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

~ ~ ~ The Adolescence

(…and, probably, that’s it. Enough is enough. It is time to roll the potatoes out from among the glowing ashes before they turned firebrands too. Yes, they told me that coals are crammed up with kilocalories, still I am not quite sure about the taste of those critters. Besides, it’s getting pretty dark and I’d rather not overeat at so late an hour. “And leave your dinner”, said some sage dietitian, “to your enemy”. Which is a pretty useless piece of wisdom in my case. Where could I possibly get them those enemies at all? I've been raised and carefully formatted for life in a society where each man is a friend, a comrade, and a brother to any other man…

Damn, but it’s so tempting to share the bullshit you once were fed with (and in ladlefuls too!) up to your ears. So, one day I poured a podcast homily to your step-sister, Lenochka, like, being good and kind is the innate feature of mankind at large, regrettably obscured by their ignorance of how immensely good they are deep inside, a sad pity!

She listened silently and same night my perversive stars flogged me Shakespeare’s “Richard III” on TV. What a treat! She stuck in the tube and watched, mesmerized, how all those good and kind people (sadly, uninformed of their hidden goodness) were strangling and shredding each other and cutting throats for a change. And sure enough, the next morning she watched the rerun too because Shakespeare isn’t a knickknack you can give the shake, it’s classic. Since then, my political line regarding the TV is that of armed neutrality.

Well, so much to emphasize the fact that, if I chance to come across an accidental enemy, I’d sooner give them my last shirt but not my dinner, moreover, the potatoes baked in the fire ashes.

The moment you break their charred crust and pour a pinch of salt into the steamy core, you see the light of Truth that no oysters, nor lobsters, nor any other fancy kulebyaki can hold a candle to them. Oh, no! Not a chance.

For their sake, all freaky nourishment leave willingly I to abstruse gourmets ‘cause we, uncouth and simple-minded garlic eaters, have no use for neither calipash nor calipee – nope! Our modest goal is an ample simple grub and plum dough, we’re not after excessive luxuries.

And were I a younger man but not a Negro advanced in my years and pressed by all kinds of problems which the struggle for life brims with, then to them, and them only, would I dedicate an ode of love and gratitude—to potatoes baked midst the fire ashes.

No wonder, that in the most poignant episode in all the pulp fiction series by Julian Semenov, his main protagonist Stirlitz, aka Soviet secret service agent Isayev, turns up the sleeves of his spiffy Fascist uniform and bakes potatoes in the fireplace of his Berlin apartment to celebrate the Soviet Army and Navy Day.

However, with all due admiration at his culinary patriotism, no, sir, dat’s ain’t da thin’. To really enjoy the taste of baked potatoes, you need to sit on the ground, under the open sky, with an evening like this one here around you…)

In Konotop, Grandma Katya kissed us all, in turn, confusedly, in her kitchen, and cried. So

Mother started comforting her and talking out of snivel, before she noticed two kids’ heads that peeked from behind the door to the room and asked if they were her sister’s children.

“Yes, here we have our Irochka and Valerik. So big kids already. The girl is 3 years old and he will soon be 2.”

When their father, Uncle Tolik, came home from his work, I for the first time saw, not in a movie but in real life, a man with a bald patch extending from the forehead to the back of his head, however, I tried not to ogle too obviously. An hour later he and I went out to meet my Aunt Lyouda. The food store she worked at closed at seven and, coming home, she always carried bags of chow from work.

Walking by the side of Uncle Tolik, I marked the way to the Underpass, which Konotopers were calling Overpass… Some vague recollection retained a long wait in front of a railway barrier, lowered to block off the overpass made of smeared wooden sleepers bridging the gaps between the rail-heads, then the barrier went up stirring agitated commotion in a ruck of people, who rushed from both sides to cross the railway, a couple of horse drawn telega-carts and an odd truck in their midst… That time we were going from Konotop to the Object… In my absence, they built a deep concrete tunnel under the multi-track railway, hence the official name—Underpass—but folks still named it the way they used to—Overpass…

On the other side of the Under-Overpass, long red streetcars were running from City to the Station and back. The Konotop’s central part named “City” was never defined officially so that Konotopers could entertain different ideas about the area’s size and borders but the Station, located within the City limits, did not belong to City, which subtleties I still had to learn.

Before Aunt Lyouda arrived by one of the streetcars from City, Uncle Tolik talked me into coming up to her under the rare lamps over the tilt into the tunnel of Under-Overpass, but he would keep out of sight, and I had to grab one of her bags and ask in a husky voice: “Not too heavy for you, eh?” But she recognized me even though Uncle Tolik had pulled the peak of my cap down to hide my eyes.

The 3 of us walked back to Nezhyn Street, and Uncle Tolik carried the bags loaded by Aunt Lyouda at the store to be squared up for at her payday.

