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

Nowadays, the population grew much more sophisticated, spoiled by the elaborate cultivated humor so that an actor in the comic genre must inhale deeply and screech at the top of their lungs into the microphone – "shit!" for the audience to get it that it’s time to laugh…

Okay, we'd better get back to the concert at a village club in the early seventies of the XX-th century…)

Issuing torrid screams, Murashkovsky dashed from the entrance thru the entire small hall towards the stage. The case of button-accordion in his hands served a make-believe suitcase with personal belongings. After climbing the stage, he started the first-person humoreska on bitter miseries in the life of Adoptee.

His wife together with her Mom, his teshcha, had turned him in for the militia to prevent his going on a binge. While locked up, he dedicated all of the standard 15-day stretch in the custody to working out a careful plan for revenge and now, on his return from behind the bars to the place of residence, he casually broke the news about the barrel with pickled cucumbers in the earth cellar-pit going to pieces…

(The audience enliven and start to giggle.)

The worried wife and teshcha race down the ladder into the earth-cellar and Adoptee from above the ladder top recites the biblical principle of "eye for an eye", announces his verdict for their wrong-doings—fifteen days of incarceration—and slams the cellar-pit lid shut.

(The hall drowns in the jubilant glee.)

Every other day Adoptee drops to the captives packages on a string, like humanitarian relief with certain food items, as a dietary addition to the vegetables stored down there.

(Decibels of the thundering guffaw reach the neighboring villages. The spectators with a particularly vivid imagination can't laugh anymore – they simply jerk their heads with their mouths convulsively open, their squinted eyes drip tears which they have nothing to wipe with because their hands, balled into fists, keep knocking against the back of the seat in the row in front of them.)

Four days later, the militia, called by some of the neighbor-villagers, come to set the captives free, and Adoptee gets another stretch of 15 days in confinement.

("Boo-ha-ha" in the audience acquire resemblance to a collective fit.)

Murashkovsky throws at them the concluding lines, like a bullfighter dealing the final stab to the animal.

"Okay, I'm leaving.

You'll never find another one like me.

I won't even burn your khutta down, which I could do!"

Normally, to these words, the audience reacted with a farewell burst of laughter capable of blowing the doors and windows out together with their frames. Murashkovsky prepared for a parting bow to the general ovation and – Dead silence. Not a sound.

All froze like exhibits in the Madam Tussaud's Theater of Wax Figures. Only from somewhere in the seventeenth row there comes a tiny plop of a tear giggled out just a moment before… Then the seat backs begin to creak uneasily. The village council chairman cautiously steps up onto the stage with a crumpled word of gratitude for the concert. The audience disperse in mute despondency. Behind the scenes Aksyonov and Skully pinion Murashkovsky gone to pieces in a heavy fit of hysterics, no one knows how to appease him…

In record time, the instruments and costumes are shoved into the bus. All got seated in the Club Manager office for the traditional treat of gratitude to the touring actors: bread, lard, cucumbers, hooch. After the first glass, the village council chairman brings an awkward apology to Murashkovsky, "Well, here… er…in our village three khuttas were burnt down…in just a month…they still can’t find who…"

The Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, blushing more and more in his plump face, keeps vigilant control over the bus driver and after the man gulps his third glass—“to smooth the road”—we are good to start into the night.

At that stage in my life the taste of hooch was still making me wince, so a couple of gulps, snacked with bread and lard, got worn away quickly. I watched the impenetrable night rushing by behind the window glass.

The driver applied his whole soul to press the gas pedal right into the floor. We flew; we shot along the soft dirt roads of the district. The headlights snatched from the dense darkness occasional trunks and branches of the roadside trees. At times a small village khuttas scudded by… A guy and a girl standing by a khutta fence… seeing her home…

They looked back at the flying bus. Perhaps they thought, "The folks manage to enjoy their lives, they live in the city". They envied me.

Strange as it was, but I envy them… seeing her home… I also want that… in the warmly dark Ukrainian night…

But I have Olga, and in the back-alley where she lives, it’s the same night, yet I still envy that guy… dreadfully odd…

~ ~ ~

Olga was superbly good at kissing and liked it too, not for nothing she had so sensual lips. The bitter taste of burnt tobacco on her breath did not distract me overly much. Besides, standing by her khutta’s wicket, the very next time I saw her home, she shared a cigarette to me. I tried with cautious apprehension, yet it brought no bummer and I began to smoke even without Olga around.

The khutta, which I escorted her to, was dwelt by Olga’s aunt by whom she stayed that summer on her visit from Theodosia in the Crimea, where also lived her mother and elder sister. As for her father, he died in an accident driving a tractor when she was twelve years old. Olga loved him so much that sometimes she went to the cemetery in the dead of night to cry by the openwork monument welded of rebar rods with the tablet "Abram Kosmenko" fixed to it. Some name, eh? But he wasn't a Jew, just so was his name.

