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

Inserting a microphone into an acoustic guitar thru its soundhole is not an easy undertaking. You have to loosen a couple of thin strings to the utmost and shove the mike into the hole pulling them aside and then, naturally, tune the strings up. Now, with the rock'n'roll riff started, how could I possibly shout into the Vladya's guitar hole that we were The Sun duo? A nice x-rated pic, eh?

For the second number, the same crap, only in the opposite direction, to get the mike out. The full logistics of the situation dawned on us, when we were on the stage already, in front of the dense crowd bordered by the light of lamps around the dance-floor.

Vladya panicked, "To hell both them and their contest!" And I began to convince him that there was no way to turn back since we popped up there with our guitars. Or was it, like, we were just walking them around, sort of?

So he started the bass riff trying to jerk his guitar up closer to the microphone in which I announced that we were the vocal-instrumental duo The Sun. Then I lowered the microphone to his guitar for the crowd to hear clearly that it was rock’n’roll after all. Quite understandable that, holding the microphone, I could no longer support his bass part with my rhythm guitar.

With the second number, everything seemed to get in the groove. We both strummed our guitars, Vladya sang, I was looking above the heads of the crowd the way Raissa had taught us in the Children Sector. Yet, after singing one verse and the chorus, Vladya turned to me with rounded eyes and moaned, "I forgot the lyrics!"

The further, the merrier! May Chuba forgive me and may forgive me those present at the contest who filled that evening the dance-floor and the nearby park ally, but I took a step forward and yelled into the microphone that:

"Over the wide empty steppe
Raven soars in vain,
We'll be living for ages,
We are not raven's prey…"

By the next verse, Vladya snapped back and we finished the song off together, in a duo, just as promised…

Natalie and I did not go to the Seim anymore. We fell out, I did not get it though why she told me not to show up again.

Of course, I suffered painfully, and, of course, I was happy when in half-month my sister, aka Red-Haired, said, "I saw Grigirenchikha today, so she asks, 'Did Ogoltsoff go somewhere or what?' I says, 'No', and 'Why then does he not come?' says she. Have you quarreled or what?"

"We did not quarrel… Kiddy! you're the sun!"

The swimming season was already over, and we started to go out to the Plant Park where she showed me a secluded bench behind the clump of untrimmed bushes alongside the alley. I had walked that alley more than once but never knew about that bench, which stood as if embedded in the grotto of foliage.

There we were coming in the dusk when the rare yellowish lamps switched on in the alleys. The brightest, distant, bulb marked the window of the ticket office in the summer cinema projection booth. The projectionist Grisha Zaychenko, Konstantin Borisovich's partner, turned on the tape recorder and filled the dark park with the sound of cinema loudspeakers:

"The twilight shadowed the light of day.
Has the night come? I can't say…"

Then the ticket office bulb went out and the sеance began. The bench in its cave of leaves got wrapped in the darkness. At that moment our talk was running out. She threw her head back leaning on my arm stretched out along the upper beam of the bench and the world ceased to exist. Especially so, if she had no brassier and was in the green dress with a meter-long zipper on its front…

But there are limits for anything and when, immersed into another dimension, my palm slid down her belly beneath the navel to touch the elastic band in her panties, her head on my shoulder moved discontentedly, and she issued a hmm as if she was about to wake, so I unquestioningly moved along to the upper treasures.

Then the sеance ended. The bulb over the ticket office flashed on again. We waited while the handful of film-goers would pass behind the wall of bushes before we rose from the bench. Some dizzy inebriety… She must go… Dad told… No later than…

But all too soon the world waddled into the quagmire of the fall. It became cold, damp, wasted. The leaves fell down and the wet black branches could not hide the bench any longer. And who would care for sitting in the wet?

By inertia, we still went to the Plant Park, but it also became hostile. Once, in broad daylight, a mujik in his mid-thirties started to bully me. I had no chance against him. Fortunately, some guys from our school called him to have a drink behind the dance-floor, and in the meanwhile, we walked away.

The first snow fell and melted, the slush got fixed by the frost. The snow had fallen again and the winter started.

