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

We executed the commands keeping our hunger in check by the wishful thinking because a small group of recruits had been already sent to the Canteen for laying tables with the midday meal. And finally, "Fall in for the meal!"

"Slow.. march!"

In contrast to the Club, where you had to climb three stairs in the porch way to the door, in the Canteen, on entering the door, you went three steps down into the spacious hall filled with two quads of tables split by the central aisle.

On both sides of each table stood a bench of solid painted-brown timber allowing for ten men to sit in a row. The dark gray floor of smoothly polished concrete endowed the hall with a bouncing hum, like in the waiting rooms of passenger stations at their busy hours.

Along the whole left wall, two steps ran beneath the three consecutive windows to the rooms outside the hall. The wide uninterrupted shelf-ledge of white-painted tin stretched under all the three windows. The first (and also the smallest) of the windows was the seat of Bread-Cutter already closed from within with its tin-clad shutter. The next one—wide and having no shutters—presented the view of the kitchen with the steam rising off the wide cylinders of nickel-plated cooking boilers, and a pair of soldier-cooks midst them, in khaki trousers, slippers on bare feet, and tank tops under their half-unbuttoned white jackets in yellowish grease smudges. One of the cooks had a white-cloth beret on his head. The last, also wide and shutterless, window connected to the Dishwashers' room filled with steam and noise of hot water bursting from several taps at once in the long tin trough full of heaps of used enamel cups and bowls, and aluminum spoons.

The far blind wall opposite the entrance, in a pragmatic dark-swamp-slime paint-coat, separated the Canteen from the Club. In the right wall high up above the floor, the row of wooden frames kept the panes of hingeless windows…

The white enamel bowls, arranged in 2 long rows along the table edges, marked the seating places on the benches put close by. 20 aluminum spoons, studded with water drops, were piled in the center of the table for each eater to grab one. Next to the spoons, lay a heavy dipper accompanied by 20 enamel cups spruced up with combat scars from the pell-mell pileups in the Dishwashers' trough. Two and a half, multiply cross-sliced, loaves of "brick"-shaped brown bread on the crumpled aluminum tray provided also exactly 20 chunks…

The cooks began throwing five-liter enameled pots on the ledger-shelf of the dispenser window, issuing shrill indistinct yells. The first meal in the army began.

The borshch was red and scorching hot. It was brought in a pot from the dispenser window and ladled into the bowls with the dipper. Since thru all of the dinner each serviceman was to use just one and the same bowl, the borshch should be eaten to get the second course, or you had to refuse the first course at once and wait until the on-duty soldier brings the following pot with barley porridge, more commonly handled kirzookha.

(…take a look at the top in army high boots made of kirza [plagiarized English "kersey"], this artificial leather was invented as a war effort during the Russian-Japaneese war and though it did not prevent the defeat of the Russian Empire in that conflict yet for more than a hundred years it faithfully remained in both combatant and non-combatant service.

Now, if you ignore these deviating asides and carefully consider the fine pattern impressed into the surface layer in the top of high boots at the Russian-Soviet-(yes, here again)Russian armies made of the artificial kirza leather, you start to understand the accuracy of the unofficial term kirzookha traditionally used for the traditional meal of the barley porridge in all of the above-mentioned armies. No wonder, the considered likeness prompted servicemen on the doorsill of their hunger death to cook their boottops as it happened on the small barge that for 49 days became a plaything for storms in the Pacific before it was met by a US aircraft carrier off the coast of California. The Soviet sailors were proposed the political asylum in the United States because the Cold War proclaimed by the British hereditary political star Churchill in the Fulton piece of his orations raged globally at that time.

However, Sergeant Ziganshin recollected the beauty of both sunsets and dawns in his native Tatarstan steppe and refused. The rest three sailors followed the suit (being not Tatars though) and later all of them were awarded one of the higher orders in the Soviet Union after a proper check if they didn't become CIA agents while being fed up back to normal in the cornucopious State of California [only by mid-90's Askhat Ziganshin managed to rehabilitate from his addiction caused by the never-subsiding making him drunk at undercover interrogation sessions disguised as ceremonial parties].

All that happened in 1960 and gave birth to a popular folk-rock song running something like this:

Beware the boogie man!
Ziganshin's on the loot!
The night before
He chomped his buddy’s boot!

Which is the oddest point in this whole story because at that period the USSR hadn't got any VIA yet…)

The porridge was liquid too and as hot as the borshch. Compote poured into the cups from well-dented aluminum kettles, was not so hot, yet also liquid. The stunning din of bustle in a railway station served the background to munching and slurping. At times (not every day though) the peaceful symphony of animated feeding got pierced thru by loud curses and dings of a cup hurled bouncing and spilling along the central aisle. Nothing to get jumpy about, the soldier noticed that his cup was leaking and expressed his indignation with that fact because in the since-long-established prison tradition using of impaired utensils was the prerogative as well as the mark of a petukh, aka faggot among inmates.

