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

And in kindergarten it was that, for the first time in my life, I fell in love. However, I did my level best to fight the feeling back. With bitter sadness, I grasped how useless was that love because of the insurmountable—like a bottomless abyss—difference in age between me and the swarthy girl with dark eyes of cherry-berry gleam in them. She was two years younger…

But how unreachable and adult looked the former kindergarten girls who came on a visit there after their first day at school. Clad in festive white aprons, putting on so reserved and mannerly airs, they scarcely deigned to answer the eager questions asked by our group’s caretaker.

The caretakers and other workers at the kindergarten wore white robes, however, not always all of them. Anyway, not the one seated outdoors on a bench next to me allaying my distress. It’s hard to say what exactly it was – a fresh scratch on my knee or a new bump on my forehead, yet as for her name, it was positively Zeena… Her gentle palm was petting my head, and I forgot to cry with my cheek and temple pressed to her left breast. The other cheek and closed eyelids felt the warmth of the sun, I listened to the thuds of her heart beneath the green dress that smelt of summer until there came a shrill call from the building, “Zeena!.”

And at home, we had Grandmother who came from Ryazan because Mom started going to work and there should be someone to look after Sasha and Natasha besides other house-keeping chores. Grandma Martha wore a cotton blouse over a straight skirt nearly reaching the floor and a white blue-dotted kerchief on her head whose large square she folded diagonally to form a big triangle and cover her hair tying the acute angles of the cloth in a loose knot under her round chin…

Mom worked three shifts doing the job of a Watcher at the Pumping Station. And Dad had as many shifts at the Diesel Station. I never learned the location of his workplace but it surely was somewhere in the forest because one day Dad brought a piece of bread wrapped in a newspaper which parcel was given him by a bunny on his way home. “Now, I go home after the shift when – lo! – there's a bunny under a tree, who says, “Here you are, take it to Sehryozha, and Sasha, and Natasha.” The bread from bunny was much more delicious than the bread which Mom sliced for the dinner…

At times the parents’ shifts did not coincide so that one of them was home while the other at work. At one such time, Dad brought me to Mom’s workplace – a squat brick building with a dark green door behind which, just opposite the entrance, there was a small room with a small window high above a big old desk and 2 chairs. But if, bypassing that room, you turned to the left thru a brown door, there would be a huge murky hall full of incessant rumble and with another desk at which Mom sat doing her job.

She didn’t expect us and was so very much surprised. Then she showed me the log under the lamp on her desk because it was her job to enter the time and copy figures from the round manometers’ faces to which there led narrow bridges of iron-sheets all rigged up with handrails because under them everywhere was dark water for the pumps to pump. And it was those pumps to make that terrible noise all the time so that for talking we had to shout loud but even then not all the words were heard, “What!? What!?”

So, we returned to the room by the entrance where Mom took from a drawer in the desk a pencil and some throwaway log with missing pages for me to do some hazy-mazy drawings. I began to draw and was busy but they also stopped talking and only looked at each other though the noise remained back behind the wall. When I finished a big sun, she asked if I wanted to go and play in the yard. I did not want to go out, but then Dad said if I didn’t listen to Mom he never-never would bring me there again anymore, and I went out.

The yard was just the piece of a grass-grown pebble road from the gate to the log shed a bit off the right corner of the Pumping Station. And behind the Station building, there rose a sheer steep overgrown with nettles. I returned to the green door from which a short concrete walk led to the white-washed cube of a small hut without any window and a padlock on the black iron door. Now, what could you play here really indeed?

Two rounded knolls bulged high on either side of the hut, twice taller than it. Grabbing at the long tufts of grass, I climbed the right one. From its height, both roofs, of the hut and Pumping Station, were seen in full but so what? In the opposite direction, beyond the wire fence at the knoll’s foot, there stretched a strip of bush and ran a river sparkling brightly, but I would certainly get punished if I went out of the gate.

