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

It was at that celebration table that for the first time in my life I drank wine. What a stunner feeling! The world around got wrapped within the thinnest lacework of translucent—like dragonfly wings—pattern of floral petals passed thru with sheer tiny veins… Beautiful friends sat around me—the best of the best in the worlds—we were engaged in the wittiest conversation and Vladya's mother’s laughter ringed so melodiously while the soft shadow beneath the bush of red currant grew darker, blurrier, and deeper…

With the onset of winter, another of my classmates, Lyouba Serduke, also had a birthday, and those who handed in two rubles to our Class Monitor, Tanya Krasnozhon, came to the khutta of the birthday girl.

Until then, all kinds of bigger parties were arranged exclusively at school, under the supervision of Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna. We gathered there in the evening, drank lemonade brought to the classroom by a couple of mothers, then they left and all the desks were moved into one corner to make room for playing Brook, and the guys from higher grades opened the door and peeped in, but Albina would drive them away with her pedagogic yells.

(…it's a nice feel to hold a girl's hand in yours and pull her along thru the Brook tunnel of paired arms arched above the two of you, unless, of course, the hand you tow behind you is not moist with sweat otherwise, after you two become the concluding part to the tunnel, you’d have to wait until Vera Litviniva free you by pulling in her wake.

Vera’s flat nose is far from being lovely, still, her palms are always dry. She's a nice girl, in general, but Sasha Uniat from the tenth grade is after her in earnest. He's a good calm guy, yet you never can tell because at times even the calmest might turn jealous.

On the whole, it’s better not to look for trouble, especially since Vera’s lips are way too thin…)

In the large living-room of Lyouba's khutta on the floor in the fresh paint-coat of red, there stood a long table under a spiffy white tablecloth cluttered with all kinds of salads, pork jelly, sweetmeat, and lemonade.

When all participants to the celebration gathered, Tanya the Monitor handed the birthday girl the present bought for the collected rubles, Lyouba' parents put their coats on and went to some neighbors to let us have unrestrained fun.

The dudes began iterating to the wide veranda with the glazed lattice to sip on sly the hooch smuggled in by someone of them.

In a small bedroom next to the living room, a cozy disco was started up where the dimly lighted panel of the record player twirling the LP disk of instrumental numbers by The Singing Guitars served the only illumination for the whole room, if not to count the sliver of light that made its way from the corridor thru the gap between the curtains in the doorway pulled closely together.

From time to time, Lyouba' brother, a blockhead seventh-grader, thrust from the corridor his arm to click the switch on the wall behind a curtain and the bulb under the bedroom ceiling flashed up with dazzling crude light. The dancers would coil back from each other, their eyes in a tight squint, and yell at the darn moron, who’d laugh his stupid horse laughter and race back to the hooch sipping group in the veranda. And then the dude from the pair closest to the curtains would kill the light off again…

I did not go to the veranda but tarried at the table stowing away my favorite Olivier Salad. When I switched over to the lemonade, not so favorite as it used to be but still tasty, at the table, in fact, remained a company of two.

Tanya Krutas from the former parallel grade sat at the opposite side without eating or drinking anything because her arms were crossed on the chest beneath the mien of unconcealed displeasure in her countenance. I plucked up my courage, went around the table and stood next to her, saying, "Would you dance, please?"

She did not even look at me but, putting on an even more rejecting air, pursed her lips, rose and, with a slithering roll to her steps made for the disco bedroom.

They did not swap the partners there and, in the hissing intervals between the numbers, the pairs did not split and only waited for the start of the next one to wrap their arms around their partner, and press themselves back to the hugged torso… Tanya's thin waist slightly swaying in between my palms laid upon her hips made me feel drunk without any wine. My ears were filled with some pulsating rumble which did not tell though on the utmost alertness of my every muscle ready to immediately respond to the least movement of her hands resting on my shoulders. And I was not angry with the moron clicking the switch but, recoiling under the bright bulb, I gazed at her profile with the clear pale skin and the eye sternly staring down, I mutely adored the tiny bob of her hair stringed below the back of her head. Her breasts were sooner circles than hemispheres, but even that what was there plunged me into the ecstatic trance of Corybants.

