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

Late September, Chairman of our School Pioneer Company fell ill and, in his stead, I was delegated to the City Pioneer Organization Account Meeting of the Chairmen of the Councils of City School Pioneer Companies. The Meeting was held at the Konotop House of Pioneers in a pleasantly secluded location behind the Monument to Fallen Heroes on the rise above Lenin Street.

By the organization regulations, an Account Meeting should elect its Chairman and Secretary. The Meeting Chairman’s job consisted of announcements whose turn it was to account while Secretary would take notes of how much waste paper and scrap metal was collected by the pioneers of the reporting Chairman’s school during the specified period, which cultural events were organized, and what places were taken by their pioneers in the city-wide contests and competitions.

The Senior Pioneer Leader of our school had supplied me with a sheet of paper to be read at the Account Meeting but, in the House of Pioneers, they charged me with the additional responsibility of the appointed Chairman of the Meeting. I was assured that presiding an Account Meeting was as easy as pie. All you had to do was to declare, “And now the floor for the account report is given to Chairman of the Pioneer Company Council from School number such-and-such!” after which the such-and-such Chairman would march to the rostrum on stage with their sheet of report. The paper read up, the accounting Chairman leaves the sheet to Secretary of the Meeting, because what’s the point in sticking all those figures down on the fly if they are written already, right?.

At first, everything went without a hitch. I and Secretary of Account Meeting, a girl in her ceremonial white shirt and the scarlet pioneer necktie, as anyone else around, were sitting next to each other behind the small desk under a dark red cloth on a small stage in a small hall, where Chairmen of the City Pioneer Companies were seated in rows waiting for their turn to read their accounts. Back in the last row, Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee—responsible for the work with the pioneers—sat in her red pioneer necktie.

The Chairmen in a well-oiled manner followed each other, read from their sheets, piled them by Secretary of Account Meeting, and returned to the audience. I also did my part as instructed but after the fourth announcement, something suddenly came over me or rather flooded over me. My mouth got full of overflowing saliva, I barely had time to gulp it before the salivary glands fountained out a new excessive portion to fill me with shame before Secretary of Account Meeting seated near me who had to surely be perplexed by my obvious hurried gulping. A spell of ease came when she went to account for School 10, yet, with her return, the disgraceful torture went on. What’s wrong with me, after all?!.

Then came my turn. Walking back those 4 steps from the rostrum, I swallowed 3 times, which did not help though. Okay, let School 14 finish and…Oh, no! Second Secretary too, with her concluding speech!.

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn’t realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)

In October, the seventh-graders started their preparation for getting admitted to the ranks of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, aka ALYCL, aka Komsomol. The membership in Komsomol organization was not a cheap giveaway passed out indiscriminately to lined-up squads or companies. Not in the least! You had to prove that you deserved that high honor at the special admittance sitting of the City Komsomol Committee whose Members would ask you questions as in a real examination because on entering this youth organization you became an ally to the Party and a would-be communist.

For a preparatory reading up, the Senior Pioneer Leader of our school, Volodya Gourevitch—a pretty young man with black hair and bluish-skinned cheek-and-jowls because of the thick but always close shaved bristle—distributed among the would-be members the Charter of ALYCL printed in the smallest typeface so as to pack all of its sections into a small accordion-folding leaflet. He also warned that at the Admittance Sitting the City Komsomol Committee Members were especially keen about the Charter Section on the rights and duties of the Komsomol members.

Volodya Gourevitch graduated from the prestigious School 11, between the Station and the Under-Overpass, as well as the class of playing button-accordion at the Konotop Music School. He dwelt in City, rather far from the Settlement, in a compact block of five-story buildings between Peace Square and Square of the Konotop Divisions, which area among the local folks was, for some reason, referred to as Palestine.

