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

(…hmm, it’s embarrassing, I can recollect the mole on Lyonya’s upper lip but his last name gives me the slip…)

About him, it was not clear yet: to respect or not to respect? He was still wet behind his ears and until recently was sitting in the Overseers’ Nest by the locker room door. Then he graduated something in absentia and got raised, with his diploma, up the iron stairway, to the Management Office where were already sitting Engineer-Technologist (at the desk with his back to the window, but I don't even remember his name) and Senior Overseer, Melai, Anatoly Melai's father. He had a wide horizontal gash of a mouth and he was always silent, unlike his yodeling son…

Twice a month the stairway to the Management Office was climbed by the cashier with her tarpaulin bag from which she portioned out the advance or monthly payment to the workers depending on which of her two visits it was. The very first time, she gave me the advance of just 20 rubles.

When I brought my first earnings home, then, before Mother’s return from her work, I scattered those 20 bills all over the couch in the kitchen, one by one, so that it would seem more. And when she was back home, I said, "Mom, that's for you to dispose of." And right away I asked 2 rubles for cigarettes, without going into detail because she did not know that I had started smoking…

The working day began at eight in the morning. We passed thru the still silent aisle in the Mechanical Shop Floor to our locker room with tall plywood boxes along three blind walls and two additional rows of lockers put back to back to split the room into the oblong halves.

Each locker-box had two vertical sections: one for the clean clothes and the other for the working dress, aka spetzovka, given out to a workman once a year. From above, the sections were spanned by a plywood shelf for the hat and the package with the midday meal. However, at the midday meal breaks, both Vladya and I went home over a stile in the concrete wall to Professions Street from where it took just five minutes to get to our khuttas.

While we changed and had a smoke in the locker room, the Mechanical Shop Floor machine-tools started to turn on, one after another. The howling, rapping, and rumbling of their engines merged with the piercing screech of steel peeled off the workpieces. The cacophony of a working day was muffled to some extent by the locker room door but very soon it swung open and Overseer Borya Sakoon drove us out to our workplaces – to the line of vises or to the rack-deck in the yard where we seemed being busy with doing something…

The rest of the day, Borya Sakoon spent sitting by the locker room door on a bench at the Overseers’ Nest table. He leaned on it with his elbow, then with the other one and was chain-smoking cigarettes "Prima", one after another. Short, with thin fair hair and dun faded face, he had the same last name as Vladya but wasn’t a relative because both denied any kinship.

Frequent coughing fits made him pull his cap down and press it to his face to choke the discharge. When his therapeutics did not work, he slammed the cap atop the table and went on coughing with his face dropped into it. Then he snapped out of his pocket another cigarette, lit it up and the cough eventually died away until the next attack. At times, he stood up from the bench to stretch his whole body—a scraggy shrimp with his arms aloft against the tide of mad rambling of the machine-tools in the Mechanical Shop Floor—then he lit another cigarette, turned back and sat down again.

Once Overseer beckoned me with a finger inviting to get seated on the opposite bench at the table and, yelling over the roaring howl of the machine-tools, began to tell how soon after the war he went to dances in the club of Podlipnoye, where the village yobos started bullying him so he cut and ran but they were chasing and he had to lie down in a ditch and shoot his Walther pistol from there, and that he also witnessed how the law enforcing bodies did away with the All-Union thief-in-law, handled Kushch, who came to Konotop but they were following him and in Budyonny Street just neared from behind and banged into the back of his head, one second later a "black raven" drove up and he, a young guy Borya at that time, was told to grab Kushch by the legs and help to heave the corpse into the vehicle.

"Up to these days it’s nowhere you can buy the fabric like to that in the Kushch's suit pants," he shouted out and his fingers picked off his lips a stuck thread of tobacco fiber from a cigarette “Prima”.

However, not always Borya Sakoon looked such a total good-for-nothing. One day, Vladya called me to drop into Loony and watch our Overseer drilling the Ballet Group in the hall on the second floor, where a dozen girls held onto the handrail along the mirror wall, while our geezer strolled along their line like a karra cock sporting a short, diamond-shaped, necktie. Then, demonstrating some of the moves, he shot his leg almost above his head. That’s some Borya Sakoon…

The hardest period in the whole working day was the concluding half-hour. In that half-hour there was no time at all: it just stopped and it was better not to even look at that electric round clock above the huge windows in the end wall. Some endless stretch of vexing disappointment which brought about a strange itch to push the frozen clock hand with a straw.

