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

We were fed at the canteen three times a day. The students "eeked" and "yakked" but I could not empathize with them, it was as havvable havvage as anywhere else. The next morning after breakfast, we walked to harvest the hops whose rows of three-meter stem-bunches coiled up to reach the wires stretched over the field for the purpose.

The dense wreaths of entwined stems, like, live columns of dark-green leaves, had to be pulled down to the ground for picking off them the clusters of pale-green soft cones. When the collected cones filled up the shallow scuttle of two handles, it was dumped into a cardboard box on the scales. The overseer-teacher registered in their notebook the kilos you've brought, for later calculation of your payment after deductions for food and bed. But the price per kilo of harvested crops was so insignificant, that the elementary Arithmetic instantly knocked all the labor enthusiasm out…

Of course, there still remained strong incentives of the sonorous yells and calls of fervent young voices over the field, and so diverse but equally attractive (each in its own way) forms of female students. Yet, my fingers, accustomed to metal of breakers and guitar strings, balked at doing that Chinese-peasant-like assiduous labor. My first day of work at the plantation of hops became the last as well, 2 in 1, you know. After that I did various jobs: I went to the district town of Borzna a couple of times to load the truck with provision for the canteen, and I mended flooring on a cow farm using sundry scraps of boards and planks, and I sawed wood for a local woman in exchange for the strong murky hooch, and I… and… well, perhaps that's all… but, in general, not too little, after all.

The hop-harvesters had earned about forty rubles in that month. A couple of students working at the dryer got a hundred plus, and I, for all my patronizing efforts, was paid 12 rubles and some small change at the institute cash desk on our return to Nezhyn. Most likely, the money was earned in those three days on the farm where I sawed and nailed boards bridging the dung in the earth-floor.

Once, responsive to a mighty hammer strike, liquid dung jetted thru a gap in between the uneven board pieces, right into my face, and the cow from the nearby stall turned her left eye at me and grinned with so deep satisfaction that I learned for certain – those cattle are not as stupid as they pretend to be. In fact, my main occupation on the farm was playing Throw-in Fool with 3 local mujiks. My photographic deck of cards (quite modest girlie nudes in black-and-white) plunged them into a catatonic stupor, their scrutiny of the dealt hands went on for a real hell of time and they were markedly reluctant to throw in any of the cards and part with the girlie.

(…now the era has changed and the same card packs, only in color, are sold in the stalls at any railway station…)

One of the students who worked at the dryer, redheaded Grisha from the Bio-Fac, also played Throw-in Fool with me after his work. He was tremendously keen on winning. The hot-tempered guy even found a deck of ordinary cards to replace my black-and-white gallery, but the school of Yasha Demyanko was bringing its fruits, and by the end of the month he had lost to me a twenty-five-bottle box of vodka. However, mindful of Sasha Ostrolootsky's orphanage wisdom, that a bird in the hand is better than a pie tomorrow studded with rubies from the sky, I, on the last working day, told the fiery-cheerful Grisha that one bottle immediately would write off all his debt, and he happily ran to the village store, otherwise I wouldn't get even as much…

I wouldn't say that vodka or hooch were really giving me a kick, no, it’s neither here nor there, but my social position and the opinion of the surrounding society were simply pushing me to booze.

(…the folks around keep us incarcerated in the unbreak-outable prison of their opinion and no matter what we do it only adds to our ill repute or mutual admiration for our character.

More often than not, we just begin to conform, so if told that some unlucky wretch had to become a boozer because of noblesse oblige, I am prepared to believe it…)

For example, a male student from the Phil-Fac with a couple of girls from his course wandered to the farm. They lingered by the stall of the bull hitched with an iron chain. The wise guy threw to the beast a scrap of hay he grabbed from the cow in a nearby stall. On taking the cow's scent in the delivered hay, the bull got horny and kicked up mad bellowing and yanking at his chain.

Quite accidentally, I passed by and that was enough to spice the evening oral news bulletin at the canteen tables with enthusiastic slurping the latest news of Ogoltsoff who guided Phil-Fac chicks on the excursion around the bull's hardon. An utterly pervert misconstruing and belying of my character! Yet, the imprint of your personal image in the collective mind is a horrendous force, and you could never prove to anyone that with my noble delicacy of feelings and trepid adoring attitude to girls I didn’t even wink at them, because of my damn innate gentility…

Having familiarized myself with the Bolshevik work and living conditions, I went to Konotop. First of all, to change the sodden sneakers, and besides, there also I was awaited by the pressing harvesting labors… Back in August, Lyalka and I had a couple of regional tours around the corners in the city backstreets away from its noisy main thoroughfares. In the slumberous quietude of the forlorn lanes, we paid good heed to the small but magnificent plantations of cannabis gently waving to us from behind khutta-fencing with their bushy branches bearing the load of fuzzily outlined, ripening, heads. Lyalka was the guide, and I was an enthusiastic tourist admiring the diligence of Konotopers at their heartfelt, loving, cultivation of their plots. It was time to help the home-towners in harvesting. And though not everyone waited for my humanitarian patronage assistance, however, there still stayed unharvested sites.