On finishing the meal, the tools of personal saturation had to be taken to the Dishwashers' window and put in the appropriate piles or stacks on the shelf-ledge. As those accumulate, Dishwashers themselves would topple the heaps into the corresponding sections of the trough under the streams of steaming water from the taps.

Now we could leave the Canteen and return to the "training" barrack so as not to miss the next command to fall in…

The subsequent army experience proved that borshch was never to happen for breakfast or supper, those started immediately with kirzookha, and in the morning next to the bread on the tables they put a tray with 20 cubes (1" x 1" x 0.5") of yellow butter brought from the Bread-Cutter's window, which you spread on the bread with the handle of aluminum spoon picked up from the pile. If the butter was brought in one piece it was portioned by the most authoritative serviceman of those present at the table, with his spoon handle.

The piece of butter could also be reduced by a passer-by serviceman who started his army service a year and a half earlier, and now approached your table to reward himself for his combat merits. The lump sugar, brought for tea, would also do for one or another honored veteran…

On the whole, the ration was unpretentious, yet enough for to survive. In autumn it became even simpler – cabbage and water for the first course, cabbage and no water for the second, water and no cabbage for the third.

On a seldom lucky day, you could detect a sliver of lard a-floating in your portion of the kirzookha porridge (the detachment had its pigsty, after all) but nothing beyond the lard.

And on the Soviet holidays, they would even add white buns for the morning tea…

At first, I couldn't eat soldiers' food. Not that I was over-squeamish, but simply because no matter how hard I tried I still couldn't manage to stuff that ration into myself. It stubbornly stuck in the throat.

At one of the meals, a soldier from the previous draft, seeing my diligent agony, laughed and explained, "No fear! You'll get used and start to havvat anything." He was right. The matter was that in the construction battalion they did not eat, but "havvat".

"The company went to havvat – catch on!"

"And what havvage is it today?"

As soon as I stopped eating and started havvating, everything fell into place. At times, I even havvatted an additional portion.

But that came later because if a soldier in his first half-year in the service (handled in that period "young", or "salaga", or "salabon") dared approach the dispenser window with the bowl in hands, the cook, most likely, would feel lazy to splash into it a scoop of havvage and simply shriek instead, "Fuck you, salabon!" Not because of being a genetic misanthropist, but just aping the attitude he had suffered from when being a "young" himself. However, he also might not start shrieking – you come across exceptions anywhere.

(…in his 2 years in the army service, a Soviet soldier ascended the hierarchical ladder of servicemanship.

In the first six months, he was a salaga, aka young, aka salabon.

For the next six months—after the following draft had brought in a new wave of youngs—he became a dipper.

1 year of service and 2 younger drafts behind made him a pheasant.

For the concluding six months, with no old-timers above him, he was a grandpa.

And, at last, Minister of Defense of the USSR has signed the order on demobilization of the servicemen drafted 2 years ago, which act turns a grandpa into a dembel to be dismissed on the arrival of the new draftees.

The hierarchy terminology is not overly hieroglyphic.

Young meant the youngest in the service.

Dippers were entrusted with dealing the havvage out – for the youngs too early, for the senior servicemen below their status.

Pheasants took in the width of their cotton pants to have them tight like sausage skin and began to stagger kinda bunch of dandies.

Grandpa was antipodal to young, and dembel presented a nice abbreviation for "demobilization".

To go thru that ladder you had to live 2 years… At the age of 18 or 20 such quantity of time seems an eternity.

Besides, the quality of time in the army is unpredictable, some days fly by hardly having been started, while others – vice versa, you feel that no less than a week had passed already but—no!—it's still today. In the army, the amount of time of the latter sort prevails over that of the one mentioned first.

The most miserable lot was that of dembels who had pulled, and pushed, and dragged the un-embraceable lump of 2 years to the finish.

For them each hour became an eternity filled with soul trepidation, anxiety beyond any good riddance, disbelief that that was possible at all.

Soldiers from the lower rungs of the ladder tried to spur time employing for the purpose card calendars where all the 12 months of the year were printed on one side, while the card reverse called to keep money in the saving banks or fly by the Aeroflot airplanes.

They ruthlessly pricked each day lived thru with a needle, one by one. The card calendars lost their glossy appeal, but when raised against the sky, they showed quads of pin-thick holes – 1 for a month lived thru.

Such calendar-pricking calls for a disciplined unswerving mind and remarkable willpower. Not by a single pheasant have ever I happened to see such a calendar. Eternity humbles and crushes any high-and-mighty pride…)

The first day in the service ended about midnight – we were trained to fit into 45 seconds when going to sleep or getting up after it. In the time specified, you had to remove all your outfit, carefully stack the items on a stool in the central aisle lit by the long daylight lamps under the ceiling, and dive into your bunk in the koobrik, and cover yourself with a sheet and blanket.