me flat to the ground. “That’s what the ‘fingertips’ are”, said he.

Lying prostrate next to the fire, I said, “Vitya, my friend Kuba is in the habit of saying ‘Don’t take offense when dealing with nuts’”. But I felt hurt all the same.

The women and the small Irochka slept in the car and all the rest inside the tent. In the morning, Uncle Tolik and I went to another place to fish but the catch was quite useless – not enough to feed a cat.

I didn’t see Vitya anymore because his and auntie Natasha’s wedding took place in the city of Sumy, and they stayed there for good….

In the middle of summer, in the middle of a week, and even in the middle of a working day, Uncle Tolik came suddenly home. “Fetch the fishing rods, quick!” yelled he, racing into the khutta.

Hastily cinching the tackle to the “Jawa” rack, he announced that there happened a breakage in the dam of the Kandeebynno fishery lakes and all the fish fled to the Yezooch river.

We rode across the city, shot over the bridge to Zagrebelya and only then Uncle Tolik slowed down, driving along the Yezooch in search of a vacant spot. And that was not an easy task. Along both riverbanks, the mixed crowd of boys, and youths, and grownup men were standing in almost uninterrupted line waving their fishing rods or poles towards and from the invigorated stream, jerking out empty hooks or flashing quiver of the catch.

It was a spontaneous all-out day off. It was the powerful, compelling, demonstration of angling forces of the Konotop city.

(…up till now, I am not quite certain if the breakout from the fishery lakes was in some weird way connected to the Mad Summer ‘68 in France or, after all, the revolutionary situation there was triggered off by the Kandeebynno events…

And lastly but also possibly, what if both developments had some third-party cause, not yet discovered but undeniably common…)

A few days later, Skully and I visited the Kandeebynno on foot. The fish lakes stretched like a vast field covered with the dingy crust of drying-up mud. Seldom spots of dark green algae were still peeping here and there. In one of such spots, there occurred a shallow, yet lengthy pit full of live fish. We were picking them out with bare hands; not very large fish though, about twenty centimeters or so. Skully did not miss bringing a mesh-bag by him, but I had to take off my tank top and tie its tail into a knot to make a sack for the catch.

At home, they fried the fish which was enough for both families and even Zhoolka had his share. Aunt Lyouda teased Uncle Tolik that he had never ever brought such a catch from his fishing tours…

~ ~ ~

Summer’s the rightest time for overhaul and reconstruction works. Father cut a hole in the dead wall of the kerogas section on the veranda and inserted a hinged glazed frame. The daylight came to the section and made it more comfortable canceling the need to switch the bulb every time when dropping in to have some water.

Then came the kitchen’s turn. One Sunday, everything was taken out of it into the yard, except for the too heavy refrigerator by the door. On the same day, Mother and Aunt Lyouda whitewashed all the walls, ceiling and the brick stove. They worked until finished and it was too late for bringing things in, they just washed the floor in the kitchen and everyone had to spend the night in our room.

Natasha gave up her folding bed to Irochka and Valerik, returning to her old place across the end of the folding couch-bed shared by us, her brothers. The spring mattress from the bed of the Arkhipenkos parents was put in the center of the room and there practically remained no place – you had to watch where to squeeze your step.

Sasha and I had also to go to bed, not bending as of yet our legs up to make room for our sister because Aunt Lyouda decided to take a dip in the kitchen while everyone else was watching TV.

From the things left out in the yard, she brought the mirror in the old wooden frame and returned it to its legitimate place on the wall above the fridge. Then she poured hot water into a big tin basin for washing and pulled together the striped curtains hanging in the doorway between the kitchen and the room. The light in the room was switched off so as to better see the TV screen, and the volume decreased but I still grumbled that I could not sleep with the sound on. The response, as always, was both disinterested and practical, “You don’t have to be listening. Pull the blanket over your head and sleep.”

Aunt Lyouda was splashing in the kitchen, then she called Uncle Tolik to rub her back. When he returned and sat, as before, upon the folding-bed filled with his children, I noticed a narrow gap left between the curtains with a glimpse of the mirror above the refrigerator containing a distanced reflection of the floorboards, half of the tin basin, and the back of Aunt Lyouda in it. And then I did what I had been told to, and pulled the blanket over my head, yet the good advice was followed no further. Instead of sleeping, I placed the blanket on the wooden armrest of the folding couch-bed and wrinkled it up into a rigid standing ripple so as to watch from under it the sight in the faraway mirror on the opposite wall of the kitchen.

