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

After the turn into the back-alley, Sveta giggled her parting "bye!" and slipped away into her khutta's yard. Olga and I went on to the wicket of the next one, where she said she lived. But Skully and Quak stuck fast and tagged on along, inserting their silly cues in our conversation. And only when I and Olga started kissing, they realized there was no making-hay for them at all. So, they crossed to the opposite fence in the alley, urinated on it under the lamppost (some bohemian milieu, dammit!) and left with a flea in their ear. As if they couldn't keep in check their nature call until back on Budyonny Street. How come Quak was at the rehearsal? Very simple, the vocalist Zhanna Parasyuk was his one and only sister…

The Amateur Activity concerts were staged not only in Club. Sometimes, they were taken to different villages in the Konotop District traveling there by a small bus of PAZ make. It was for one of such concerts that we rehearsed that icy ceiling with the creaking door in A-minor.

Since the PAZ bus was not of rubber, you couldn't take along any amplifying equipment, neither was there any room for the young snowflakes in their tutus bred by the Ballet Studio. Just one Ukrainian Hopuck and one Moldovan Jock danced to the button-accordion of Ayeeda were quite enough for such a touring concert. Then she handed the instrument over to Chuba for playing his part in the Variety Ensemble band.

My role in the Ensemble was that of a rhythm guitarist with a common acoustic guitar. Vladya remained outside Variety Ensemble because Aksyonov, with his saxophone, felt no need for assimilating a solo-guitar. As for Skully, he was irreplaceable, only his "kitchen" got minimized to the skeleton composition of the snare-and-hat to pat his sticks upon.

The universally recognized cream of the concert program was, certainly, Murashkovsky singing songs and telling humoreskas. Those rhymed stories about "me and my koom", were his specialty. About how “I”, together with the koom, aka a sister-in-law's husband, smashed the football goal clean away with koom's head or, riding a motorcycle, collided with a kolkhoz bull who threw us over an Oak-tree just for free… Simple rhyme, solid wit. The audience liked it – they laughed and clapped.

And then on the stage again appeared Zhanna the Singer and we – her band. Skully sat the tempo, we started and I suddenly felt that the guitar strings under my fingers were loosened to the utmost. Aksyonov had tempered with them, no doubt, during a humoreska or, maybe, while they danced Hopuck, to have a hearty laugh. Some stupid thick-cheeked joker.

Well, so Chuba and Skully were making up for chords and rhythm and I, like scenery alive, was striking chords careful not to let them sound – as if I was playing an odd klepka…

In the end of the concert, Murashkovsky traditionally burst out his main "bomb" – the humoreska about Adoptee and his Mother-in-Law.

(…in those days the word "mother-in-law", aka "teshcha", was the most magical incantation among stand-up comedians. It was enough for a man on the stage to pronounce "teshcha!" and the audience laughed and laughed.

Nowadays, the population grew much more sophisticated, spoiled by the elaborate cultivated humor so that an actor in the comic genre must inhale deeply and screech at the top of their lungs into the microphone – "shit!" for the audience to get it that it’s time to laugh…

Okay, we'd better get back to the concert at a village club in the early seventies of the XX-th century…)

Issuing torrid screams, Murashkovsky dashed from the entrance thru the entire small hall towards the stage. The case of button-accordion in his hands served a make-believe suitcase with personal belongings. After climbing the stage, he started the first-person humoreska on bitter miseries in the life of Adoptee.

His wife together with her Mom, his teshcha, had turned him in for the militia to prevent his going on a binge. While locked up, he dedicated all of the standard 15-day stretch in the custody to working out a careful plan for revenge and now, on his return from behind the bars to the place of residence, he casually broke the news about the barrel with pickled cucumbers in the earth cellar-pit going to pieces…

(The audience enliven and start to giggle.)

The worried wife and teshcha race down the ladder into the earth-cellar and Adoptee from above the ladder top recites the biblical principle of "eye for an eye", announces his verdict for their wrong-doings—fifteen days of incarceration—and slams the cellar-pit lid shut.

(The hall drowns in the jubilant glee.)

Every other day Adoptee drops to the captives packages on a string, like humanitarian relief with certain food items, as a dietary addition to the vegetables stored down there.

(Decibels of the thundering guffaw reach the neighboring villages. The spectators with a particularly vivid imagination can't laugh anymore – they simply jerk their heads with their mouths convulsively open, their squinted eyes drip tears which they have nothing to wipe with because their hands, balled into fists, keep knocking against the back of the seat in the row in front of them.)

Four days later, the militia, called by some of the neighbor-villagers, come to set the captives free, and Adoptee gets another stretch of 15 days in confinement.

("Boo-ha-ha" in the audience acquire resemblance to a collective fit.)

Murashkovsky throws at them the concluding lines, like a bullfighter dealing the final stab to the animal.

"Okay, I'm leaving.

You'll never find another one like me.

I won't even burn your khutta down, which I could do!"

Normally, to these words, the audience reacted with a farewell burst of laughter capable of blowing the doors and windows out together with their frames. Murashkovsky prepared for a parting bow to the general ovation and – Dead silence. Not a sound.

All froze like exhibits in the Madam Tussaud's Theater of Wax Figures. Only from somewhere in the seventeenth row there comes a