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

"What?! Speak out!"

Now, before going out to the city she would make up my eyes.

What the fuck?!. Though, if you come to think about it, that was better than her being on the rag… Hercules would understand me. After the victorious fights against the Nemean Lion, the Lernean Hydra, the Cretan Bull, and other monsters, he was made (by a chick named Omphal) wear a female dress and spin the yarn in a gynoecium, with her high heel crushing his male’s dignity's throat. At least in some way, I'd equal that inhumanly hunky demigod… And I agreed…

Blueish eye shadows tinted my eyelids, black eyeliner accentuated the lashes… And out we went to the city…

(…at present, in the aftermath of all those "blue" and "pink" revolutions, after Elton John was knighted, after the charming cutie pirate Jack Sparrow, etc., etc., people became more intelligently aware.

In those pre-enlightment days folks needed more than a glance to get it what the heck was there with my visage. Then some shrugged, others giggled…)

Borya Sakoon, who came out of his five-story block in Zelenchuk Area greeted me cheerfully but, after a more focused look, suddenly changed in his face. Genuine fright distorted the worn-out facial features of Overseer, the unfinished "hairy yob…" stuck in his throat and he fled back to the block of his residence.

(…and that was the man who survived the rampant banditry and all kinds of "black cat" gangs in the post-war Konotop!

Or maybe because of that? To grab the old Walther gun from the down-most drawer in his chiffonier?..)

"You are nuts on the run from their having your head checked," concluded my younger sister Natasha flatly, when she met us on the sidewalk of Peace Avenue.

" …but I don't care
'cause of this hardon…"

In the Central Park of Recreation, Olga took out her cosmetic bag and washed out my War Paint, so much for faking a Hercules. Then Skully's girlfriend Nina with her girlfriend Ira came up to us, and the 3 girls walked off looking for a place to have a smoke.

A pack of Settlement bros approached me, they were celebrating it in full swing already. They felt elated, they wanted that an Orpheus from the Settlement was also nyshtyak. They tore off the lid from an intact bottle and handed it to me… Everything in this life is to be paid for, even your popularity. I raised the bottle up, threw back my head, cast the parting look at the sun, and started drinking from the bottle’s neck.

Then the bottle went from hands to hands around the circle warm and emotional.

Then we went to a deli for more wine.

Then I felt sick and reeled off home…

I woke up in the lean-to on the iron bed which inherited the space from the "Jawa" bike when the Arkhipenkos moved to their apartment. My "dacha" season had already been over, but the bed still tarried in the lean-to and, as it happened, that was the rightest place for it.

I woke up with my raincoat and shoes on, but the bare spring mesh of the bed didn't mind. The main thing was that I hadn't overslept the farewell dances that we were playing in Park that night. Only I still had to trudge all the way there being so stiff and with that oily smack in my dried up mouth and—ouch!—with that pain in the nape…

I finally came there when everyone was already schlepping the equipment to the dance-floor stage. Lyokha fussed that I was shirking, and Olga too began to lay into, "Where did you get lost?"

I hardly could explain that I was very so very much sick, and Lyokha said all that I needed was a hearty swig to get back to life. I shuddered at the very thought of it, but Lyokha and Olga started to laugh at me.

Yurko, the young guy whom Olga used as her errand-boy, ran to a nearby deli and brought wine. I forced myself to take a few gulps and—lo!—the remedy brought me back to life…

After the dances were over and the equipment dragged back to the ticket office, Olga and I left the Plant Park and in 2 minutes of suspensive walking reached her back-alley.

The first khutta, then the Sveta's one, the third was for us. I assuredly walked Olga to the wicket, opened it and… all of a sudden, she recoiled!.

By age, I was two years older than Olga, yet always felt, like, it was another way around. She knew more than I learned from all the stuff in all the books I read.

Besides, she enjoyed respect and authority. Whenever any of the girlfriend in our bohemian milieu had problems with outsiders, she turned to Olga for help. Olga walked out with the brazen and put the stupid cow in her proper place…

It was a rare evening when the dances went off without a fight… A multi-voiced discordant squeal broke suddenly from the dance-floor, yet not at all in time with the number played at the moment. In the dense mass of the youth gathered for collective recreation, a circle of vacant space formed in no time, filled with the blur of rapid gusts of fists milling the air. The vortex swept, tornado-like, across the dance-floor, thru piercing shrieks of girls giving way.

Abruptly yet asynchronously, we cut playing and encouraged dear friends to keep order, please. The defeated side, alone or in a ring of his bros, was pushing thru the crowd to the exit. To remove the low depressing hum, Skully set the tempo with dry snaps of sticks against each other and we started the next number…

Girls though did not make a show of their dissent and for their cat-fights invited each other to go out. Olga went out just a couple of times and gained respect and authority because in Theodosia she started attending dance-floors at the age of thirteen and, without wasting time on verbal preliminaries, decked them bang off. As a result, if some frostbitten bitch hurt feelings of a girl from the bohemian circle, then mentioning Olga’s name was quite enough to make her realize the blunder and shut up.

Another reason why Olga seemed maturer than me was the attentive attitude towards her from mujiks.

Once after the dances, when we were collecting cables and stuff from upon the stage, a frightened dude raced into the dance-floor, crossed it and jumped over the fence into the darkness of the Plant Park. At the last moment his chaser, a hairy-ass mujik over thirty, managed to deal a glancing strike and the fugitive sprawled into the bushes, but bounced up at once and ran away.