Actually, there was not much to watch – suds splotches in the wet floorboards and a slightly moving shoulder blade with the wet lock of black hair stuck to it. Then there remained only the floor and the empty half-basin left by Aunt Lyouda.

Yet, very soon she appeared again in the mirror frame—much closer and clearer—because she’d come up to it with a towel wrapped about her waist below the naked tits. She smiled a little cunning smile, licked her lips and looked straight into my eyes all the way thru my blanket periscope. I shut the eyes firmly and didn’t open them anymore, while she was wiping the floor in the kitchen and coming over to the room…

Then everyone got to their beds, the TV and light were turned off. Only then I, at last, removed the hot blanket from over my head. The room was pitch dark. Soon after, various snuffling from all the sides mixed with the darkness, and from the spot where the Arkhipenkos’ spring mattress was placed on the floor, there came some cautiously low crunch as if a bale of straw was getting squeezed then let go in slow rhythmic repetition.

I did not turn my head. Firstly, what the use amid such darkness? And then, after the tons of books read by me, I could tell even not seeing that they were making love down there…

Six months later, on a dark winter evening when I and Skully went to take a shower in the Plant, he called me to watch thru the windows of the female section in Plant Bath House shedding a warm yellow light on the snowdrifts in bluish darkness. I did not follow. Was I shy to do it in his presence? I don’t know. But even when going alone for a shower, I never watched thru those windows…

And that same summer Raissa asked us to tour, for the old good times' sake, the city kindergartens with a puppet show. In less than a week we gave ten performances. In the morning, we came to a kindergarten indicated by her the day before, installed in their dining room the screen brought by a Plant truck, hung the backdrop, set up tripods with the hut and a forest tree, performed the show before the much-respected toddler public, and moved to the next kindergarten – the scenery on the same truck, and the actors by a streetcar.

Kuba grumbled that we were slaving at the conveyor belt for just a “thank you” because no one knew how much Raissa ripped off the directors in eye-to-eye talk in their offices at kindergartens, but I did not care. First, every day Raissa treated us to ice-cream of the most expensive Plombir flavor, and one time she took everyone to a movie show in the Vorontsov Movie Theater, and it was not her fault that “The Western Corridor” turned out such an eerie splatter film. Besides, and most importantly, the money we had earned that week wouldn’t amount to the price of watching films in Club with the check-passes from Director, that we enjoyed for years after her lead…

The Club alone was not enough to satisfy my natural proclivities. Even though attending the temple of Melpomene disguised as Children Sector where the worshipers got blest by free access to film shows (which, undeniably, enhanced their faithfulness), I felt an additional pull to architecture and the only available grounds for practicing it was our khutta’s yard.

The parents allowed erecting an experimental structure there propped by the fence of the Turkovs from Number 17, if and only if it would in no way block access to the shed sections in the yard, to eschew complaints from other dwellers of the khutta.

Together with my brother and Skully, I went after construction materials to the Grove and from among the quagmire bogs of the Swamp, we cut a couple bundles of two-meter-long whips, added to the booty a generous bunch of green twigs, cinched everything onto two bikes and transported home.

A number of the procured whips became the lattice roof secured by pieces of wire and all sorts of strings. While the roof's one edge rested on the fence, the other one was supported by the lattice wall produced of the same whips in the likewise manner. Our skills at tying knots and diligent stickability to the task in hand resulted in a crisscross-styled contraption, a kinda sturdy cage where you could pace to and fro for three steps almost without stooping. The project was accomplished and furred with the finishing layer of leafy twigs over the roof and 2 walls because the fence served the third one and the concluding, fourth, wall provided, by its absence, a conveniently wide entrance. Wow!

When entered, the structure smelt pleasantly of withering leaves and, from outside, it caressed your sight by its presence in the yard corner… A week later, the foliage wilted but the delight and ecstasy with the creative efforts drooped even earlier because there arose the unavoidable pesky question which makes each and every creator scratch the back of their head: What now?