(…I have no idea why with a straw, but that's what I hankered for at those periods when there was no time, although I fully understood that the straw would only break instead of moving that iron piece of crap…)

The Mechanical Shop Floor machine tools would slow down and fell silent, one after another. The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit gathered from elsewhere to line the workbench with their backs leaned against their respective vises.

The two-meter-tall Mykola-the-old empties his horse-long nose into the crumpled lump of a rag the color of earth-and-ash. Could you ever suspect so gentlemanly habits by the geezer?! Mykola-the-young froze at pensive picking fresh acne on his cheeks.

Tick! Twenty-seven to five.

Swarthy-faced Yasha begins to tell me a story how the Red Army took him along after liberating Konotop of Germans. A solitary shabashka-tinker at the grinding wheel in the corner does not interfere with the calm flow of Yasha's narration.

They ran to attack and the ours supported them from behind shooting the "forty-fivers" when one of the supporting shells shot off the balls of an attacker. With the slow move of his palm-down hand, Yasha demonstrates the low-arc trajectory of a flying 45-mm shell. After which the poor wretch ran another half-kilometer before he died…

Recollecting how I also felt nothing and only saw the ground of the bumpy field jumping before my eyes, as we ran to attack thru the shaggy fog in the military game of Zarnitsa, I believe Yasha.

He shifts his cap far back revealing the sharp, like an arrowhead, angle from which his black hair runs up under the halo of his cap peak. Not a speckle of gray. Looks twice younger than Borya Sakoon who once told me that at the installation of the TV tower something went wrong with the uppermost section. It was in winter with severe frost and Yasha took off his sheepskin coat, climbed up by the cable and put it to rights.

Mykola-the-old two heads taller than Yasha. They're sort of chums and after work go home by the same diesel train, only to different stops.

Tick! Seven to five. Okay, that's that; time to go to change…

Skully also dropped out of the Railway Transportation College and entered our Experimental Unit which was a smart move. They didn’t pay him any scholarship there but after getting the diploma he’d be sent to slave in the middle of one or another nowhere. Did he really need it?

So three of The Orpheuses got together. As for Chuba, he worked at the Car Repair Shop Floor put there by some protective hairy hand because a carpenter’s profession is cleaner than ours and better paid for, we scarcely ever ran into each other in the Plant.

And we continued to play dances even when Vladya chiseling sheet-iron peened heartily his finger. Club paid each of us thirty-six rubles a month. It seemed too little, but what could we do? At our attempt at talking business to the Club Director, he said that after buying the electric guitar for one 150 rubles there remained no funds to increase our salary.

True, the guitar of Iolanta brand was a classy thing – so neatly streamlined and it sounded miles better than make-it-yourself ones after The Radio magazine guide, Iolanta’s smooth scarlet gleam eclipsed and turned them into pieces of spray-painted plywood.

Soon after, I was sent together with Projectionist Konstantin Borisovich to the city of Chernigov after new instruments from the local music factory there – the bass, and rhythm electric guitars. Pavel Mitrofanovich talked to the Plant Management and I was exempted from work for two days, because of the long way to Chernigov and back.

There we stayed overnight in a hotel as business travelers, and at nine in the morning we were at the factory. Konstantin Borisovich went to talk with their management and I had to wait in the corridor for a couple of endless hours. At last, they called me in for checking the guitars which had no cases, and were much heavier than Iolanta, and covered even if with the glossy but black lacquer. It was clear at once that the factory hadn't yet mastered the electric guitar manufacture or, maybe, Konstantin Borisovich did not have enough funds on him to purchase some better products. Although, when we brought the caseless instruments to Konotop, Chuba admitted that the bass guitar would do.

The following Monday in the Repair Shop Floor locker room, Vladya kicked up agitation for us, all the Orpheuses, to get exemption from work for health reasons. His idea was to visit the Plant Medical Center with complaints about the sausage we ate the day before when playing trash at a wedding which snack was certainly stale. Only we had to go all together and keep saying the same thing.

So we found Chuba in the Car Repair Shop Floor and the 4 of us arrived in the Medical Center facilities all ill because of the bummer sausage we never ate.

The doctor suggested us get seated on chairs under the corridor wall and sent the nurse to the Plant Bath House after tin basins which were brought and lined on the floor at our feet – one basin for each of the ailing Orpheuses. The morbid preparations were crowned with her fetching a bucket of luke-warm water which she made purple pouring in a handful of potassium permanganate.

The doctor came back from his office and explained that the concoction should be drunk in liters before poking two fingers into the mouth, each person their own, to tickle the root of each respective tongue as deep as possible, which procedure would remedy the obvious food poisoning.