"I'll catch you, bitch!" cried the triumphant and, turning to Olga who stood by the stage, added, "Ain't it, Red-Haired?"

"You yoursel is the word," Olga answered diplomatically, and the latter swagger out the dance-floor.

That's why I felt to be younger than her. But the moment she flinched at the wicket to the dark khutta that feeling dissolved, and everything fell into place. Next to her fear, I felt older and stronger than her, I felt pity for her and compassion. After all, the younger ones should be cared for and protected. Even from ourselves.

I comforted the frightened girl and left without entering the yard. On my way to Nezhyn Street, I knew that I had done the righteous thing and was pleased with myself, yet all the same, I couldn't but agree with the diagnosis by my sister Natasha – "nuts on the run from their having my head checked "…

~ ~ ~

On November 7, the unusually long Indian summer ended and we moved over to Club to play dances there.

The Ballet Studio Gym opposite the cinema auditorium on the second floor was a tremendous room stretching for about 40 meters from its entrance to the small stage at the far end wall. The stage was intended not for concerts but for Evenings of Recreation and, therefore, was just a low deck with two steps running all its front. That way a recreating participant could easily ascend it when called by the mass-entertainer to take part in some funny competition or another event in the ongoing Evening.

The stage-deck took the central one-third of Ballet Gym's width the rest of which was sealed off with vertical bars of black-paint-coated rebar rods on both sides from the elevation. The light cloth curtains hanging behind the bars formed, like, some backstage.

In the center of Ballet Gym, high overhead, midst the roof bearing structures painted with the black Kuzbass-Lacquer, there was fixed a large white ball encrusted with the scale-like mirror shards all over. Besides, among the joists there was also installed a searchlight focused on the ball and one click of the switch set in motion the ball-rotating electric motor and also hit the ball's rind of mirror-scales with the straight beam from the searchlight to get fractured into innumerable dim specks of light idly floating along over all and everything within the huge Ballet Gym.

The length-side walls consisted mostly of manifold tall windows, below which the handrail for the students of ballet art ran from end to end. The butt wall opposite the stage was paneled, according to the ballet school tradition, with large, tight fitted, squares of mirrors which conferred onto the room its second name – the Mirror Hall…

The Mirror Hall served an ideal place for any get-together, both the New Year matinees for the Settlement kids, and School Graduating Parties, and Evenings of Recreation for the Plant youth, and, last but not least, for dances. And the dances it was to reveal the ideal's weak spot – its floor. In less than a month the treds of a couple of hundred dancers scuffed the red paint coat off the floor and bared its timber planks. Yet, the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, said it did not matter.

Behind the curtains on both sides of the stage, there were installed the huge loudspeakers transported from the summer cinema in the Plant Park, and they produced some really bomb sound, awesome nyshtyak! In the common reflection, blurred by the distance to the far-off wall of the Mirror Hall, our figures with guitars stuck up over the rhythmically swaying whirlpool of dancers' heads in the huge murky void whose only illumination was the floating swarm of soft light specks – round and round, and round – and everything went on nyshtyak thru and thru.

And only Chuba fussed and bitched that the sound of his bass guitar put out by the two portable loudspeakers on the stage was lost completely behind the mighty boxes with the meter-wide speakers. Lyokha usually assuaged him that he knew a guy who had low-frequency bass speakers for sale, we only had to procure material for making a box to install those. And it was also Lyokha to suggest the relevant place where to get the material in question – the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant. After all, we needed just one sheet of thick plywood, all in all, 3 by 2 meters.

We, the Plant affiliated Orpheuses, started to mull over a plan… In the Repair Shop Floor, there was no plywood whatsoever, iron and steel were all we dealt with. The proper place to look for plywood was surely the Car Repairing Shop Floor, where Chuba worked. And he admitted that the plywood could be extracted from the cars brought for repair, but how to get it outta Plant?

He resolutely declined the proposal to cut the plywood into pieces the size of the bass box parts and drop them over the wall in Professions Street because his overseer would fire off uncomfortable questions about the source for such immodest quantities of so expensive material.

Thus, there remained the one and only option – to get a whole, intact, sheet out of Plant thru the Club building, with its never closed side door to the Plant grounds, next to the movie list painters’ room.

However, the planned mission had a certain slippery point – the Car Repair Shop Floor and Club were located at the opposite ends of Plant. Dragging the whole sheet thru all of the Plant territory? Chuba refused to take such a risk, neither Skully showed any whiff of enthusiasm. As usual, the hardest part in undertaking rested entirely on my and Vladya's shoulders…

Still and all, Chuba partially collaborated and ripped the plywood sheet loose in a car waiting for repair on a sideway outta his shop floor. Besides, leaving the car, he somehow forgot to lock its door as required by the regulations… Thru the above-mentioned door, I and Vladya penetrated the car to find, in the indicated place, the coveted treasure – a standard sheet of thirty-millimeter-thick plywood blotted in a couple of spots but, on the whole, it did not matter.

We dragged the plywood out of the car, grabbed at the edges, and carried on over the crunching gravel of the track ballast shoulder, then along the even and not so noisy asphalt paths between the Plant shop floors. On the way, we kept persuading each other that the sheet was not particularly heavy and that there was nothing special if two workmen carried it bypassing the shop floors within Plant. Although we, personally, had never observed such a picture because dollies were a usual means of transportation for the purpose.