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

Whenever my sides felt sore from so hard a hammock, I’d climb down and go on a stealthy visit to the raspberry plot somewhere between Numbers 15 and 13. In the gardens, you might occasionally come across a short span of a fencing fragment that served a landmark splitting the possessions, but not a barrier to a sneaky raid…

From among those environs I was carried away with The Interstellar Diaries of Jona Calm and The Return From a Space Mission by Stanislaw Lem, Khoja Nasreddin by Vladimir Solovyov, The Odyssey of Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, among other pulp fictions for unsystematic reading by the younger generations.

But then, for no obvious reason, I suddenly decided to meet the requirements of the school curriculum and started to learn by heart the novel-poem Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, although at school your home assignment would be to memorize not more than the opening stanza from the poem. In breach of the modest requirement in school curriculum, after solidifying the first stanza, I went on to the following ones and murmured, day after day, to the Antonovka Apple tree about the constant alertness of the Breguet watch, and the profitable merchandise enriching scrupulous London, and the pitiful lack of a couple or two of slender female legs about all of Russia…

When the number of memorized stanzas grew over twenty, I began to lose my way in the countless threads of lines at recital them all at once until Mother helped me out. Returning from a Sunday visit to Bazaar, she mentioned meeting there Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna, a teacher of the Russian Language and Literature from our school, who asked if I would like to go to Leningrad with an excursion of schoolchildren at a modest price.

You bet I would! But where could I get the money from? Mother paid, and she also gave me an incredible sum of 10 rubles for the journey. I made a firm decision to spend that money on a miniature billiards, like the one we were playing at Children Section using steel balls from crushed bearings.

(…yet now, not as a consistent narrator, but as a layman archaeologist wrapped up in my sleeping bag in this tent surrounded by the eerie symphony of the wild forest nightlife – would I be able to unearth the root reason for the strenuous memorization of the Pushkin’s masterpiece?

It seems, that only now and just from here, I would.

To begin with, the scheme “I decided and started to…” does not apply to me. Developing a use case is quite okay, especially if an accurate and reasonable one, but my way of doing things is exactly opposite. I act first, and only then start looking for a suitable reason to justify my action and give it some resemblance of logicality. That is, instead of being motivated by well-defined decisions, I do things on the spur of the moment.

But what or who is prodding me to act then?! Which are the secret springs and goads? The answer is simple: It’s because of my credulous and all-too-ready submissiveness to the impact of the printed word. Yes, the stuff read by me determines my subsequent actions.

The episode, when the Soviet secret agent, Alexander Belov, forces the fascist intelligence officer Dietrich to flip thru a folder with top-confidential documentation before his eyes, so that later, in a safe house, to dictate to his helper-asset hundreds of addresses, names, and figures from his memory, becomes the hidden underlying reason for my endeavor at memorizing the rhymed lines by Alexander Pushkin.

No, I did not want to compete or check my abilities, the root stimulus is the plain fact of my reading The Novel-Gazette filled with the work by Kozhevnikov which, frankly speaking, does not deserve the name of a novel.

Or let's take another case, when, impressed by the book The Baron in the Tree, about an aristocrat who refused to walk upon the ground anymore, and moved to live in the trees, I mounted the heap of bricks stacked under the too thick trunk of the American Maple and, from that elevation, climbed the less impregnable part of the tree. And from there I went on getting higher and higher, to the very clouds that floated quite low on that day, almost brushing the crown.

Viewed from the upper branches, distant khuttas far down under the tree decreased to the size of matchboxes. Taming fear and dizziness, I observed the bird-eye view of Bazaar, and the Plant, no more hidden behind the tall wall along Professions Street, and of the Station on the other side of the Plant.

The magic power of the printed word by Italo Calvino made me compliant like melted wax, turned into a docile slave, who was alighted atop of the American Maple tree…

Of course, the secret springs slip at times – how on earth could I possibly compete with D’Artagnan and ride twenty leagues in one day running down three horses which I did not have? Keep your legs to the length of the blanket, they say.

That’s why I like this sleeping bag so much – it fits any leg size…)

~ ~ ~

To Leningrad, we went thru Moscow. Besides me and Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna, School 13 was represented in the excursion group by 2 more girls from my class – Tanya and Larissa, as well as by 2 students from the parallel, 7 “A” grade – Vera Litvinova, and Tolik Sudak, the rest of the group were students from other city schools herded by a couple of their teachers.

