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

“Are you in for Hide-and-seek?”

“No go. Two are too few for it.”

“There are two more. Coming back from the swamp in a minute.”

“Went to the swamp? What for?”

“Wanking.”

Soon the promised two came from the swamp, chortling between them, each one clutching a whisker of grass in his grab. I couldn’t guess the purpose of the grass bunches, neither had I any clear idea what “wanking” was about. Though from the grunts by which boys usually accompanied the word, I saw that it was something bad and wrong.

(…all my life I have been a champion for righteousness. Everything should be as right as rain. Seeing something which is not right just puts my back up. If, say, a grown-up shoat with brazen squeals sucks on a cow’s udder, I’m tempted to disperse them.

And take a look at that cow too! So resigned and obedient! As if she doesn’t know that milk is for calves and people only…)

That’s why I stood akimbo and met the comers with the reprimand in question form: “So what? Enjoyed your wanking?”

And then I learned that the righteousness supporters sometimes would better keep mum. Besides, it’s a crying shame that I could so easily be stretched on the ground at an unexpected brush….

Football was played in the grassy field between the Bugorok-Knoll and the garbage bins enclosure. Team captains nomination was based on who’s older, taller, and shriller in their shrieks at bickering.

Then the boys, in pairs, went aside and put heads together, “You’re ‘hammer’ and I’m ‘tiger’, okay?”

“No! No! I’m ‘rocket’, you’re ‘tiger’.”

Having agreed on the placeholder handles, they returned to the captains-to-be and asked the one whose turn it was to choose, “Which one for your team: ‘Rocket’ or ‘Tiger’?”

With the human resources divided, the game began. How I wanted to be a captain! To be so popular that all the boys would hanker to play in my team! But the dream remained just a dream… I zealously scrambled thru the grass: from one football goal to the other. I was desperate to win and didn’t spare myself, ready to do anything for our victory. It’s only that I never could get near the ball. At times it did roll towards me, yet before I got prepared to kick it properly, the swarm of “ours” and “theirs” came racing around and send it far afield… And again I plodded in a clumsy trot, back and forth, and shrieked, “Pass! Me here!” but no one listened to me and everyone else screamed too and was also running after the ball, and the game rolled on without my actual participation…

~ ~ ~

In summer all our family, except for Grandma Martha, went to Konotop in the Sumy region of Ukraine, to the wedding of Mom’s sister Lyoudmilla and the region champion of weightlifting in the third weight class, young, but rapidly balding, Anatoly Arkhipenko from the city of Sumy.

A truck with a canvas top took us thru Checkpoint—the white gate in the barbed-wire fence surrounding the whole Zona—to the Valdai railway station where we boarded a local train to the Bologoye station to change trains there. The car was empty with no one but us on the wooden yellow benches paired back-to-back on both sides of the aisle. I liked the car swaying in time with the clatter of wheels on rail joints beneath the floor. And I liked to watch the dark log posts flicking across the windowpane, their crossbars loaded with the endless stream of wires sliding to the bottom in their sag only to go up to the next post’s leap-flick for the unrolling stream to slide into the next sag and tilting up, and again, and again, and… At the stops, the local train patiently waited to give way to more important trains and moved on only after their impetuous whoosh by.

One especially long wait happened at the station of Dno whose name I read in the glazed sign on the green timber-wall of its shed. And only after a solitary steam engine puff-puffed past the shed, slowly piercing with its long black body the white curls of its own steam, our train started on.

(…I recollected that station and the black glitter of the engine penetrating the milky mist of the steam when I read that at the station of Dno, Colonel of the Russian Army Nikolay Romanov signed his renunciation of the royal throne… However, by that act, he didn’t save himself nor his wife, nor the children of their royal family all lined up with their backs to the basement wall and shot at and then those not killed by the volley were finished off with the rifle bayonets.

