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

(…Anna did not sleep then and she later told Eera that at some point she couldn't control herself and kissed her own forearm…)

…but I still liked it.

The next day Eera admitted, "Seems, I'm thru the psychological barrier."

"Gosh! I kinda thought the physical got done with too…"

~ ~ ~

After Olya refused to marry Jan, he instantly grew Russian. The sufferings inflicted by his turned down love peeled all the varnish of civilization off the Czech European. He never learned the language though, but he dropped shaving and walked around in bristles wearing a black padded jacket, from under which he took a bottle of vodka—at uneven intervals—and swallowed from its neck, like Validol or some other medication. Sort of homeopathy in the Bolshevik style…

On the last night before our departure from the village, Vera, with a lot of care, prepared a bed for me and Eera in the next room, which had already got vacated. I did not turn the light off, and later Eera told me how much she was confounded at the sight of what I was getting on top of her with.

In the morning, before the arrival of the buses, she kept mum, hardly talking to me except for "yes", "no", "nothing". I did not manage then to bring out, that her mood resulted from Olya's forewarning that all we had had there was merely a "collective-farm affair" and back in Nezhyn, I would not give Eera another look.

When the buses came, I boarded neither of them, but put the guitar over my shoulder and walked towards the windbreak belt along the Moscow highway at the distant horizon, to go hiking to Baturin and from there to Konotop…

"Rumors have it, you've got an affair with a teacher's daughter?"

"They say, you've got married?"

Yes, she had and was in Nezhyn on a flying visit to get aright some papers, and dropped into Room 72 in the Hosty, before leaving for Mongolia where her husband was sent to serve after graduating his military school. By the by, he realized she was not a virgin. After the first wedding night he asked, well, they say, that women, usually, as if would, like, compare… "Yes, that's true," she answered and didn't add a word to it.

(…that's how she fucking crushed the poor fool. Just stepped on and smeared away.

Why not spread it thick and comfort him affectionately, like, there’s no one quite like you, babe, you’re the best man I’ve ever had, nobody's fit to hold a candle to you, my hero lover?.

Women are the most cruel creatures if you ask me. And should we really be so much surprised at having Tughriks among us?…)

However, sometimes you'd better make love, not talk. And we lay on the former Fyodor's and currently my bed because it was by the window. The first and only time in my life, I was with a married woman, and that's only for the old sake's' sake.

When we got dressed and hugged goodbye each other, she exclaimed, twice, "I'm a whore!"

Yes, and sounding way too happy, like, Archimedes in his famous jogging after a bath. "Eureka! I found myself and I know what I gonna do in Mongolia!"

Farewell, Nadya. Whatever and regardless, you're the most cloudless love in my life…

The senior overseer kept true his threats to me. And there was a general meeting of the English Department with just one issue on the agenda: petitioning the Institute Rectorate to send me down.

The day before it, on Veerich's advice, I called the meeting of my course-mates—well, of those living in the Hosty—who gathered in Room 72, to rally the ranks, so to say… Veerich was a current fourth-year student, who also entered the Institute after his hitch.

They crowded in, got seated on each other's laps – all girls, except for Igor and Volodya. I'd never have believed that such a swarm could fit into our pencil-box room. So, I had to perch on the window sill. It was some rally of supporters! Damn! They came together united by one wish – to admire me crushed, wrung out of my image, crucified on that windowsill. The saliva was dripping even from their eyes, like by those public execution goers. They came to lynch me beforehand, impatient to wait for the general meeting, because in Bolshevik I turned my nose up at our Department girls. They craved to quarter me, impale, to put me at the stake for that unpardonable slogan – "Phil-Fac forever!"

One of the girls even accused me of uttering to her something eye-to-eye, which she wouldn't forget until her last day and never forgive me for saying that. She even had to quench a sob, when telling her sad story. Everyone rushed to ask eagerly—what words were they?—but she only blew her nose and repeated her oath to carry them with her to the grave. Even I got intrigued – what kind of so stirring words might I have known? Moreover, until that moment it never occurred to me she was from my course, I could swear to see her for the first time!

Then I got tired of that Lynch trial session. "Okay," said I, "many thanks for your most kind support, but I still have to prepare my homework for tomorrow's classes." Irina from Bakhmuch nearly choked with chortling…

At the meeting, after the overseer's declamation, a couple of my course-mates took the floor to confirm, that, yes, I went to work only when I wanted to, and shamelessly slept on the oilcloth.

