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

The friendliness in his face faded. “Ukraine,” he said. “In the war years, they burned my side with the blowtorch there.”

I recollected Masha’s screech on the day they were slaughtering her, the buzz of a blue flame bursting from the nozzle of the blowtorch and the cracks in blackened skin of carcass. He grew silent and so was I, feeling somehow guilty for coming from the place where he had been tortured. It was a relief when our group, at last, came out of the canteen.

The Poltava excursion group left two days earlier than ours. On the last evening in Leningrad, we went to the circus tent. Our seats were at the very top, under the quaking canvas roof.

It was a united performance of circus actors from the fraternal socialist countries. A pair of Mongolian acrobats synchronously jumped onto the end of a see-saw to toss up the third one, standing on the other end. The tossed man somersaulted in the air and landed on the shoulders of the strongman in the arena. The pushers launched another one and one more – three people were placed upon the man below, like after the Battle at the Kalka River.

The gymnasts from the GDR worked on four high bars put to form a square for them to fly from one bar to another. Then the Czech trainers brought out a group of monkeys who started to spin and circle on the bars left after the Germans, only much funnier.

The next day we left without visiting the canteen, probably, because of having run out of the coupons. There was a very convenient train, with no train changes, on the route thru Orsha and Konotop. Only it started off in the evening and after all the ice-cream eaten during the excursion, and paying for the ticket to the circus tent, plus the purchase of a ball pen, there remained just 20 kopecks of all the 10 rubles given by Mother.

I had a pair of piroshki for the midday meal, but at about five o’clock, when we were already sitting in the waiting room at the station, Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna noticed my despondency and asked about the reason. I confessed that I was hungry and had no money, she lent me one ruble. In a deli near the station, I bought bread and a big fish in oily brown skin and thin strings tied all around it. Clutching the paper-wrapped prey, I returned to the station with our train at the platform already.

On boarding the car, I immediately sat down at the table under the window and began to eat. Very tasty fish it was, easily crumbling but slightly drier than expected considering its oily skin. I ate one half, wrapped the rest back and put it on the third level bunk, which was not for sleeping anyway but to put your luggage there.

Some single fellow-traveler, a couple of years older than me, got seated at the opposite side of the table, took out a deck of cards and offered to play Throw-in Fool with him. I won a couple of times and, when he was once again shuffling the cards, I flashed a commonplace Kandeebynno wit for the like cases, “A dinghead’s hands have no rest.”

With a sidelong glance at a couple of girls from our excursion, who sat by the window across the aisle, he dryly retorted, “The less one yaks, the longer lives.” I marked the look of genuine rage in his eyes and, after winning another game, refused to play on, he seemed glad to stop it too…

We arrived in Konotop in the morning after unusually heavy rain… During that night on the train, something happened to my shoes and they became too small size. I hardly forced them on, yet not completely, and my heels were partly hanging outside.

Hobbling painfully, I got off the car onto the platform and waited for our excursion to disappear into the underground passage to the Station. Then I took my shoes off and, in the socks only, went along the wet Platform 4 to the familiar breach in the fence at the very end of it.

Across the road from the breach, there stood the Railway Transportation School, I passed it by and very soon entered Bazaar. No one was ogling at me walking in the drenched socks, a disfigured shoe in each of my hands, because there were neither passers-by nor traffic around but boundless puddles everywhere.

After Bazaar the ground disappeared altogether under the even water surface. I splashed on following the streetcar track, kinda a tightrope walker along the railhead which stuck a tad bit from out the water, and on reaching Nezhyn Street I just waded ahead indiscriminately – the khutta was not far off already…

Later, Mother laughed, sharing with the neighbors that from both capitals I brought only a pair of shoes one centimeter too short for my feet. I hadn’t ever heard or read anywhere that it’s possible to grow your feet one centimeter in just one night…

On the first of September, Mother gave me one ruble to repay the debt. However, at the ceremonial line-up in the schoolyard, Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna was nowhere to be seen, and in the Teachers’ Room they told me she was ill and explained how to find her apartment in the two-story block by Bazaar, so I went there.

In the apartment, she kept repeating there's no need for such haste, it even somehow seemed to me she was not very happy that I returned that debt at all. And then her father entered the room and I was surprised to see it was Konstantin Borisovich, the projectionist at Club. The world was really a small place.

(…and were I asked now of the vividest impression from the visit to the Cultural Capital of Russia, my immediate response delayed by no hesitation would be—it is the luminous twilight in the sidewalk bounded by the stone parapet that opens to a few granite steps down to the immensely wide flow of the Neva River by the Palace Bridge when a random wave splash against the lower step sends up high spatter and the shrill screech of the girls from our excursion group standing on the first step from the stream…)

~ ~ ~

Still and all, Lenin was quite right marking the force of habit as a tremendously mighty force. Take, for example, the albums of young ladies from beau monde, where Eugene Onegin, with a reckless stroke of the quill, sketched out his author’s whiskered profile on the page following the autograph by a certain Lieutenant Rzhevsky. Such an album was the must for any young lady of quality to outpour her personal feelings and amass creative scribblings of her guests and visitors.

Of course, no album of that kind had ever come near my hands, yet after a whole lot of wars, three revolutions, and radical changes in the way of life, the albums for the sentimental exercises of sensitive girlish souls were still there because those albums had too much of a hard-die habit to simply disappear.