I knew nothing of all that when sitting there in the local train by the shabby shed. Neither was I aware that it does not matter if I knew it or not. Either way, all that is part of me. It’s me at both ends of those Mosin rifles ridiculously long even when with no bayonets…

Still, it’s good that we don’t know all in childhood…)

Most of the houses along Nezhyn Street in the city of Konotop kept slightly off the road, standing behind their respective fences which reflected the owner’s level of prosperity, as well as the mainstream trends, brands, and stages in the evolution of the local fencing technologies. However, the left-side continuity of sundry fencing stretches in the street was briefly interrupted by the wall of Number 19 whitewashed ages ago, having 2 windows in bleached peeling-off paint-coat equipped by 4 hinged deal shutters to seal the windows off for the night.

To enter the house, one should have passed thru the wicket of tall weather-worn boards, side by side with the wider, yet constantly closed gate which separated the yard from the street. The comer should also know which of the 4 entrances they needed. The doors were identically distributed between two windowless verandas abutting the house in between the 4 windows looking in the yard.

The veranda next to the wicket, with both of its doors, as well as the half of the whole house, belonged then to Ignat Pilluta and his wife Pillutikha, therefore the pair of windows overlooking Nezhyn Street were theirs. The timber walls of the second veranda wore a coat of rambling Vine with wide green leaves and pale clusters of dinky, never ripening, berries; the blind partition, also of boards, divided the second veranda’s inside into 2 lengthwise sections, 1 for each of the 2 remaining owners.

The home, aka khutta, of our grandmother, Katerinna Ivanovna, comprised the half-dark veranda-hallway, the kitchen with a window viewing the 2 stairs beneath the outside entrance door to the veranda, and the brick stove in the opposite corner next to which stood the leaf of the constantly open door to the only room in the khutta. The space between the whitewashed walls there all day long remained submerged in the perpetual limbo-like dusk oozing in thru the room's window from the solid shade under the giant Elm in the two-meter wide backyard, who also shadowed half of the neighboring yard of the Turkovs at Number 17.

Turning round the farthermost corner in the second veranda, you reached the last, fourth, door belonging to the khutta of old man Duzenko and his wife. They also had the same-sized sequence of hallway-kitchen-room, yet by 2 windows more than in Grandma Katya’s khutta because of the symmetry in layout—the 2 windows viewing the street called for 2 windows looking into the common yard.

2 mighty American Maples with pointed fingertips in their open-palm leaves grew in the yard right next to each of the Duzenko's additional window. The wide gap between the tree trunks was filled by a squat stack of red bricks, brittle with their age, which old man Duzenko kept all his life for a possible reconstruction of his khutta in some future time.

About six meters away from the breastwork between the Maples and parallel to it, there stretched a long shed of ancient dark gray boards, whose blind wall had blind doors secured by sizable one-eyed padlocks. Their respective owners kept there fuel for the winter, and in an enclosure within Grandma Katya’s fuel section lived a pig named Masha.

Opposite the veranda in the barren Vine coat, one more huge Elm and a timber-fence separated the common yard from the neighbors at Number 21. Next to the Elm, there stood a small shed plastered with the mixture of clay, cow dung, and chopped straw, which also was padlocked to secure the earth-cellar of the Pillutas inside it. The Duzenkos’ earth-cellar shed of bare boards stood farther away from the street and as if continued the long common shed, being separated from it by the passage to the kitchen gardens.

Between those two earth-cellar sheds, there stood a small lean-to structure covering the lid over Grandma Katya’s earth-cellar—a vertical shaft two-plus-meter deep, with a wooden ladder going down, into the dark between the narrow earth walls. At the bottom, the flashlight disclosed 4 niches caved in on all four sides and slightly deeper than the shaft bottom under ladder legs. That’s where they stored potatoes and carrots for the winter, and beets too because the frost couldn’t reach the stored vegetables at such depth.

In the corner formed by the Duzenko’s and Grandma Katya’s earth-cellar sheds, there stood a kennel of the black-and-white dog Zhoolka chained to his house. He tinkled the long chain, whipped and lashed it against the ground, barking furiously at any stranger who entered the yard. But I made friends with him on the very first night when, by Mom’s prompt, I took out and dumped into his iron plate the leftovers after supper….

