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

Something kept me from answering the card, either the heinously joyful School Pioneer Leader’s laughter or my being ashamed at her unawareness that more than once I had unbuttoned her green coat under my blanket on the folding couch-bed shared with my younger brother.

And just a couple of days later I went to Peace Square because my sister told that by that building where in summer they sold kvass from the two-wheeled yellow barrel-trailer, they put a booth to refill ballpoint pen ampoules for just 10 kopecks. Such ampoules, for both short and long ball pens, you could buy in bookshops but at the double price—for 20 and 22 kopecks apiece.

Riding a streetcar on my way back, I stood by the large poster fixed behind the glass wall in the driver’s cab, as big as a spread-out newspaper only the title much longer: “Rules For Streetcar Usage in the City of Konotop of Sumy Region”. As if other cities had different rules, eh? Or if anyone but me had ever read the articles in those Rules… The rules on how to correctly ride a streetcar… on paying 3 kopecks for a ticket… and who you’re supposed to cede your seat to… And the concluding article about the measures of administrative penalties up to the three-ruble fine if being caught without a ticket. A good quality paper in that poster, so glossy and obviously thicker than the common newsprint…

The conductors with their puffy bags on gunny straps had since long disappeared from the streetcars. And the tickets were replaced with paper coupons sold by drivers thru a small hole in the cabin door. The stupidly located hole made you bow way too low when buying coupons, yet for a driver seated in the cab, the height was comfortable enough.

And in the streetcar walls, between the windows, they fixed small boxes with lever-handles. You insert your coupon in the slot of a box, pull the lever—click!—your slip's marred by punched holes which, if closely scrutinized, made up the pattern of digits. Occasionally, a couple of inspectors boarded the streetcar at the stops asking the passengers to deliver their coupons and checked those digits. Because in Tramway Depot, they periodically changed the pattern in the levered boxes: ain’t it smart?

Yet, any smartness could be outsmarted and some bilkers kept by them a handful of used coupons to travel for free, and when addressed by the inspector they would present a whole bunch of paper trash angled from their pocket, “How could I know which one is from this streetcar? Look yourself for the right one…” At times some too stubborn ass of an inspector might start to kick the dust up because after a month of riding in the pocket many a coupon got travel-fretted. However, they would sooner give up and move along to the next passenger…

So, under those Rules, I stood, although there were vacant seats, it’s only that in winter standing seemed warmer than sitting.

Some familiar guy boarded at the stop in Zelenchuk Area. Although I didn’t know him by his name, he was from the graduating class at our school, and a couple of times I saw him in Club too. Well, so he moved near. Hey. Hey. How’s all? So-so. And we went on standing silently.

Then I saw the jerk started clamping me as if I was a girl. On the right, there's the window with the handrail across it and the driver cab behind me, with those darn Rules above another handrail. Now, the clown grabbed those 2 handrails and pressed me into the corner.

“Piss off! Stop horsing!” says I, but he only giggled and squinted his stupid eyes, yet didn’t let me go. Such a shame. I looked at the passengers. They were not many, like, about a dozen and everybody, as if mimicking each other, was looking out of the windows intently so, like, on an excursion to a famous city, like, something could be seen thru the ice-coated panes.

To put it short, I barely managed to wriggle out of his grip and stood on the steps by the cab door. There, I had to put my clothes in order because of both the jacket and the sweater, well, everything up to the naked skin, got jerked up. Some stupid asshole, if so was your bent, go and enroll the Greek-Roman wrestling group at the Club Gym and rub against your partners on the mats. But what a humiliation for the big-time CJR Captain getting into a such sinusoidal flop!.

And the next breathtaking crest rolled up end April at the All-Union military-patriotic game Zarnitsa, aka “Heat-Lightning”. Nominally, the game was for pioneer organizations but still involved all the senior classes. And I was appointed Commander of the United Formation at School 13!

