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

The rehearsals were held late in the evenings, behind the blue blinds on the windows in the Physics classroom. Our string group was enhanced with one more guitarist from School 12. He looked more mature than a tenth-grader and did not conceal his special relation with Valentina, wrapping her neck with a scarf after the rehearsals in an unmistakably owner's manner, and then she trustingly leaned her head on his shoulder, walking along the dark school corridor to the exit.

The girls from School 12 appeared at the rehearsals just a couple of times, and not in full, but Valentina promised us that the singers knew their part quite well. At the final stage preview in Club, the day before starting off to the regional center of Sumy, there popped up one more singer, a corpulent dude of no school affiliation, who sang solo:

"Hello there, the field of Russia,
I'm a thin shoot of yours…"

The chorus of eight girls from School 12 performed a patriotic number emphasizing the fact that Komsomol members, first and foremost, take care of their Homeland and only after that they cater for themselves. Then Sasha Rodionenko, aka Radya, was giving out a song by Vysotsky about the mass graves.

Supposedly, we cut a nice picture – the line of eight white-shirted girls in front of two microphones, Valentina with her shining accordion, Skully standing behind a single drum on its rack, three guitarists with their acoustic guitars hanged on package strings over their shoulders, and Volodya Elman handling the double bass.

Where did Elman come from and why without any handle? He was a tenth-grader from our school and lived in the end of Smithy Street, in the khutta next to a century-old Birch tree. In spring, they milked it, gathering about a dozen of three-liter glass jars of the Birch sap. But the sap, of course, was not all for Elman alone, because it was a long brick khutta-block of four apartments. And the absence of a handle was easily explained by the fact that his last name, by itself, sounded like a criminal handle— "L-man".

As for the double bass, it was handed out to him by Aksyonov, Head of the Variety Ensemble at Club. Head couldn't say "no" to the drummer at his Variety Ensemble. It’s hard to suppose though that Elman had much knowledge or any skills at playing the double bass, more likely his eagerness to get integrated into the glorious world of the music industry was as great as mine. He joined us without a single rehearsal, at the stage preview in Club. Valentina asked him to play the double bass as low as possible and not too often. However, Elman could not keep his zeal in check and, by the end of the stage preview, two fingers on his right hand were bleeding because their skin got rubbed off against the sturdy strings. To somehow pull them at the Regional Review in Sumy, he bandaged his torn fingers with electrical tape..

Eleonora Nikolayevna, the nominal Head of Children Sector, went along with us, as the official head of our Youth Ensemble, in one of her blouses of starched immaculateness and a cameo brooch under the collar. The long earring, no doubt, dangled in place…

We went to Sumy by the morning diesel train. While waiting for it, I was strangely struck by the sight of our three guitars leaning onto each other, like a stack of rifles on the snow-clad Platform 1. Some piercing nudity…

The Regional Palace of Culture buzzed like a beehive, crammed up with young talents who arrived to show themselves in the Review. We were auditioned in a separate room by a couple of people with block-notes and they tick-marked us for participation in the gala concert at five in the afternoon. All the neighboring rooms were also filled with auditions and rehearsals in full swing. In one of them for the first time in my life, I heard and was stopped in my tracks by the mesmerizing caterwauling of a live electric guitar. Wow! The whole room drowned in the swaying vibrato sounds…

We went out for a midday meal in a nearby canteen, where I fell under the spell of Sveta Vasilenko, one of the chorus girls from School 12. Coming back to the Regional Palace of Culture, I walked by her vacant side like a dog on the lead because her other side was escorted by her lanky girlfriend holding her by the arm. My schoolmates, following closely behind, kicked up a hailstorm of stupid giggling and heying addressed to no one in particular, which did not sober me in the least.

During the final rehearsal, Sveta won me over to the hilt. From the compact line of young chorines in white blouses and strict black skirts, she kept casting at me flip glances of her black glittering eyes just to drop them modestly down, or direct at the ceiling above… In more than one book, I happened to read that beauties knew how to shoot with their glances, but never could I imagine that those shots could fell you on the spot.

After the rehearsal was over, there remained two hours of waiting before the gala concert, so I approached her and invited to the cinema. She was not sure about it and hesitated, even though her girlfriend, who turned out not so lanky, after all, but quite a nice individual, backed up my proposal persuading Sveta to go with me, and why not, eh? Our united efforts failed to overcome Sveta's uncertainty, however, I still managed to get her flat refusal and left carrying away my shot-thru heart.

I was at the doorsill of death all the way to the movie theater where I plunged into the magical world of the seventeenth century France, with Gerard Fillip and Gina Lollobrigida in the "Fanfan the Tulip". They reanimated me.

