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

Mother turned to me and said, “Wait a little, I’m closing in half-hour, we’ll go home together.”

I sat leaning my back against the door, so as not to be in the way when she reached for goods from here and there in the stall’s narrow innards.

The said half-hour later, the flurry by the stall in the park alley did not subside.

“Maman! A pair of Strong Blondes and a smaller one of cookies!”

“Auntie! Auntie! A pack of “Prima” cigarettes!”

“Sister! A bottle of white!”

“White is over.”

“And over there? In that box?”

“It’s Rkatsiteli for one ruble and 37.”

“Alright, come on! Let it be it, we’re not racists!”

Finally, the Georgian was over too, the crowd dissolved. Mother dropped the window shutter but had to open again for a latecomer that tattooed in a trot under the yellow lamplight from the posts over the asphalt up to the shut stall. Grieved by the fact that everything was sold out, he bought a bottle of the uncertain expensive Riesling for 1 ruble 78 kopecks, though it was already 30 minutes past the allowed by regulations hours for selling alcohol.

When Mother locked the stall and we walked to the streetcar stop by Peace Square, I asked if such mayhem was there every evening.

“No, Sehryozha. It’s because it’s Sunday today.”

~ ~ ~

And again the summertime Kandeebynno lake awaited us but now, apart from the swimming trunks and a sandwich with a slice of melted cheese, bringing along a deck of cards became the must.

“Whose move?”

“Yours.”

"No fake?”

“Take the shoes off your eyes! It’s Skully who’s been dealing!”

“That’s a good boy! He knows it was work to shape Man out of Ape… Here, two Knaves to lazy Kuba.”

"…and ultimately will shape Man into Drab Horse… Queen and Ace of same suits.”

On each and every beach blanket spread between the currant bushes, heated battles of Throw-in Fool went on to the music from portable radios. The most enviable receiver was, of course, Spidola produced at the Riga’s Radio Plant, with the face dimensions of a copybook and no thicker than a brick. All the body of its telescopic antenna was hidden in the receiver’s plastic case leaving outside only the tip button. Pulling that button, you obtained the shiny nickel-plated rod for fishing in SW, the LW and medium-wave were caught without extending the antenna.

Browsing for radio stations in short waves was a hopeless lick though. Half of the range drowned in a sizzling, hissing, and crackling because the ours choked all those “voices” in service of the CIA—“The Voice of America”, “Liberty”, “Russian Service of BBC” and their likes—by a godawful static. So, on the beach, all the receivers were tuned to “Mayak” – the All-Union Radio Station, which broadcast signals of the exact time and short news account every half-hour, filling the rest of the air by concerts at the requests of radio listeners…

But it’s better not to visit the Kandeebynno alone, and not only because you’d stay without partners for card-playing but merely for security reasons.

Once, not heeding the advice of Kuba and Skully, I swam across the Kandeebynno to the low dam of the fish lakes. A group of guys of my age was there on the bank. One of them asked me in Ukrainian, “Have you seen Peka?”

“Who’s Peka?” asked I in surprise and got an explanatory sucker punch on the chin, a kinda dab bonus for curious dumbos.

They all dived off and swam away. It did not hurt much but left a bitter resentment at such meanness on no provocation. Probably, the blades from Zagrebelya… and how, if one was allowed to ask, had I ever hurt them?

(….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…)

The Kandeebynno was not the only place in Konotop for beach-going. There, for instance, was a sizable water-filled gully in the field beyond the Settlement. Sometimes its grassy banks got overcrowded by the guys from all over the city swarming in a flash mob for unknown reasons.

And a couple of times our friendship-knit trinity traveled by bikes to the river of Yezooch in the Konotop outskirts diagonally opposite the Settlement. The dormant flow of the stream slumbering in the shade of thick Willows over the grassy banks was almost imperceptible. And it was deep indeed, so in one place there even stood a tower for high diving. The contraption made of iron pipes had three height levels: 1, 3 and 5 meters.

We climbed the ladder to the three-meter level but it took some time to pluck the heart, and even then it was not a headlong dive but just a jump heel-first. Then we proceeded onto the plank deck at five meters, yet, having looked at the water so too far down there, silently retracted to a lower level. Even Kuba.

When leaving already, we watched an adult guy in a nice “swift-like” dive from the highest level. The only drawback of the Yezooch was its lack of beach-goers, there was no one at all except for us and that lone diver.

And, of course, the most popular place for summer recreation of Konotopers was considered the sandy Bay beach on the Seim river reached after a short, two-stop, ride from the Station by any of the local trains.

Yet, that summer I wasn’t going there. Not because of the ticket price of twenty kopecks, like lots of other guys you could go there as a hidden traveler, aka “hare”, the crowd of Seim-goers was too thick for the conductors to squeeze thru all the cars in just ten minutes. So expenses were not the point, neither the grim harvest of a few drownings reaped by the Seim each summer