Then Veerich attempted at breaking the monotonous mood. He leaned on the lectern and, facing the audience, began to broadcast what kind of a reliable comrade and friend I was, and recently I did my best to rescue a couple of freshman girls subjected to hooligan harassment in the Count's Park. I bravely rushed at the villains, although one of them had a neck from a broken bottle in his hands… Here, Veerich stepped out from behind the lectern to demonstrate for the audience the proper way of gripping a spalled off neck in your hand, and commented that such a weapon was more dangerous than a common knife. The audience froze in awed attention to the disclosed details…

On the whole, he did not deviate too much. That day Slavic and Twoic ran up to Room 72 from the hostel lobby. There was a first-year student, they said, in a fit of hysterics 'cause some guys had stopped her girlfriend in the park and were keeping her there. The 3 of us raced to the indicated place and shooed off 3 local guys. And the saved mantrap started to scream her guts out, that we were busters who ruined her personal life. It seemed one of the would-be rapists had become her target. Damn! Don't call me anymore to rescue a twat gone a-hunting!. However, the detail with the bottle's neck was a free-style fantasy flight brooded by Veerich’s imagination.

In the end, I was given the floor. "Everyone is forging his own destiny. Here is mine, white-hot, right from the forge and now it depends on you how it will turn out…" Then I gave out a repentance ? la Marc Novoselytsky at the meeting dedicated to the Game of Parties and with a minimal margin—who's for? against? abstained?—I received a severe reprimand with the final note of warning…

(…although the outcome of the meeting was clear before it even started – were I kicked out then where would you come up from?. Certain shell-fragments cannot but miss…)

~ ~ ~

Every good news has some crappy lining. Hardly I rejoiced that sending down whizzed harmlessly by, as it was time to stick my neck again into the hateful noose. The KGB Captain beaconed with his newspaper: come to report and get instructions. At the secret meeting, it turned out that I became a hand-me-down item at their enterprise. The Captain for his heroism and vigilance displayed during the Game of Parties was rewarded by the rise from the provincial backwoods to the capital city of Kiev. He did not hide his joy passing me as a stock-in-trade to his successor.

The successor was a black-haired young man who had just graduated from some institute in Chernigov. The educational institution had a special Historical Department there at which they were forging Party Cadres. After that Department you weren't sent to a village to work off for your diploma, you got a job no lower than at some District Party Committee and then – grow up in your career to become a Member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, if your liver can cope with the amounts of alcohol on the way and you've got a felicitous gift of assuming, pliably and aptly, the right position under current leadership.

But not everyone was up to graduating that Department. 2 students from the Philological Department at the NGPI got transferred there, and a month later they blew off all the career prospects and came back. The discipline at the special Department was like that in a cadet school. With the lecturer entering the classroom, you had to stand at attention, otherwise the group headman, also a student, would get at you like a construction battalion pheasant at a newly drafted salaga. And in the hostel, everyone kept strict to the rules and peeking after everybody else to catch pants down and knock on them. After all, there were district committees and District Committees, one might be in a muddy district center, while another in the capital city. A trite example of the struggle for survival – the more competitors you outlive, the harder it is to outlive you…

That young black-haired KGB man had a long sheepskin coat and did not inquire about the price of mine. And he was much more mobile than the promoted Captain or, maybe, the upstart hadn't yet grown lazy. Anyway, the secret meetings with me, he arranged at various city institutions. For instance, in ZAGS closed after a working day or in the Tourism Bureau. One time it was in an empty apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story building, not far from the main square. To that meeting, he brought along his new boss. Once upon a time, a male with the looks of that boss was stamped as "an interesting man" – gray hair in a clean cut above a youthful, well-tanned, face; a European gloss was felt at once. I don't know what for he was transferred from Hungary to the provincial backwoods of Nezhyn, where he got interested in a rat whose finking helped his predecessor in the promotion to Kiev. However, I couldn't serve a springboard for him either. Enough was enough; I had got thoroughly fed up with that shit.

My invariable reports to the black-haired KGB young man, that the current student youth was an amorphous mass, indifferent to anything except for the present stock of lard in their "torbas", were almost bringing him to tears. The playful times of gamey gossip were over, I unilaterally stopped narking on my co-students. But he had so irrepressible desire to dig something out, that even send his secret collaborator to Room 72, in case I was a double agent, and kept an underground printing house under my bed.