How was our performance at the gala concert? With my defective musical ear, I'm not the right guy for making judgments. However, when three guitars strum the same chords in unison, there's not a fat chance of guessing whose one is out of tune. The electrical tape on the Elman's maimed fingers remarkably softened down the dubbing of the double bass. Skully’s drum was not too acute because instead of sticks he used jazz drumming brushes. Valentina's accordion, rolling over her energetic body, kept covering all er-harmonic inaccuracies and chance falling out of key. I believe that, on the whole, all that sounded fresh, and torrid, and full of both youthful zeal and (most importantly!) eager patriotism.

After the concert, a bus from the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, waiting for us by the Regional Palace of Culture, fully justified Eleonora Nikolayevna’s presence at the Review of Young Talents.

On the bus ride home, everyone was giving meaningful looks at both me and Sveta though we did not sit next to each other. The chorus girls kept singing all kinds of songs about the eyes that drive us mad, and "Sveta's shining, Sveta's dazzling…" substituting her name for "the moon" in the well-known folk song. Sveta was snapping back at them, but me all their hints left undisturbed, I just did not care.

The following day at school, Volodya Gourevitch kept stupidly cuckooing about our competitors from the School 12 CJR team having turned me into their agent, each repetition of the jest was concluded by his protracted laughter. And at a break between the classes, Tolik Sudak from our grade, for no reason whatsoever, started sharing in a group of guys that Sveta Vasilenko was a daughter to Head of Militia Station and once she came to school in a skirt with jism splotches.

If anyone allows themselves so offensive allusions about your beloved, you have to demand satisfaction at a duel. However, at PE classes Tolik stood the first in the line. He was a hefty guy from Podlipnoye and always knew everything, probably, because his mother taught Math at our school. That's why I just stood by as if all that had nothing to do with me, and silently hated the blond curls and drowsy stare of Tolik Sudak's pale-blue eyes.

Soon after, the combined Youth Ensemble participated in a Club concert but when it was over I did not try to see Sveta home. What killed my love? The monotonous joke and loud laughter of Volodya Gourevitch? Or, maybe, Tolik Sudak's disparagement of the stained skirt?

Frankly, the heaviest blow was dealt with by the fact of her residence in Depot Street which was another unfavorable neighborhood for those in love. Vadik Glushchenko, aka Glushcha, escorting a girl to her khutta in Depot Street and was stopped there by a gang of 10 who knocked him down and kicked from all the sides. "The main thing is to cover your head with your arms, then you got woozy and the kicks grew dull," so he later shared his enlightening experience…

~ ~ ~

The end of winter was postponed because of so huge a snowfall that Nezhyn Street had to be cleared by a bulldozer pushing mounds of snow off the road.

On my way back from school, instead of walking along the cleared way I chose to leap along the ridge of snow heaps moved aside towards the fences. The fun was cut off by a sharp pain in my groin, so the remaining way to our khutta I followed the prints of the bulldozer tracks.

In the evening, Mother, worried by my moans, demanded to demonstrate what was the matter there. After my refusal, Father said, "Show to me, then, I'm also a man." The scrotum, swollen up to the size of a teacup, felt hard to the touch. Father frowned and when Mother asked from the kitchen, "So, what's there?" He said I had to see a doctor… It was an awful night – the agony of panic and despair…

In the morning, walking with painfully shortened steps, I came with Mother to the Railway Polyclinic nearby the Station. In the reception, they gave me a slip of paper with my number in the queue to the doctor. We got seated on the chairs next to the specialist’s office in the hollow reverberating corridor. When it was my turn to enter the white door, I, averting my eyes, told Mother that if needed I agree to be operated on, let only everything be normal.

The doctor was a woman, but either her white robe gave her the status of man, or the fear to lose something beyond my current ken, erased my shyness. The doctor said it was a sprain and all I needed were spirits compresses. Two days later, the scrotum returned to its usual shape and I forgot my agonizing fears…

On the seventh of March, Vladya brought to school a miniature bottle of cognac. We shared the booze between 3 of us, sipping from the tiny bottle's neck. Some warm glowing filled my mouth, and we laughed louder and oftener than usual, but there was nothing like the bliss from the wine at Vladya's birthday.

We were dismissed early because it was the eve of Women Day, and when I got home the influence completely disappeared except for the heaviness in my head. I climbed onto the khutta's roof, because already for a week Father chewed my ear to dump the snow from up there.

The tips of four brick chimneys, barely protruding from the snowdrifts, helped to outline our part in the roof. It was rather steep, and in the final stretch my felt boots slipped and I fell into the narrow back garden. The landing was successful – on both legs and into a deep snow, however, when I saw the cusps of the low palisade between the back garden and the yard of the Turkovs, stuck up from the snow an inch off my thigh, my feet grew cold with horror.

