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

"And who are you here at all?"

She decided to crush them by her authority, "Girls! Tell them who I am!"

And all the 4 girls, in unison, as if in the collective recital which they had been preparing from their kindergarten times, "She-Is-a-Teacher!!."

To which, kinda antiphon, "Then fuck her!"

(…well, yes, not all in our younger generations are brought up in the proper way, and non-rural areas, regretfully, are not exceptions to the rule…)

During that matinee dialogue, I, of course, realized that they had come after my soul. The night before, a girl from the next hostel came running to the club dormitory and raised the alarm about local guys misbehaving in her room. You bet, I ran there and saw a scene of confusion on the first floor. Some girl was crying, 3 local guys were confronted by 3 student counterparts stuck in a futile discussion on the subject of "and who are you?" In short, a stalemate position.

To solve the etude, I chose the bigger guy among the locals and asked the crying girl, "This one offended you?" "Yes!"

I punched the guy. The locals vanished without a trace and the common agitation subsided. Later that guy and 2 more with him waited for me at the entrance to the club. "It was not me," he said.

"I'm sorry," said I. "I had no choice." How could I explain to him that so I was trained by Chief of Staff: a fact of violation should be followed but the fact of punishment? Only Chief of Staff—which is characteristic—did not ask me for forgiveness…

It seemed that my apology was not accepted, and the uninvited guests to the tea-party arrived to demonstrate a Bolshevik-styled vendetta. From under the bed, I fished out the empty champagne bottle and stood up close to the doorway. They kept barking outside but abstained from stepping in – the bottle had rather weighty looks. How could they know that my martial art level was less than a fig and minus?

Some footsteps sounded in the corridor and, behind the guys, I made out Stepan. He grasped at once what’s what, and attacked from the rear. I also jumped out into the corridor with the warcry, "Come fucking here!" It worked no worse than on Shoorik – the guys flinched and fled. Stepan and I were adding stimulation to their stampede, but I already hadn't the bottle in my hands, I didn't remember where it got lost. The memory retained only their unanimous clattering down the stairs with Stepan racing in their wake.

I was left one to one with the guy who in the mutual commotion failed to pass the bottleneck of the stair-flight and stuck upstairs. His spirit though blasted without a fight. Giving in to his fate, he limply drooped onto the railing and was sagging there like a wet mat, considering from above the steps down there on which he was to plop.

And I grabbed him—noblesse oblige!—but then I heard a cry; very distant, hardly audible, like the one that called me on the snowy road nearby the nine-story building in Stavropol. I observed the submissive jelly of a guy. What for?. So, I turned around and went down the corridor back to the room.

(…I agree all that sounds more than oddly, but at times strange things do happen. Some people hear voices, but I heard cries, distant, from afar…)

And once again she did not come to midday meal. I went to their room. Eera was sitting alone and did not want to talk. I sat on the bed by her side, took her hand… I liked that hand and those fingers, long and tapering. I only did not like the whitish narrow scars on the inside of the left wrist, as from a teenager’s toying with the suicide, but I never asked about them. And at that moment I only asked what's wrong.

She sobbed and said that in the morning on the plantation, the senior overseer was putting her to shame. He told it was unworthy of a teacher's daughter to have anything in common with such a renegade and married man as I was. And that he would call her mother, and tell her everything the first thing on our arrival back in Nezhyn.

But what was there to tell about!?. And of which teacher mother?.

"Of Ger..maaaaan.." and the tears quashed her speaking.

"Damn them all, then! Come with me!"

"Where?"

As if I knew where, but she agreed, and we went out there… At first, it was a field of corn, not the one over which we walked at our arrival, here the stalks were shorter and scantier. Then the field tilted down and we came up to a long secluded stack of straw.

The day was warm and clear. We stretched out on the straw broken off of the stack side and were lying there, talking, kissing. I wanted to open up to her my whole soul, up to admitting that I was a space cadet. And I wanted her so badly, only the sun was in the way. But with the approach of the evening, the solitude dissolved. Next to the stack, there appeared an unnecessary dirt road, some trucks and motorcycles started to pass by, gaping at her red sweater…

We returned in the dark and were met by Anna, who waited for us between the hostels to warn about the ambush up there. She also told that when the senior overseer teacher came to their room, he screamed and shouted that both Eera and I had shunned work but were seen strolling around, and the dean offices of our respective Departments, as well as the Institute Rectorate, would be informed about such brazen breach of discipline.

During the briefing, Olya, Vera, and Jan emerged from the darkness for the joint brain-storming of the problem: what to do? Jan kept shaking his head and repeating in Czech, which had already grown a bit more intelligible, that "it is-a not-a good-a". Olya ordered him to shut up, and better go to the canteen to fetch some food for us; because only he could do it without evoking unwanted suspicions… Jan and Olya were understanding each other without translation; so he soon returned with a newspaper parcel for the hunted-after "milovitsy". I did not know that I was that hungry.