Of course, that secsot did not introduce himself as a rat with the operational pseudonym "Vova", yet I still figured it out. Would a normal student from the Physics and Mathematics Department ask me for help with his English? With all the “pro” and “cons” secured by my image? Hooey! The shammer drove a fool about living in the same hostel as me. Okay, dude! No problem!

So, here he comes. I hospitably encourage him to take a seat on a freshman's bed and call the exercise number from the textbook he’s brought along, and he starts doing the exercise. So I can return to the table with the players in the already started "pool" of Preferans around it. And what will he sneak into his notebook for his report to the KGB man: "seven in spades", "trick", "pass", "miser"? At those carefree times, the Ministry of Health has not yet started to print its warning on cigarette packs and the malignant deadly tobacco smoke kept filling Room 72 with its tumbling, slowly whirling layers. The non-smoker martyr of a rat learned it from his severe exposure, that stool-pigeoning was hazardous for health. It took him just two visits to make sure that, yes, the student body was hopelessly amorphous and miserably supine – beggarly two kopecks for a trick.

But once the young KGBist dictated me a telling on Zhomnir. There was nothing compromising in the text though, just that on such and such a day, at such and such an hour Zhomnir was coming out from the Language Laboratory. Well, the Language Laboratory was not a safe house and contained just the laboratory assistant at her desk, and a swarm of freshmen behind the glass doors in the booths, parroting the tape-recorded texts "Meet the Parkers" from the headphones on their heads. Some absolutely inappropriate place for disseminating of the Ukrainian nationalism.

I guess, the dictation was done just in case, after the KGB man found out that I was visiting Zhomnir at home to discuss my translations for Translator, which I never cut ties with. Such a piece of paper could always come handy: "Some familiar hand, isn't it, Alexander Vasilyevich?"

My final mission was making friends with an American. There was a ten-day USA Agricultural Exhibition in Kiev, so I was instructed to visit it and make friends with at least someone from their staff. I took Slavic with me and we whizzed by a local train to Kiev, and there to the grounds of the Republican Veh-Deh-eN-Kha with the exhibition held in a huge white-tin Quanset Hut.

A live American was then a rare phenomenon, so at the exhibition, you could hardly squeeze and push thru the crowd denser than that to the Lenin Mausoleum in the Red Square in Moscow, or at the traveling menagerie in Konotop on a Sunday afternoon. Inside, under the rib-curves in the arched roof, up above the streaming crowd, hovered black-and-white Jimmy Carter, kinda Host to the Quanset Hut Show with his best wishes to the Soviet People, white-on-black. And the crowd carried you farther alongside the glossy barriers splitting compartments on both sides – farm tractors, machines, pictures of happy rural life. In one small section there stood a dummy pig, some nice creature, with large flowers painted all over it, in the style of "Yellow Submarine" cartoon by The Beatles. And next to the ornamented piggy there stood a girl, but alive. Not my style though, if not aware that it’s an American you wouldn't waste another glance at her.

So, she stood by and kept squeaking like a clockwork, "This is a piglet! This is a piglet!" But her staring eyes, long since stunned, dim, and glassy, turned kinda swoony slugs and swam over all that rumbling crowd that flowed past her for hours, like some f-f..er..I mean, flooding Niagara Falls without the tiniest splash of response to her words from the thrumming waves of strange faces.

I pitied her and slowed down by her stall, "Hey, girl,” says I, “Call it porosyonok."

"This is a piglet! This is a piglet!"

(…at that time the two great nations were not prepared for a dialogue yet…)

I and Slavic went out and sparked in the dank spring wind around the giant Quanset Hut. When back in Nezhyn, I reported to the black-haired that those Americans were too introvert. He realized that both "introvert" and "amorphous' stuff was not the right building-blocks for his career and grew sad…

That mission turned the last one because soon after I dug a hole for myself to fall into… The black-haired KGBist really fretted me already with his importunate demands to write a report and not to just play with the word order. And there popped up something to make him happy without harming innocent civilians… In the institute reading hall, on the second floor of the New Building, I was leafing thru a biography of Bogdan Khmelnytsky when on one of the pages I saw a mark in pencil: "Bogdan Khmelnytsky is a traitor to the Ukrainian people". I mentioned it in my next report to the KGB.

The guy was delighted – calling the initiator of the Ukraine and Russia reunion a traitor was visibly steaming with the Ukrainian nationalism. "On which page?"

"Well, somewhere in the middle."

So, they arrested the book, found the subversive page and, at the following meeting, "But it was you who wrote that."