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys, my ups and downs sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)

End March a team of doctors came to our class to have the physical examination of the dudes to register us as future conscripts.

While the girls were taken to another room for some special lecture, the physicians told us to undress and demonstrate them our backs and sit on a chair for them to knock a rubber hammer beneath our knees, besides the height-measuring and cock inspection.

In my draftee card, the line for "sexual development" was marked with ‘N’. When the commission left, Tolik Sudak explained that "N" stood for "normal" and all the dudes got that mark except for Sasha Shwedov, and the girls, who returned after we got dressed, somehow found it out and that's why now they were whispering to each other and exchanging informed giggles…

~ ~ ~

The summer started with the examination session for the ninth grade. Of all the exams, Chemistry was the most feared one – a normal guy from the Settlement could not really bottom all those benzyl rings and their atomicity.

Following the majority of my classmates, I memorized the answers to just one of the twenty-five question sets, aka "tickets", from the Tickets List. At the exam, hand-made cards with ticket numbers were strewn face down on the desk of examiners for us to choose. My chances were one to twenty-four and I lost. However, the teacher of Chemistry, Tatyana Fyodorovna, handled Hexabenzyl, began, for some unknown reason, pulling me out and, eventually, evaluated my ignorance by "four".

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn't realized yet that all my, etc., etc…)

Physicist Binkin, who, strangely, had no handle among the students, at that examination was Assistant Examiner and used his position for demonstrating the cards to Vladya. Picking a slip from the exterminators’ desk, Binkin would keep it up, face to Vladya, and bob his head encouragingly before he put it back and get over to the next one. As fair a play as one could wish.

Unfortunately, Vladya was seated in the end of the classroom, loaded with handfuls of the cribs prepared by diligent girls, who had already passed the exam and dumped to him their cheat sheets. But who can get it seeing for the first time in your life all those formulas scribbled on an inch-wide accordion-folded paper-strip in a handwriting three times smaller than normal? Of course, Vladya would jump to the opportunity of swapping the ticket in hand for that one whose answers he had learned by rote.

For Binkin his fair play was an innocently sadistic fun because at such a distance Vladya couldn't make out the numbers, however hard he squinted. So, he had 2 more wild attempts by which dint he exhausted the ticket swap quota and, though raising his chances to 3 to 25, missed again. Still and all, he didn’t flunk and got his "three" as well as the comment from Binkin, "Your unalloyed proletarian origin secured this mark for you…"

I never quibbled about my clothes, put on and wore just what was given, and Mother made sure the things were neither torn nor dirty. So the new addition to my wardrobe—a jacket made of leatherette to the patterns from The Working Woman magazine—appeared on Mother's initiative and it was her to sew it.

The money to buy leatherette was found because Father moved to work at the RepBase as a locksmith again and his earnings grew by 10 rubles a month. The jacket looked classy, of a nice brown color but cuffs and the belt of a darker cloth. If watched from afar, it even glistened in the sun… In two weeks the leatherette at the elbows fretted to its gunny base, but at the moment when I received my award, the jacket still had good looks.

Yes, the Trade-Union Committee of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant rewarded me for outstanding participation in amateur activities. At the All-Plant trade-union conference in Club, the Chairman of the Plant Trade-Union Committee personally handed me not a useless Certificate of Honor, but a sizable paper packet which contained dark rubber fins and a mask, yet, sadly, no snorkel.

Nonetheless, I took the equipment to the Seim once, but swimming in the fins turned out much harder than you might think when watching flicks alike to "The Amphibian Man". Besides, water found the way to penetrate inside the mask and get into my nose, but then, perhaps, it couldn't be otherwise… However, I was not too keen on studying the bottom life of large water bodies because my main concern that summer was finding a job. I desperately needed money, lots of it, because of my "horselessness".

Vladya had a motor scooter "Riga-4", Chuba drove "Desna-3", Skully reconstructed his bike into a moped, and when a flock of the Settlement scooter-riders buzzing their motors scudded along Peace Avenue, he did not fell too far behind… Yet, "Riga-4" was the coolest. Vladya, of course, allowed me to drive it a couple of times – the buzz of the engine, wind in the face, speed operating, delight! But begging Chuba's scooter for a ride was of no use. Straddling his "Desna-3", the feet firmly on the ground, he'd only scoff in answer.

"Let me, eh? Don't be greedy."

"I ain't greedy, I am gritty!"

"Churls aren’t gritty. One ride to Professions Street and back, I swear!"

Another chuckle at nothing funny.