The struggle for life taught them to cunningly disguise—no silk bow-ties on the cover, neither creamy pages anymore—a general-purpose ruled-paper notebook in brown leatherette covers for thirty-eight kopecks, such was the common aspect of a girl’s album in our class. In place of long-nosed self-portraits of aristocratic rascallions there came cutouts from the color illustrations in Ogonyok magazine, securely mounted on glue… However, poems managed to survive:

Why? O, I don’t know why
A streetcar needs rails to go far or nigh
Why? O, I don’t know why
Why do parrots scream and cry?
I do not know why…

A-and fancifully adorned inscriptions to relate profound maxims and winged expressions of all sorts also proved immortal:

The one who loves will forgive anything”
Cheating kills love”

When such an album, accidentally forgotten on a desk, fell in a guy’s hands, he, having turned a couple of pages, would slap it back on the desk—some “girlish nonsense”.

Yet to me, for some odd reason, those albums were interesting and I dutifully scrutinized them. As a result, I got an offensive handle of “lady-bug” among the schoolmates. Nobody ever called me that to my face, even though when our class lined-up at a PE lesson I was only the fourth in the line, and the shortest guy, Vitya Malenko, could beat me up in a wrestling match under the scornful giggling of the girls. No, I have never heard that handle, but if your sister and brother attend the same school, there is no secret for you about you that you don’t know…

The school principal, Pyotr Ivanovich Bykovsky, unlike his nickname, Bykovsky the Cosmonaut, had a Herculean physique. When all the classes were lined-up in the long—from the Teachers’ Room and all the way to the gym—corridor, the sizable floorboards, paint-coated in red, creaked pitifully under his measured steps alongside the ranks of students.

His mighty skull’s dome with trailing locks across the wide bold, towered half-head above the tallest, graduating, class. When the drowsy look of his big eyes sent a-coasting from under his jutting jumbo eyelids over your face, your innards involuntary contracted, even though you knew perfectly well that the mail received from the Children Room of Militia had nothing to do with you, and the principal would call another guy to get out of the ranks and face the lined-up schoolmates.

So, no surprise that when our Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, told me to stay after classes and go to the Principal’s Office, my heart sank… In that sustained state—the heart sunk and the spleen contracted—I gave the high door of his office a meek knock, and stepped in followed by partly puzzled, yet mostly farewell, glances from Kuba and Skully… Bad luck about your karma, pal, see you in some thereafter life, maybe…

In the long and narrow office room of one window at its far end, Pyotr Ivanovich sat at his desk put in profile to the door and hardly reaching up to his waist. Slight motion of his chin sent me to get seated on one of the chairs lined-up alongside the wall opposite his desk.

Uneasily, I obeyed and he picked up a thin copybook from his desk, opened it and froze in a suspensive silence boring the pages with his fixed look. Occasionally, an irate twitch wrung his thick, clear-cut, lips.

“It is your essay on Russian literature,” announced he at last, “And you’re writing here that in summertime the sky is not as blue, as in fall.”

He consulted the copybook and read the line up, “In summer it looks as if sprinkled with dust at the edges… Hmm… Where could you have ever seen such a sky?”

I recognized the incomplete quotation from the opening sentence in my essay on free subject 'I am sitting by the window and thinking…' which was our home assignment the week before.

“In Nezhyn Street,” answered I.

He began to drive it home to me, that it absolutely didn’t matter – be it Nezhyn Street, or Professions Street, or Depot Street, but the sky always remained the same, both in the center and along its edges. And the blue was always blue, it stayed as blue in summer as it did in fall because blue was always blue.

At my timorous attempt to maintain a slightly different view on the sky blueness, he once again rolled out his weighty arguments and I surrendered.

“Yes, the same,” said I.

“That’s good. Now, we've agreed that this here sentence of yours is wrong.”

And in the same unalterable manner, we proceeded to agree about the wrongness of my views. With stolid ponderosity, he shattered each and every sentence in my essay to pieces, one by one, and, after a short, forlorn, resistance, I gave in and surrendered them, one after another.

From the left bottom corner in the window, thin iron bars fanned up diagonally, the walls squeezed the high ceiling of the corridor-like office to narrow its span, the heavy desk towered over the disciplined row of the lined-up chairs, the bulging sphere of Principal’s skull hovered over the desk with his crosswise hair wisps unable to hide the bald and only clinging to it like the cobweb over a still globe in the locked storeroom of School House Manager…

And I recanted, line by line, from the beginning to the essay’s end, each and every word that seemed so true and right to me when writing them. Yes, Pyotr Ivanovich, you’re right, I was completely wrong…

I was wrong refusing to use the template suggested by the teacher to start the essay smoothly: “Walking down the street, I heard schoolchildren arguing about Tatyana Larina from the immortal poem by Pushkin and, when already home, I got seated by the window and started to think once again about Tatyana, analyzing her social background and her love to Russian nature…”

Yes, it’s a completely wrong statement that schoolchildren would rather discuss motorcycles, karate, and fishing but not Tatyana Larina’s characteristic features. That’s absolutely thoughtless and erroneous…

When I agreed with him on all the points, he handed me the copybook and said that I could go, yet I should think it over again.

I went out to the empty school. From the entrance door came clangs of tin pails against the iron sinks and the swish of water from the taps filling the pails—the janitors had already started washing the floors. I numbly went by those 5 taps without looking at my reflection passing thru 5 mirrors above the sinks.