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

That was, as you call it, a question below the belt, but I recollected that Yesenin also lived some time under the Soviet regime, and started pouring out with a restaurant drawl to it:

"Oh, my leafless Maple,
Ice-coated Maple…"

Before my getting into the second verse, the examiner surrendered and yielded a passing score…

In the interim between the exams, I bought a couple of balloons for Lenochka. In the trade network of Konotop, such goods were seldom on sale and I did not like that her staple plaything remained the old suitcase preferred by her to a couple of worn-out dolls. She used to drag the scratched suitcase out of the bedroom and drop it in the middle of the kitchen to announce, "Cry, Grandma! Grandpa, cry! Lenochka is leaving for the BAM!"

It was about a year already that the Central TV news program "Time" was night after night presenting reports of labor achievements at the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway track, aka BAM.

>"Come to me at the BAM
I am not a stuck-up Ma'm
On the rails, we'll have a sex…

I did not like that the child was growing so over-politicized, and I had warm recollections of how at the Object we loved to play balloons.

And so, one evening stretched out on the hostel bed, I watched the smoke from my cigarette swimming up to the ceiling which view suggested an idle idea of staging an experiment in Physics because there was nothing else to busy myself with… By its behavior, the smoke very clearly indicated its being lighter than the air. Now, if we had a balloon filled with it then the balloon should soar up! It only remained to solve the purely technical problem of stuffing the smoke inside a balloon.

The solution was prompted by my life experience. More than once I watched a couple of stoners assisting brotherly each other to get a swift lift, high as a kite, by the trick code-named "locomotive". One of the bros would put a sparked joint into his mouth reversely, the burning end first, observing, sure thing, precautions to avoid inner burns, and then the benefactor blew. As a result, a squirt of thick smoke was pouring from the tube-mouthpiece of the Belomor-Canal cigarette to be immediately consumed by the relief target.

Yet, for the outsider of a balloon, a straight cigarette would also do, right? So, I lit it, inserted the mouthpiece into the balloon's neck, and blew from the opposite end a lungful of air. But it should be kept in mind that the "locomotive" smoke is eagerly sucked and kept in by the consumer, whereas the air, when forced into a balloon, tries to escape the rubber body thru its neck. In short, the amount of the smoke-mixed air, which I had blown in, burst back thru the cigarette mouthpiece and knocked the smoldering tobacco out, straight into my throat.

(…"When a dog has nothing to do, he licks his balls." my father used to say.

Sometimes it's better to lick than bungle about the aeronautics…)

Sure enough, I coughed the tobacco out after its smoldering fibers scorched my larynx somewhere behind the glands. That's what happens when a philologist meddles with Physics matters. Firstly, it hurts, and then go to pharmacies in search of Furacilin for treating burns.

(…but what hurts even more, hurts to tears, that no lessons may prevent my future follies. Certain morons are not able to learn from their own experience because it is not possible to foresee which other locomotives with balls, or vice verse, will inspire my inquisitive mind tomorrow…)

I was matriculated at the English Department, but the triumphant departure to Konotop was somewhat clouded by having words with the commandant of the hostel who found a shortage of one pane in the window of my room. The glass had not been in place when I moved in there, but the jackass did not listen to my explanations, demanding retribution in ready money, or finding a workman who would insert the pane. Beside not having the specified amount, I also resented the unjust rip-off. When left alone in the room, I went up to the upper floor and pulled a glass from the window in the toilet. The pane size fitted perfectly, I do love the standardization! The commandant still croaked that the glass had obviously been in use and I proclaimed that it was bought at a chance seller in Bazaar, at which transaction I missed to notice those paint smudges along the edges.

(…our old good world is very repetitive, at any rate, my arguments when dealing with commandants are all alike…)

~ ~ ~

Olga resisted the very idea of my striving for higher education, moreover in the field of pedagogy. As for English, she did not consider it a specialty at all because everyone should know the language nowadays, so she was told by a baby doctor who visited to treat Lenochka's cold. I responded by calling the doctor smart dumb-ass and swore to come to Konotop on every Saturday. Yet, Olga stopped pecking at me only after I agreed that she would dye my hair with hydrogen peroxide. That's why in the all-out picture of the 1975 first-year students at the English Department of the Nezhyn State Pedagogical Institute, aka the NGPI, I had the looks of that fancy ass-hole of a protagonist in The Hero of Our Times by Lermontov—a blond with the dark mustache…

Our course was split into four groups of twelve students each, with only one male per group. The exactly same male-female ratio was maintained at all the other courses of the English Department.

Because of my obviously dyed hair, some local young fairy started trailing and coveting me with signs of care and close attention along with insistent proposals to make friends which solicitations were full of wooing intonations like those by the boy from Nalchik. After a shock sample of construction battalion parlance, he bleated that his life was ruined for he had missed his chance of going to Moscow because of me, and pissed off.

Olga immediately informed me that in Nezhyn I was hanging out with fags. To my demand of specifying the source of the fabrication, a certain Shoorik was indicated as the horse mouth, whose sister studied at the Physics and Mathematics Department of the NGPI.