On his arrival to school from Palestine, he donned mixed paraphernalia of a very clean and well-ironed pioneer necktie and the golden profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s bald head and resolutely pointed wedge beard in the red enamel banner of the small badge of a Komsomol member pinned in the breast of his jacket. At shop-talks within the close circle of pioneer activists, Volodya Gourevitch liked to frequently announce, emphasizing his and the Leader of the Revolution coincidence in both name and patronymic, “Call me simply – Ilyich.” Following these words sounded his hearty laugh, loud and protracted, after which his lips did not immediately pulled back to the neutral position and he had to assist by pushing his thumb and forefinger at the short saliva threads in the corners of his mouth.

However, Volodya Sherudillo, a firmly built champion at Bitok gambling with the red turf of hair and a thick scatter of freckles in his round face, who studied in my class, in the close circle of us, his classmates, called Volodya Gourevitch – “a khannorik from CEC!”

(…at the shake-down period of the Soviet regime, before enslaving villagers into collective farms, the Communist leadership experimented about organizing rural population into fellowships of Collective Earth Cultivation, acronymically “CEC”

However, the meaning of “khannorik” is not recorded even in the multi-volume The Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great-Russian Language by Vladimir Dahl, probably, because the prominent linguist never visited the village of Podlipnoye.

Who remembers CEC’s nowadays? Yet, the collective memory of village folks still keeps them dearly and transfers from generation to generation.

The Konotop City Komsomol Committee was located on the second floor in the right wing of the City Council building. The building itself, somehow resembling the Smolny Institute from numerous movies about the Great October Revolution, faced Peace Square past the greens and across Peace Avenue. Three short, quiet, flag-stoned, alleys beneath the umbrage of splendid chestnuts in the greens connected the building and Peace Avenue.

None of the guys from our school had any problem whatsoever at the examination on Komsomol Charter, neither had them other students of our age from the rest of the city schools, we got admitted to the Leninist Young Communist League nice and smoothly…

~ ~ ~

In autumn, they started tramway construction in the Settlement. The track ascended from the Underpass tunnel to pass Bazaar and dive under the giant poplars lined along the rough cobbles in the road of Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street. Gray pillars of smooth concrete for supporting the contact wire above the tramway rose at regular intervals between the mighty tree-trunks. By the October holidays, the track had reached our school and even turned into May Day Street, which stretched to the city limit at the end of the Settlement.

Then three small streetcars started running from the terminal on the city-side of the Under-Overpass tunnel to the terminal at the end of May Day Street. Stout female conductors collected the fare in the streetcars selling a three-kopeck ticket per passenger which throwaways they tore off the narrow paper rolls fixed on the canvas strap of their plum duty bags cinched across their trunks to keep jingling change and uphold their mighty busts.

In the large streetcars that ran in the city, the driver had only one cab, in the head of the car, and on reaching a terminal stop the streetcar went around the turning loop to start its route in reverse. The Settlement tracks were not equipped with turning loops because the small streetcars had two cabs, kinda heads of a pushmi-pullyu, and at the loopless terminals, the driver simply swapped the cabs and started back assisted by the conductor, who stood on the step in the back door pulling the robust tarp strap tied to the streetcar arc so as to flip it over because the arc should be in backward position when sliding along the contact wire over the track.

And again, if the doors in the larger streetcars were operated by the driver who slammed them automatically from her cab, then the small streetcars in the Settlement had hinged folding doors of plywood, so on reaching your stop, you pulled the middle handle in the door to fold its leaves, pushed them aside and got off, whereas in the reverse operation you pulled the handle fixed at the edge of the leaf opposite the hinges and pushed the middle handle to unfold and close the door, off we go!. But who cares for all that algorithmic trouble? That’s why the streetcars in the Plant Settlement ran their routes with both doors wide open except for the spells of devastating frost. To make it possible for the streetcars to give way each other, two of the stops in the Settlement had doubled track, one such stop was by School 13 and the other in the middle of May Day Street…

The toilet in the Plant Club was on the first floor – at the far-off end in a very long corridor that started by the library door and went on and on between the blind walls on both sides, you could touch them both at once, beneath the rare bulbs in the ceiling. In the dark green paint on the walls, there occasionally happened closed doors with the glazed frame-legends: “Children Sector”, “Variety Band”, “Dresser Room” and, already nearing the toilet, “Gym”. All the doors were constantly locked and kept staid silence, only from behind the gym door there sometimes came tap-tapping of the ping-pong ball or clangs of metal in barbell plates.

