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

In this regard, Yasha put his index finger upright to draw a philosophical conclusion, that Fyodor "had swum hell of a way before he drowned nearby the shore".

We drank again and, inspired by the bright warm day, I said that pipe-walking was a baby toy because I could climb even that Elm whose wide trunk was clean of branches to grip at and forked about eight meters above the ground.

Yasha once again set his philosophical finger up and instructively declared the undertaking beyond the humanly possible, yet he was prepared to buy two bottles of wine if he see me waving my hand from the tree crown.

I somewhat cheated at the bet because behind the Elm there grew a thinner tree you could shin up and then move over into the crotch of the giant. That way, I climbed to the mentioned altitude and safely returned to the native terra firma. Yet, Yasha began to cavil and announced my exploit a measly wangling, but Fyodor, who he appealed to for an arbitration, gave out a peremptory command to shut up with petty quibbling – the point stipulated had been reached and two bottles from Yasha were due on the barrel head…

Returning to the Hosty after our recreation, I showed them the pipe over the ditch – the training kit for aspirant pipe-walkers. Yasha grew passionate and proclaimed such crossing but a trifle, and he would easily prove it for merely two bottles of wine if I would hold his pants. I could not refuse a senior student from my department, my coach at playing Preferans and Protracted Throw-in Fool…

And he stepped on the pipe and walked ahead, in his elegant white shirt with the grid of thin yellow and blue stripes, from under which lasted his long legs in socks and black shoes. He did not suspect how insidious the pipe was over the middle of the ditch… However, as it turned out, the depth there allowed for standing on the bottom.

When Yasha got back to us, the colors of the shirt clinging to his torso bore generous additions of slimy green. He had nothing to lose anymore and went for the second time, with a tantamount success though. My loud laughter motivated Fyodor and, to maintain the honor of the graduating course, he gave me his pants too and went over the shaky piece of iron. After plumping down he was smart enough to get out at the opposite bank of the ditch.

Damn it! I was splitting my sides with their pants in my hands. They might have done it, by the by, had they not surrendered beforehand by taking their pants off. Well, at least, the Hosty was not too far off and fourth-year students without their pants was not a too seldom sight there….

My laughter seemed to turn an ominous hoot. On the arrival in Konotop, I learned that my wife was missing; she went to work a day before and hadn't been seen ever since. My mother visited Olga's aunt who neither knew a thing… At the insistent advice of my mother, I dined before going to aunt Nina in the hope of some recent news.

She shook her head sadly, nothing whatsoever. Then I went to the brick factory. It was already dark and the electric bulbs shed their hazy yellowish light inside of the main workshop floor building. As it turned out, the Konotop brick factory didn't use a circle kiln, being equipped instead with trolley-trains going in and out the kiln gate over narrow-gauge rail tracks… It seemed to be a break, and on the entire workshop floor, I saw just one man and inquired him about Olga.

"Where should she be?" retorted he resentfully. "Whoring about the city." That moment I recognized him, it was the one she introduced me to by Deli 1 when I came back from the army. Had he remembered me? Hard to say…

I went out of the workshop floor into the night…whoring about… But, maybe she'd come to the third shift? I had nowhere to go anyway.

Climbing upon the unfinished wall in the nearby building under construction, I sat there like that owl who flew to me in my childhood at the Object, the messenger from the unknown… That's how I sat there, in the middle of night, thinking thoughts which were better be left alone and not thought at all, the thoughts that should be dropped down the road before their final completion for it did no good and there would come the moment of their critical mass going beyond the fail-safe point and—willy-nilly—you had to act already, regardless of how carefully the thoughts had been thought thru or else… but what to act?

A rectangle of yellow light sprang up in the darkness, a man came out of the workshop door and banged the light back into the dark. Soon, he opened it again, went in, and all again turned the dark night. Been out to take a leak. Nothing to do here. I go home…

The following day brought news. My sister said that Sasha Plaksin, handled Esa, who lived in Gogol Street, had seen Olga by the fishermen huts at the Seim river. He did not speak to her, yet saw there, for two days in a row.

With the exam in Latin on the following morning, I couldn’t wait for further developments, the main thing she was alive and kicking, so I left for Nezhyn.

My proficiency in Latin Lupus evaluated with "four" after my preparatory action by the door to the auditorium where he examined our course. Sending mighty echoes along the whole corridor, I roared at the top of my lungs:

"Gaudeamus igitur!.."

The disappearance of my wife, followed by her popping up, in absentia, at the place I wouldn't like to think of further, was surely putting me off, but having started you couldn’t but go on:

"Juvenes dum sumus!.."

Lupus jumped out of the door to make sure it was I who loved his Latin so loudly, and later, when I got seated in front of him at the examination desk, he acted like a skilled worker at a conveyor belt – opened my grade book, entered "four", closed it, handed back to me. Fare the well, O, Lingua Latina….