For any further playing at all, there remained only the other knoll with a thin tree on its top. I went down to the hut, bypassed it from behind and climbed the second knoll. From up there, everything looked quite the same as from the previous knoll top, only that there you could touch the tree. Hot and sweaty after the climbing, I lay down under it.

What’s that?!. Something stung me at the thigh and then at the other, and then over and over again. I turned around and peeked over my shoulder behind my back. A swarm of red ants was busily bustling about my legs below the shorts of yellow corduroy. I smacked them away but the scorching merciless stings kept increasing in numbers…

Mom jumped out from behind the green door to my wailing, and Dad after her too. He ran up to me and carried me down on his hands. The ants were brushed off, but the swollen, reddened thighs still burned unbearably… And that served me a lesson for the rest of my life – there is no better remedy for the bites of those red beasts than being seated into the sling of the cool green silk in the hem of Mom’s dress stretched taut between her knees.

~ ~ ~

Grandma Martha lived in the same room with us, her three grandchildren, her narrow iron bed stood in the corner to the right from the door, opposite the cumbersome structure of a mighty sofa having upright leatherette back in the frame of varnished wood. The tube-like puffy armrests on the sides of the wide leatherette seat were hinged to let them drop off and get leveled with the seat making it long enough for accommodation of a medium-size basketball player, which was not needed because the twins were bedded in the sofa for the night. At the bottom of the top plank in the back’s frame, there ran a narrow shelf alongside the low strip of mirror inserted above it to reflect the small figurines of white elephant parade lined in a file on the shelf, from the tallest leader to the bantam baby. The elephants had long since lost and the varnished shelf remained empty, except for when we were playing Train constructed of legs-up stools brought from the kitchen and chairs tumbled on their backs, and with the nightfall in the train car, I climbed onto the shelf although its narrowness allowed for stretching on only one your side and to change position you had to go down onto the seat and climb back accordingly.

The Train game became more interesting when Lyda and Yura Zimins, the children of our neighbors, crossed the landing to join us in our room. Then Train became even longer and, sitting inside the up-legged stool-cars, we swayed them with all might and main, so that they tap-tapped against the floor, evoking Grandma’s grumpy orders to stop raging like zealots.

When the games and supper were over, my aluminum folding bed was set up in the center of the room. Mom brought and spread the mattress over it, and a blue oilcloth too, under the sheet, in case I peed in sleep, then a huge pillow, and the thick wool-filled blanket to complete my bed. Grandma Martha turned off the radio box hanging on the left wall by the door and clicked the light switcher. However, the darkness in the room was quite relative – the lights from the windows in the neighboring corner building and from the lampposts in the Courtyard penetrated the tulle mesh of window curtains, and from under the door, there sneaked in a sliver of light from the corridor between the kitchen and the parents’ bedroom.

I watched the dark silhouette of Grandma Martha as she stood by her bed and whispered something up to the ceiling corner above her head. That strange behavior didn’t bother me in the least after Mom's' explanation that it was Grandma Martha’s way of praying to God and that the parents could not allow her to hang an icon in that corner because our Dad was a Party member…

The hardest part of the morning was discovering my stockings. Believe it or not, but even boys in those days wore stockings. Over the underpants, there was donned a special suspender belt with 2 two short rubber straps buttoned on its front. Each strap had a clip-fastener on its hanging end, some gizmo of a rubber nipple squeezed thru a tight-fitting wireframe. You raised the frame to pull a pinch of the stocking top over the nipple which then was forced back into the tight loophole of the wireframe – clip!. Ugh!.

All that harness, of course, was put on me by Mom, however, locating the stockings was my responsibility, and they somehow managed to always find a new place for hiding. Mom would keep urging from the kitchen to come for breakfast, “Can you dress quicker, slow duck?!” Because she, after all, had to be in time for her work, while those meanies were nowhere to dig up… At last – peekaboo! – I spotted the nose of one of them sticking from under the hinged armrest of the sofa with the still sleeping twins. Of course, it called for Mom’s help to pull them out and not to waken Sasha up…

Weary of regular morning earfuls, I found an elegant solution to the problem of disappearing stockings and, with the light in the room switched off already but Grandma Martha still gossiping in whisper with her God, I tied them around my ankles, in secret, separately, one for each. My sister-’n’-brother with their pillows on the opposite armrests of the big sofa were, as always, kicking each other under their common blanket and could not follow my subtle manipulations in the dark. And I was in time to cover my legs when Mom entered our room to kiss her children goodnight. Yet, quite unexpectedly she did something never done before. Mom switched on the light, who lived under the ceiling within the bulb surrounded by the orange shade of silk, lush fringes hanging from the rim let him sleep comfortably in daytime. But now he had to spring at once from his bed and show—as she threw the blanket off my legs—the stocking shackles on each of my ankles. “Something had just pulled me to do it”, she told Dad later with a laugh. I had to untie the stockings and leave them atop the bundle of my other clothes on the chair next to my folding bed and never realize so a brilliant solution…

~ ~ ~

In all fairness, the most unpleasant part in my kindergarten life was going to bed after the midday meal for the “quiet hour”. You had to take off your clothes and put them on a small white stool and, no matter how carefully you did it, at getting up after the “quiet hour” the clothes would be in full mess, and the stocking fastener in one or another garter would stubbornly refuse to do its job.

Besides, what’s the use of idle lying for a whole hour staring at the white ceiling or the white window curtains, or along the long row of cots with a narrow passage after each pair of them? The children would lie silently in that row ending by the far off white wall with the far-off-white-robed caretaker in her chair reading silently her book, distracted at times by some or other child who would approach her to ask in whisper for permission to go out to the toilet. And, after her whispered permit, she would in a low voice silence the rustle of whispering arising along the row of cots, “Now, everyone shuts their eyes and sleep!” Maybe, now and then I did fall asleep at some “quiet hours”, though more often it was kinda still stupor with my eyes open but not seeing the white ceiling from the white sheet drawn over my head…

And suddenly the drowsiness was cast away by a gentle touch of cautious fingers creeping from my knee up over the thigh. I looked out from under the sheet. Irochka Likhachova was lying on the next cot with her eyes closed tightly but, in between the sheets over our cots, I could clearly make out a length of her outstretched arm. The quiet fingers dived into my underpants to enclose my flesh in a warm soft palm. It felt unspeakably pleasant. But then her touch moved away from my private parts – why? yet more!

Her hand found mine and pulled it under her sheet to put my palm on something soft and yielding that had no name, which it did not need at all because all I needed was that all that just went on and on. However, when I, with my eyes tightly closed, once again brought her hand back under my sheet, she stayed there all too briefly before pulling mine over to hers… At that moment the caretaker announced the end of “quiet hour” and called all to get up. The room filled with the hubbub of dressing children.

“And we don’t forget to make our beds,” the caretaker repeated instructively, walking to and fro along the runner by the row of cots, when all of a sudden Irochka Likhachova shouted, “And Ogoltsoff sneaked into my panties!”

The children lulled in expectation. Sledgehammered with the disgraceful truth, I feel a hot wave of shame rolling up to spill in tears out of my eyes. They mingle with my roar, “It’s you who sneaked! Fool!”, and I and run out of the room to the second-floor landing tiled with alternating squares of yellow and brown.

Stopping there, I decide to never ever any more return to that group and that kindergarten. No, never ever anymore. That is enough of enoughs. But I don’t have time to think about how I will live further on because I get spellbound by the red fire extinguisher on the wall.

In fact, it was not the whole fire extinguisher that mesmerized me but the yellow square on its side framing the picture where a man in a cap on his head held exactly the same fire extinguisher only in action already, upside down, to spurt the widening gush towards a fat bush of flames.

The picture was intended, probably, to serve a kind of visual instruction on how to use this or any other fire extinguisher, for which reason the one in the man’s hands was painted true to life in every detail. Even the yellow square with the instructive picture on its side was scrupulously reproduced, portraying a little man in a tiny cap who fought, standing upside down, the undersized fire with the bushy spurt from his miniature fire extinguisher.