Yet, one day I heard the sounds of piano playing behind the Children Sector door and I knocked on it. From inside, there came a yell to enter, which I did and saw a small swarthy woman with a bob-cut black hair and wide nostrils, who sat at the piano by the wall of large mirror squares. Opposite the door there were three windows high above the floor and, beneath them, ballet rails ran over the ribbed heating pipe along the whole wall. The left part of the room was hidden behind a tall screen for puppet shows preceded by an unusually long and narrow, kinda refectory, table of taut thick lino in its top.

And then I said that I’d like to enroll Children Sector.

“Very well, let’s get acquainted – I’m Raissa Grigoryevna, so who are you and where from?”

She told me that the former actors grew too adult or moved away to other cities, and for the Children Sector revival I needed to bring along my schoolmates. I started a canvassing campaign in my class. Skully and Kuba felt doubtful about the idea of joining the Children Sector, yet they were won over when saw the point that the long table in that room could easily be used for ping-pong playing. And a couple of girls came too out of curiosity. Raissa Grigoryevna received the newcomers with delighted welcome, and we began to rehearse a puppet show “Kolobok” based on the same-named fairy tale.

Our mentor taught us the art of controlling common hand puppets, not letting them duck below the screen, out of the onlookers’ sight. We gathered at Children Sector twice a week, but sometimes Raissa missed the rehearsals or was late and on such occasions the key was to be found on the windowsill in the room of the movies list painters whose door was never locked but kept wide open for often visits of fans of their talent and art-lovers in general… So we opened Children Sector and played ping-pong for hours, albeit with a tennis ball, across that long table. Neither had we bats, effectively replacing them with the thinner of school textbooks in hard covers and the net between the players’ sectors was also made of the slightly open textbooks lined spines up, and though hard hits of tennis ball knocked them down but then restoring the net didn’t take long either…

Rough and exhausting is a puppeteer’s job: both mentally—you need to copy your character’s clues and learn them by heart, and physically—you shouldn’t ever low down your arm stretched out and aloft with the hand doll donned on your 3 fingers. During rehearsals, the acting arm grew numb because of the strenuous exertion, and even propping it with the remaining hand didn’t really work. Besides, there appeared that pesky nagging crick in the neck because your head was constantly tilted upward to check the actions of the doll. But, on the other hand, after the on-stage performance, you would step out from behind the screen and come in front of it, keeping your hand inside the doll lifted up to your shoulder, and Raissa Grigoryevna would announce that it was you who acted Hare. And, following the theatrical nod of your head, Hare next to your shoulder would also give a nice bow provoking the eager laughter and applause among the audience. O, thorns! O, sweetness of the glory!.

Later on, many of the participants dropped out but the core of Children Sector—Skully, Kuba, and I—persevered. Raissa made of us actors for short performances about the heroic kids and adults from the times of the October Revolution or the Civil War. For the performances, we made up, glued real theatrical mustache on upper lips, wore army tunics, rolled cigarettes of shag and newspaper slips the way she taught us, and let the smoke in and out of our mouths without really inhaling so as not to cough. With those performances, we toured the bigger shop floors in the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, the ones that had Red Corner rooms for meetings where, during the midday break, we acted on tiny stages before the workers eating their midday meal out of newspaper packages. More than anything else, they enjoyed the moment with hand-rolled cigarettes…

Twice a year Club staged a major amateur concert where the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, recited heartfelt poems dedicated to the Communist Party. The pupils of Anatoly Kuzko, the teacher at the button-accordion class by Club, played their achievements.

Yet, the creamy crest of the concert program was dancing numbers by the Ballet Studio because their trainer Nina Alexandrovna enjoyed a well-deserved reputation which attracted students from all over the city. Besides, Club possessed a rich theatrical wardrobe so that for the Moldovan dance of Jock the dancers appeared in skin-tight pants and silk vests spangling with sequin, and for the Ukrainian Hopuck, they wore hugely wide trousers and soft ballet boots of red leather.