(…frankly, I did not know so weird terms then and it is where Father would scoff again:

"Piled up a mess of arty-farty words a kinda fleasome by a scrawny cur. You, tops hopper!"…)

Yes, I was on top of bliss, it was incurable, inevitable, love forever… After school, I waited for her going home just to walk by her side to the gate of our khutta because most of the School 13 students scattered over the Settlement thru Nezhyn Street. And I even went to School 5 to support our girls when they lost in the Volleyball Championship of the city schools. She also was on the team.

Their loss almost did not disappoint me, I was too busy falling deeper and deeper in love with her high cheekbones. And I forgave her her slight bowleggedness which, after all, was a characteristic feature by Amazons, the fearless and beautiful she-warrior riders. But how devastatingly nice she looked in her white sportswear shirt!.

However, with all my constant and admired being there I never managed to dissolve the incomprehensible displeasure always present by her. At the breaks between classes, as soon as I bobbed up by her side, she beckoned to one or another of her girlfriends. She even changed her route of coming back home from school and bypassed Nezhyn Street thru May Day Street.

Thus, all I could do was to just wither off…The ruins forlorn of the love unaccepted got lost in the tall listless snowdrifts piled up by the winter storms to bury the ashes of fire killed tracelessly off…

~ ~ ~

Persistent snowfalls met the participants in the winter stage of the All-Union military-patriotic game 'Zarnitsa' arriving in Moscow, the capital of our Homeland. 6 among those participants were from Konotop, together with their skis and a middle-aged supervisor…

Confident of the rubber bands fixed by Father years ago, I threw my skis onto the uppermost, third, level bunk, undressed, and climbed into the bed on the second level in the compartment of the first-class car. The lights in the car had been turned off already, yet behind the window, there stretched Platform 4 whose crust of firmly trodden snow reflected the glare of arc lamps above it.

At last, from the locomotive in the head of the train, there rolled nearing clangs of cars that yanked each other in turn. The domino effect hit our car too, it jolted and gaining smooth acceleration glided forward. To Moscow! To Moscow!.

On the evening of the following day, we left our skis in the vestibule of a huge school scarcely lit and empty except for a small group of tenants from the surrounding neighborhood who came to take us to their different apartments as bed-and-breakfast guests at their hospitable families.

Next morning, my hosts treated me to tea and hurriedly left for their work telling their teenage son to see me to the same huge school closed for the vacations. On the way, he insistently warned me to mark the route well, so that in the evening I could find their apartment where I was billeted to stay.

We had three meals a day in a huge canteen, not too far from the huge school, both surrounded by the neighborhood of huge multi-storied tower-blocks. And we skipped only one visit to the canteen, which happened on the day when we, together with our skis, were taken to the Taman Guard Division stationed outside Moscow.

There we ran to the attack thru the deep snowdrifts between young Fir-trees, and a soldier in his greatcoat also ran on skis among us smiling and bursting profuse blank rounds from his Kalashnikov assault rifle spilling the spray of spent cartridges into the deep snow. Later in the day, together with two hundred other guys, who arrived for the winter-stage 'Zarnitsa' in Moscow, we were fed with the midday meal in a soldiers' canteen at the Taman Guard Division.

The following day after an endless excursion around the city, our Konotop group arrived in the Red Square to visit the Lenin Mausoleum. We joined the dense line of people moving to it across the Red Square and for a long time kept nearing the Mausoleum while the twilight grew ever thicker above the slick black flagstones showing in patches thru the snow. The icy chill from the pavement pierced the feet even thru the thick soles of winter shoes, and I got pretty cold.

When there remained about fifty meters before the Mausoleum entrance, we learned that the working day was over and they locked it for the mummy to have a night’s rest. The supervisor led our group back across the Red Square to get warm in the brightly lit emporium of GUM, aka the State Universal Store, which worked to later hours. I doubted that the half-hour he allotted for getting warm would be enough to save my feet, however, the stretch did the trick.

In the subway car carrying us back to the hospitable neighborhood, the supervisor announced that 'Zarnitsa' was over, yet we had one more day in Moscow so the first thing in the morning we'd pass thru the Mausoleum and then go loose for a shopping spree.

