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

The manna from heaven came in the form of a first-year student at the Mus-Ped. In his angel-like curls, golden gloss in his glasses' rim, he descended from above—the firmament of the fifth floor—to our sinful third floor and handed me the key to a vacant room in the corridor up there. Hallelujah!

But why? After all, I did not ask him nor anyone else, and I did not even suspect that room existed. How could he possibly know?!. Yes, a couple of times I gave him my guitar last autumn, but since then we had not even met…

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my…

– COULD YOU FUCKING SHUT UP IN THAT YOUR FUCKING SLEEPING BAG?!.)

And that was it. The key in hand switched me and Nadya to the nocturnal way of life, we were ascending to the fifth floor when the student life gradually subsided in the Hosty’s benighted corridors and we were coming down back in the mum gray of the pre-dawn dusk.

She once again became a freshman student, sort of. When our course was on the training excursion to Kiev, where we rode a bus for foreign tourists, she also joined in. The young guide on that bus spoke only English, "Look to your left!. Look to your right!." Concluding the tour, he asked if we had any questions.

By that time, I got so used to being a foreign tourist that also asked in English, "Are you a Communist, Mr. Guide?"

Taken aback by so out-of-the-blue question from a local student, he still managed to answer, "I am a Candidate for the Communist Party Membership."

"Okay, I see, Comrade Guide."

Then Nadya and I were sitting on a bench in a green patch of one of those steep lanes descending to Khreshchatyk Street. The sun was shining from the sky with fluffy clouds floating around it without screening the tender warmth. Nadya and I were kissing long kisses. Next to me there sat Igor Recoon and gravely scattered bits of cookies to the pigeon flock of a different feather, noisily crowding on the asphalt about our feet. Hopefully, Kiev felt on that day that it was another—albeit small—Paris…

~ ~ ~

(…why was it so irksome to be a secsot? I did not tell on anybody, making the KGB man shake his head at my reports empty of useful information. Still, the feeling of being hooked and squeezed with the ratchet from which there was no way out, and the constant fear that my finking would get exposed, remained the source of ever-present internal torment – an unwilling rat is still a rat.

On the other hand, I, sort of, felt guilty before Captain. Especially, after my turning down his request in winter…)

Captain asked me then to sell my sheepskin coat for him to wear when a-hunting. The short coat of shaggy black sheepskin, my father's coat still from the easy times at the Object. The sheepskin which Olga and I were sitting on at our wedding party. It was a part of my image, converging with the plastic black "diplomat" briefcase and my nigh-tabooed warcry whenever having a situation, "Stuff it! We'll prick the hooey!"

To sell that sheepskin coat was kinda selling a part of me. I did not tell Captain all that, I only answered that I couldn't. He didn't insist though; that might have also been a test, sort of, if I was ready to sell myself.

But in May I pleased him in full. At last, he got a fat reward for all my empty reports written under his dictation that nothing worthy of attention had happened or heard about. Yes, twice a month he was dictating for me to write them so that the sheets of paper by my hand, signed "Pavel", accumulated in his safe, to get me ever deeper run thru with their hook…

So, end May, returning from the weekend, Marc entered the room bubbling with delight about a new game he'd just learned in Kiev. "The Game of Parties" was its name and all of us should have a try to see how interesting it was.

Fyodor and I took a break in Throw-in Fool played on Fyodor's bed. Ostrolootsky sat down on his and leaned the back of his head against the soiled spot in the wallpaper, and all of us listened to the rules.

The objective was to re-model the events of history process at our will. Starting from the summer of 1917, the period before the single-party political system got consolidated, when there still were all sorts of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries, Anarchists and so on, each player had to choose a party to their liking and win the other players, move them joining their side. Try and see for yourselves what great fun it is!.

In the Hosty, Room 72 enjoyed no less popularity than a public urinal next to a cheap beer bar and everyone, who happened to drop in on that night, was met with Marc's gleeful giggling and the offer to partake in so breath-taking role-playing game. For the start, he together with Ilya Lipes and Ostrolootsky united into the Bund, on the basis of their shared nationality, but then they split and joined the Mensheviks and the Social Democrats.

Sasha Nesteryouk, on a flying visit thru the room, waved his black scarf playfully and proclaimed anarchy to be the mother of order.

Fyodor and I declared ourselves fighters from the Peasant Army of Nestor Makhno and threatened to fuck up anyone distracting us from playing Throw-in Fool. Yasha, as a resident of Poltava, became a representative of the Ukrainian Central Rada. The horseplay was not too long but as loud as usual…

Next morning, no one remembered the noisy pastime and would forget it altogether were I not so stupid as to mention the jolly game at the meeting with the KGB man. Captain got wired, sat upright and, instead of usual two lines, squeezed out of me a whole page with the names of who was in the room, which party was his choice.

He did not like the conclusion in my report that the game died out because we got bored; I had to re-write all after he edited the page and crossed the statement out… And the hell of a rumpus broke loose.