No paper shoulder straps, no division into “blues” and “greens”, and everyone should have by themselves a knapsack with the field ammunition: a bowl and spoon, a needle and thread. After the line-up in the schoolyard where a PE teacher, Ivan Ivanovich, checked a pair of knapsacks for the presence of the told items, we went along Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, past Bazaar and turned into Budyonny Street. There we passed the Plant Park and went down to the Swamp, aka Grove. Thick fog was hiding progress of the column on march.

We stopped at the Grove and the PE teachers—Ivan Ivanovich and Lyubov Ivanovna—opened a sealed envelope with the directions for our further route and mission. The column proceeded to the bridge in the high railway embankment. Besides the main tracks, there was a sideway forking-off from under the bridge to the Meat-Packing Plant, we followed that lone track and outflanked the Grove from the left.

The fog was thinning and thru its rising wisps, there peeped fragments of a bumpy field. Ivan Ivanovich roared “To attack!” and we ran across the field shouting “Hurray!” I ran amid the disordered crowd and didn’t feel my body, which, like, dissolved in the general stampede and of all my senses there remained only the sight relaying sketchy pictures of torn fog locks over bumps and tussocks jumping before and past me…

Then we stopped not far from Podlipnoye in the field with occasional mighty-trunk Elms. The fog cleared up completely, and the day became glad and sunny. A real army field-kitchen arrived from the village and we were fed with hot soup. Then after a short-cut march thru the Grove, we returned to our schoolyard and lined up again. As the commander, I stood to face the ranks, ranging from the sixth to the tenth-graders, and some unknown cameraman shot us, buzzing his hand camera.

The following Monday Volodya Sherudillo mockingly (but very funny) acted me facing the ranks of my schoolmates, a slouch-shouldered weakling with a stoop but, whenever the camera turns my way, I'm bravely thrusting my chest out and stretching at attention almost to tiptoes.

(…at times I wonder if not for the daily fetching water from the pump to our khutta, might I have still become for at least an inch taller than the fourth in the line of boys when our class fell in at PE classes?..)

That spring I had a dream of a long journey and by no other means if not a raft. Most likely, I was impressed by the Tour Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition. The dream was shared with Kuba and Skully, and they approved it, yeah, that would be cool, they said. And we even began to discuss the details of its realization. If, say, the raft was built on the Seim river then, carried by its flow, we would reach the river of Desna and farther downstream to the mighty Dnieper, that flowed to the Black Sea. And the journey should be completed before August when Kuba had to leave for entrance examinations to the Odessa Sea School and Skully to some Mining Technical College in Donetsk.

The dream lasted for two weeks, and then it began to wither. Problems of growing magnitude cropped up in the way of bringing it to life. Well, suppose we’d made a deal with the watchman in the Pine forest on the Seim river. Then how to move a heavy log from the forest to the river? Dragging it for half-kilometer? But when constructing a raft, you needed more than a log or two. Eventually, I ran into a thought which shattered the dream irreparably, into fine useless shreds. Because I remembered that on the Dnieper, following the Lenin’s GOERLO plan, they had built several hydro-electric power stations whose dams across the river put raft navigation out of question. Dismantle the raft and drag it, log by log, to bypass each dam? Damn!. I did not tell my friends about the incompatibility of the advanced electrification with our beautiful dream and simply stopped discussing it with them…

Volodya Gourevitch made another fiery speech and declared it was time to annul the hegemony of School 11 at the city Ballroom Dancing Competitions. At the first training of the group of ballroom dances, there were formed five pairs of willing dancers from both eighth grades. Volodya Gourevitch demonstrated us waltzing in the ballroom style, after which he played his button-accordion for us to dance.

Skully dropped out at once without any explanation except for he just did not want to. Kuba and I lasted longer, but very soon the group of prospective hegemony-busters disintegrated. And really what’s the point in going on, if my partner, Natasha Grigorenko, after finishing the eighth grade was moving to School 12 whose Math and Physics specialization boosted the chances of its students for entering some Institute on graduating?.