I was a noble robber, well-versed in the concepts of justice, and never snatched more than a couple of bushes from one plantation, and even those 2 were one hell of a load to haul. Whereto? To the nearest nook, for a too shallow and, I would sadly admit, predatory processing. That is, the final product comprised skimpy 10 percent of what could be obtained from the same amount of the raw material when approached with a balanced and well-thought-out technology. And the regretfully meager turnout was, if I were asked, the consequence of deplorable incompetence in such a fundamental field. Elementary ignorance and nothing else…

After laborious night vigils in Konotop, I was already well furnished to plunge into the everyday working efforts in Bolshevik… When on the first night back, I was thoughtfully tuning the guitar—…you leave it without control and anyone would spin the tuning machine, good news the strings are still in place…—two local guys came into the clink-like dormitory who declared of their desire to play billiards.

Out of sheer curiosity—how could anyone play it with the balls screwed up to the utmost?—I rolled my mattress up and put it on a chair by the wall. Well, yes, exactly as supposed, no one could. Not only that the maimed balls jerk-hopped along their wiggling way, but it was them to chose when to jerk and change the tack. The absolutely chaotic unpredictability excluded any aesthetic pleasure distinguishing that strictly harmonized game… On realizing that, the fellas introduced themselves as 2 brothers from a neighbor village.

The information did not arise any discernible excitement among the students sitting in line along the edge of the mattresses-topped decking, and the brothers left…

The following day one of them, named Stepan, called me out from the canteen at midday mealtime. In token of gratitude for my understanding during their previous night visit, he proposed a ride to his village, where we went by his "Jawa"… Stepan pulled up in front of a well-built house and asked to act before his parents that I had been one of his buddies during the hitch in the Limited Contingent of Soviet Troops stationed in Germany, and now we accidentally met each other in Bolshevik.

His parents were most delighted with our chance meeting and laid the table for the comrades-in-arms… After the second glass, getting in the mood, I asked Stepan if he remembered Elsa, the German blonde waitress from the Gashtet round the corner. Stepan was taken aback, and started to look at me more closely – what if I indeed slept on a bank in the corner koobrik?.

A day later, Stepan and I were paying visits to different rooms in both hostels dwelt by girl-students, after they returned from supper in the canteen. He pulled up in a room with my course-mates, but I (fully aware of the absolute barrenness of such a hunting grounds for me personally) went on alone until reached, already on the second floor in the next hostel, the last room to the left.

It was occupied by girls from the Philological Department: Anna, Eera, Olya, and Vera all of whom I was so very pleased to get acquainted with. And they had no other alternative but to be also pleased, without any dance-floors, cinemas and even a TV set around.

Olya, a short amiable girl with the wavy yellow bob-cut hair, asked where my business card was, implying the guitar. Without much delay, I fetched it from the club dormitory, sang some sentimentally romantic trash, and passed the guitar to Olya, who suddenly fancied learning to play it. Meanwhile, I got seated onto the bed of reserved and silent Eera to pick up a trifling conversation in which it doesn’t matter what about because it's meant to follow the voice modulations and trace the fleeing shifts in the expression of the eyes and face in general…

It’s hard to say whether on that particular or the following night she and I went outside and stood under the yellow light shed by the bulb from the lamppost between the two shabby hostels when I happened to have what the North American Indians call "vision".

I saw the boundless Ukrainian night wrapping us from everywhere and in the blacker dark along its edges, there was raising the buzz of chilly autumn winds already. The only bright spot, besides the bulb overhead, was that face opposite me, smiling and not unfriendly anymore, radiating tiny beams of light which happen when you squint, without fully closing your eyelids. Yet, I was not squinting, not a bit, and maybe even opened my eyes wider, struck with the beauty of that new face. And all that—even myself—I beheld as if from aside, from some point in the immense wrapper who, like me, focused on the vision center, on her face of incredible beauty, kinda warm circle of light in the surrounding darkness, like a lifebuoy to withstand the onslaught of icy cold rattling at the far-off, rimed, horizons.

(…of course, at that moment I was not thinking any of this lofty trash, and, in fact, I was not capable of thinking at all because at the moment all I could do was looking at her face and falling in love irretrievably…)

The next day Eera did not come to the canteen for midday meal, Vera said that she was on duty – cleaning their room. The moment I came up to the hostel, she went out on the porch with a mop in her hands, in a short gown.

(…the most wide-spread methodology for estimation of female attractiveness is gouging her volumes. The self-proclaimed experts and qualified connoisseurs base their evaluation on the volume of the breasts and buttocks, while gourmets, subtractively, measure the waist… Absolute dilettantism. But what else to expect from all those differently aged junior jerks?

The most convincing detail in a woman, with which she will hook you at once and forever, is her knees. If the glimpse of them warms your heart, makes your shoulders straighten up and your breath go deeper, then stay assured – that’s it, nothing more beautiful will ever be met.