Grandma Katya’s hair was sooner white than gray and a little wavy. She had it cut to the middle of her neck and held in place with a curved plastic comb beneath the back of her head. The whiteness of the hair contrasted to the swarthy skin in her face with a thin nose and somewhat rounded, as if frightened, eyes. But in the somber room behind the kitchen, on one of the three blind walls, there hung a photographic portrait of a black-haired woman with an aristocratically high hairdo and a necktie (as was the fashion once upon the New Economic Policy times during the late twenties)—Grandma Katya in her young years.

Next to her, there was an equally large photo of a man with a heavy Jack London’s chin, wearing a Russian collar shirt and black jacket, so looked her husband Joseph when in the position of the Regional Trade Auditor before his arrest and exile to the North, and abrupt disappearance strangely coincident with the retreat of German troops from Konotop…

On the whole, I liked the visit to Grandma Katya, although there were neither gorodki nor football playing, and only daily Hide-and-seek with the children from the neighboring khuttas who would never find you if you hid in Zhoolka’s kennel.

Late in the evening, on the log electric-line pillars along the street, there lit up rare yellowish bulbs, unable to disperse the night dark even on the ground beneath them. May beetles flew with a bomber buzz above the soft black dust in the road, yet so low that you could knock them down with your jacket or a leafy branch broken off a Cherry tree hanging over from behind someone’s fence. The captives were incarcerated in empty matchboxes whose walls they scratched from inside with their long awkward legs. The following day, we opened their cells to admire the fan-like mustaches and the chestnut color of their glossy backs. We tried to feed them on freshly shredded blades of grass, but they did not seem hungry and we set them free from our palms the same way as you set a ladybug to fly. The beetle ticklishly crawled to a raised fingertip, tossed up his/her rigid forewings to straighten out their long transparent wings packed under that protective case, and flew off with low buzzing. Okay, fly wherever you want – in the evening we’ll catch more….

One day from the far end of the street, there came a jumble of jarring wails split by rare prolonged booms. The sounds of familiar cacophony made the people of Nezhyn Street went out of their yards and, standing by their gates, inform each other whose funeral it was.

In front of the procession, 3 men were marching slowly, the lips pressed to the brass mouthpieces of trumpets in heartrending sobs. The fourth one carried a drum in front of him like a huge potbelly. After walking for as long as it was proper, he smote its side with a felted stick. The wide belt cinching the drum across the drummer’s back left both his hands free to hold the felted stick in one of them and a wide copper plate in the other, which he from time to time crashed against the second such plate screwed upon the drum rim, to which event the trumpets responded with a new splash of disparate wailing.

After the musicians, they carried a large photo of a sullen man face and several wreaths with white-lettered inscriptions along black ribbons. A medium platform truck followed the wreaths, purring its engine. On the platform with the unfastened sides, there stood an openwork monument of rebar rods coated with silver paint. Two men grabbed onto the rods from both sides to keep their balance over the open coffin at their feet with the deceased laid on display. A hesitant nondescript crowd concluded the slow procession.

I did not dare to go out into the street, although Mom and Aunt Lyoudmilla were there standing at the gate as well as the neighbors with their children by the wickets of their khuttas. However, driven by curiosity, I still climbed the gate from inside to peek over it. The lead-colored nose stuck from the pallid dead face looked so horrible that I flew back to the kennel of black-and-white Zhoolka, who also was ill at ease and whining to back up the trumpets….

Grandma Katya knew the way of tying a usual handkerchief into a fatty mouse with ears and a tail, which she put onto her palm to pet the white head with a finger of her other hand. All of a sudden the mouse would leap in a desperate escape attempt, but Grandma Katya caught it on the fly, put back and went on petting, under our eager laughter. Of course, I realized that it was her who pushed the mouse, but following the trick, as closely as possible, I could never crack how she did that.

Each evening she hauled out the pail of sourly smelling slop with peelings, scraps, and offals to her section in the mutual shed, where pig Masha greeted her by upbeat impatient grunting. There Grandma Katya would stand over slurping Masha accusing her of one or other act of blatant misbehavior.

She showed us which of the vegetable beds and trees in the garden were hers so that we did not play around with the neighbors’ because there was no fencing to split the plots. However, the apples were not ripe yet and I climbed the tree of White Mulberry, though Grandma Katya warned that I was too heavy for such a young tree. And indeed, one day it broke under me in two. I dreaded the pending punishment, but Dad did not beat me. He pressed the halves of the split tree back to each other wrapping tight with a length of some sheer yellowish cable. And Grandma Katya never said a scathing word.