Right after the examination, I hurried to Konotop and my mother told me that Olga came home in the morning. Unaware of her mother-in-law’s presence in the bedroom, she, first of all, rushed into the living-room towards the mirror in the wardrobe door. Standing in front of it, she unbuttoned her shirt to examine the hickeys on her chest.

…the owner’s brand… everyone bears theirs, of this or that kind… for someone, it's the hieroglyphs nail-scarred on their wrist, another one gets adorned with a necklace of monkey bites on their breasts…

"I yelled at her and told to go back from where she came. She gathered her clothes and left. What now?"

I shrugged, "What can there be?"

"No way for her to get Lenochka," my mother said resolutely.

All that was so weighing down…

Olga came the next morning wearing a turtleneck. She said she was staying at aunt Nina’s because my mother kicked her out. Then she poured forth a pack of lies about going to the Seim with Sveta and spending time in the hut of uncle Kolya's friends. I advised her to spare her breath because we were to divorce anyway.

"And Lenochka?"

"She'll stay here."

Olga went over to threats about her taking her daughter to her mother in Theodosia. Then she said it was I who made her do it because of all my whores in Nezhyn of whom they were telling her everything but she just kept silent. And, yes, she went to the Seim, out of spite, but there was nothing there, and we could still put everything aright.

(…in life, there is always a choice. You may dig a hole or you may not dig it…

By filing for divorce, you affirm that you're a cuckold who takes retaliatory measures within the framework of the current moral code. Neglecting the move, you still remain a cuckold but only if you look at yourself thru the eyes of society or—but not everyone is up to that "or"—you become a hooey-pricker who does not care a fuck and lives for his/her own pleasure. The teeny nuance is that the true hooey-pricker does not see any insoluble dilemma about all that stuff – they just live for their pleasure all the time.

I always had it good with Olga but a whole lot of centuries-old morals and codes of "honor" bulldozed me and I was faced with the choice: to become a cuckold or go over to the other league? Making a choice is always a tragedy – choosing one thing you lose the alternative…)

I never liked to choose, I preferred leaving tragedies to others – to fate or, maybe, chance and, at that point, Olga served a tossup coin for the purpose. I told her that all would be scratched out and forgotten if she fetched weed for just one joint by the end of the day. She left and returned already in the evening, fairly weary. She said she had walked the whole city but no one had no weed.

That was the cruel finger of fate, some chance empty suction. Alea jacta est!.

(…were Olga lucky in providing the joint, then I, as a noble man of quality, would only have to keep my word. We would have started living on and now someone else would be composing this letter to you.

And maybe no letter would be needed, with you having Dad and Mom, and stuff. After all, replacing just one, even the tiniest, detail harbors a host of other outcomes…

If, say, you flick by time machine to Mesozoic and there you accidentally slap-kill one single mosquito then, returning back, you find yourself in an irreversibly changed future – yes, the same year when you had left, but you yourself do not conform to the contemporary standards. And there’s no one to blame, you should have watched out better in what you were stepping in that Mesozoic past…

Just a single joint would give me back the family idyll with an ideal woman. She was not trading herself for money or some other assets, she cheated on me just for her personal pleasure. The eternal pattern of the most natural exchange of joys – you to me, and I to you.

The fact that she was exchanging with someone else did not tell on my having it good with her. Why did I so stupidly gave up what I wanted and was getting in full? The moral foundations of the society left me no other choice but to join the crowd of dumb-ass "seminarians"…)

She gave me a great blow job for a goodbye and asked to come the next day to Aunt Nina's for something important. And it was how, because of cruel chance, I became a cuckold…

(…for a long time I couldn't understand my dislike of Lermontov, but now I know – that's because of his lies. Lermontov lied from the very start, from his poem to Pushkin's death:

"…with the lead of a bullet in his chest, he drooped his head…”

Well, let's say this lie was caused by the ignorance of anatomy. A hussar is not a doctor, after all, and for him the loins, where, actually, the bullet hit, and the chest might be the same. Half-meter higher, half-meter lower, who cares?!.

But there is no way to excuse the following lie:

"…he rebelled against the society's morals…"

Pah! Stop kidding, Lermontov-boy. He did not rebel but, on the contrary, he most exactly followed the precepts of the society for such a case. With the utmost rigor and slavish loyalty, Pushkin kept to the rules. And if he himself did not dare disobey the moral code of the society then what can we, mere mortals, do in case of violation of marital fidelity but to file for divorce?.

However, one always looks for some or other way to justify their beloved… What if Pushkin was not at all obeying the dictates of moral customs? What if he intentionally used them for his personal gains? What if the aging, weary, poet worn out by the excesses of poetical lifestyle, threw down the gantlet to the greenhorn French youth on a visit to Russia for a too close attention to his wife, just to simulate a Shakespearean Othello with the hidden agenda of getting killed at the pledged duel and passing away in style?

But the development of this hypothesis requires three doctoral degrees: that in gerontology as well as in psychology, and one more in philology. While having a much more urgent matter on my hands—the letter to my daughter—I’d rather flashback, from the Varanda river to Konotop…)