You would not organize a clandestine pioneer group like that in The Timur’s Team just because there was a suitable structure for the headquarters of such an organization in your yard, would you? Especially if you were past the age for pioneer games…

So, Skully and I switched over to our usual pastime – vain hurling of a kitchen knife into the trunk of the old Maple tree by the stack of bricks crumbling with age because that year the first Soviet Western “The Untraceable Avengers” reached, at long last, the Konotop cinemas and the Gypsy’s knife swished across the silver screen to deeply stuck in the white slender trunk of a young Birch tree. In real life though, the home-made knife just bounced from the hard bark even when hitting it with the tip of its blade, and that’s the meaning of being born into a wrong era after all the romantic revolutions and splendid wars dried up and left you no chance of riding a horse after the scattered enemies or shooting a fiery machine-gun to beat off their assault…

The leaves of the structure dried, blackened and fell off but the cage-like skeleton withstood another couple of years…

~ ~ ~

Still and all, my itch for architecture did not subside, but the following, inimitable, creation I built all by myself. The sheds over the Duzenko’s and our earth-pit cellars stood slightly apart and the half-meter gap between them was boarded up from the yard, yet squeezing behind the sheds, along the neighbor’s fence, you got access to that narrow board-sealed cleft. That was where I built my private study room.

A piece of plywood, fixed horizontally to the aforesaid couple of boards nailed from the yard, became a decent desk squeezed between 2 walls of the blind passage. A length of plank, inserted lower the desk edge, served a stool. Absence of any other item of furniture made the interior truly Spartan, but then the study would attract no intruders, neither my sister-'n'-brother nor the little Arkhipenkos. Okay, let’s imagine someone sneaked in when I was not home and… what then? Of course, Natasha made sure to check it all the same and to wrinkle her nose scoffing at my level best creation—that fairly snug and cozy nook in the inter-shed cleavage space.

On finishing construction works, there again arose the mentioned doggone question: what now, eh? Well… let's say… Aha! the place could be enjoyed for unobserved secluded speculations neither disturbed nor seen by anyone, except for Zhoolka who resented my presence on his turf, even behind the clumsy stop-boarding in the gap. And he never cared to conceal his indignation, but got upon his paws and scornfully retired, the chain rattled in his wake, jerked in over his kennel sill, kinda his slam to the door, whenever I squeezed into my Spartan cleft from behind. Yet, what namely can a person use the nook of solitude they've so cleverly created for?

That’s when I had to give free reign to my next long-standing itch, that for graphomania. I have no idea what specific label from their scientific cant they use for my particular case—expressed or manifest graphomania—yet I always felt a certain longing for clear notebooks, albums, block-notes, and suchlike stationery items. It gave me real thrill to spread them wide open and began to cover their innocent pureness with the jerks and strokes of my crinkly scribbling.

Thus, there remained only a minor drag of finding content for those ripping lines, an easy quiz for an expressed (or manifest?) graphomaniac. I simply grabbed a book about the adventures of a group of circus actors in the turbulent years of the Civil War, added a pen and a thick notebook, not finished off during the last academic year, and dragged them to my study—so to say—room…

(…here’s a queer, yet scientifically noteworthy, fact – the written exercises assigned at school for homework somehow made my graphomania fade into the woodwork…)

There, the book and notebook were placed on the desk of unvarnished plywood piece, and I started to copy the content from the first into the ruled—but otherwise untouched—pages of the latter. And I did not bother to ask myself about the purpose of such an occupation. Would it make any difference? I just enjoyed the process of doing it.

After a week or so, the process neared the middle in the second chapter, when a spell of bad weather made my study room too damp and chilly, and the printed adventure story remained un-hand-copied….

In good weather, I even had a private reading room, not of my personal creation though… The plots, unfurling behind the long sectioned shed and the lean-tos over the earth-pit cellars, were split by narrow treads between the beds of turned soil for kitchen crops. Those beds, however, did not merge into integral landholdings of respective owners because sundry historical processes led to land swapping, as well as using it as a means of paying for goods or services obtained from the adjacent landlords. As a result, the land possessions turned into the streak of complicated patchwork. For instance, our tomato bed was located right behind the common shed and followed by Duzenko’s stretch, which separated it from our cucumber-and-sunflower bed as well as from the booth of our outhouse next to the slop pit. And our potatoes were planted past the Pilluta’s strip, at the very end of the khutta's garden, beneath the old sprawling Apple tree.

After our potatoes bed, there began, or rather ended, the plot belonging to the khutta in Kotsubinsky Street, which ran parallel to Nezhyn Street. So, the vegetable and fruit gardens, embraced by the khuttas of 3 adjacent streets and 1 lane, composed a vast area with vegetable beds and fruit trees of different sorts.

The Apple tree, on whose widely sprawling branches I lounged in clear summer days reading a book under the blue dome of the sky with the remote motionless cumuli, was called Antonovka Apple. Some of its branches were long enough to allow stretching out at full length over them and lightly sway until a gentle breeze would run up to you from the heat-swept expanses of the summer.