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

"A scrimpy asshole!"

But Chuba only scoffed again.

Skully's moped I did not want myself; but where to get money to buy a scooter? That was the question…

Mother said that a guy after the ninth grade might get a job at the Vegetable Storage Base, if he applied at the Head Office of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, near the Under-Overpass.

It sounded a great idea, there should be truckloads of strawberries and watermelons too were surely passing the Vegetable Base before they got on sale at stores. But would they give me a job if I wasn't sixteen yet? In the long narrow corridor of the barrack-like ORS Head Office, I felt more uptight than thru all the session of summer examinations at school. And I got the job! So began my labor career…

The Vegetable Base was located at the end of Depot Street and I was getting there by bike. Besides me, the enterprise employed about 10 other summer hands, mostly from School 14. I recognized one of them – a short guy sporting long hair, handled Luke, he it was who slapped me in the face for shooting in his back. The guy tacitly let the bygones be bygones, and so did I, of course.

The initial couple of days on the job we were sorting boxes, just empty boxes with no strawberries whatsoever. The whole ones were stacked in the shed, those in need of repair piled next to the shed, while split and shattered throwaways had to be schlepped to the stoves under the open sky in the middle of the Base yard…

Arriving in the Base, a truck with a load of vegetables goes onto a weighbridge to get weighed. After dumping the cargo they weigh the vehicle once again; the difference between the loaded and empty truck shows the weight of the brought vegetables if only the weighbridge works correctly. That's where arises the need for a trained calibrator who knows how to tune the weighbridge. To do the calibration, you also need a trial one-ton load of 20 kg pig iron weighs, as well as some workforce to move that ton from one corner of the weighbridge to another, to another, to another, to the middle…

The job of hands at calibration disclosed who of us was who. At first, it was like a sporting event, we carried the weighs racing ahead each other, by the third corner we started to notice which of us shirked and who was going to the end…

Then for two or three days, we cleaned the potato storage block of its stock gone rotten in winter. I never imagined there could be so sickening a stench in the world. Wrapping our mugs in our tank tops, we dragged that horrid muck out, in two-handle wicker baskets, to dump in the thicket of tall grass on the Vegetable Base outskirts. The number of working school guys diminished to 5…

The main workforce at the Base were women in black robes and pattern-printed kerchiefs on their hair. They sorted the carrots or beetroots in the respective blocks, and we moved and stacked the boxes filled by them. Sitting in a circle around a dusty knoll of vegetables, they never stopped yakking, not for half a minute, faith. They were telling each other endless sagas of "he" and "she". About how that "she" of theirs grew fat, then skinny, then got to the hospital, then told her mother she couldn't live without him, then died, then cheated on him and fled with someone else… And "he" was tall, then short, then pot-bellied, then bald, then black-haired, then a drunk; "he" refused to pay alimony and asked to marry him, they treated him for alcoholism before “he” ripped off the linoleum from the kitchen floor to take it to his lover widowed two times…

And so they would pour out their chin music until the blonde guy from School 14, Long by his handle, addresses the peppiest one in the circle of squaws seated on the upset empty boxes, "Well, you give or what?"

"At once!" says she. "But when in I'll squeeze and tear your little willie clean off you, kiss it goodbye, lover!"

And the lady-squaws would start to silence her by oops and pfffs and "watch your mouth! It's a kid you talkest to!"

For the midday meal, I rode home – 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back, 10 minutes for soup and tea or, maybe, compote.

Thus, 4 times a day I gained the first space velocity pedaling all the way down the concrete dive into the Under-Overpass tunnel. Who, of the Vegetable Base hands, does not crave for crazy speed? Whee-hoo!.

Each morning Head of the Vegetable Base was allocating jobs for the present workforce. A couple of times I got a coopers' helper job. The area in front of their stocky workshop was crowded with hogsheads in need of repair. I rolled or dragged the vessels in, depending on their current condition. Two mujiks in caps and aprons knocked the iron hoops off, and the barrel fell apart turning into a heap of slightly bent staves which they called klepkas. The coopers sorted them, threw the hopeless off, and filled up for the shortage from the stock of odd klepkas. They planed and fitted them to each other, collected flat round bottoms from straight lags to insert them on both ends of the resurrected barrel and drive the hoops back.

