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

Needless to say, that I envied him – one whole year in India!. From his detour, he brought some books in English and those commenced circulating among the students at our Department and when my course-mate Igor Recoon made friends with Zhora, I borrowed from Igor a book which he borrowed from Zhora. It was a volume of short stories by William Somersault Maugham published at the Penguin Publishing House. The book was difficult to read because of lots of nebulous and tricky words. I had to borrow The Large English-Russian Dictionary from Natasha Zhaba, my group-mate…

Reading the book borrowed from Igor, borrowed from Zhora, I came across a really short story (some two-and-a-half pages) named The Man with a Scar, and its size tempted me to try my hand at translating the story into Russian. Moreover, there was a place for publishing – on the third floor of the Old Building next to the Language Laboratory, there hung the wall newspaper Translator, a sheet of Whatman with neatly glue-mounted rows of typewritten pages of translations made by the students of the English Department, alongside with the Classes Time-Table for all the four courses…

Besides being so conveniently short, the story highlighted the very essence of all those Latin American revolutionaries. The to-do list for such a revolutionary was not too complicated – to adorn oneself with the rank of Colonel or General, rally a gang, and start a war for liberation under the slogan "Liberty or Death!" until he became the dictator.

However, the would-be dictator from the story ran out of ammunition and got captured before he reached his goal. At the dawn on his execution day, he for a moment stepped aside from his gang lined up against the wall for the pending procedure and hugged his beloved who came running up to him to say goodbye, get a soul kiss, and be stabbed to death. Because they loved each other so much. Alma de mi corazon!

The current dictator, present at the execution, was impressed by such a poignant passion, ordered to single his rival out and after the firing squad did their job on the rest of the gang, they deported the man to a nearby Latin American State where his following career was that of a drunkard jackalling at bars under the pretext of selling lottery tickets… Once a bottle of beer burst in his hands and a glass splinter nicked his face, that's how he became the man with a scar.

Just so simple a story without superfluous frills. However, Maugham knows the way to present concise but tangible details in his stories. He is some real writer that son of.. er.. the foggy Albion.

(…the words in English are short, except for those borrowed from other languages, and a sentence made of them looks like a handful of scattered rice, yet sometimes it might contain a whale of meanings, enough to fill a whole sack.

In Russian, on the contrary, the words, because of their suffixes and prefixes, are long like spaghetti, or cobweb threads of which you have to weave what, actually, you were about…)

The wall newspaper Translator was supervised and edited by the teacher of theoretical grammar or something like that, studied at the senior courses of the English Department. Alexander Vasilyevich Zhomnir. A capital man.

(…nowadays such an individual would be referred to as a regular screwball, but then it meant a dissident they hadn't run down yet…)

Outwardly, he sooner had looks of a Ukrainian nationalist than of a dissident, but also too cunning to be caught, otherwise, they’d never allow him to teach at an institute. His long gray hair he combed back for it to immediately return to bangs over his broad forehead and touch his gray bushy brows. The shoulders were somewhat arched as if prepared to receive a weighty sack upon them, and in his movements there was the touch of clumsiness which takes decades of cultivation. Just a villager beekeeper for you or, say, a miller who had bored all the way up into professorate of linguistic neurosurgery… To the institute, he was coming by his bicycle, like a mujik, yet intellectually buckled it down with a padlock threaded thru the spokes when leaving his means of transportation leaned against a Birch tree.

When in the wide corridor by the Language Laboratory, I handed Zhomnir a thin copybook with my translation of the Maugham's story, he flipped thru it and with overly exact articulation of Russian words, stated that he did not work with texts in Russian, for which reason Translator presented students’ works in only Ukrainian except for the translations of poetic pieces…

Right, in my school certificate the Ukrainian Language and Literature were marked with "n/c" – "not certified", thanks to arriving to Konotop past half of my school-time which legally allowed ditching Ukrainian Language classes while the younger came too early to also evade it. Nonetheless, in a fortnight after moving to Konotop I was reading books in Ukrainian as well, so in two weeks I surprised Zhomnir with a Ukrainian version of that same man with a scar.

He bucked up and, with a glint of satisfaction in his eyes, smashed and crushed my labors to the finest dust.