On one of the dating evenings when I unbuttoned her coat to make my way to the beloved breasts, she recoiled and said she could not allow everything to a man who, in fact, was no one to her.

Was it me that she considered no one?! After all that had been between us?!.

(…sorting out the toppled relations, like, who’s righter, who’s wronger, is just a farewell cannonball fired with the stern cannon after the ship sailing away…)

We broke up. Fare thee well, sweetest Natalie…

"Ah, tender rosebuds killed by the cruel frost…"

~ ~ ~

End February, a year after I told Mother that I agreed to be operated on, I had to lie under the knife. A manly man should keep his word, ain't it?

Starting in the evening and all night long, my stomach ached sharply and the ambulance, called in the morning, diagnosed the appendix that had to be removed before too late. I walked to the vehicle myself but there I had to lie down in the canvas stretcher placed on the floor. Mother also wanted to go, but along Nezhyn Street, there was walking an acquaintance of hers, who was late for her work, and Mother forwent her place to the woman who she always praised as a very good legal consultant deserving all the possible respect.

In the City Hospital, despite the urgency of my diagnosis, they were too lazy to carry me on the stretcher, and I had to walk up to the second floor myself. There I changed into the blue hospital gown over a white shirt with no buttons and walked to the operation room.

They helped me to lie onto the long tall table and fixed all my extremities to it by wide sturdy belts. A white sheet was thrown over a tall frame above my face so that I could not see what they were doing to my tied up parts. A nurse, whom I also could not see, stood behind my head and asked all sorts of diverting questions. The interview was obviously intended to substitute the general anesthesia because they only syringed some local anesthetic in my stomach.

The injection took effect, I followed how they were splitting me down there and getting into my abdomen but it felt somehow in a distanced way as if they were doing it to my pants, although at the moment I had nothing on but the hospital shirt on me. A couple of times it really hurt though, so that I even groaned but the invisible nurse behind my pate began to pour a fiddle-faddle of what a gutsy patient I was, she never saw so brave, so I shut up to let them finish their business without any distracting noise. However, to a cot in the long corridor, I was taken on a gurney, after all.

Two days later they brought me a note from Vladya. He wrote that he was down in the reception hall but they did not let him pass thru, and our class would come to see me when I was allowed to get up, and I should recover as soon as possible because Chuba grew violently untamed and kept jumping at Vladya like a Mazandaran tiger.

After the surgery, they warned me to hold back coughing and avoid any straining so that the stitches keep the cut. But could you really avoid it when having such friends?

"Chuba Maza.." And, crushing the paper slip in my fist, I pushed my face into the pillow to keep back the rolling up round of laughter.

"Mandara.. tiger.”

Hha! Haha!

"Ouch! It hurts!"

And even after I managed, with a lot of preservative stops, to read up the note, there was no way to ward off the jerky lines popping time and again up in my mind.

"Tiger Chuba Mazanda…”

Haha! Haha!

And tears seeped thru my eyelids squeezed so tightly. Vladya! You're worse than a tiger, O, son of a bitch!.

Ten days later I was discharged, and in one more week came to the hospital to have the stitches thread pulled from my stomach, and collect the reference releasing me from PE classes for one month…

By the by, Vladya's scrawl was more cryptic than a team of famous detectives could possibly decipher with all their methods of elementary deduction.

Half of the written essays he handed in were not even read by the Literature teacher who returned them unchecked but fiercely gashed, crisscross, in red ink. On some occasions, he even failed himself to make out heads or tails in his own graffiti and turned to me for assistance.

I was the expert arbitrator in his cryptographic disputes with Zoya Ilyinichna, "No, there is nothing wrong with the spelling, he always writes "e" that way, and this one stands for "a" by him."

"What "e"? What "a"? They're just ticks!"

"Yes, for sure, but that tick's tail is, like, a bit longer. See?"

I had a rough talk with Father when he said I should have my hair cut, for it already was as long as it’s damn hard to find a name for. And because of my looks, he was summoned to the Zampolit at the RepBase.