End May, Kuba and I had a bike ride to the Bay Beach on the Seim river to open the swimming season. It turned out that twelve kilometers of riding a bike by the even path alongside the railway embankment, was not an overly exhausting exercise…

On the beach, there was not a single soul except for us and our bikes dropped on the sand. And the water was still too chilly, but we took a swim all the same. Then from the nearby bushes there droned the buzzing swarms of mosquitoes who hungrily stung us from all the sides and very badly too. Probably, we had just fallen out of the habit during the winter. To get rid of the blood-suckers, we tried burying ourselves in the sand, but the sand was also too cold and didn’t protect from the bites of those flying cannibals. Our crazy cries echoed in the empty beach, and then we had another swim and rode back to Konotop. We didn’t know yet that life, actually, is a series of losses, but felt that from that beach our ways parted…

~ ~ ~

Yes, that year School 13 was hegemonic in everything except for the ballroom dancing. We even won the city competition at the concluding stage of the All-Union Game 'Zarnitsa'.

On a Sunday, the teams from city schools, six people each, under the supervision of their PE teachers, went on a one day hike to the forest near the Seim. There were all sorts of competitions: for the transportation of an “injured” without a stretcher, for putting up a two-man tent, for skillful bandaging…

My part in the competitions was measuring distances by eye. The umpire asked how many meters were to the tree over there, and then silently recorded the participants’ estimations. I was following changes in his facial expression.

Someone said the distance was 20 meters. The umpire lifted his right eyebrow, the guess seemed an overshoot. To the estimation in 14 meters, the umpire’s mouth dropped its left corner—not enough. So I called out the average—17 meters. After everyone got thru their attempts, the umpire checked his records and announced that the most accurate was my guess – I didn’t need a tape-meter…

However, everything was to be decided in the concluding contest of boiling water on the fire in a ten-liter tin bucket. No favoritism would help out, neither reading of facial expressions.

The start given, the matches stroke matchboxes by the brushwood mounds readied for bonfires. Dense white smoke gave way to crackling flames—it’s time to hang the bucket over the fire and feed the firewood to it; the drier, the better.

The red tongues of fire fluttered unsteadily under the bucket, licking its tin, painting it black with soot. The bastard of a wind! So much of flames driven away from under the bucket… The team of School 12, trying to control the situation, held a blanket in their hands, sort of a screen to block the wind, prevent its playing with the fire. But we? Our PE teacher Ivan Ivanovich, a wartime soldier and an experienced fisherman, scornfully waved aside their smartness. That’s all bullshit! Get more brushwood, the drier and smaller, the better. Put it over that side!

No textbook presented me with a clearer and more memorable idea of water-boiling stages. Heating; light steam over the water; formation of tiny bubbles on the vessel walls; the bubbles float up forming agitated foam and, at last, the water in the bucket starts to roll, jump and splash, it gushes the white steam up.

The umpire clicks his stopwatch. Hooray! We are the first!. And School 12 still about their bucket ogling the bubbles on the tin walls…

The competition over, the teams boarded the buses. Except for those who wished to spend the night in two large tents, and in the morning the bus would come to take them back to Konotop…

At twilight, I left the glade with the tents and went deeper into the forest. In general, it was the same as at the Object, only more deciduous than coniferous. Casting an appraising look around, I took a leak. Suddenly, some part of the forest next to me came into motion separating from the picture of stillness in the late evening woods. What’s happening?

The eye, perplexed at the unaccustomed sight reported nothing to the stunned mind until the thing little by little assumed a certain form and consistency… Wow! That’s a moose! What a whopper! And it had been standing so nigh… Looking after the giant disappearing among the trees, I thought it was not in vain that I did stay for the night.