On climbing up out of the Underpass, we crossed Bazaar along the wide aisle between the rows of empty at that hour counters under the tall lean-to roofs above them, like, lined-up abandoned gazebos, and after walking for another 10 minutes, we turned into Nezhyn Street; a couple of distant lights on far-off lampposts in its depth made it look different from the rest, unlighted, streets….

In Konotop, we arrived at the start of the last quarter in the academic year and both I and the twins became students at School 13 which very conveniently stood right opposite Nezhyn Street, across field-stone-cobbled Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street. Old folks called it “Cherevko’s school” because under the Czar, a certain rich man from the nearby village of Podlipnoye, Cherevko was his name, built a brick two-story pub-house, but the then authorities didn’t allow him to operate it because the would-be pub’s stood too near to the only factory in the city, threatening to make drunks of the local working class en masse, so Cherevko donated the building to the city for arranging a school of four classrooms in it… In the Soviet era, the morality of workingmen rocketed up so that the present-day pubs moved two-three times closer to that same industrial unit and “Cherevko’s school” got expanded with a long one-story building in the pronounced barrack style, also of bricks. The addition stretched along a quiet side street slanting toward the Swamp named, interchangeably, the Grove, that separated the village of Podlipnoye from Konotop or vice versa.

Going to school for the first time, I couldn’t get the meaning of canvas pouches hanging-dangling alongside the schoolbags or sizable leatherette folders of the students walking in the same direction.

I was surprised to learn that in those pouches they carried their ink-wells. It felt a little out-of-date because the schoolchildren at the Object had long since started using fountain pens with an inside ink-tank whose capacity allowed for refilling it no oftener than once a week if you did not write too much. Ha! Kinda getting from the era of gasoline engines back to the epoch of post stages, yet the very next morning same pouches did not look as something overly striking anymore.

Protracted deafening ding-and-dong of the huge electric bell filled the long corridor in the one-story building, plus all the yard of the “Cherevko’s school”, and 3 adjoining streets in the vicinity. If it signaled a break, everyone went out into the wide schoolyard with an ancient tree in its center and the low building behind it, which comprised the Pioneer Room, the workshop for Handicraft classes, the school library and, as I was too late to learn at the moment, the ski storage room.

The gym, with its windows grated from inside to prevent smashing the panes by ball hits at PE classes, abutted the far end of the barrack-like building at the right angle. Opposite the blind end wall of the gym, there stood a detached hut of toilets of whitewashed brick.

All the break long, a swarm of students hung out at the high stoop of three stairs by the entrance door. The horizontal handrails in the stoop’s landing were congested by perched boys until a maverick teacher would shoo them off and they reluctantly comply only to again light up the moment the teacher’s back vanished in the doorway.

A lively trickle of students kept flowing to and from the toilets in the yard corner, yet the majority of boys (and boys only!) veered before reaching the toilets hut and turned round the gym corner. There, in the narrow passage between the gym and the tall fence of the neighboring garden, life ran high in a brisk cash game for ready money, the game of Bitok at the school Las Vegas grounds, where the average stake was about pyatak, 5 copper kopecks, and no less than 2. If you had nickels, say, 10, 15, 20 or even fifty-kopeck in one piece, it’d be exchanged before you say “knife”.

The stakes stacked on the ground in a tiny neat tower—one atop the other, each coin heads up—the bitok comes into play.

What’s a bitok? It’s hard to say, every player had his favorite hunk of iron—a bolt, a railroad spike, a polished ball from a huge bearing—no limits in the game, you could use whatever you wanted, be it even a stone. And even the absence of any gear was no problem—anyone would readily lend you his bitok for hitting.

Hitting what? That stack of kopecks, silly!. Any coin turned over by your hit and showing their tails is now yours. Collect them into your pocket and hit the remaining stubborn heads, one by one. When no coin turns over, the next player starts his tries.

And who is to open the game? Quite logically, the one who enters the biggest share of kopecks the stack…

At times, the warning cry of “shuba!” from the gym corner signaled the approach of some male teacher. The money vanished right away from upon the ground into the pockets, cigarettes hid inside the capped palms. However, the alarm was always false – the teachers turned to the toilet where beside the row of common holes in the floor there was the boarded cabin for Director and the teaching staff.