The KGB started calling the guys from the English Department for interrogations, even those who never popped up in Room 72 that cursed night. They wrote down their testimonies – who entered second? who sat where? why declared himself a Kadet? Some students were summoned more than once. Dudes were coming back to the hostel with drawn faces, retelling the interrogation, anxiously discussing the possible outcome. Under the single-party political system, you could very easily be denied the diploma even after four years of study…

Three weeks later there was a general meeting of the English Department because the Organs detected certain unhealthy tendencies among our students. The KGB captain was introduced to the meeting and read out the list of the participants in the subversive Game of Parties. It eased me up a little when I heard my name mentioned – they wouldn't guess that it was I who finked on guys. Then they began to selectively call the players to the large blackboard in the auditorium.

Lipes said that he dropped in absolutely by chance, seeking a teapot, stayed for just a minute and did not have time enough to get it what game it was at all.

Sehrguey Nesterenko from Kiev, without any preliminaries, banged off a dramatic declamation of the lines in a Shakespeare play:

"Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your ears!.."

He was called to stop the balagan and get back to his place immediately.

As for Yasha Demyanko, he felt obviously happy to lean onto the lectern with his elbows and begin developing logical syllogisms in the most flowery Ukrainian language about the unprecedented precedent at hand.

In the end, Marc Novoselytsky faced the meeting, as the instigator, and said how sorry he was for not getting it at once how bad that game was, and promised solemnly to never ever play it again. The meeting decided to announce a reprimand to everyone from the Captain's list and called to always guard and uphold the honor of the Soviet youth…

Returning to the hostel from the meeting, everyone seemed to give me sidelong glances and whisper behind my back.

Sasha Ostrolootsky, to relieve the stress from the interrogations in the KGB, drank a bottle of vodka without any snack and had to throw up, however, he managed to run out to the toilet.

Everyone finished the studies and received their diplomas. The KGB Captain failed to bloat the Game of Parties up to the dimensions of the "doctors-poisoners" case about their attempt at assassination of Leader of All Nations, Comrade Stalin, with their medical treatment. However, he certainly proved to his seniors that not for nothing his salary was paid to him…

(…and I am still thinking that it was not for nothing that Gray came to the battalion stoker-house to beat me up for ratting. It’s only that he anticipated the events and came ahead of time…)

The first time that thought came to me at the concluding meeting with Captain in the current academic year. He handed over twenty rubles and told me to sign the receipt that I got the money for secret collaboration. Damn! It was not silver coins and the sum didn't coincide with that paid to Judas, yet the rubles burnt my hands urging to get to Konotop as soon as possible and use up all of it for ganja right away… That failed to restore my peace of mind. I rode the footstep of Streetcar 3, looking at my reflection in the glass of folded door (I always liked the way it reflected me) and hated that face in the glass. Why have I ruined my own life?.

~ ~ ~

Between the New Building and the Hosty, there was a rather wide ditch for draining of excess water from the Count's Park lake into the Oster. We walked together—Nadya, I and Igor Recoon—bypassing, for some reason, the New Building from behind, when I noticed an iron pipe connecting the banks of the ditch. It sagged about a meter above the surface of still water overgrown with duckweed.

"I dare me to go over!" said I.

Nadya screamed, "No! Don't dare!"

And Igor immediately said, “I bet you won't!"

The pipe was not wide (cross-section 10 cm) and, half-way over the ditch, it teetered under my feet. With Nadya's "ah!" and "oh!" behind my back, I regained a feeble balance and, fluttering my arms, advanced for another couple of meters and spurted the final segment.

"Aha!" shouted I and looked back.

Igor waved me from the other bank, "I dare you to return!"

Some viper of a homie, eh? I'm the Ogoltsoff but not just limitless so…

And why did I start all that at all? Because of the darn masculine pride. The day before, our course had a picnic by the Oster, almost outside the city. There Nadya challenged me to compete in swimming, one hundred meters down the river.

She went ahead at once and after another twenty meters, I realized that my Kandeebynno-made freestyle swimming was but a garbage in comparison to her powerful butterfly. What could I do? I climbed onto the bank and was the first to reach the finish line where I met the winner with a bunch of flowers grabbed in the grass along the way, "You're the champion, Nadya!"

When the 3 of us (Fyodor, Yasha and I) came with a load of bottles under the canopy of giant Elms in the Count's Park and lay down in the grass to have a drink accompanied by the rustle in the green sway of foliage overhead, Yasha asked if I really had chosen the career of a circus pipe walker. I was surprised because he had not been there, but Fyodor said that the whole English Department knew already about my crossing the ditch.

We drank and Fyodor began to complain of Pro-Rector Budowski who viciously, on purpose, spoiled Fyodor's entire Grade Book that registered results of credits and examination past in all four years of his study. The grades in there were uniform "threes" but that bitch Budowski put him "four" in spite of Fyodor's earnest plea not to do so.