That evening she shared that the pig refused to eat anything at all and knocked the pail over because the animal was too clever and felt that the next day they would slaughter her. In the morning, when the butcher came, Grandma Katya left her khutta, and only after that they pulled frantically screaming Masha out of her enclosure, chased about the yard and slaughtered with a long knife to pierce the pig’s heart and her high-pitched squeal turned into wheezy snorts growing shorter and shorter. Throughout that time, Mom kept us, her children, in the khutta, and she allowed me to go out only when they were scorching the motionless it by the buzzing flame of blowtorch.

At Aunt Lyoudmilla’s wedding, plates with sliced lard and fried cutlets, and dishes of chilled-out pork jelly cluttered the long table in the yard. One of the guests volunteered to teach the bride how to stuff a home-made sausage, but she refused and the merry guests laughed out loud….

In general, I liked Konotop although I felt sorry for Masha and ashamed of splitting the Mulberry tree. For some reason, I even found likable the taste of the cornbread. Everyone was cursing it but still buying because Nikita Khrushchev declared Corn the Queen of the fields and at shops they sold only bread made of cornflower…

Back to the Object we also were coming by train but the road seemed so much longer. I felt sick and dizzy until eventually there was found a window in the car where you could stick your head out into the wind. Clinging to that window, I watched as the green string of cars in our train, keeping a constant bent about its middle, rolled around the green field. It was easy to figure out that our journey became so endless because the train was describing one huge circle in one and the same field with random copses added here and there. At one of the stops, Dad left the car and did not come back at the departure. I was scared that we would remain without our Dad, and started to whine pitifully. But a few minutes later, he appeared along the car aisle, carrying ice-cream because of which he lingered on the platform and jumped into another car of the departing train…

~ ~ ~

That year my younger sister and brother also went to school and at the end of August, Dad, angrily red-faced, was taking Grandma Martha to the station of Bologoye to help her change trains to Ryazan.

When saying “goodbye”, she sobbed a little until Dad snarled: “Again? Started again!.”

Then she kissed all of us, her grandkids, and was gone from my life…

Across the road opposite the corner buildings of our Block, there was a grocery store and, after Grandma Martha had left, Mom was sending me there for small purchases, like, bread, matches, salt or vegetable oil. More important products she bought herself—meat, potatoes, sore cream or chocolate butter. For holiday celebrations, large-beaded red or smaller-beaded black caviar was also bought because the Object was well catered for. And only ice-cream appeared at the store no sooner than once a month and was immediately sold out. As for the tasty cornbread, I never saw it on sale there.

To the right from the store, near the bend in the road around the blocks, the wall of the forest was slightly cleft by a narrow glade, where the car repair ramp constructed of sturdy logs provided another gathering place for children to play.

“To the ramp!” called a familiar boy running by. “They’ve caught a hedgehog there!”

All the hedgehogs seen by me up to that moment were only met in the pictures, so I also hurried to the scream-and-shouting group of boys. With the sticks in their hands, they checked the animal’s attempts at fleeing to the forest, and when the hedgehog turned into a defensive ball of gray-brown needles, they rolled it pushing with the same sticks into a small brook. In the water, the hedgehog unfolded, stuck his sharp muzzle with the black blob of the nose out from under the needles, and tried to escape thru the grass on his short crooked legs. Yet, he was spread on the ground and firmly pressed across his belly with a stick to prevent his folding up again.

“Look!” shouted one of the boys. “He’s constipated! Cannot shit!” To prove the statement, the boy poked a stalk of some rank grass into a dark bulge between the animal’s hind legs.

“The turd is too hard. He needs help.”

I recollected how Grandma Martha saved me.

Someone in the company had pliers in his pocket, the patient was crucified on the earth with a couple of additional sticks and the self-proclaimed vet pulled the jammed turd with the pliers. The turd, however, did not end and turned out having a strange bluish-white color.

“Damn fool! You tore his guts out!” cried another boy.

