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

"What?!."

"The hand is yours, that's what. No use of denying. You better admit." And he started to intimidate me with full-scale expertise. 2 weeks later, he explained that the letter "a" in the pencil inscription was very like to mine but a little different; so the graphologist told him. Yet—which is characteristic—he did not even apologize.

In general, I, like, got offended and stopped to turn up for the loathsome dates, no matter how diligently he flashed his semaphore newspaper. And at chance meetings in the city transport, I was cutting him dead with a disinterested indifference of a stranger. He seemed to understand that such a secret collaborator is as beneficial as 2 aces in the kitty when playing miser at Preferans, and pissed off. So the KGB archives ceased to accumulate the reports with my handwriting signed "Pavel" of which I never regretted. My affair with the organs was anything but a happy one…

~ ~ ~

(…yes, but now I have to rewind, who were they – Slavic and Twoic?..)

They were a couple of first-year students, who entered my life at the Hosty to substitute for Fyodor and Yasha. Slavic was from Chernigov, he matriculated the English Department and even lived in the same room with me. And he had also served in a construction battalion, but being a member of the well-to-do society stratum, he spent his hitch in the capacity of a warehouse manager. I mean, he came from a family wealthy enough for keeping successful negotiations with the Commanders of his military unit.

(…lots of things in my life flowed by unquestioned because I was never good at analyzing and just lived on with any bullshit implicitly taken for granted. Now I know why in our great Soviet Homeland of working people by working people for working people with equal rights for all and everybody, certain people happened to have their rights equaller than the average.

It’s only there’s no way to pass my present wisdom to that hairy yobbo of myself, happy with his/my blissful ignorance. There’s no way to reach over there, I cannot re-run my life, I can only re-tell it.

But, hey! Who cares? Probably, those hyper-equalized folks had just found a maverick treasure in their stove chimney…)

To the construction battalion, he also got because of some sight problems hidden behind the smoked lenses in his glasses. The long forelock of straight chestnut hair slid across his forehead – from edge to edge alongside the glasses rim, and he did not shave his upper lip, saving soft female tendrils trimmed with scissors…

The guy, schooled at his hitch in a construction battalion, knows the meaning and origin of the all-forgiving mellowness and omni-comprehension in the optics of his roommate returning after a short absence to the nearby Count's Park. A former conbatist will find in himself enough determination to ask a direct question and, after a direct response, to beg for a joint. In the enlightened circles, it is termed as "clinging to the tail".

Weed cemented us and made, practically, inseparable. I recollect the case of a winter empty suction, when bang in the middle of week I rushed to Konotop, by 3:15 local train – there and by 19:05 back to Nezhyn. So, Slavic kept me company because of being such a sterling loyal friend.

In Konotop, we went to Lyalka’s who asked me if I remembered that bastard on a visit from St. Petersburg.

How not to remember? I liked his boots right away, obviously weighty, you could see at a look it was some sturdy footwear. Lyalka then was at conquering the visitor with the sweep of lifestyle in our provincial backwater. The Petersburger was taken to the host’s section in the basement, where weed was reaching the condition; we sparked there – not bad it was, some real stuff for high flights in circles of any height…

"So 2 days ago," sez Lyalka, "that bitch bombed my basement. Broke the door and took it out. Sehryoga the King saw him at the station getting on the Leningrad train with a backpack."

Yea, that's what you call a cleanly done job because St. Pete had always been the cultural capital of our country… In short, Lyalka forked out a couple of heads, but warned that the quality hadn't been tested yet. Then I, just in case, dropped on 13 Decemberists and found one or two twigs in the attic of the brick shed.

On the train back, it became completely unbearable, and I stuffed a joint from Lyalka's donation in the car vestibule, while Slavic acted a make-believe screen around me with his fur headgear on top… We sparked it right there, smoked, entered the car and got seated on the benches, opposite each other. He looked at me, I looked at him, in the hope, so to speak, maybe it's just that I didn't have time enough to feel the touch?. But it's all bullshit. If you start cultivating wishful expectations of that sort, then the stuff has no more dose in it than clippings from a kitchen broom.

We arrived in Nezhyn, each one full of glum and dismay. By the time we reached the Hosty, it was completely dark. But, just in case, we walked to the Old Building… Night. Desolation. Winter… I stuffed one from the grabbed in the attic. Sparked it. Slavic was standing by, but manly restrained himself.

I took another drag and said, "Slavic…" (…and from the marble plaque on the corner of the Old Building with the inscription “N. V. Gogol studied here…” my own words echoed back to me…), "…it's not in vain, that we have ridden three horses to death today." So said I, and passed the joint into his craving claw…

As for Twoic, he was a guy from Bakhmuch named Sasha whom I renamed into "Eternal-Two-Getter" because "two" was the poorest mark for school kids, but then the handle was shortened to Twoic. Reciprocally, he dubbed me with the handle of "Hooey-Pricker" derived from my half-tabooed warcry by which I answered any kickbacks in life, "We'll prick any hooey thru!"