Her mother found a stepfather for her and her sister, no ZAGS registration though. He's a musician, knocking drums. One time, Olga lay on the couch with the temperature watching TV. He got seated next to her feet and covered his lap with the end of her blanket. Her mother saw it and raised some hell of yelling…

Then she went in for athletics, one hundred meter dash. The coach said she had a good physique for that sport. And their group even went for a competition in the regional center, Simferopol City. Before the dash, the coach made everyone eat a whole lemon, not a pinch of sugar to sprinkle it. He said, "It gets straight to the blood!"

Thus, between the kisses, we were getting to know each other more closely…

After that touring concert, Skully, Vladya and I went to the Seim for an overnight stay. By the evening local train, Skully and I got there bringing with us a large vinyl bag which Father had fetched from the RepBase. Such bags came there as wrapping for certain helicopter spare parts. The big translucent bag could easily do for a three-man tent. We also brought a guitar with us and then Vladya arrived by his scooter "Riga-4" loaded with the dinner.

On a sandy spit overgrown with young supple Willows, we put the bag-tent up. It was getting dark and we built a fire to share a bottle of wine by its light and the slathers of grub brought by Vladya, which seemed too much for a snack and was lavishly scattered around, however, no one cared because in the morning Vladya had to ride to Konotop after more chow…

He began to give out guitar riffs from popular hits. Above the placid water, the guitar sounds wafted mighty great, so clear, so full and… nyshtyak, in a word, it sounded out there… One fisherman in his boat anchored in the middle of the river liked it and asked to cut more. But when we roared "Shyzgara!" another night catcher from afar—near the other bank—began to curse us for scaring off his fish.

Skully advised not to mess around with him, the geezer could go and call more mujiks from the huts. The fire burnt out and we crawled under the vinyl roof…

At dawn, I woke up from water dripping into my face. Vinyl is absolutely water- and air-tight. The night-chilled walls kept our breathing inside turning it into water droplets—the condensate, at school they did not teach us of such things. So we met the morning cold and hungry. I hardly managed to wheedle Vladya to give me his "Riga-4" for riding after some eats instead of him…

Yes, motors are the real thing, you don't have to pedal or pull anything, the only effort is twisting the throttle handle and steering… I drove into the city mapping the routes in my mind: first – home, then to the Skully's khutta and to the Vladya's to collect available victuals, and then the ride back to the river.

"Plans on paper looked just fine
Yet, they'd missed out the ravine…"

Entering the left turn between the Station and Loony Park I heard my name called out loud. Over the Station square, Olga was dashing in her red mini-skirt. The coach was right – that's some physique!. I throttled down and let the scooter come to a stop…

She ran up with not a whiff of panting and let me have it – it's three days since I'd disappeared no one knew where and if I did not want going out with her I didn't have to she didn't care because yesterday she got a telegram from her mother inviting for a telephone talk with Theodosia and she said that's enough for staying and she had to go back in two days but I didn't care I rushed to the Seim with my fucking friends who were more dear to me than her and she was just a fool to think she had found someone she could trust and if I needed her the slightest bit I would stay with her right now.

After the cold condensate shower so torrid a squall, and her pending departure and the rise of incipient hope—hey, she might let have it off for a farewell, eh?—had their job done. I only begged for a couple of hours – to take the scooter to Vladya's khutta and go to change before our meeting at the Park…

Sure enough, my friends returned from the Seim by 17.20 local train, after they combed the entire sand spit in search of scraps that they had so improvidently scattered hither-and-thither at the orgy the night before. Who but I could understand them better? Once I also almost fainted from hunger on the Seim.

They stopped talking to me and boycotted for full 3 days. And who but I could understand them better? You couldn't boycott a dude for longer than 3 days if you played dances with him and your only means of communication was thru disgruntled Chuba.

(…you can imagine nothing meaner than the betrayal of your chums… Yet, from all the mean deeds in my life that particular one, for some odd reason, I regret the least. Although, of course, I am sorry.

"A skirt chaser, a dishrag, he betrayed his homeboys for a piece of the smelly hole, betrayed for a ho!" would say 95 percent of real bro guys… well, okay, it was overdone – 93 percent is the exact number.

And I would understand them. Moreover, I'd fully agree with them. But most of all I would pity the poor boobs. Too bad luck, they had not come across a woman for whose sake it's worth betraying…)

Now, Olga.

Her breasts certainly lacked the yummy splendor of the melon-like treasures by Natalie. And the nipples were not jutting rigidly as prescribed in the literary tradition to the mentioned parts in the virgin anatomy. Yet, on unbuttoning both her blouse and my shirt to press her topless chest against mine for the first time (she did not have a bra on that occasion after dropping for a sec into the dark khutta yard) I was stunned by the immensity of the sensation caused by the naked female flesh.

The fact of her breasts being small and the nipples not too stiff she explained by diving from a cliff after rapans in the sea which happened to be too deep there and that’s why at the hospital they had to pierce her breasts.

(..some whopper for of a gaping sucker’s ears? I have no idea.

As a champion dupe, I believe anything they tell me. Faith, I mean it, while listening, I believe anything at all from whoever they be.