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

(…well, okay, then…

Sarah and Abraham had also been there…)

He had a long table in his room all filled with wine bottles, sort of a hussar banquet. Sometime earlier, he was a cadet at the Stavropol Military Aviation School but got expelled and now came there to see his friends, and all those already were third-year cadets…

I knew their Aviation School, out squad-team once were laying partitions in the basement of some building there. When the bell sounded and the cadets rushed to the classes from the yard, we combed trash pits in the gazebos hunting cigarette stubs… Now they were sharing common memories with each other, toasting this and that from their mutual past.

We also drank. And then I saw how that kicked-out cadet dropped his palm on Olga's knee. What to do? To surprise him with a bottle crushed against his pate? Not quite traditional treatment of your prospective brother-in-law though.

Of course, she took his hand off and I, like, didn't see anything. Soon we left and back in our room she said, “Well, and so what of it?”

Indeed, on Peace Square in Konotop when our whole passe alighted on a bench by the constantly dry fountain for a smoke, they also stroked her knees and she as casually brushed their stray hands off. Yet, we weren't married then…

In the morning, when I ran to the UAZ van taking Ensigns to the detachment, Jafarov rocked with laughter in its open bed.

"You ran as if in a slow-motion film stretch. Clearly doing your best, but still no progress. I swear by Mommy. Good luck there was no counter wind."

They gave me the Leave Ticket only till the evening roll-call, dirty fuckers. When I returned, Olga was still sleeping, in her blouse inside out.

Then it was the time to check out, the room was for one day only. I told her I should be back at the Battalion for the evening roll-call, and she said her train was also in the evening.

We went to the cinema, some kind of a fairy tale about a Persian Hercules named Rostam… Then we were sitting on a bench at the foot of the Komsomol Gorka Hill.

She said that she had to go to the station, but no need to see her off, and she started to cry. The rare passers-by scoffed on the sly – a classical picture by Repin: the girl got pregnant but the soldier doesn't care a fuck.

When she left, I sat on a little more and then went home…

The next day in the Canteen, I knock-toppled a bowl of soup from the table. It spilled in my lap, scolding even thru the canvas pants. I could not get it at all how it happened. Everyone at the table looked up at me, oddly silent, and no one laughed.

Spilled the soup in the lap…What sign could it be? The blouse inside-out. Why?.

(…it’s better not to think some thoughts, just leave them alone and if heedlessly started they’d better be dropped and not thought down the road to their inevitable conclusions…)

~ ~ ~

Zampolit ordered the Club Director, Alexander Roodko, there should be a brass band by the Victory Day, on May 9, or he'd get the boot and busted to a construction site as a plasterer's hand, and his Company Master Sergeant would rot him "on the floors" until his demobilization day.

Of course, we pulled for The Orion leader and did not let him down, in mere three weeks a brass band was thrown together. Jafarov and Commissar, clear enough, were two horn players, Pickle played the baritone, and Zameshkevich blew the tuba. As it turned out, in their schooldays, they participated in a brass music course. Karpesha was the drummer, Roodko played the clarinet, the Club painter dubbed the big drum and mine was the main instrument in any brass band – two copper plates. Bzdents!!.

Sasha Lopatko began his service in the same squad-team with me, but then his Dad came and held negotiations in the Staff barrack and Sasha was appointed the Club painter… His Dad was, by the by, a priest and, probably, for that reason Sasha got to the construction battalion. You can’t trust whosoever handling advanced weaponry, right?.

We rehearsed 2 numbers: “On the Hills of Manchuria” and “Farewell of the Slav Woman”, not because we got way too scared by Zampolit's threat but simply a lahbooh would do whatever is humanly possible to help out another lahbooh.

On May 9, we changed into parade-craps and were taken by the UAZ van to different construction sites escorted by the "goat"-Willys carrying Zampolit. Holidays were invented for idlers and the construction battalion warriors are always on duty. The squad-teams at the sites visited by those 2 vehicles got ordered to briefly leave their front of work and fall in by their projects. Zampolit pushed over a very short speech (the Battalion Commander with his leaky brain would start an oration for a half-hour without knowing what he was about at all), we played "The Slav" and "The Hills" and the sun shimmered playfully from our brass and copper… To have a holiday you do need a brass band…

Next step in The Orion's career became the one-night dances in the village club of Demino, in 6 kilometers from our detachment along the same asphalt road. In response to the kind invitation, the musicians not only played but, replacing each other at the instruments, climbed, in turn, down from the small stage to the small hall to dance midst the local youth. Of all The Orions the pleasure was withheld only for Alexander Roodko, the irreplaceable bassist.