In fact, he was not from Bakhmuch itself but from a village adjacent to it. On account of that, he liked to pass for a naive child of nature and acted a simple-minded peasant yokel. Each weekend when he started back to Nezhyn his parents collected him a generous "torba" with ample grub. On the whole, it was a bulky farm boy.

Man's nature is best reflected in their laughter. By Twoic it was a sharp yank of his moon-like broad face up to chortle two-three squeaks out, with his eyes shut tightly, and then, as the round face was lowering back, the pair pin-sharp pupils would frisk thru the portholes of his squint, checking the current situation: what's how? Just so a recklessly cautious character…

Studying at the Biology Department, he, naturally, lived on the second (the Bio-Fac's) floor at the Hosty. Twoic was another "tail-clinger", though not as keen as Slavic. The main factor to turn us into an inseparable trinity was Preferans which is a great game if you take a closer look at it. Poker, Snore, King or its reduced version – Eralush, are just a contest in actor skills, while Preferans is an intellectual game of mind. Only I had constant bad luck at it… I tried to break that tendency and tame the fortune, and, because of that, I kept taking desperate risks. "Bluish" misers became the trademark of Hooey-Pricker.

It was clear as day that because of the crimson tablecloth stolen from the redhead dembel, I had fallen out of grace by Luck, so I tried to overcome that status quo, whatever the costs, and gain back a grip at the fortune's forelock. As a result, getting 2 or 3 "throw-ins" or even a "train" of them at playing a regular "bluish" miser, I sat, deject, indifferent, and languid, in a bummed-out prostration until the end of the "pool of 40" in progress…

I was paid the regular student scholarship of 45 rubles a month. Almost every weekend, my mother gave me 10 rubles before I left for Nezhyn. All the money went to my card debts, well, plus the havvage at the canteen. The tall bottles with dry wine forsook me; I switched over to the healthy way of a sober life. Although constant being down-and-out was f-f…er…I mean, flatly bending me out of shape.

Besides, Twoic and Slavic played "a mutual paw", that is as a team, having conspired, which means forget the hope that your seconded King, or Queen backed by two lower cards, will ever bring you a trick. United efforts of 2 playing "a mutual paw" would strip the single-handed opponent of a trick, or a chip at 50 percent of the games in the pool. Such is the law – severe, but just: there are no bros at cards; shut up your driveling gape when among pals.

(…of course, you do not need to understand all this Preferans terminology, but, to get the feel, imagine a couple of muggers working in a minibus: one holds the victim's hands while the other frisks and picks the pockets.

The difference though is that you won't take the same minibus seeing them on it, while in Preferans' case you will come up to them the next day and say, "Well, will we "draw a pool", or will we?" Of their conspiracy, I was directly told years after graduating from the NGPI…)

Of course, I noticed their "mutual-paw pedal system" of scratching their eyebrows and pulling themselves behind the earlobe, under the guise of reflexive body movements, but I did not care a damn. It was not them but my fate I vied to vanquish in the single combat gambling, even if it chose to wile using the pair of tricky pawns… Knowing that "they play" in Room 72, Preferans lovers from other Departments also came to us. With those, I was breaking even, I would have stayed in the win, but for the adamant propensity for unreliable—"bluish"—misers…

In addition to being always ready to play cards, Twoic served a source of useful acquaintances. With his mediation, a pair of cute, educated local fags paid a couple of visits to our room. One of them told "pinkish" jokes, "Then get, you naasty fascist, a grenade from a Soviet homoseexual!" With much gusto and very accurately, he emulated the fey droll of fairies. And Dr. Grisha shared how visiting the beach of Golden Sands in Bulgaria, he screened his partner, who was lifting the golden watch from the clothes on the sand left by an Englishman taking a swim in the sea… We laughed again.

No, Twoic was not a homo. And I hadn't met a single one at the institute. What's the point? To matriculate and land among a group of girls? So the gay guys just flashed by like a funny episode. However, Dr. Grisha was useful indeed. Once he arranged a twelve-day sick leave for me, writing some bronchitis in the diagnosis. Such a cute little man; he had very beautiful hair, though the word "hair" wouldn't suit it, I'd rather say – a wavy chevelure. And he was handsome of face too, only that a little short. But his brown soft briefcase was large, as well as his hips which he rolled in his gait. I was on friendly terms with him, despite the difference in orientation; nothing like it was in the case with Tughrik. By the way, Dr. Grisha was also married and had two children, boys both of them…

But a three-day leave for acute respiratory disease, aka ARD, I could easily procure without Dr. Grisha’s help. Behind the Old Building, there stood the institute’s one-storied hut of the medical center. You come there in the morning before classes, and they give you a thermometer and, if there is the temperature, you receive a stamped slip of paper for ARD which meant 3 days of freedom. Only you needed to warn the headman-girl of your group not to smear the log with "absent" marks, in 3 days she'd have the reference.

Twoic, as a biology pundit, shared that the temperature significantly rises in the area of strained muscles, but the armpit is a bunch of muscles. Placing a thermometer in there, I started to intensely strain and relax that area muscles under the clothes, until the doctor, handled Pill, would say, "Enough!" And the result was never less than 37.3 degrees centigrade.