I hated being flogged like that, yet I couldn't but see that he was right. Nonetheless, to simply ditch the whole venture was out of the question, not only because of wounded pride but also of getting hooked by wrestling obstinate Slavonic words and making them express what I was able to grasp from among the rolling beads of Maugham's language. The struggle was so exciting that I took the guitar back to Konotop…

~ ~ ~

The rumors I became aware of one year later, that arriving in Konotop on Saturdays I dropped my black plastic "diplomat" in the hallway and started off to whores, without ever caring a fig that, while I was away, my wife got laid promiscuously, readily and regularly, was a gross exaggeration. My relations with Olga remained steady, passionate and invariably brought a feeling of deep satisfaction. Except for that occasion when I staged timing…

My roommate Marc Novoselytsky, for no obvious reason, asked me about the duration of my having a sex with my wife. Caught unawares, I made a wild guess at modest ten to fifteen minutes, no longer. He mocked so tall a tale exceeding any limits of the humanly possible and we bet…

Olga did not get it when I put onto the bedroom windowsill the alarm clock normally stationed in the kitchen, and I did care to clarify the news… With the clock’s clacking on my brain, the shown results were a total debacle…

On Sunday night arriving back to the Hosty, I honestly admitted it had taken a niggardly five minutes, which report turned Marc’s usual smirk into a happy smile… But all of the other times it was all right and time did lose all meaning whatsoever.

Before it, we were visiting Loony and danced slow dances there with a sincere feeling, and we gave free rein to our vigor in the fast ones. She was good at it, in any style. In the meantime, we watched a couple of fights on the floor, which Lyalka dubbed ‘gladiatorial bull-battles’ or took a respite out of the hall, in the unlit corridor of the library wing.

There, leaning our backs against the windowsill beneath the silent dark-black panes, Lyalka and I shared a joint immersing into more and more deep comprehension of the aquarium essence of the interior around, while Olga was smoking her orange-filtered cigarettes. Everything turned nyshtyak and the thoughts about my being a KGB rat in Nezhyn sank to the very bottom of the aquarium…

My matrimonial duties I performed rather accurately, so when Olga said she was pregnant and the abortion regulations called for the husband to donor one glass of his blood in the hospital, I went there without much ado, though I had, like, always tried to keep protective at having it.

In the room for blood transfusions, I was shod in white shoe covers and laid on the table topped with a chilly oilcloth. There were two nurses in the room, and I was stunned by the expression about their eyes, or rather struck by the absence of any. Their eyes seemed being blanked with filmy blinds, like to the stilled gaze of dead fish.

With a needle on the end of a thin elastic tubing, they approached me and tried to stick it into the vein inside my arm to make the blood flow thru the hose. Yet, at all of their 3 attempts at piercing the vein, it stubbornly rolled away from the needle stubbed deep under the skin. Their bewilderment turned the dead-eyed nurses astoundingly merciful and they gave the needed confirmation ref that I had undergone the procedure as stipulated by the respective HealthCare regulations. Streamlined, out-worldly, as any other piece of paper from any other state affiliated institution or boghole…

(…tell you what, guys? Them those organs feeding them those officials since long invented their special dialect to pump snooty mist in the simplest things while all that’s needed, “unattended fucking, fine—250 ml of blood”. Period. And all those mildewed vampires wilt and wither from black envy in their frowzy twilights…)

The surrender was unthinkable and simply impossible. So, I had to learn one more writing—similar to Arabic lettering only with a wider sweep—the hand of Zhomnir with which he scribbled his notes over and between the lines of the manuscripts I kept handing to him. At last, he raised a bushy brow and said that it seemed somewhat like that already, and my translation would go for the next issue of Translator.

Then there came the day when Yasha and Fyodor, standing in front of the typewritten pages pasted in the Whatman sheet on the wall, congratulated Zhomnir with the fresh discover of an upstart talent in the field of Ukrainian translations with such an unmistakably Ukrainian ending in his family name – Ogolts-OFF. Zhomnir responded more directly – he was not to blame that so truly-truly Ukrainians as Demyan-KO and Velich-KO had never scratched their ass in all four years of their studying at the English Department….

Spring came hand in hand with the most cloudless and unalloyed love of my life. Everyone both addressed and referred to her as Shvydcha, but I called her by her name – Nadya. It was her to bring about the resurrection of my belief that true female principle was still and all alive in this civilization-jizzed world… We loved each other, love was filling us to brims and trickling over. Love for love’s sake is a lovable love, it’s the purest form of love, if you love it.

Why am I stating for both of us? By what right do I use so unrestrained allegations? The answer is very simple – Nadya was a virgin, innocent and inexperienced, as yet, in faking.

Then, maybe, I once again forgot to warn that I was married? The fact needed no advertising, she was finishing her fourth year at the English Department and lived on the Anglo-Fac floor in the Hosty. Some unique combination: virginity and the fourth course at the Anglo-Fac, eh?