The accompaniment for them all, including young girls in ballet tutus, was provided by virtuoso accordionist Ayeeda standing behind the scenes of the stage. And there, next to her, stood also we, in army tunics and adult makeup, marveling how classy she played without any sheet music.

The handsome electrician Murashkovsky recited comical rhymed humoreskas and sang in duet with the bald tenor, a turner from the Mechanical Shop, “Two Colors of My Life” in Ukrainian. On Murashkovsky’s right hand there missed three fingers – only the pinky one and the thumb stayed in place and, to hide the deficit, he clutched a spiffy handkerchief between them like an extrinsic catch grabbed by a crab claw.

Two elderly women sang romances, not in a duet but in turn, accompanied by the button-accordion of Anatoly Kuzko himself, whose eyes were sooner astray than crossed, when he eye-contacted you with one of them, the other was looking straight into the ceiling.

For the concluding peak of the concert, Aksyonov, the blonde Head of the Variety Band, and his musicians came to the stage thru the dark of the auditorium. The drums and double bass were already waiting there in the small makeup room behind the stage for their invigorated players, but his saxophone Aksyonov was bringing himself.

Blonde Jeanne Parasyuk, also, by the way, a graduate from our school, performed a couple of popular hits accompanied by the Variety Band and the concert ended with the all-out applause and eager shouts “encore!”

The auditorium at those events was filled to the brim, like for a show of some popular two-sequel Indian film. The stage was inundated by the light of lamps sitting along its edge as well as from those above it, and the blinding beams of searchlights from both balconies. In the dark passage along the wall beneath the balcony, the Ballet Studio dancers kept trotting to the Dressing Room of auntie Tanya on the first floor, to change their stage clothes for the following numbers.

For acting our short performances, Raissa trained us how to appear on stage from behind the scenes and get out without turning your back to the spectators, and how to look into the hall – not at someone in particular but just so, in general, somewhere between the fifth and sixth rows. Although in the crude glare of the searchlights directed into your face from the balconies thru the dark hall, you could hardly make out anyone after the fourth row, and even those in the first one looked fairly blurred…

So Club became a part of my life and if I didn’t show up home for a long time after school, they didn’t worry – I was dawdling at Club as usual….

In the dark of winter nights, we got together for hanging out along the streetcar track because our favorite pastime became riding the streetcar “sausage”, so was called the tubular grille hanging under the driver cab. We ambushed a streetcar at the stop, neared from behind and, when it started rolling forward, we jumped onto the “sausage”, grabbing at the small ledge under the windshield of the empty driver cabin. The narrow ledge provided nothing to catch a hold at, and you strained your fingers to the utmost seeking some absent point of vantage in its smooth surface. The streetcar rolled and rumbled, and bumped on the rail joints, the springy “sausage” jumped up and down under your feet – wow! Super!

The speediest stretch in the track was between Bazaar and School 13. It’s where the streetcars fancied being racing cars and it was there that once my fingers grew too numb and began slipping off the smooth ledge, but Skully shouted, “Hold on!” and pressed them back with his palm, but in a minute Kuba cried, “Kapets!” because his fingers also slipped off, and he jumped from the “sausage” shooting along at full speed. Fortunately, he didn’t ram against the trunk of some huge poplar and he caught up with us jogging from the darkness, while the streetcar waited at the stop for its counterpart coming from the Settlement, so we went on riding without losses…

The attraction was not exclusively our hobby-horse though but in common ownership of the Settlement guys. At times there collected a whole bunch of “sausage”-riders so that the springy grille began to scrape the railheads. At longer stops, the conductors got off the car in an attempt at driving us away. We fled into the frosty winter night, yet as the streetcar started off the stop, we lighted back onto the grille before the means of public transportation gained full speed…

~ ~ ~

One day the classes for our 7th “B” were canceled because we walked for an excursion to the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.