Meanwhile, the girls were quick at drawing a plan for the campaign of persecuted students against oppressor-teachers. Eera and I would go to Borzna, the native town of Vera, and stay for the night at the khutta of Vera's parents. In the morning, Eera would go to Nezhyn as if she had gone there 2 days before because of being unwell, and I would come back to Bolshevik as if coming from Konotop, unaware what's the fuss.

Czech Jan saw the 2 of us to the road out of the village, still preaching about "lovely pretty milovitsy" and we left into the night…

The night was dark and windy and the road all potholes, and longer than 10 kilometers from the approximate estimation by Vera. Eera got very tired, and in the end, I even piggybacked her like Gogol's Homa Brutus the witch bestriding him, for the distance between 2 posts in the roadside electricity line.

Having already been on a visit to Vera's khutta, Eera found it even in the dead of night. Vera’s mother bedded us on the floor in the living room and promised to wake Eera up for the seven o'clock bus to Nezhyn. We lay down and, to my embrace, Eera said that she was too tired and that she had to get up early. In a moment she was fast asleep, but I still lay for a long time full awake, gloating and grinning in the dark that we had rubbed the senior overseer's nose in it… No trumps? No ace? Grab my cock and wipe your face!.

When I awoke in the morning, Eera was gone and Vera's brother gave me a lift to Bolshevik by his "Jawa" bike. Students and teachers were just coming out of the canteen and he, cracking his motor, carried me alongside the crowd in the slow triumphant ride. A certain stupid asshole stood still with his jaw dropped. Yet, Vera's brother was disappointed when to his inquiry I answered that Eera and I had no sex on the floor in their living room…

~ ~ ~

She stayed in Nezhyn for a long time, and I again gave in to the image enforced on me by the society… 3 workmen from Borzna came to conduct a stretch of running water; the pipe of half-inch cross-section in a knee-deep trench. I was passing by and helped them a little because of nothing better to do. The mujiks got emotional and bought some vodka, yet without a snack. A throwaway kitchen oilcloth was found and spread under a cherry tree, we sat on it with our feet lowered into the trench for comfort, and killed the bottle.

And then the senior overseer came up to witness the disgraceful recidivism when, instead of work, I was at boozing drastically, so he again began to croak what was awaiting me, when back in Nezhyn… While the youngest of the workmen went to the store after a catch-on addition, I dropped in at the plantation. My course-mate girls started to speak up that I did not notice my own and keep the company exclusively with the girls from the Philological Department. I told them I was a Slavophil since my early childhood, so the Anglo-Fac's beef to heels did not turn me on, in short: Phil-Fac forever!

Then the mujiks called me from the trench. We finished the extra bottle too, sharing a doughnut for a snack, and I passed away on that same tablecloth. Like, enjoy our specialty dessert… Later, the senior overseer in his accusatory speech focused on the fact that the students, returning from the plantation, had to pass by me served-up in that spread flat form. Although the distance between the road and the trench was about 5 meters, I was still ashamed to hear about it. But that was later…

3 days after, Vera went to Borzna, and I accompanied her to make a telephone call to Eera in Nezhyn.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"How d'you?"

"Nothing."

"You… well… come back… eh? I wrote a song here for you." And what more sensible could be expected of a balmy fop like me?. In fact, I did not write a song but made a Russian adaptation of the then-popular hit "It's raining, it's pouring (you might be sorry)…"

"The weary whisper of this endless rain
Drowned hopes of seeing you again,
Dripping drops with their low drone
Make me feel forlorn and lone
And drive me mad with their stance:
"You can be happy only once!"
What's the use of all your weeping, rain?
Keep it back, don't spend on me in vain,
Let the wind dry up your tears
With a swarm of fallen leaves
I don't need any preaching rains
They can't bring back my happy days…"

Zampolit wouldn't approve that again it was about the recidivistic rain, but so was the lyrics in the original, and the chord sequence was really cool…

Coming back with Vera, we didn't go along the road but took a shortcut over the vast fields which she was familiar with. There happened some secluded square hole nearby the path, like a former dugout, all overgrown with inviting carpet-like grass, where we entered for a midway repose. Vera was a beautiful black-haired girl of dark complexion and commanding air. When she got fed up with my incessant babbling about Eera this, Eera that, we hit the road again.

Getting out of the hole, I noticed candy wrappers in the grass. It seemed to be a local dating house, where I failed to live up to my image… Many years later, Eera told me how on one of the endless evenings in Bolshevik, before my drifting to their room, they arranged shaman dances behind the closed door. Vera hung a piece of sausage and a pair of onions from her sports pants and went off to roll and jump in that disguise: uh! Uh!

(…those swarthy Slav females would out-sex anyone when left on their own, and here lies the clue to the music by Igor Stravinsky…)

Eera came back to the village, and I spent the night in their room. It happened all by itself. We lay dressed on her bed and kept hugging and pressing more and more tighter and closer to each other, and then there remained nowhere any closer. Only I did not want to creak the bed, like Marc and Katranikha, which called for slowing down the action…