Then and there it dawned on me that in the next, already blurred, picture on that miniature extinguisher the already indiscernible man was back again to his normal position, feet down. Yet in the still next, further reduced, picture he would be on his head once more and—the most breathtaking discovery!—these diminishing men just could not end, they would only grow smaller, receding to the state of unimaginably tiny specks and dwindle on without ever ending their dwarfish tumbles, serving each other a link and a spring-board to ever turning tinier simply because of that Fire Extinguisher who started them off from his nail in the wall on the second floor landing next to the white door to the senior group, opposite the door to the toilet.

The spell was shattered to pieces by the awakening calls for me to immediately come to the dining room where the kindergarten groups were seated already for the after-“quiet-hour” tea. Yet ever since, passing below Fire Extinguisher—the bearer of innumerable worlds—I felt respectful understanding. As for sneaking into someone else’s panties, that one became my only and unique experience. And enlightened by it, at all the “quiet hours” that followed, whenever I had to go, by the undertone permission from the caretaker, out to pee then, passing by, I fully knew the meaning of sheets overlapping the gap between a pair of coupled cots, as well as why so firmly kept Khromov his eyes closed in his cot next to the Sontseva’s…

~ ~ ~

We lived on the second floor and our door was followed by that of the Morozovs, pensioner spouses in a three-room apartment. Opposite to them across the landing, there also was an apartment of 3 rooms, yet only 2 of them were dwelt by the Zimins family, while the third one was populated by single women, now and then replacing one another, at times there happened couples of women, who declared themselves relatives after meaningful smiles at each other.

The dead wall between the doors to the Morozovs’ and to the Zimins’ was outfitted with a vertical iron ladder reaching the ever open hatchway to the attic where the tenants hung their washing under the slate roof, and the father in the Savkins family—whose apartment was smack-bang opposite ours—kept pigeons after he came home and changed into his blue sportswear.

The wooden handrail supported by the iron uprights ran from the Savkins’ door towards ours without crossing the whole landing though, because it turned down to follow the two flights of steps to the first-floor landing and from there four more steps down—to the staircase-entrance vestibule. There you pushed the wide entrance door held closed by a rusty iron spring, big and screechy, and went into the wide expanse of our block Courtyard, leaving behind the vestibule with one more, narrow, door that hid the steep steps into the impenetrable darkness of underground basement.

Deducing from my subsequent life experience, I may safely assume that we lived in Flat 5 though at that time I didn’t know it yet. All I knew was that the most numerous population in a house were its doors. Behind the first door with a large handmade mailbox screwed up to it, there would open the hallway with the narrow door of the tiny storeroom to the right, and the partly glazed door to the parents’ room on the left, where instead of a window was the wide balcony door, also glazed in its upper part, viewing the Courtyard.

Straight ahead from the hallway started the long corridor to the kitchen, past two blind doors on the right, the first, to the bathroom, followed by the toilet door, while in the left wall immediately before the kitchen, there was just one, also blind, door to the children’s room that had two windows, one of which faced the Courtyard and the other presented the view of murky windows in the plastered butt wall of the next, corner, house in the Block. The only window in the kitchen was looking at the same wall in the adjacent corner building, and to the right from the kitchen door, up under the ceiling, the matte glassed square of the quite small toilet window was also filled with the same murky darkness unless the lamp there was on. Neither bathroom nor the storeroom closeted behind its white door in the hallway had any windows at all but, in the ceiling of each of them, there hung an electric bulb—just click the black nose jutting from the round switch by the needed door, and step inside without angst because, as it turned out, all the doors in a house opened inside the rooms they serve…

Entering the toilet, first of anything else I spat on the wall to the left from the throne and only then sat down to go potty and watch the slow progress of spittle crawling down the green coat of paint, very vertically, leaving a moist trail in its wake. If the glob of the snailing saliva lacked sufficient reserves to reach the baseboard, I would assist it by an additional spit in the track, just above the stuck locomotive. At times the trip took from three to four spits and some other times the initial one was enough.