In just three games, I lost fifteen kopecks, that Mother gave me for a cabbage piroshki from the school canteen. This was no wonder though because the bitok virtuosos were training their hands at home with their favorite bitok pieces while I had to hit with a borrowed one. Maybe, that was even for the better, leaving no time for me to get addicted…

(…the Konotopian “shuba!” takes roots from thief slang “shukher!” that takes roots from Yiddish “zukher!” each of which means “cheese it!”. The school slang “atas!” at the Object meant exactly the same yet derived from the French ”l’atantion!”. Traditionally, Russian gentry were taught the French…)

~ ~ ~

On my first day at school, Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, planted me next to a skinny red-haired girl, Zoya Yemets. I never used Zoya’s inkwell, yet Sasha Dryga, a grown-up double repeater with a greasy forelock down to his eyes, resented my presence at her desk and, after the classes, he didn't omit informing me of the fact…

And on the way home I made friends with my classmate Vitya. His last name sounded a bit scary, yet it’s a fairly trite one among the Ukrainian family names – Skull. Our on-the-fly friendship had sound foundation though because we both were walking along one and the same Nezhyn Street, and he also lived on it, only farther, next to the Nezhyn Store which was halfway from any of the street’s ends. The following day I asked Albina Grigoryevna for moving me to the last desk in the left row, to be seated next to Skull, because we were neighbors and could help each other with home assignments. She respected so weighty reasons and I left Zoya’s side.

The desk in front of me and Vitya was seated singly by Vadya Kubarev, which situation immediately gave rise to our triple friendship.

The last names at school were, naturally, used by only teachers, while among the students Skull would surely turn Skully, Kubarev become Kuba and so forth. What handle did I get? Goltz or Ogle? Neither. If your name happened to be “Sehrguey”, they did not bother about vivisecting the last name and everyone started to call you “Gray” by default…

Friendship is power. When the 3 of us were together, even Sasha Dryga refrained from bullying… Friendship is knowledge. I shared the pieces of poetry never included in school curriculum but firmly memorized by all the boys at the Object, such as “To get insured from the cold…”, and “The light was burning in the pub…”, and “Vaniyka-Halooy went to the fair…” as well as other short but flowery instances of rhymed folklore. And in the context of cultural and philological exchange, my friends explained to me the meaning of popular Konotopian expressions like “Have you fled from Romny?” or “It’s time to pack you off to Romny.” As it turned out, the town of Romny, about seventy kilometers from Konotop, was the seat of Regional Psychiatric Hospital for nuts…

~ ~ ~

That morning the gambling bouts at Bitok ran low behind the gym. On that clear April morning, the lads stood arguing and waiting for the confirmation of so welcome rumors that the Central TV news program “Time” was grossly mistaken the previous night. Because some guy heard from guys from School 10 that last night some man landed by parachute in the Sarnavsky forest near the Konotop outskirts. And now Sasha Rodionenko would arrive from City, his family had recently moved over there but he still attended our school, just let's wait him come, he should know for sure, he would confirm…

I remembered the flight of Gagarin and as soon after him Guerman Titov was orbiting all day long to say in the evening, “Bye, for now, I’m going to bed.” And Dad chuckled with delight and replied to the radio on the wall, “That’s a good one!”

Our cosmonauts were always the first and we, elementary school pupils, were arguing who of us was the first to hear the radio announcement about the flight of Popovich or Nikolayev, or the first cosmonautess Tereshkova…

Sasha Rodionenko came but he didn’t confirm anything. So the Central TV news program “Time” was not mistaken. And the sun faded in grief…

Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov…In the landing module…

Entering the dense layers of the earth’s atmosphere…

Perished…

Then Father came and he was followed a week later by the railway container with our things from the Object that arrived at the Freight Station and moved from there on a platform truck to 19 Nezhyn Street, both the wardrobe with the mirror on its door and the folding couch-bed, and the two armchairs with wooden armrests, and the TV set, and all the other implement-utensils. Even the old-fashioned leatherette sofa arrived for which there was no room in the khutta.

(…now I can feel nothing but horror at the thought: how could 10 people—2 families and their mutual Grandma Katya—to fit into and live in 1 room and 1 kitchen?

But at that time I didn’t think of such things at all because since it was our home and we lived there the way we lived, then it couldn’t be somehow different, everything was as it should be and I just lived on along and that’s it..)

For the night, Sasha and I readied the folding couch-bed and shared it with Natasha, who lay across at our feet with a chair put next to the couch for her legs. My brother and I had to keep our feet pulled up to the middle of our bed, otherwise, Natasha would grumble and complain to the parents on their bed by the opposite wall, and tell on me and Sasha for kick-fighting. Nice news, eh?! She could stretch her legs out as far as she wanted, and rebuffed my offers to swap our places… The family of Arkhipenkos and Grandma Katya slept in the kitchen.

Parallel to Nezhyn Street, about three hundred meters off, there ran Professions Street one side of which was just one endless wall of tall concrete slabs fencing the Konotop Steam-Engine and Railroad-Car Repair Plant, which name was commonly eschewed and substituted by the short and nice KahPehVehRrZeh. Because of that plant, the part of Konotop outside the Under-Overpass was named the KahPehVehRrZeh Settlement, or just the Settlement.