The hedgehog was set free and once again made for the forest dragging behind the pulled out part of the intestine. All followed to see the outcome.

I didn’t want any more of all that and, fortunately, my sister came to the rescue running from the Block to say that Mom was calling me. Without the slightest delay, I left the party of boys and hurried after her to the Courtyard. There I talked to Mom, greeted neighbors, ran some errand and all the time was thinking one and the same thought formulated in an oddly crisp, not childish way, “How to live on now, after what I’ve just seen? How to live on?”

(…but still and all, I survived. The blessing property of human memory, its aptitude to fade recorded by Vladimir Dahl in his dictionary, saved me.

Yet, in the series of atrocities registered by me, for the most part human beings torturing their likes into deformed pieces of tattered meat, the mutilated hedgehog comes the first, dragging thru the brittle grass the grayish length of the intestine with small pieces of dry earth stuck to it.

And I still lived on to understand that low brutes need lofty excuses for their barbarity: …to alleviate sufferings…as sacred revenge…to keep the race pristine…

But again, to be entirely frank: is there any guarantee that I myself would never and under no circumstances do anything of the kind? I can’t tell for sure…)

When you are a child, there is no time to look behind at all those series back in your memory. You have to go on—farther and beyond—to new discoveries. If only you’ve got the nerve to keep the course.

Once, slightly veering to the left from the accustomed “school—home” route, I went deeper into the broad-leaf part of the forest to come, on a gently rising hillock, across 4 tall Pine trees that grew a couple of meters apart from each other, in the corners of an almost regular square. The smooth wide columns of their trunks without branches nearer to the ground went upwards and at the height of six to seven meters were bridged by a platform you could reach climbing up the crossbeams cut of thick boughs and nailed to one of the trees, like rungs in a vertical ladder … I never found out the purpose of the contraption, nor who it was made by. All I learned was it’s not a fraidy-cat to climb a platform in the forest even if discovered by himself…

Much easier went on the exploration of the basement world. I was going down there together with Dad to fetch the firewood for Titan the Boiler who heated the water for bathing.

Because all the bulbs in the basement corridors were missing, Dad brought along the flashlight with the spring lever protruding from its belly. When you squeezed the flashlight in your hand, the springy lever resisted yet yielded and went inside, you loosened the grip and it popped out again. A couple of such pumping rounds awoke a small dynamo-machine buzzing inside the handle to produce the current for the lamp as long as you kept pushing-loosing the lever, and the faster you did it, the brighter was your flashlight.

A circle of light hopped along the walls and cemented floor in the left corridor of the basement with our section at the very end of it. The walls in the narrow corridor were made of boards and so were the sections’ doors locked with weighty padlocks.

Behind our door, there was a square room with two concrete walls and the timber partition from the neighboring section.

Dad unlocked the padlock and turned on the inside bulb whose crude light flooded the high stack of evenly sawed logs by the wall opposite the door, and all sorts of household things hanging from the walls or piled on shelves: the sled, the tools, the skies.

After a couple of plump logs were chopped with the ax, I collected the chips for kindling Titan the Boiler and a few thicker splinters, while Dad grabbed a whole armful of firewood.

Sometimes, he was tinkering at something or sawing in our basement section and I, bored with waiting, would go out in the corridor where a narrow grated ditch middle-lined the cemented floor. Thru the open door, the bulb threw a clear rectangle of light on the opposite section wall while the far end of the corridor, from where we had come, was lost in the dark. But I was not afraid of anything because behind my back Dad was working in his old black sailor’s pea jacket with two upright rows of copper buttons in its front each bearing a brave neatly embossed anchor….

~ ~ ~

The firewood got to the basement in early autumn. A slow-go truck would enter the Courtyard and dump a heap of ruffly halved bole chunks nearby the tin-clad lid of the cemented pit right in the center of every sidewall of the Block's houses. Inside one-and-a-half meter deep pit, slightly up from its bottom, there started a hole thru the foundation, 50 cm x 50 cm, which ended in the basement dark corridor at about a meter-and-half above the cemented floor. The chunks were dropped down into the pit, and thence, thru the hole, into the basement to be hauled into the section whose owner the firewood was brought for.