First of all, we visited the Plant Fire Brigade which was not too far from the Main Check-Entrance. Thence we proceeded to the shop floor for filling tall cylinder iron tanks with oxygen.

In the Smithy, no explanations were audible behind the deafening hum of giant fans and the roar of fire in the brick furnaces from which black-overalled workers were pulling with tremendous tongs huge glowing slugs and carrying them by jib cranes onto the anvils under hydraulic hammers.

Our class stood for a while and watched the worker turning by his steely tongs a big white-hot slug upon the anvil, this way and that way, under the mighty strikes of huge hammer shooting with dinosaurous puffs from above, between its oily stands, to shape the needed form. The floor vibrated from the tremor sent about by the hammer bangs. Flakes of metal fell off the workpiece while it got darker, changing color to scarlet, then to dark cherry. But the most surprising was the sensitiveness of the hammer which could also strike very lightly, and even stop halfway in its sharply accelerated fall. It was operated by a woman in a kerchief on her head, who used just a pair of levers sticking from the juggernaut’s side frame.

On our way out of the shop past another, silent, hydraulic hammer I saw a scattering of round metal tablets the size of a jubilee ruble, only thicker. I liked their pleasant lilac color, besides, such a tablet would do for a good bitok to turn kopecks over in the game for money. Moreover, the pieces were surely just a waste if thrown there on the floor. I picked one up and dropped at once – it badly burned my fingers. A passing-by worker laughed and said, “What? Too heavy, eh?”

And in the Mechanical Shop Floor, I was impressed by a planing machine in a low narrow frame, scraping off, in no hurry, shavings from the clamped metal plate. The astounding feature about the machine tool was its bas-relief boilerplate – “Manufactured in Riga in 1904.” From before the Revolution! And still working!. Farther along, there stood a large Soviet machine tool, also a planer, its cutter kept traveling long runs and the worker sat next to it in a chair just watching idly. Some nice job, huh?

When at home I shared my impressions from the excursion, Mother said I might start taking shower at some of Plant’s shop floors instead of going to the City Bathhouse behind Square of the Konotop Divisions. Then she asked if I knew that Vadya Kubarev’s mother worked at the Plant cooling tower and that would simplify access to the tower’s shower room.

I discussed the idea with Skully who told that all his life he had been going to Plant on his bath days, and there were shop floors with better shower rooms than that at the cooling tower. The majority of the showers worked only till eight at night but those in the shop floors with three work shifts were open round the clock. Of course, they might not allow us to Plant at the Main Check-Entrance but who cared about going that way? There remained 24/7 free access to the territory thru the Plant rear end, along the tracks where the cars were pulled in for repair and the repaired ones pulled out. Yet, there was no need to go even that far, because the high concrete wall along Professions Street was full of convenient stiles for the workforce to easily take home shabashkas after their working day.

(…and again I have to break out from the consequently flowing timeline, and take a jump from Konotop to the Varanda River, how otherwise would a metropolitan woman from the third millennium understand the everyday provincial lingo of the last century?

At times even the Dahl’s Dictionary is of little help. Although he correctly noted that the word “shabash”, aka Sabbath, was used to signal the end of work, yet no further revelations beyond that point. It took the Russian language another hundred years and adapting to the era of developed socialism in the country to produce “shabashka” from the Sabbath.

Shabashka is some product manufactured at workplace to take and use it at home or, at least, a bundle of timber pieces acquired and chopped at work for burning in the stove of the worker’s khutta. Hauling the shabashka home is the period, sort of, to mark the end of a working day.

How do you estimate my etymological efforts?. Well, and since I’m here, perhaps, it’s time to crawl into this one-person Chinese pagoda of mine. What I do like about it are these folding bamboo rods. Some cleverly designed gizmo – a dozen half-meter tubes assemble into the pair of three-meter-long elastic poles to stretch the tent over them. And this mosquito net at the entrance works fine – zip it up, and no mosquito can fly in. Buzz outside, bloodsuckers! Fig at you!