If that does not happen, go away and keep looking out, maybe you’ll be lucky someday…)

Spotting her knees, I immediately realized that I was right in raising my paws and flashing dumb wit about the size of the high boots, because on the wet trail thru the corn jungle under her blue jeans were those very knees.

Of course, you’ve guessed already, that it was your mother…

~ ~ ~

Thus, there still remained three full years before your birth, which stretch, supposedly, would suffice for no less than a couple of loves to die away, if we accept naive calculations promoted by the reverend Sigmund Freud.

(…what a blasphemous mockery of the sacred beliefs, eh? Which chesty assault though can easily be parried by the traditional fencing trick of "terz" – to wit, that there are 'no rules without exceptions.' The good ol’ move…Yet, it depends on the rules, you know.

If a certain scientist Galileo, when dropping his balls from the Tower of Pisa would have noticed that one of them, marked, for the scientific accuracy, with something like "E + S", all of a sudden started to soar and put out aerobatics tricks, then there would be no law of universal gravitation.

And on that account, our beloved Ziggy can't be registered as a trustworthy die-hard scientist. He should be moved to some other league. Place him among such illustrious coryphaei as Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and so forth, up to the nameless creators of The Thousand and One Nights. There he would fit perfectly with his Tom Thumb, aka "ego", Evil Giant, aka "super-ego", the royal castle of "consciousness", and impenetrable wilds of tropical swampy jungles of "subconsciousness", on the canvas of which he weaves the lacy patterns of his theory.

How dare I?!. So many generations have been conceived and, in their turn, conceived further generations with the blessing of his psychoanalysis!.

Nature does not tolerate emptiness, man necessarily has to fill with something their gray matter, aka brain, aka (using the apt expression of the brain-tapped Battalion Commander of VSO-11) the "highest fucking stuff". And that's the indisputable truth. Nothing but intolerance to emptiness caused the production of all those Bibles-Korans-Vedas-Iliads, as well as belief in the existence of boogies and brownies.

And, obedient to the naive wisdom of nature, we stop marketing the useless bullshit—it's not worth it from a pedagogically correct standpoint—and start bringing into the picture the three years until you’ll condescend to be born…)

In the girls' room everything was figured out already, that is everyone got it clear who I was after. Olya's eagerness to learn the guitar playing cooled off but, all the same, I tarried with taking it back to the club dormitory. Just in case, so that I would have an excuse to pop up again, like, oh, I forgot here something… No safety measure would be too proactive if they fall over themselves to blast away to your sweetheart, "Gee, he's married!." I was not denying that dent in my biography, since long sunk in the abyss of the past though. And she never asked to show her my passport!.

(…the booklet in red covers asserting your USSR citizenship was more than just ID card. It registered your movements about our boundless Soviet Homeland, witnessed changes in your matrimonial state, reflected variations in the expression of your facial features every ten years, and more… Folks developed and cherished strong belief in the pleonasmic omniscience of Organon, aka passport. They could on the fly invent and endow it with magic powers.

In a separate development, a militiaman checked my passport and on one of its blank pages (reserved for the stamps in future) detected letter “Z” disguised as a casual smear. The sign told him I was an ex-con, aka zek. He couldn’t read the duration of my stretch though and escorted me to a senior in his chain of command who fatherly advised him not to take anyone in a raincoat of unfamiliar cut for a threat to the public and state order.

Even under socialism, wise people were still there. Thank you, unknown Captain!.)

That evening a young teacher from the Philological Department came to the girls' room. Probably, to make sure that she didn't skip her duty and checked what was going on there at all. Because apart from me, one more lover started his visits to the room – Czech Jan.

A natural Czech, middle-aged geezer, who arrived within the framework of socialist integration of the fraternal states to drive it home to Bolshevik (which was not just the village but also the name of the state farm for hops-production) the subtle art of drying hops so as to get the right beer. (Czechs and beer for centuries were and remain twin brothers.)

Jan's wife stayed to keep their children in the Czech-Slovakia Socialist Republic. He missed her and, to relieve the longing, fell in love with Olya. That was the reason for his late evening visits and long talks with her about something, I was not sure what namely, because he talked in Czech. And if it were not for the language barrier, I would not miss interviewing him about the year of '68…

Once the girls arranged a party in the room, so he came even in a necktie, that's a civilized man for you. For the occasion, he brought a bottle of Champagne and canned food, but not from the village store because the canned food turned out more delicious than even the cod liver, after which you had to go to Moscow or Leningrad. And he flatly refused to drink any vodka. Showing at the filled glass he wrinkled his face and patted himself on the heart to emphasize his fear of that swill charged with health problems…

But when the teacher came on her control visit, Jan was not present in the room. She could see for herself that though Eera and I were sitting on the same bed, yet in a quite appropriate attitude – each one at the opposite side rails. All moral prescriptions respected, so, get seated, please, let's have a cup of tea.

The moment she sat at the table, there surged a hell of an uproar in the corridor: You!. Who!. Mother-blother!. The door of the room burst open. And in the dark corridor, five to six guys were looming in two-rank formation.

The teacher turned around from her cup, "What's happening?"