On the Plant’s opposite side, the same slab-wall split it from the multitude of railway tracks in the Konotop Passenger Station and the adjacent Freight Station, where long freight trains were waiting for their turn to start off to their different destinations because Konotop was a big railway junction. The marshaling yard of the Freight Station with freight cars running down the hump, both as loners or in small groups into the sorting lines, sent forth the shrieking screech of wheel chocks, bangs of cars against each other, indistinct screams of loudspeakers with reports about that or another train on that or another sorting line. However, in the daytime the marshaling yard symphony was not too overbearing, its racket whooped it up against the background of night quietude after the noises of day-life subsided…

Regardless of any time of day, whenever it breezed from the nearby village of Popovka, the distillery there permeated the air by its unmistakable stink, which atmospheric phenomenon the Settlement folks christened “From Popovka with Love”. Not that the reek was totally lethal, yet you were better off if shunned to sniff at it attentively, anyway, to have a running nose on such days was kinda blessing…

Nezhyn Street connected to Professions Street by lots of frequent lanes. The first of those side streets (counting from School 13) was called Foundry Street because it led to where the former foundry was located inside the Plant and now not seen because of the concrete wall.

Then there came Smithy Street offering the view of the tall brick smokestack by the Plant’s smithy behind that same wall.

The next (past our house at number 19) was Gogol Street, neglecting the fact that there was no Gogol, or any other writer for that matter, in front or behind the Plant wall.

The mentioned three streets were more or less straight but those following them before and after the Nezhyn Store tangled in the warren of differently directed lanes which, in the end, also led to the Plant wall if you knew how to navigate them…

The Nezhyn Store gained that name because it stood in Nezhyn Street and it was the largest of all the 3 stores in the Settlement. The smaller ones were named by their numbers.

The premises of Nezhyn Store occupied a separate one-story brick building and a backyard. It comprised 4 departments entered separately and marked by the time-worn tin frames over their doors: “Bread”, “Industrial Goods”, “Grocery”, and “Fish and Vegetables”.

The “Bread” opened in the morning to work until all of the “white” loaves and darker “brick”-bread there got sold out and they could safely lock the emptied department. In the afternoon, with the arrival of the food truck delivering another bunch of “bricks” and loaves from the Konotop Bread Factory, it opened again.

The next, and also the biggest, department—“Industrial Goods”—had two shop windows adorned by dust-smeared miniaturized boxes of security signalization pressed to their panes from inside, on both sides of its mighty door. The store-soiled goods in the glazed showcase-counters were looked after by 3 dead bored saleswomen because they hardly saw a couple of customers a day. The Settlement population, when in need of such goods, preferred to travel to shops in City.

But the 2 saleswomen in the “Grocery” department had their hands full all day long. At times, there even formed a queue, especially on the days when the butter was brought to the department and they cut its huge yellow cube, put next to the scales, with their enormously big knife and wrapped your 2 or 3 hundred grams into the friable blue paper.

And when the “Grocery” was entered by a workman from the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, he was served without standing in the queue because in his palm there was a thoroughly counted and readied amount of kopecks for his vodka, which saved the trouble of counting the change. Besides, he was to come back to his workplace as soon as possible for which end he arrived without changing from his boiler suites, aka spetzovka.

The choice of vodkas in the department was fairly extensive, of different colors and names— “Zubrovka”, “Erofeich”, “ Let’s Have One More…”, but people bought only “Moscow Vodka” with its green and white sticker.

The concluding “Fish and Vegetables” department was mostly locked not to disturb its empty dormant shelves and the dried-earth smell left by potatoes sold out last year…

And after the Nezhyn Store, there were Locksmith Street, Wheels Street and in the unexplored as yet depths of the Settlement other streets and lanes and blind alleys…

~ ~ ~

The very first Sunday after our arrival, Aunt Lyouda led me and my sister-'n'-brother to Professions Street that was the only asphalted street in the Settlement. We went along it in the direction of Bazaar and in 5 minutes reached the Plant Club for the 3 o’clock movie show for children.

The Plant Club was a mighty two-story building but as tall as a four-storied one. The masonry in its walls and windows had lots of arches, ledges, and columns, like, a lace-work of smoky bricks. The concrete wall of the Plant enclosure did not miss to surround the backside of the Club as well. In the small square in front of it, there was the Plant Main Check-Entrance built in the same ornate ante-revolution style of masonry, opposed by the modernist structure of the two-story-as-two-story murkily-glazed cube of the Plant Canteen.

We entered the lofty lobby in the Plant Club full of diverse-aged but equally shrill children lining to the small window in the tin-clad door of the ticket office. One boy, a second-grader by his looks, started leaching Aunt Lyouda for ten kopecks to buy himself a ticket, but she snapped at him and he shut up. She seemed to enjoy visiting the Plant Club for an afternoon show for children…