At night I regretted my staying there. Because of inexperience and unbridled individualism, I had lain down by the canvas wall of the tent, becoming the last in the line of guys preparing for the night. The night chillness woke me up an hour later and forced to press my back against the last but one guy in our sleeping group to feel at least a drop of warmth.

In the small hours, chilled down to the point of freezing, I got out of the tent when the night darkness hardly started to turn gray. The ashes of the fire next to the tents were dead, but a couple of youths still sat near it—a girl and a boy. Probably, being foolish like me, they had tried sleeping at the edges and not in the midst of the group in their tent…

No bus came after us. Instead, a “goat”-Willys with a canvas top drove into the glade, and we were told there had happened some pickle. The collapsed tents and four girls filled all the room there was in the vehicle, and the rest had to go to the city on foot, carrying the 2 tent stocks that also needed transportation to the House of Pioneers, yet did not fit into the “goat”.

It turned out that twelve kilometers on foot were a damn long distance, especially when dragging along a wooden tent stock even if not too heavy.

The guys from School 12 soon disappeared from view together with their stock, and we lagged diminishing in numbers because some people went ahead and we never caught up with them, neither saw them that day.

When we reached a streetcar stop in the city outskirts there remained only three of us: I, my classmate Sasha Skosar, and the smooth stock of pinewood coated with green paint.

(…Oboy! We got bone-tired. I remember that stunned by fatigue we were not up to chewing ham when reached the streetcar stop nearby the Tram Depot, which memory leaves me indifferent. Perhaps, any kind of sentiment got dulled by multiple repetitions of that same state in my following life. However, the picture of a moose dissolving in the twilight among the trees, I can vividly see even now and it brings a little smile to my lips – hey, Mr. Whopper, pass my best to Bambi!..)

~ ~ ~

In spring Father switched his workplace. He left his job of a locksmith at Car Repair Shop Floor of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant and moved over to Shop Floor 19 at the Konotop Electro-Mechanical Plant, aka KEMZ, aka the “Red Metallurgist” Plant, to embrace the same position there.

The salary of workers at KEMZ was a trifle higher. The trifle’s exact size though I didn’t know, such matters never interested me because it’s Father and Mother who were in charge of getting money, after all. I had cares of my own being up to my chin in CJR, and Club, and all sorts of Groups, not to mention the books non-stop exchanged at the library. Well, kerosene and water fetching were also my responsibility, but if they needed something from the Nezhyn Store, let them send Natasha or Sasha…

Besides his salary, Father earned some side money by repairing TV sets considered hopeless cases even by the specialists at the TV Repair Atelier. About once a month, coming from work, he would collect his pot-bellied satchel of green leatherette with his multimeter tester, soldering iron, some spare vacuum-tubes, and other necessary things before leaving till late at night. Then he’d come back, sozzled pleasantly, and hand Mother a crushed three rubles of earnings. To parry her loud rhetoric disparaging his shameful alcoholic propensity, he reiterated one and the same, unbeatable clue, “Was my drink on you?” Probably, Mother’s eagerness to upgrade his moral standards took roots in her suspicion of 2 more rubles stashed away by Father, I don't know, I've never been keen on monetary matters…

Sometimes, the procedure lasted for two evenings. If so, on the first one, Father came back home sober with neither money nor his satchel left at the client’s khutta until resolving the complicated case. The most critical ones were delivered to our khutta. Father put the dead box on the desk under the only window in the room, where he freed it of its case transferred then out of way onto the wardrobe, so that the desktop held now just the box’s entrails—the electronic tube within the skeleton of aluminum panels with the thick growth of divers radio vacuum-tubes. He would turn it over and over, checking from all sides, muttering, “Well, so what’s that that you want then? Eh, sweetheart?”

In the dead of night, I would be waked by sharp hissing—Father, in the niggardly light from the desk lamp, had brought bouncing white stripes to flick across the tube screen. “So, that’s why you couldn't shoot, girlie! Not loaded you were!”