My falling ill so often perplexed Pill, where was my immune system, eh? Later on, her bewilderment transformed into angry suspicion, and she used to check me with two thermometers at once, one for each armpit. So the difference was only one-tenth: 37.3 and 37.2 – all the same ARD.

And then Pill went amok, "Enough! Here's a referral for you – go to the hospital!"

But I did not retreat, and went there, and lay in the hospital for a week and a half, for no reason, actually, just for the principle's sake…

With all that in mind, don't forget about my main occupation – studying. I was sitting thru the practical classes in my group, and at times attended lectures for the students of the whole course, I passed credits and examinations. Besides, I never dropped self-education.

In the second year, I was fortunate enough to meet The Cavalry Army and The Odessa Stories by Ivan Babel. He convinced me that even after the Great October Revolution there still remained writers in Russia and not just sholokhovs-proskurins-markovs. At the third course, in the institute reading hall, I discovered magazines with The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. It was a thunderbolt… In my final year, the endless, like the flow of the Nile, Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers were attending the institute to keep me company thru the long lecture hours.

I don't account for commonplace pulp fictions not related to my education, that was read for a pastime. Like, when there was a stir in the Hosty, "Ah, Efremov! Thais of Athens! The peak and limit of wildest dreams!" Ilya Lipes gave that hetaera to me for only 2 days. So after the midnight lights-out, I even had to go in the corridor and read it under the lamp above the doors to the washroom and the men's toilet.

I was sitting in a chair, dragged along, with my sheepskin coat thrown over the shoulders but not covering my bare legs because I was too lazy to dress after reading in bed before the curfew. So what? Let them imagine I'm on the beach…

But with all due respect to Lipes, that's not literature but just another illustration from the textbook The History of the Ancient World for the fifth grade of secondary school. When a schoolboy, I liked those gaudy pictures of the Egypt slaves dragging stone blocks to the pyramids, of the Roman legions on their march and other suchlike masterpieces. Some seductive means of education, no denying, yet comics strips and literature are not the same things… However, you cannot know beforehand where a find might be awaiting you, and where a loss.

Sitting out there, by the dark frozen window, with my eyes scuttling along the lines that described an ancient festival, where stark naked participants were having a ritual run thru the darkness of night, I had a vision again. Just for a fraction of a second I got into a dark Greek night and ran, stark naked, thru the black shadows of dark trees under the big moist stars in the sky… But then – flip! – and I am back again in the sheepskin coat, on a chair in the cold light from the lonely fluorescent lamp in the ceiling above the gray concrete floor getting lost in the pushed-off darkness of a corridor in the fast asleep hostel, and my body still tense from that pair of plunging step-jumps in my run thru that split-second, and my skin still feeling the chill of night from that distant past…

(…now, what to do about all that? Just do as everyone else – brush it aside with a dismissive shrug, forget, and get back to living on.

But the book itself was, nonetheless, lame garbage…)

No better garbage was all those theoretic Grammars, Theorophonics, Scientific Communism, Communist Aesthetics, and oodles of likewise farragoes devoid of any rhyme or reason obligatory taught at the institute… Although, I do understand, in part, the lecturers who poured them out; once upon a time they had to learn all that shit themselves, and now, gaining leverage at the past sufferings, they tormented us, students, because of their dissatisfaction with so crappy life design.

"All work and no play in perineum makes Jack a dull zygote…"

Still, those lectures have certain value when approached properly prepared, I happened to even like one of the theoretical lectures on… grammar?.. phonetics?. Well, in short, Scnar it was who delivered that Lecture of lectures. It’s only that his last name sounded kinda disparaging handle, but he himself was an acceptable geezer. When I ventured to be locked up in the city hospital because of the medical staff at the institute hadn’t antiviral means to bridle my temperature galloping with so immodest frequency, he lent me The Quiet American by Graham Green, in English. I'd hardly survive that week there without that quiet companion because the ward-mate patient from the next bed kept window curtains bubbling with his mighty snore…

Now, before that incredible lecture, when on a weekend in Konotop, I visited Lyalka. He wasn't home and his brother Rabentus warmed me up. I had never come across such grass yet, like some dry emaciated skeletons of tiny twigs. And never had I been in the like jag. After a joint for 2, I watched Rabentus as if thru a lens – his top and chin got narrow and distant while the middle of his mug stretched in a disproportionate zoom-in. He noticed that I had drifted beyond the limits, and advised to rinse my smiler with water from the tap. No use.

But I remembered that I still had to go to Nezhyn. On the way to the station, I dropped to Igor Recoon on Peace Avenue. His mother was cordiality itself, "O, how so nice to meet you! Please, get seated and have a snack before the journey."

As if I could keep sitting! I was dragged back and forth – from the living room to the balcony, from the balcony to the living room. On the way hither-thither, I asked Igor to find some piece of paper for jotting down the things I would say. Something like: