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

Then came Tonya, who graduated the NGPI and was sent to teach Russian language and literature to kiddies in a Transcarpathian village, where she met a local boy, Ivan, whose courting (in a simple and unpretentious style of a Bandera man) kindled reciprocative feelings in her… Unable to reach over the language barrier, he knocked on the door of the young teacher late in the evening and, when it opened, his shotgun was mutely pointed at her chest. Like, be mine or nobody else’s.

Ivan's brothers were in time to disarm him, but the depth of feelings in the romantic lover did impress Tonya, which her attitude deserved her a chance to survive among the superb views of the Transcarpathian nature. She married him, gave birth to a pair of lovely children, returned to Nezhyn and, together with her entire young family, lived in one of the narrow bedrooms in the three-room apartment of her parents.

For their night rest, the parents enjoyed the folding coach-bed by the wall in the living room which also served a passage to both bedrooms. Opposite to that blind wall, there was a wide window behind a tulle curtain separating the windowsill occupied by a couple of neglected aloe flowerpots from the abutting table with the TV box on its top.

The curtain also veiled the backs of the chairs squeezed in between the table and the windowsill so that the chairs pushed under the tabletop would not take up space until needed. The chairs had plush-covered seats and they were from the same set with the table which, if you removed off it the electric iron, the messy pile of central newspapers, the TV, and the checkered oilcloth, presented its dark glossy varnish and could be folded out for a celebration feast.

When there was no festivity, those chairs from the set that found no place under the folded-back table were put in the corners of the living room, draped with the clothes for household wear and keeping heaps of those same newspapers, and all sorts of whatnots dumped upon their seats to keep them out of the way for a minute or two and forgotten there for a couple of months.

Besides all that, the living room also contained a wardrobe with a big mirror in its door, and a varnished hutch whose front was of two sliding glass-sheets protecting from the dust two shelves of crockery inside. Upon the hutch, there stood, lamely leaning its frame against the faded wallpaper, a repro of "The Unknown Beauty" by Kramskoy and scornfully observed from under her ostrich feather the dump around, including the "The Major's Matchmaking" repro fixed in the opposite wall.

There was no balcony in the apartment, thanks to its being situated on the first floor, but there was a boxroom niche in the tiny passage between the living room and the bedroom filled up with Tonya's family.

Eera and I were placed in the second, narrower, bedroom with a large plywood chiffonier from the times of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, and a veteran pier glass on a small table between the door and the windowsill. Along the wall with the carpet of almost the same pattern as in my parents', there stood the hand-me-down conjugal double bed for the soon-to-be newlyweds. It remained only to get married…

~ ~ ~

In the late evening before the bridal, Gaina Mikhailovna offered her services for ironing the trousers of my wedding suit, which task, in her opinion, she could do virtuously because in the years of the German occupation she, a young girl Gaina, was taken from a hinterland Ukrainian village and moved to Germany to work for more than two years as a "guest-worker" in a well-to-do German family by whom she became a past master in the above-mentioned art… Strange are the shuffle-and-deal ways of the knowledge deck, but it was how I learned that

Pants Are To Be Ironed On All Four Sides.

I clearly understood the rule and firmly kept to it all my life, but at that particular moment the unconquered spirit of a young pioneer partisan awoke in me, and I rejected the offer of my the-next-day-to-be mother-in-law. Like, it was not the first time for me to iron trousers thru a piece of moistened gauze… With the ironing accomplished, I hung the trousers over the back of a chair pushed under the table and went to bed.

In the morning I was awakened by Eera's sobs in the adjacent living room. Going out there, I traced back the grim silent glare of Gaina Mikhailovna to see an undeniably hot iron print on one of the trouser-legs hanging accurately from the back of the chair. Poor Eera!

The burnt spot, albeit blurred and lacking the clear-cut outline, discernibly changed the smoky shade of dark gray in the trousers’ fabric to something greenish. I could swear that nothing of the kind was there the night before, but the spot sat on one of the two sides I had applied the iron to. It cost me helluva efforts to persuade Eera not to cancel going to the ZAGS office – we had pulled thru too much of everything to make a U-turn at the last moment. I swore with the most solemn oath to hide the damaged part of my outfit into the folds of her long wedding dress.

Do brides have always to cry on the threshold to their wedding? Poor Eera!

Then there was a very long wait at the registry office, because the witness on the groom side, Slavic, that bitch of my best man, appeared only after my brother Sasha scribbled Slavic's name instead of him. Good news that they did not check witness' passports in ZAGS.

Yes, my brother and sister came from Konotop for the wedding and departed on the same day by the 17.15 local train.

So, at last, in all its glory arrived the dazzle of the breath-taking