Under the long-long song sung by Robert Zakarian, I was embracing the ample-bodied villager Irina. Life was smiling on me…

Before his demobilization, Yura Zameshkevich reported to Major Avetissian, the Battalion Supply and Maintenance Commander, that no one but I was qualified to replace him at the position of the Battalion Stoker. Zameshkevich's statement was actively backed by a Battalion Cook Vladimir Rassolov, aka Pickle, who had still another half-year to serve. In course of petitioning, the chef congratulated the Supply and Maintenance Commander on obtaining the long-awaited-for rank of Major. As a result, Major Avetissian granted my enrollment to the glorious ranks of chmo.

The collective name of chmo embraced all the servicemen engaged in the battalion internal services: the pigman, dishwashers, stokers, cooks, the locksmith, the tailor, the shoemaker, the projectionist, the drivers of the vehicles for the commanding officers, as well as the assistant paramedic at the first aid unit – anyone, in short, who was not fortunate enough to work at construction sites was referred to as a part of chmo reporting to Major Avetissian.

(…initially, CHMO was the acronym of "person messing around with the society" but soon because of its so impressive sound form the term forced to forget the original meaning and nowadays everyone thinks that chmo is a synonym to "wafler" only more degrading…)

Before his return to civilian life, Yura Zameshkevich showed me the location of the water well with the main water supply valve-wheels to keep the proper water level in the tank above the stoker-house. He taught me to light the nozzle in the steam boiler furnace with a handmade torch, to read the steam-gauge, water-reserve tube and pressure manometer. I was transferred to Fourth Company where all the chmo was listed, and Yura got demobilized.

The young draft was from the Crimea and Major Avetissian chose me a partner from them named Vanya who sported a thin mustache and thick eyebrows. It's highly doubtful that Major Avetissian's choice of Vanya was prompted by the eyebrows' thickness of the latter. Most likely, Vanya's father, who came to see his offspring on the third day of sonny’s service, forwarded convincing arguments in his negotiations with Major. I shared Yura Zameshkevich's lectures to Vanya and we split 7/24 into day-in, day-out.

The stoker-house of the Military Detachment 41769, aka VSO-11, consisted of two high halls in a red-brick one-story building. Each of the halls contained 2 massive boilers encased in their common lining of refractive brick, and a slew of pipes with valves and cocks – for hot water, for cold water, for steam, for fuel supply… On the concrete floor before each boiler, there was planted an air pump forcing the fuel to spray thru the nozzle inside the respective furnace. However, in operation was only one boiler, the farthermost from the entrance, the rest were reserved for the heating season in winter.

The stokers' task in summertime was providing steam for boilers in the kitchen of the Canteen plus hot water for the Dishwashers'. And, once a month, we heated water for the bath day of all the personnel at VSO-11 and Separate Company. Anyway, each day you had to sit at a round table by the high window opposite the deafening rumble of the air blower and the howling buzz of the nozzled flame inside the boiler’s furnace for about 4 hours until the on-duty cook knocked on the locked door of the stoker-house to say the havvage got ready. Then you could turn it off. The runs for breakfast and supper were shorter though. Silence is an invaluable grace… Until the next, one of the remaining 2, shorter, 2-hour stretch.

To the right from the entrance door, there was a narrow room of the pumping section to drive hot water thru the heating system in winter. But if going straight ahead, in the corner behind the twinned boilers of the first hall, you found the door to a small workshop. It had a window, a wooden workbench without a vice put by the butt wall across the room, an iron box in the corner between the door and the window, a hammer and a blunt chisel in that unlocked safe-like box, and a narrow mirror shard embedded in the plaster above the box, next to the switch for the bulb in the ceiling.

~ ~ ~

The arrival of summer was celebrated by the chmo of VSO-11 by a collective booze. The battalion's truck delivering havvage to the watchmen at the construction sites and those kept there even at night by urgent works came back with a box of vodka smuggled utilizing a huge thermos pot emptied of havvage. The on-duty officer at the checkpoint cast a fleeting glance into the bed of the returning truck, and it passed the gate.