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy…"

The fourth-year male students held a banquet in their pencil-box room opposite ours, to which I also was called. Nadya happened to be sitting next to me on the same bed and, when someone turned off the light in the room, I reflexively unzipped her sports jacket. She flicked it back right away and when they turned the light on, everything was the innocence itself and no need to call the police morale. However, Marc had read the zipper sounds in the dark, and he began to chaff. Nadya got hurt and left, and all was over.

The following day she met me in the long murky corridor on our floor, dressed in the same sportswear, spoke up to me, and smiled. Oh, the smile of Nadya was a real thing! Those dimples in the cheeks, those impish sparks in her eyes!

She fitted all the canons of a Ukrainian beauty – glossy stream of black hair down to the middle of her back, round face with velvety black rainbows of eyebrows over the shiny dark-brown eyes, voluminous breasts, rounded shoulders smoothly flowing into the arms and hands set akimbo on her abundant hips above the gorgeous thighs of a trained swimmer. Because she was going in for that sport.

And, with all that, what did she need me for? Well, here a simple answer again – that summer she was going to get married. Not to me, betcha, there was some lieutenant graduating some military school who would marry and take her to the garrison of his appointment.

There was not much time left, and we did not want to squander it away. We loved to love each other and we wanted more and more of it. But that came later because, at first, we had to tackle busting her cherry…

The initial couple of dates we spent in the narrow compartment with one window and one sink, partitioned, for some reason, from the rest of sinks and taps in the washroom. The truly spartan style of the tight interior did not matter much at the introductory stages of acquainting ourselves with each other, especially since the latch-lacking door of it was easy to block.

And then the guys from Room 71 left for a day or two, leaving their key to Zhora Ilchenko. He, actually, rented some place in the city but who would reject the key from a vacant room in the Hosty? They did not pass the key to him from hand to hand though, just hung it on its nail in the plywood shield behind the watchwomen's desk in the lobby. It's hard to trace back in what way that information reached me, but I did not wait for another invitation to such a gift of fate and snatched the key before Zhora.

In the evening, Nadya and I retired to Room 71 and locked the door… When the knocking on the door ceased, and the echoes of Zhora's cries, "Anyone seen Ogoltsoff?!" died away in the long corridor outside, Nadya started to gradually take off the items of her sportswear, accompanying the striptease of the stagnation era with a chant from the pre-war black-and-white movie "The Circus",

"Tiki-tiki-do, ay!
I'm leaving from the cannon to the sky!."

Although she was noticeably ill at ease… We lay down on the bed by the window. On the other side of the double partition made of gypsum slabs was my Room 72. By the window, there stood Fyodor's bed under the wall socket which was not properly fixed in its place and kept falling out when disturbed by the plug of a cassette tape-recorder.

Nadya's scream from the socket attracted Fyodor's attention. He took it out altogether and till late at night was listening to the moans that followed. We were not aware of being tapped, though even knowing it wouldn’t tell on our enthusiasm…

The following day, the guys from Room 71 returned and wanted the key back… On Monday, at the date in the washroom, Nadya was gloomy, silent, yet I managed to bring the reason out: Marc Novoselytsky was spilling dirty gossip among the fourth-year students that Ogoltsoff had had Shvydcha in the washroom from the back… I always sensed he was not indifferent to her, otherwise, why should he be so attentive to the zipper zips at that birthday? O, you'll catch it, Jewish bastard!.

On Tuesday, he returned from the shower, his hair freshly moist, the towel hanging over his shoulder, to find only me in Room 72. I locked the door, let the key slide into my hip-pocket, and announced, "Take off your glasses, Marc. I'll beat you up." He did not remove the glasses though but instead began to run around the brown table with the chairs placed deeply under it. I had to push the table to the window exterminating space for him to go on orbiting that weary piece of furniture.

In the nook between the windowsill, the bed, and the table, he stood with his head bowed like Andriy, the son of Taras Bulba – a lamb resigned himself to being sacrificed. I hit him on the chin so as not to damage the glasses, and in a pitched-up tone of voice promised that if he, fucking motherfucker, would ever squeal a single word about Shvydcha… When I finished my Sermon on the Mount, he set his glasses aright and said with a toady smile, "You so fucking well kicked up my fucking ass, right?"

(…the wisdom of ages imbibed with the mother's milk.

And—what is characteristic—he on the fly picked up my sermon phraseology. Affinity with languages resides in their blood…)

On Thursday, at the end of our date in the compartment, she pensively observed, "Yet, he was right after all…" It stunned me that I was like fulfilling the plans laid down by Marc Novoselytsky. Some fucking Nathan the Prophet… But where was the way out?.