Of course, I knew that when saying "a klepka’s missing in his head" folks meant the same as when they said "not all at home" or just "crazy", but it was in that workshop that I got it where that meaning came from – you cannot fill a barrel with a missing klepka, it's as impossible as filling a cup whose walls are crazed.

The refuse I hauled to the same idle stoves in the yard with the iron cauldrons embedded in them. The coopers worked unhurriedly, fixing two or three barrels a day, and the time by their side passed so very slowly, but in their workshop, there was a pleasant smell of timber shavings…

By the masons, it smelled of damp earth. They worked in a long basement bunker, replacing a log wall with a brick one. And they also wore caps and aprons; the caps were the same as on the coopers, but the aprons of a sturdier tarp.

I was so eager to try my hand at laying a wall, at least a little. The older mason allowed me to lay one course. He was standing by and smiling at something, although his grim partner grumbled along that what I did was not proper.

My helper-partner from School 14 also grumbled all the time, however, not on the subject of masonry. His standing point of dissatisfaction was Head of the Base. Being unhappy about having such a bitch of a boss, he shirked the work which Head was allocating for 2 of us. I did not mind doing more than my partner, only it seemed not right so I was glad when he decided to quit at all…

And then the cucumber season began. They were coming in by cars pushed by a small diesel locomotive along the sideway tracks entering the Base grounds. The cars were filled with boxes of cucumbers that had to be moved to the stoves in the yard, in whose cauldrons the brine with smelly dill was boiling, and crowds of pickle barrels stood around, with their lids removed, prepared to get their load of cucumbers for pickling.

The already familiar squaw-team worked there, but they did not have time anymore for chin-wagging about "her" and "him". They cooked the pickling oozuar in the stove-embedded cauldrons under iron lids and poured it into the barrels loaded with cucumbers.

I did not aspire to become an oozuar-cook, I was satisfied with the job of a stoker feeding the stoves with the wood-waste from broken boxes and split klepkas, some of which had to be shortened by an ax. In general, it was not a conveyor job – they would call and tell when to add the fuel, and then again go and get seated someplace, and wait for the next call.

And I sat in the shadeless yard under the scorching sun way off from the stoves by which it was hellishly hotter. To while the time between calls, I practiced taking chords of a six-stringed guitar: from D-minor to A-minor, to E-major. A narrow cask stave grabbed from the pile of fuel served the guitar neck. The lady-squaws laughed from about the boiling cauldrons, "Found your missing klepka at last?"

Without paying them any attention, I took B-7th and thought of Natalie…

~ ~ ~

If you walk along the sidewalk and meet a girl with a kerchief around her neck tied not like the pioneer necktie though but with the knot moved onto her shoulder, you get it immediately that she knows what's what in the chic style. And at once you feel like coming up to ask her name, and start a talk.

But how to speak up? What to say? Who cares to get "piss off!" in answer and then feel yourself a squashed tomato?. However, it's quite another kettle of fish when you know that the stylish girl's name is Natasha Grigorenko, and you have even tried to learn ballroom waltz as her partner, under the button-accordion of Volodya Gourevitch, aka Ilyich.

"Hello, Natasha! How you doing?"

"Oh, Sehryozha! Is that you? Actually, at School 12 everyone calls me 'Natalie'."

We happened to be walking the same direction and I saw her to the corner of the street she lived in, Suvorov Street, opposite the middle driveway into Bazaar.

(…or was it she to greet me first on that sidewalk? After all, for tying the kerchief that dashy way one needs not only the grasp of fashion but being of a resolute cast as well…)

Whoever started it, but the next step was made by me. Maybe not too soon. In a week or so. Or was it even a month?. Anyway, I made that decisive step, or rather a very resolute jump.