The orgy, to which I also was invited because a stoker is a necessary accessory in the soldiery life, started after the lights-out near the remote car-boxes. In the bright illumination from the full moon, some fifteen chmomen sat on the ground in a wide circle, kinda aboriginal tribe of that field. Everyone faced the center of the circle where the glass of vodka bottles, and the sides of two pots full of meat fried by cooks in large baking trays at the Canteen kitchen, glistened in the moonlight. On the spread burlap of two empty sacks there piled several loaves of bread chopped in the Bread-Cutter's. Never before I had vodka from the bottle’s neck. The initial gulps were somewhat disgusting but the following kept pouring in smoothly.

The snack, regrettably, disappeared all too soon… I never finished the bottle in my hand. Having risen on unsteady legs, with the most best wishes to the honest company, I informed of the immediate departure of me to the village of Demino.

"All's nyshtyak, buddy-bros. What fucki' on-dut' what fucki' office..rr… It's me on-dut'… fuck!.."

Nevertheless, so as not to run into, I crossed the perimeter fence near the pigsty, away from the barracks. And there I made for the round face of the full moon that shone from above the distant village of Demino and was swaying back and forth like on a swing. I muttered reproaches to its treacherous inconstancy, and to the field as well for arranging a sea-rolling in my way. Then I fell down and tried to hoist me on my elbows but the earth gravity occurred too powerful and the field was so irresistibly soft…

I woke up in the dusk of dawn, only a hundred meters from the pigsty, dying from thirst, and went back to drink water from the tap in the stoker-house before crashing onto the workbench in the workshop room…

Looked like I’d given too free rein to my wishful thinking, imagining that till the end of service I would live my life between the Club and the stoker-house. On some morning after a night shift, Major Avetissian found me asleep in the workshop and ordered to retreat to the Company barrack. And that at the time when the majority of chmomen skipped even mustering the roll-calls before lights-out! Thus, the soldier-clerk from the Stuff half-barrack slept at the Medical Unit hosted by the paramedic assistant sharing a bed from the couple of normal ones waiting for ill personnel whom he escorted to the city military hospital the moment they popped up with health complains. The Club painter Lopatko had a room of his own at the Club. But the ill-fated stoker, after sitting all day in that howling hell of the stoker-house, had to go for the evening roll-call where instead of absent chmomen a voice from the ranks would shout out "on duty!" and there were no questions at all…

To somehow pass the time while they were cooking havvage, I took a book from the library in the Staff barrack, with the assistance of the Staff clerk. The book was chosen because of its thickness so that it lasted longer. The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Wow! That's the stuff! A culmination upon culmination… After those of his works prescribed by the school curriculum, I wouldn't ever think he was writing so cool… And there wasn't anything else to take from the Staff library with its just one shelf of books, because reading the masterpieces of B. Polevoy or N. Ostrovsky was not worth the while after the Dostoevsky's novel.

At the Club, Roodko passed me a booklet The Beatles in America about their tour there. Some of the youngs brought it along. I undertook to translate it because that booklet had more pictures than the text. However, without a dictionary at hand, my school stock of vocabulary allowed me to understand it only here, there, yet not everywhere. I filled the gaps with my wild guesses, but Roodko was happy all the same…

And so it went in a circle – the hiss of steam, the rumble of the air pump, the Club, the evening roll-call, and back to the Club. And in the morning all over again…

Here, Jafarov rushes a-galloping into the stoker-house with his eyes round and bulging, the face as pale as the white marks on his khaki shirt back which he had fucking rubbed against some whitewashed wall.

"Where to hide? Chief of Staff’s after me!"

I watched out the door and who was there but him – making for the stoker-house from the Canteen's kitchen in his boxer swagger. Jafarov barely had time to jump out thru the window in the workshop into the tall grass on the other side of the stoker-house. "No, Comrade Major, no one was coming this way."

But the Major’s scent would surpass that of a hunting dog, and in a moment, from behind the corner, "Ensign Jafarov! To me!"

Fucking caput to you, Ensign, I swear by your Mommy… Why should Chief of Staff chase Jafar as with a fucking prick in his arse? But then, who fucking cares…

And in the evening there's another hunt in the field. The swarthy cowboys from Separate Company ran down a rat and drove it into a stub of plugged pipe there, splashed gasoline inside and set on fire. The rat whizzed out and jumped around the field like a ball of flames and they followed running – some cultural and sports event…