The train arrived in Moscow in the morning, and we spent there one day which time was enough for me to make 3 major discoveries. The first one was the discovery of the existence of foreshadowing dreams. It was proved undeniably when we rode an excursion bus on our tour in the city—look to the left! look to the right!—until at some place, they asked us to leave the bus for a close look at something from anear.

Our group tagged along with the guide, I also followed straggling at some distance, when, all of a sudden, the surroundings looked so much familiar to me—both that bridge above no river, and the far-off tower of the Moscow State University, and even the locked stall on the pavement I walked by.

Someone from our group turned back and called me, “Don’t lag or we will leave without you!”, to which I answered, “When you turn back, I’ll be the first!” And exactly that moment I felt having seen already that view in all its details and pronounced those very words because all of that was in a dream dreamed by me a week before. I felt freaked out and even stopped, but not for long – the excursion group was indeed returning to the bus.

(…in my subsequent life, time and again I had the like instances of getting back to once-seen dreams. Some of such dream recollections could precede for a split-second the actual development happening live, in real, so that I knew who and what would say a second later, and by what gesture they would accentuate their words because the going on scene was just an echo of what had been already seen by me in some earlier dream. Duration of such presaging dreams is not exceedingly long, and at times it can take years before their echoing in my wake hours.

I never discussed my discovery with anyone and much later, with a mixture of relief and disappointment, I learned that such things happen not only to me, and that folks in Scotland even have a special term for the phenomenon – “second sighting”…)

After the second revelation, we went to the All-Union Exhibition of the Achievements of National Economy, aka Veh-Deh-eN-Kha. There we were taken to the Astronautics Pavilion, with the gigantic white needle of “Vostok” spaceship put in front of its facade, one from the series by which Gagarin orbited the Earth. Inside the spacious pavilion, several excursions were wandering at once among the stands, and mock-ups and mannequins donned in red spacesuits and bulky helmets.

I did not know what the other guides were sharing to their groups, but ours ruminated things known by anyone from the times immemorial, so I kept lagging, or running ahead, and at some point sneaked off into a wide side door. Stone steps led upward following the arrowed inscription “The Optics Pavilion”. I reached the landing where the steps U-turned going up to the pavilion itself. But I didn’t follow them any farther immobilized and fascinated by the extravaganza of colorful airiness unfolded on the landing. A whopping cube of space was filled with a motionless, as if frozen, family of soap bubbles of all sizes radiating silently diverse hues of the rainbow colors. What a delight!.

My deviation from the programmed rout was noted by someone in the group and they called me from down there, “Come back! We're leaving!” After a parting look at the unreachable pavilion entrance on the upper landing, I joined the excursion.

(…what was behind that door I do not know and the discovery itself is as follows: sometimes a single step away from the trodden rut opens new shining worlds, but, as runs a popular folk adage in the country that was the first to undertake creation of a Socialist society, “A step aside is vied as an escape attempt to be shot at to kill without warning”…)

The final, third, discovery of that day awaited me in the State Universal Shop, aka GUM, on the Red Square, where we arrived without any guide already. There, I learned that dreams do come true, you only need to be ready for their realization…

At the entrance to GUM, we were told to gather in the same spot after a half-hour and were dismissed to scatter in search for goods. From inside, GUM looked like sectioned wells of space within an ocean bulk-carrier enclosed by multi-story transitions up the hull sides.

In one of the compartments on the third floor, they were selling the billiards of my dream whose price was exactly ten rubles. O, how I did curse my gluttony! From the sum given by Mother, I had already paid for 2 ice-cream – one in the morning at the station, and the other at the V eh-Deh-eN-KHa. There remained nothing I could do but say goodbye to my dream so, to mitigate the grief, I ate one more ice-cream right in the GUM.