At my request, Lyalka called Shoorik out of the Loony dance-floor into a dark alley where I allegedly wanted to have a talk with him. I hit the summoned Shoorik on the jaw and he did a runner with all deliberate speed. I didn't pursue though and only roared after him in the best traditions of construction battalion, "Come here, fucker!" Rather an odd if not counterproductive way to lure back an escapee running for their dear life, if you come to think of it….

The classes in the Old Building lasted from nine to almost three and then I went along the wide asphalt walk towards the sandstone-tiled New Building in front of which there stretched a row of thick sprawling Willows screening beneath their canopies straight benches without backrest… In 30 meters from the New Building's left corner, there loomed the red-brick five-story block of the student hostel, aka the Hosty and alongside if, after another 30 meters, there stood the canteen, a tall two-story Mausoleum-like structure styled as a couple of glazed cubes.

The large hall on the second floor contained a crowd of four-sitter square tables wrapped in the hum and babel of students' voices, of water whooshing in the dishwasher’s, snaps of kitchen utensils, clicks of plates with chosen havvage landing on the plastic trays being dragged along narrow railings by the kitchen counter towards the woman in the stiff tube of white cloth upon her head behind the cash register in the end of the multi-rail-path.

With a fleeting glance at the tray’s load, the nun of the order of Starched Cashiers announced the verdict—from 60 kop. to 1 ruble—accepted the payment, gave the change, and her box spat out another paper slip onto the heap of the neglected checks… At times some students, with a quirk for research, took the same set of food while in different points in the moving line – just so, from purely scientific curiosity. The payment for those control sets varied. The cashier created the price on the fly, by the inspiration prompted by the client's looks, the outside weather conditions, and the level of noise in the hall…

After finishing their meal, guests went to the first floor, past the shortest embodiment of human wisdom E = mc

, painted on the wall at the staircase landing. Plagiarizing a Russian byword, an empty stomach makes you a slow learner, while after the meal the theory of relativity and stuff might seem more digestible, you never can tell.

(…by the by, it's a moot point who's wiser – Einstein or the guy who found such a fitting place for the application of the genius’ formula…)

On the first floor, there was the constantly locked hall of celebrations that hosted a couple of weddings per year. Going out onto the high porch you could still turn into a glass door of a small confectionery with 2 saleswomen in nun whites, and the usual assortment of sand cakes for 22 kop., two-day-old donuts, and tobacco products. Cigarettes were not too good, rather on a dampish side, except for "Belomor-Canal" of the most excellent quality – stuffed with dry and finely chopped tobacco, which is very important.

Once, being on high, I demanded from the saleswomen "The Ledger of Complaints and Proposals", which presence was the must in any Soviet store, and scribbled thanks on the Belomor account, concluding it "be blessed, dearest dears!" A graphomaniac would always find a vent for his unpretentious passion…

Now you could return to the five-storied Hosty. 3 columns of wide-section (36 cm) iron pipes, paint-coated in the tonality of medium rust, supported the flat concrete canopy over the wide two-step porch at the entrance. The columns, when knocked at, sounded differently letting play the phrase "do-re-mi-do-re-do!", thanks to precise tone pitch of the iron pipes. Although the institute had, among others, the Department of Music Teachers, yet the honor of that particular music discovery belonged to a student of the English Department who graduated before my enrollment. As for the mentioned music phrase, it was an old-time curse used by the lahboohs. Wherever you played it, any lahbooh, if he happened around, would get at once that old good jive running, "Go and fuck yourself, jerk!" One syllable for each note, exactly…

The glazed door on the porch let you inside the small glass-walled cage of vestibule with another door opening into the lobby in whose right corner there stood a sizable desk with the on-duty watchwoman behind it guarding the square shield of plywood fixed on the wall, with rows of nails for hanging the keys to the rooms in the Hosty. If the nail beneath the ink-written ‘72’ was empty, then one of my roommates had already grabbed the key and passed over to the room. In the long corridor behind the lobby you could take any, either right or left, turn and reach one of the two staircases to the upper floors, yet the left one was the shorter route to Room 72.

Each of the floors belonged to a different department, aka faculty. Thus, the second floor was inhabited by the students of the Biology Department, aka Bio-Fac. The English Department, aka Anglo-Fac, possessed the third floor. Mathematicians from the Phys-Mat lived on the fourth, and the uppermost—fifth floor—was for the Music-Pedagogical Department, aka Mus-Ped…

On any floor, leaving the staircase landing, you entered a long, pretty dark, corridor to which the light was getting only from its opposite ends, thru 2 windows (1 per each end) distended from the floor to the ceiling. The rest of the scenery was made of walls with rows of closed doors above the smoothly ground dark-gray concrete in the floor.

Room 72 followed the washroom of 6 sinks, which was the first from the end window, opposite the door to the men's toilet on the other side of the same window. At the faraway opposite end of the long corridor, everything was exactly the same, only the toilet there was for ladies.

