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

When it got very late and all the visiting children gone back to their apartments, I would venture to the parents’ room filled with the smarting mist of thinly bluish tobacco smoke and the noise of loud voices each of which trying to speak louder than anyone’s else. Old Morozov would announce that being a young man he once oared no less than 17 kilometers to a date, and the man by his side would eagerly confirm that proves it was worth it and all the people would rejoice at the good news and laugh happily and they would grab each other and start dancing and fill all of the room with their giant figures, up to the ceiling, and circle along with the disc on the gramophone brought by someone of the guests.

Then they again would just speak but not listen who says what, and Mom, sitting at the table, would start singing about the lights on the streets of the Saratov City full of unmarried young men, and her eyelids would drop and shut half of her eyes. Mortified by shame at that view, I would get onto her lap and say, “Mom, don’t sing, please, don’t!” And she would laugh, and push the glass back, and say she did not drink anymore and go on singing all the same. In the end the guests would go to their apartments taking out the tables with them and still talking without listening. I would be sent to our room where Sasha already sleeps on the big sofa but Natasha alertly bobbing from her pillow. In the kitchen, there would sound the tinkle of the dishes being washed by Grandma and Mom, and then the light in our room would be briefly turned on for the parent bed parts to be taken back…

Besides her work, Mom was also taking part in the Artistic Amateur Activities at the House of Officers which was very far to go and I knew it because at times the parents took me to the cinema there and made the twins envy so dearly. All the movies started by loud music and the big round clock on the Kremlin tower opening a newer newsreel “The News of the Day” about black-faced miners in helmets walking from their mines, and lonely weaver-women in white head-clothes pacing along the rows of shaking machine tools, and giant halls full of bareheaded clapping people. But then one of the news frightened me to tears when showed jerky bulldozers in fascist concentration camps whose blades were pushing heaps of naked corpses to fill deep trenches and press them down by their caterpillar tracks. Mom told me to shut my eyes and not watch and, after that, they didn’t take me to the cinema anymore.

However, when the Artistic Amateur Activities performed in their concert at the House of Officers, Dad took me along. Different people from Artistic Amateur Activities came on stage to sing by the accompaniment of one and the same button accordion and the audience clapped so loudly. Then the whole stage was left for just one man who talked for a long time, yet I couldn’t get it what about even though he made his voice louder and louder until they started clapping from all the sides to send him away. And so it went on with singing and talking and clapping in between, but I waited only to see my Mom up there. At last, when a lot of women in the same long skirts came to dance with a lot of men in high boots, Dad said, “Aha! Here is your dear Mommy!” But I could not make her out because the long skirts were all alike and made the women so too similar to each other. Dad had to point again who was my Mom and after that I looked only at her so as not to lose.

If not for that intent attention, I would have, probably, missed the moment which stuck in me for many years like a splinter which you cannot pull out and it’s just better not to press the spot where it sits…The women dancers on the stage were all spinning quicker and quicker and their long skirts also swerved rising to their knees, but my Mom’s skirt splashed suddenly to flash her legs up to the very panties. Unbearable shame flooded me, and for the rest of the concert I kept my head down never looking up from the red-painted boards in the floor beneath my felt boots, no matter how loudly they clapped, and all the long way home I did not want to talk to any of my parents even when asked why I was so pouty.

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn’t realized yet…)

But, hey! Really, what’s the point in those concerts at all if there was a shiny brown radio box on the wall in our—children’s—room? It could both talk and sing, and play music, we knew it very well that when they broadcast Arkady Raikin you should turn the white knob of the volume control to make it louder, then run and call everyone in the house to haste to our room for laughing all together back to the box on the wall. And we learned to hush the radio or even turn it off when there was a concert for the cello and orchestra, or if someone was telling how good was the news about the victory of Cuban Revolution in Cuba which made him so happy that he turned out 2 daily tasks in just 1 shift for spite of the revenge-seekers and their leader Adenauer…

~ ~ ~

Yet, the May Day celebration was not a home holiday at all.

First, you had to walk a long way by the road going down past the Block’s corner building and there, at the foot