In the evening tired but wholly satisfied (if counting out the misfire about the billiards) we left Moscow for Leningrad…

In the city on the Neva river, we were billeted in a school on Vasilevsky Island, not far from the Zoo. At the school, we were allotted half of the gym, since the other half was occupied already by an excursion group from the Poltava city. We did not cause them any inconvenience—the gym was pretty spacious—and only moved several black sports mats they were not using into another corner. Additionally to the mats, we were given cloth blankets getting accommodated for sleep with much more comfort than the royal court of France, when fled from the rioting Paris in Twenty Years Later by Alexandre Dumas where poor aristocrats were provided for the purpose with just raw straw and no linen…

For 3 meals a day, we walked up a couple of blocks to a canteen next to a humpbacked bridge above the Moika river. A very quiet place it was, with hardly any traffic at all. There, our heads paid in advance with paper coupons and the girls from the excursion group laid the food on the square tables before inviting the rest of us to come in from the sidewalk. Sometimes we had to wait because apart from the Poltava’s and ours there were other groups as well – not from our gym though. In such a case we stood waiting on the nearby bridge over the narrow river with its indiscernible flow between the upright stone-lined banks.

p>“ On the Moika bank,
we ate garbage skank”

So ran the epigram composed by someone from our group.

(…the rhyme, of course, is flawless, but I personally had no complaints about the food there – everything was as it always was in any canteen I dropped in along my life path…)

We were a little late for the white nights but everything else was in place – both Nevsky Avenue, and the Palace Bridge, and trotting thru the halls of the Hermitage with the immense Pompeii demolition in the picture by Karl Bryullov, and luxurious, yet small-sized, oil paintings by Dutch masters…

In St. Isaac Cathedral they launched for us the Foucault’s Pendulum hanging all the way down from inside the main dome. It swung for some time swishing between the disgruntled, icon decorated, walls and then pegged down one of the sizable wooden pins lined on the polished floor.

“See?!” exclaimed the enthusiastic Cathedral guide.”The Earth is turning, after all. Foucault’s Pendulum has just proved this scientifically.”

The revolutionary battleship Aurora denied us admittance for some reason, but we listened to the Admiralty’s Cannon fired each day to mark the noon, and visited The Piskaryovskoye Cemetery with green lawns over the mass graves of people starved in the years of fascist Blockade and the pool by the dark wall for the visitors to drop their coins in.

The day when we went to Peterhof was cloudy, and crossing the Finnish Gulf we could not see the sea but only fog above the circle of yellowish water with shallow waves around the boat, like on a lake with a sandy bottom. It was boring and dank, and when I got out of the passenger hall and climbed down the short ladder to the low stern with the churned up mass of foam behind it, the boat boy came up to tell that passengers were not allowed there. I climbed back, and he hung a chain across the ladder and started to wash the stern deck with a mop.

But the Peterhof fountains jetted pillars of surprisingly white water along the channel banks below the hillock with the palace on its top closed for restoration…

Everything in Leningrad turned out to be as beautiful as one would expect of the Cradle of Revolution. The weather got nice again, and on the first floor in the Naval Museum there stood the boat of Peter the Great, almost the size of a brigantine, and all the walls on the second floor were decorated with the paintings depicting glorious sea battles of the Russian fleet, starting with the battle in the Sinop Bay.

On the first floor of the Zoological Museum, a skeleton of whale bones towered high, while the central attraction on the second floor was the composition of life in Antarctica, behind the glazed partition. The white snowfield was painted in the back, and behind the glass there stood a few adult penguins with their beaks up in the air. They were surrounded by a kindergarten of penguin chicks of different ages to show how they change when growing.

At first, I liked them dearly – those lovely fluffy cutie pies, but soon the nagging thought that all of them were stuffed animals abated my delight. 3 dozen living birds were killed for the exposition. I did not want to look further and climbed down to the gnawed whale skeleton and out of the Museum.

In a glazed stall by the Zoological Museum, I bought a ballpoint pen—they did not sell such in Konotop yet—and two spare ampoules to it, folks said just one of them would do for a month of scribbling…

That day I was the first to finish the midday meal at the canteen and went out to the bridge over the Moika to wait for the rest of our group. Between the high walls of the river banks, a small white cutter cautiously made its way, splitting the black water into two long bumpy waves.

Then an elderly man came up to me over the bridge and warned that my pants were stained on behind. I knew about it, two days earlier I had sat down on a bench somewhere and it left a whitish splotch in the seat of my pants as if of Pine resin. It was unpleasant to be marked on behind in that way but the stain proved ungetriddable by simply rubbing-scratching so I tried just not to think of it.

He asked where I was from.

“We’ve come on an excursion. From Ukraine.”