On entering the room, you got into its narrowest part squeezed between the 4 plywood lockers reaching the ceiling—2 of them on each side. After the lockers, the room became a bit wider to accommodate a bed, a cabinet-box, and another bed lined under the walls which pattern was mirrored by the same arrangement under the opposite side wall. The wide, three-winged, window was right ahead between the 2 and under its sill were 2 more cabinet-boxes pressed to the pig-iron radiator of the central heating system. The center of the room was occupied by the dark-brown varnish-scarred veteran of a table with 4 wooden chairs pushed under, so that you could bypass it when heading to the window.

The soiled spots in the wallpaper marked the places where the inmates or their visitors habitually leaned their heads taking a seat upon the bed covers, while the wallpaper cleaner stretches bore dense columns of inscribed card debt records and scores in Throw-in-Fool competitions.

The round tin box in the center of the whitewashed ceiling slab contained 2 naked light bulbs of low voltage. The room was also equipped with 2 wall sockets (the left one falling out from the partition with the following room but it was a double partition so the socket couldn’t be pushed in from outside while from inside you had to keep in mind the socket’s state and withhold too wide gesticulation in its vicinity that’s why the rented tape recorder was always plugged into the wall to the washroom) plus the switch by the door. However, from midnight till six in the morning the electricity in the Hosty rooms was turned off by the on-duty watchwoman, with the general switch near her post. G’night, sleep tight, Jesus Christ Super Star, in the flock of rented tape recorders on the window-sills of all 5 floors!.

For those eager to scratch and gnaw into the granite of science, there was a reading room in the corridor on the first floor next to the hall with a TV box. In both the electricity was in place thru all the night. However, the reading room got empty long before the midnight, as well as the hall with the TV, except for the nights of an international football match or a new 4-sequel musical with Andrey Mironov on…

All of my 3 roommates in the pencil-box room were fourth-year students… Fyodor Velichko came from a hinterland village in the vast Ukraine-Mommy. The straight thick hair, jutting above his wide forehead, was somehow reminiscent of the straw-thatched barn roof on a quiet farm.

Sasha Ostrolootsky was brought up and educated in an orphanage, which didn't prevent his mapping out plans to marry the daughter of Professor Sokolov from Moscow. No one besides him had ever met or heard about both Professor and his daughter… Like Fyodor, he was not very tall, but looked more sporty, besides, his fair hair was softer, his nose was longer and he had the reputation of Casanova. Sasha’s favorite pastime was visiting girls' rooms on the floor to drink tea with sweets to which outings he was often accompanied by another inhabitant of Room 72, Marc Novoselytsky from Kiev.

Marc had a broad face with icicles of black hair hanging to the rim of his glasses and indispensable smirk beneath his thin mustache, he looked the most well-fed of my roommates. Visiting the room of Sveta Havkina and 3 more freshman girls, Marc and Sasha paid for her tea and jam with most black ingratitude. Sprawling on the covered beds of the inmate girls, they started a sneer-fleer-jeer discussion full of unworthy innuendos in the address of those low-grade Jews.

Sveta, a pretty black-curled daughter from one of the 12 tribes of Israel from Chernigov, was changing in her face to each of their anti-Semitic remarks but suffered in silence. For the next 2 days she was utterly out of sorts until Ilya Lipes, a third-year student with sideburns like in Pushkin's self-portraits, did explain to her that those ungrateful pigs were, actually, Jews themselves…

The fourth-year student Yasha Demyanko from Poltava rented a room somewhere in the city but visited his course-mates almost every evening. The people of Room 72 spend their spare time (which was nearly the only type of time by them) in constant Throw-in Fool battles at which occupation Yasha’s skills were simply superb and he also was the tallest of us. He had a long Baltic face in the frame of long brown hair with a natural wave and, likewise Fyodor, he spoke only and exclusively the Ukrainian language. The rest of us communicated in Russian but we all perfectly understood each other…

The fourth-year student Sveta, a native of the Nezhyn city, kept visiting our room regularly. She was the official bride of Marc and even their respective parent pairs had already known each other. Sveta did not play cards, she kept sitting on the Marc's—and only his—bed and held him in an iron grip, "What's that, Marik? I did not get it!"

"Well, Svetik, well, I just…" with cowardly lowered eyes behind his glasses, Marc began to meekly defense himself until the other players would express their indignation with the procrastination caused by his tarried move in the game.

Then he escorted her home, came back and, after they turned off the electricity in the rooms, he brought in his course-mate Katranikha. For a couple of minutes, they silently creaked his bed and parted. And that was correct because of the strenuous study-work awaiting us all in the morning…

~ ~ ~

Katranikha had a warmly affable disposition, widely open, unreserved and very hospitable. One burglar, after having broken into the Republican Fashion House in Kiev, decided it was time to lie low. He got off a local train in Nezhyn and spent a whole week in her room because they met each other on that train. And every night he took her and her roommates to one or the other of Nezhyn restaurants.