The macabre aspect of the basins in their waiting position on the floor as well as the instructions delivered with an unmistakable sadistic pleasure worked like a charm on both Chuba and Skully, their crises was over in no time to speak of and, leaving no traces, they hurried to their respective workplaces.

However, Vladya’s and my cases evinced a graver nature and we staunchly endured the whole hog of the procedure throwing up into the basins everything that we had for breakfast that morning. The doctor, impressed by our obstinacy, gave us exemption for the current working day.

We changed and left thru the Main Check-Entrance in the crowd of workers going out to the canteen for the midday break. Thus, for all our pains and labors we got just scarce 4 hours of freedom, all in all, and the next morning – get back to the mill, O, boy!.

The Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, kept us informed that Club was fixin' to buy an electric organ Yonika to be played by Lyokha Kuzko as the fifth Orpheus. Lyokha had thinning but long, reddish hair and sported a horseshoe-shaped mustache a-la The Pesnyary to somehow distract the public attention from the severe bend in his nose, the legacy of some old-times fight. Because of that disfigured nose, his handle was Rhinoceros.

He was seven years older than us, yet he was a cool dude who had The White Album by The Beatles on his tape-recorder which he played to Vladya and me when he invited us to his place. His father, Anatoly Efimovich Kuzko, the teacher in button-accordion class at Club, had built for Rhinoceros a red-brick two-story house in the yard of his fatherly khutta. The first floor was the garage with a sheet-iron gate, and on the second floor, there were two rooms and a kitchen. Some folks could live conveniently, anyway. Yet, the garage stayed empty of any car because Kuzko Senior did not buy it for Lyokha who was drinking like a fish for which reason his wife Tatyana left him taking their baby daughter away.

Besides The White Album, Lyokha also shared The Forensic Medicine Textbook to look thru. The yellowish aged pages had lots of black-and-white photographs with explanatory notes beneath them.

Knowing the illustrations by heart, Lyokha shared his favorite spot in the textbook, where there were rows of small-sized pictures (3 by 2 cm, like for a passport), demonstrating the difference between intact and dented hymens.

(…I have a strong suspicion that because of that textbook, all kinds of pornographic publications give me so dreadful shudder.

No kidding, they cram me with panic, I fear on turning a page in The Playboy to get smack midst a murder with the household scissors sticking from the open chest of the body up into my face, or else a guy strangled against an upturned stool, you never can tell…)

Climbing up and down the Plant concrete wall at midday-meal breaks was a real shortcut that spared a half-kilometer walk if compared to going thru the Main Check-Entrance.

At home, I warmed up soup or vermicelli on the kerogas in the veranda and took the meal into the kitchen where I doffed my spetzovka pants and jacket keeping only my tank top and underpants on. It caused no inconvenience to anyone because with the parents at work and the younger ones at their College I was home alone.

The reason for taking off my working clothes was those surplus ten minutes before going back to the Plant. While eating, you could use a stool even with your dirty spetzovka on, yet smearing the couch or an armchair with it was not right.

To fill the odd ten minutes up, I strummed the guitar and screamed different songs to train my vocal skills which I have never had. Yet, I sang all the same – may Beata Tyszkiievich, a professional Polish beauty torn from a color magazine and pinned above the folding bed-couch, forgive me as well as The Who in the black-and-white photo next to her. They also witnessed one time how my wild wails happened to bring about a boner and, grabbing from the desk under the window a ruler left behind by the younger gone to their college, I measured my cock. Locksmithing definitely instills respectful attitude towards knowledge of specific details…

One day, coming back after the midday break, Vladya and I saw Skully on a bench of the Overseers’ Nest in the company of Borya Sakoon and some stranger in clean clothes.

"Here they're coming," said Overseer, and the man suggested us, including Skully as well, to go along with him. From the flitting farewell grimace on Borya Sakoon’s mug, we could get it that the invitation was issued by a representative of law-enforcement organs, staying in the dark though as to why.

Clad in our faded T-shirts with no spetzovka jackets on because of a sunny, hot, October day, we followed his athletic figure in a tartan shirt walking contrary to the flow of latecomers who leisurely sauntered from the canteen in the square outside the Main Check-Entrance gate. Everything went as usual, and only we were pulled out and estranged from the routine life of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.

"Where to, smarties?" asked Peter Khomenko flashing a broad smile from the counter-directed stream of workmen, yet, at the abrupt turnabout of our escort, his mirth dried up at once and he accelerated his pace towards the Mechanical Shop Floor, not caring to wait for an answer.