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

The Club Director was short and thickset without having a pot-belly though. His slightly swollen, and oftentimes ruddy, face was accompanied by the combed back grayish hair with a natural wave. When the Club stuff together with the amateurs from the Plant staged a full-length performance of the Ostrovsky’s At the Advantageous Place , the Club Director just parted his hair in the middle of his head, smeared it with Vaseline and turned out a better than natural Czar-times Merchant for the play.

Electrician Murashkovsky acted Landowner and appeared on stage in a white Circassian coat, constantly clutching a riding-whip, instead of a handkerchief, in his thong of the disfigured hand.

Even the Head of Children Sector, Eleonora Nikolayevna, partook in the full-length production of that classic play. Her position at Club was unmistakably higher than that of Raissa, who was the Artistic Director of Children Sector and reported to Eleonora because the latter appeared in Children Sector much seldomer. On those visits, as elsewhere, she invariably arrived in dangling earrings studded with tiny bright sparklers, as well as in an immaculate white blouse with a lace collar, which rigging was further emphasized by mannerly retarded movements of her hands, in contrast to the energetically Plebeian gesticulation of Raissa.

The only occasion when I saw Eleonora without those tiny shining strips hanging from her ears was in the one-act play, where she was acting the underground communist caught by the White Guards. The Whites locked her in the same prison cell with a criminal, acted by Raissa, and Eleonora converted her into a Communist supporter before Stepan, Club House Manager, together with Head of Variety Band, Aksyonov, both in white Circassian coats and ballet high boots, took her away to face the firing squad…

If the Club Director was absent from his office, I had to buy a ticket like mere mortals from the ticket office next to his locked door. On one of such occasions, I entered the common auditorium and chose to land into a seat right in front of two girls, my classmates, Tanya and Larissa, because even though in the sold tickets they always marked the row and the place no one paid much attention to those marks.

Sometime before, I secretly liked Tanya, but she seemed overly unattainable, so I pulled wisely up and switched over to courting Larissa. After the classes at school, I tried to catch up with her in Nezhyn Street because she also went home that way. However, she invariably walked together with Tanya, her close girlfriend and also a neighbor in their Maruta Street.

When Larissa was a participant in Children Sector, I once happened to see her along Professions Street to the Gogol Street corner because she did not allow going with her any farther. At that period Tanya also participated in Children Sector activities and there, actually, were 3 of us walking Professions Street. On the way, Tanya kept urging Larissa to walk faster but then she just got angry and went ahead alone.

The 2 of us parted at the aforesaid corner, and I went along Gogol Street enthusiastically recollecting Larissa’s sweet laugh in response to my silly yakety-yak. On reaching the ice-coated water pump under the lamppost at the Nezhyn Street corner, all of my enthusiasm evaporated because of the two black figures, contrasting crisply against the white snow, who called me to come up.

I recognized both, one was a guy from the parallel class, and the other – Kolesnikov, a tenth-grader from our school, they both were from somewhere about Maruta Street. In a privately threatening tone, Kolesnikov began to make me understand that if I ever would come up to Larissa again and if he ever would hear or be told that I dared then, well, in general, I should get it what he would do to me. And so he kept rehearsing those general concepts in a circle, with slight variations in their order of priority, when I suddenly felt something snatching at my calf. I thought that was a street dog and looked back, but there was only a snowdrift and nothing else. That’s where and when the meaning of the idiom “hamstring shaking with fear” came to me completely.

He asked again if I understood, and I muttered that I got it. Then he asked if I understood everything of what he meant. I mumbled that, yes, everything. But I didn’t look at their faces and thought how good it would be if Uncle Tolik, the former regional welterweight champion in weightlifting, came to the pump for water. No, he never appeared. On the morning of that day, I fetched enough water to our khutta …

And now in public, before the pretty crowded auditorium, I took the seat in front of the two girls, my classmates, even though being fully aware of all the imprudence of such a move, yet, for some reason, unable to behave differently. I turned to them and tried to start a talk in the general hubbub of the audience present. However, Larissa kept mum and looked aside, and only Tanya was responding in rather a monosyllabic way before Larissa herself addressed me directly, “Stop following me, I’m laughed at by the guys because of you!”

Unable to find a word to answer her, crushed and dumb-stricken, rose I to my feet and walked away along the blind wall to the exit, carrying within my chest the fragments of my broken heart.

When I was nearing the back rows in the auditorium, my black sadness got drowned in the downright darkness because the lights went out to start the movie. To let my eyes get accustomed to the dark and prevent stumbling, I for a second took an empty seat by the passage and forgot to go and carry on my grief and pain because “Winnitoo the Chief of Apaches” was starting!.

~ ~ ~

At 19 Nezhyn Street, the old man Duzenko was no more and that part of the khutta was dwelt already by two old women: Duzenko’s widow and her sister who moved in from her village.

And in the half- khutta belonging to Ignat Pilluta there remained only his widow, Pillutikha. She never stuck her nose outside her den, keeping the window shutters in Nezhyn Street closed for weeks on end. Sure enough, she had to visit Bazaar or the Nezhyn Store but my treads never crossed hers…

In February Grandma Katya all of a sudden was taken to the hospital. Probably, only for me, with my life split between school, Club, books, and the TV it happened suddenly. Trying to get everywhere leaves no time to see things right by your side.

Coming from school, I clinked the latch-hook in the wicket, trotted to and up our two-step porch past Pillutikha’s window with a profile glimpse of her standing figure cloaked in a black shawl hung loosely from her head, her hand menacingly aloft against the wall between her and our kitchens.

At home, I dropped the folder with school notebooks into the crevice between the folding couch-bed and the cabinet under the TV and went back to the kitchen to have a midday meal with my sister-'n'-brother, if they hadn’t had it yet. Mother and Aunt Lyouda cooked separately for their families, and Grandma Katya ate the meals by her youngest daughter, together with her younger grandkids, Irochka and Valerik, at the common kitchen table by the wall between our and Duzenko’s parts of the khutta .

In the daytime, there was nothing on television but the frozen circle and squares for adjusting image by small knobs at the back of the TV box, if the circle was uneven then the announcers’ faces would be flattened or overly long. That’s why until the All-Union Television started to broadcast at 5 o’clock the TV was turned off and the midday meal was eaten under the muffled drum-roll-like chant from behind the wall to the Pillutikha’s, whose blather at times peaked up into piercing but indistinct shrieks.

Then I went to Club and, coming back, again saw Pillutikha, back-lit by a distant bulb in the room, she never turned on the light in the kitchen where she stood up against the hateful wall. After all the 4 parents of our khutta returned from work, Pillutikha would increase her volume to which the usual comment from Father was, “Ew! Again that Goebbels at her hurdy-gurdy!”