However, the next morning after leaving my hosts' apartment, I tarried in the huge canteen and, on coming to the huge school, was told that our group had left already to visit Lenin in his casket. The watchman also was leaving until five in the afternoon, so he locked me inside (the weather outdoors was frosty) and all of that day I spent imprisoned in the huge empty school.

Almost all the doors in the building were locked. In the watchman's room, there was a phone and, having never used the device, I started learning. Not a too knotty task to stick your finger into one of 10 holes along the edge of phone dial-disc and wind it collecting random digits until there sounded beeps in the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Hello! Is that zoo over there?"

"No…"

"Then why the call is answered by an ass?"

(…yuck! you wanna puke even recalling…)

Soon after the watchman unlocked me, our group arrived and I was expressly reminded that we were going home the next morning.

In the apartment of my hosts, I saw Twenty Years Later by Dumas inside their glazed bookcase and asked where they sold such books. The hosts began to explain how many crossings were along the way to the bookshop, though it should be closed already. But I went out all the same…

It was dark and very quiet with rare fluffy snowflakes coming down from above, one after another. I stood by the glass walls of the locked bookshop with the feeble glow of distant light inside. Some supernatural emptiness wrapped all around in a profound immense silence… Then a belated passer-by walked soundlessly along leaving shallow steps in the soft virgin dusting over the pavement, and I went back to the home of strangers. There was "The Vertical" on TV, starring Vladimir Vysotsky…

~ ~ ~

We knew exactly what we wanted, we aimed at becoming a vocal-instrumental ensemble because in the then USSR there were no rock groups. Rock groups were an attribute of the decaying capitalist West, but in our Soviet state, free from the exploitation of a man by man, rock groups were named vocal-instrumental ensembles, aka VIA's.

The songs about the prosecutor, who raised his blood-smeared hand against the happiness and peaceful life of an honest pickpocket, were just a spring-board in our glorious career. Those upstart crows, so popular VIA's as The Singing Guitars, and The Jolly Guys, actually, stole our songs. It was us, who should have performed the hit about fetching the ring of Saturn to ask the one we loved to marry us, and no other but we and only we should have turned out that thrilling electric guitar vibrato ending to "The Gypsy Girl" in the LP Disc of instrumental numbers. But while we were busy training ourselves and sang that, when visiting Bazaar, instead of trade in pigeons there he hunted the passers'-by pockets, they leaped forward ahead of us. Still and all, we did not give up…

During the breaks in the two-story building of the "Cherevko's school", where the ninth grade was again transferred to, we gathered at the window on the staircase landing to make music. The triangle-ruler of light metal normally used for drawing figures in school copybooks was thrown on the windowsill to serve a musical instrument on which Sasha Rodionenko, handled Radya, was knocking out rhythmic backup to the songs.

Chuba at once crossed out any chance for me to be a singer though. The problem was not about my vocal cords but my ears, I just could not hear my own sharps from flats when singing. There was no way to argue with Chuba because he finished Music School in the class of button-accordion and, as an expert, should hear better. As for Vladya's musical ear, Chuba admitted its presence and the fact that Vladya even had some kind of a voice, only it was hard to tell in which part of his anatomy it was sitting. Thus, there remained only two vocalists – Chuba himself, and Radya.

It's more than likely though that with all our zeal we would never progress any further than the mentioned windowsill, if after the winter holidays there did not appear a new teacher of Music at our school, named Valentina. She looked like a tenth-grader girl but styled her hair in the ladies' way of making a round cushion of hair atop of their heads.

At the lessons, she widely spread the billows of her accordion out and squeezed them vigorously back, and before the endless strident bell announcing the break shut up, she collected her instrument and hurried to the streetcar stop because she also taught Music at School 12.

Valentina promised we could go to the Regional Review of Young Talents, only we had to work hard because the Review was taking place next month. The girls she worked with at School 12 were to perform there and we might accompaniment their singing, the whole combination would pass for a VIA from the Plant Club because the Regional Review ruled out the participation of school students… Anything can be solved exceedingly simple if you know how to go about it…