The parents were lost in perplexity as regards the spittle condensing under the toilet wall until the day when Dad entered immediately after me, and at the strict interrogation that followed I admitted doing that yet failed to offer any explanation why. Since then, fearful of punishment, I blotted the traces of the wrong-doing with the pieces of cut-up newspapers from the cloth bag on the opposite wall but the thrill was gone.

(…my son Ahshaut at the age of five sometimes peed past the john, on the toilet wall. More than once I carefully explained him that it was not the right way of taking a leak, and those who missed the target should wipe up after themselves.

One day he balked and refused to wipe the puddle. Then I grabbed at his ear, led him to the bathroom, and ordered to pick up the floor cloth, then brought him back to the toilet where, in a rage-choked voice, ordered to collect all the urine from the floor with that cloth. He obeyed.

Of course, in more developed states my parental rights would be grossly jeopardized after the child abuse of so violent a nature, still and all, I consider myself right at that particular development because no biological species can ever survive in their own waste… I would savvy, were the kid just spitting on the wall, however, in the house that I built the toilet walls were simply plastered and whitewashed, no spittle would crawl down such a surface. Later, the money for ceramic wall tiles got scraped up too, yet by that time the children were already adults…)

You feel yourself kinda Almighty when reconstructing the world of a half-century ago, adjusting the details to your liking with no one to rub your nose in it even if you muck up.

However, you can fool anyone but yourself, and I am ready to admit that now, from the distance in fifty years, not everything is falling in just nicely. For instance, I am far from certain that the pigeon enclosure in the attic had anything to do with Captain Savkin. The mentioned structure could as easily belong to Stepan Zimin, the father of Lyda and Yura… Or maybe there were two enclosures?

Frankly, at the moment I am not sure about the presence of pigeons in one or the other enclosure (but were there two of them?) on the day when I ventured to climb up the iron ladder towards something unknown, indistinguishable in the murky square hole of the hatchway above my head. And it is pretty possible that I simply remembered the remark overheard in my parents’ chat, that Stepan’s pigeons also fell victim to his unrestrained booze binges.

On the whole, just one thing stands beyond the shadow of a doubt – the tremulous ecstasy on the doorsill to revelation when, leaving behind my sister’s dismal divination of the pending manslaughter of me by the fatherly hand and, next to her, the silent stare of my brother watching closely each my movement from the landing down there, which diminished at each ladder rung as I climbed into the brave new world that any moment now would unfurl before me beneath the grayish underbelly of the slate roof… A few days later Natasha came running into our room to proudly herald that Sasha had just climbed up to the attic too.

Taking into account all of that, it is quite probable that the pigeons were gone from the attic enclosure, but in the Courtyard, there were hosts of them…

The Courtyard’s layout presented a systematized masterpiece of pure unalloyed geometricity. Inside the big rectangular formed by the 6 two-storied buildings, the ellipse of the road was inscribed and accentuated by the knee-deep drenches along its both sides, bridged by albeit short, yet mighty overpasses minutely opposite each of the 14 entrances to the 6 houses in our Block.

Two narrow concrete walks aligned at right angles to the ellipse’s longitudinal axis cut it into three even chunks, the resultant rectangular in between the walks and the road ditches was further divided into three equal segments by one more couple of concrete walks parallel to the above-mentioned axis to connect the walks also mentioned already.

The intersection points formed four corners of the central segment, from which the rays of 4 additional concrete walks traversed the Courtyard diagonally, each one projected in the direction of the central entrances to the respective corner buildings, the line between adjacent ray-starting points served the chord of a concrete arc-walk described about a round lumber gazebo, 2 of them all in all, so that, on the whole, it presented the model of perfection reminiscent of the Versailles’ design, only of concrete.

(…it is impossible to come across such a purified Bau Stile in nature. No circular circles exist among natural ones, neither absolutely isosceles triangles, nor flawless squares – someplace, somehow, the accomplished evenness would be inevitably ruined by the stubborn awl spiking thru the Mother Nature’s haversack…)