Radya and I were riding the back steps in the Settlement streetcar, getting fanned by the strong counter wind. And when the streetcar rumbled along Bazaar, I suddenly turned my head and glanced across the road into Suvorov Street. Not that I had any reason for that, yet not far from the corner, two girls were playing badminton. Sure thing, I immediately recognized Natalie's long straight hair.

"Bye, Radya!" And I jumped off without answering his, "Where to?"

Yes, no mistake – it was she. Her partner also turned out to be my former classmate, Natasha Podragoon, who, as well as Natalie, went over to School 12 because of the Math and Physics specialization there.

Of course, I immediately fired up some yakety-yak about providing free masterclasses to share proper skills for taming their shuttlecock. And then—could you imagine!—one more chance passer-by turned over the corner. Radya obviously jumped off before the stop at our school, although he had been going to visit his Grandpa.

Natasha Podragoon went home soon, because both Radya and I talked to her so too little, if at all, on account of her being fat. Natalie invited us into her khutta's yard, where, on a table dug into the ground, lay a stack of Czech Film a Divadlo magazines. I got carried away with perusing the pictures, and Radya snapped up the conversational initiative.

But then from the neighbor garden, two missiles of dry earth lumps whooshed, though missing under. Natalie yelled at the boy she would complain to his parents, but for Radya that seemed not enough, and he ran to the garden fence to whip the snotty fool up with an elder guy's lecture. Or maybe, he wanted to show off his sporting bearing, because he, after all, had been attending the volleyball section at the Youth Sports School for two years.

Either Natalie somehow sympathized with the ten-year-old Othello of her neighbor, or Radya, despite all his training, crushed some of the potato bushes on his run, but while the jock was bullying the boy behind the fence, Natalie told me to come on Thursday because she had more of those magazines. So we started dating, me and Natalie.

Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that she was dating me because I did not know the way of doing dating. I just came to 8, Suvorov Street, on the appointed day, greeted her mother, sat on the couch and turned the pages of another Film a Divadlo magazine. Some people know how to live! And where only could them folks manage to get such magazines from?

Then her father came home from work on his motorcycle with a sidecar. He had the same round chin as Natalie, and he gave her his permission to go out for a walk till ten, but no later than half to eleven. And we went out.

She talked a lot, yet not for just to flap her chops like many others. Natalie became my enlightener. Despite the long years of reading addiction, there was so much I did not know yet… That the coolest candies were "Grilyazh", only they were not on sale in Konotop. You had to go after those sweets to Moscow or Leningrad, and even there it's not a snap to find the treat… That the most delicious sandwich was bread and butter with layers of sliced tomato and boiled egg. And it should be rye bread, of course… And that Louis Armstrong had the hoarsest voice of all the singers in the world.

Following her lead, I borrowed a book of poems by Voznesensky from the Club library. I knew where it stood on the shelves but always bypassed because it was poetry. So that's what the real poetry meant!.

But immeasurably more than for filling my educational gaps, I needed her for the giddy thrill swoons. For example, when we were walking to the Peace Movie Theater and she allowed to hold her arm. Gee! That's impossible to describe! I felt the delicate skin of her forearm because she had a summer frock on and I held her biceps gripped tenderly. Although girls have no biceps to talk of. And because of all that I was on a full flight, I swam in thrill starting from under the bridge over Peace Avenue, past Zelenchuk Area, and almost to Peace Square. Before we reached it, she explained that it would be more correct when the girl herself holds you by the arm, and we went on walking the way she shared.

Also nice, though not quite the thing before that… And then I got hit by a ball-lightning because, walking as freshly explained and absorbed in the conversation, she half-turned to me and—O!—her tight right breast pressed lavishly to my forearm…the bliss that stops your pulse…

So, I had what to think about by the stoves in the Vegetable Base yard, while practicing chords on the missed but eventually found klepka of mine…

It's hard for those enlightened to abstain from sharing the light of truth they've seen… I attempted to bring the revelation over to my sister. We were walking along Forge Street towards Club when she said, "Come one, I'll take my brother under the pretzel!" and she took my arm.