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

There were lots of huge puddles all over the road, but you and I still managed to make a roundabout over almost all of the drenched empty Settlement – from the streetcar terminal to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, and back along Professions Street. You were adequately dressed and sleeping under the buckled apron and the raised top of the carriage. Only at the end of Professions Street, when the rubber tire fell off the right front wheel, you woke and sat up, and grabbed the tire which I had placed over the buckled apron.

You grabbed it with your both hands as if it was a steering wheel, but I took away that wet and muddy piece of rubber. You whimpered a little, then hushed but never went to sleep again. Decemberists Street was not far away already, and we reached there on just the hind wheel pair in the carriage…

Then the weather cleared up and in a couple of days I took you out to the field near the streetcar terminal. There I got you out of the carriage and put on the green grass. You were not too firm on your legs yet and just stood with your hand leaning against the carriage side.

I lay down in the grass nearby. The green field slanted upward into the blue sky, and larks were singing from up there. So loud, joyful. You stood there until your red pantyhose showed a dark patch of moisture. I had to take you back home because pampers had not been invented yet…

Another time I took a spare pantyhose along with us and drove you to the pond by the Approvals village, which Kuba and I had been visiting on our bicycles. It's not too far, 5 kilometers or so. You slept all the way.

The pond by Shapovalovka was rather big. I placed the carriage on a low sandy beach to watch your reaction to an unfamiliar world because you had not seen any ponds yet, it was like the first walk-out from a spaceship to an unknown planet.

You woke and sat up, left on your own with something you've never seen in your lifetime. I stood behind the raised top, so as not to interfere with the first impressions.

You turned to the left—only the wide water surface was seen from your viewpoint—then to the right, there was just the same incomprehensible substance, and you burst into tears. Of course! Waking up in the middle of who knows what and all alone. I had to show up and soothe you before we rolled back….

The clothesline under the load of already dry washing stretched from the wicket at 13 Decemberists to the front porch. On the way, it passed above you sitting in your carriage. My mother stood next to it with the basin in her hands to collect the dried things. Suddenly, you gripped on something hanging alongside, rose and stood up in the carriage at all your height.

My mother told me to remove the baby and you, like, responding, threw both your hands up, as if in a dance, as if to say, “See how big I am! I can do what I want!”

And then thru my mother's eyes, there flicked something so dark and eerie that I instinctively pulled you back. Rather, I pulled the handle of the carriage and, by that move, I yanked its bottom from under your feet. You tumbled over the carriage side onto the ground. The spot was, luckily, soft soil and you, fortunately, landed on your back.

Instantly, I picked you wailing at the top of your lungs, but Eera was already darting from the garden in panther leaps to pound her fists against my head and the shoulders because my hands were busy holding you…

The local train taking you back to Nezhyn was overcrowded with the passengers standing in the aisle as one thick mass as well as in the space separating the bench-seats that abut the car walls between the windows. When I had to take your plastic potty to the toilet in the car vestibule, I kept it over my head like a waiter his tray in a crowded tavern…

(…in my memory, I keep two sets of images which can be easily retrieved and considered in detail. The first set is a collection of apocalyptic impressions, full of howling darkness, crowds in panicky stampede, cold horror.

The second one contains nice, heart-warming pics but they arouse poignant longing for something unreachable, or underachieved. Like that view thru the open door on the bus pulled up nearby Vapnyarka, next to a lean concrete post bearing a blue tin square at its top numbered 379, and behind it there opens a narrow gap for a country road in between the walls of ripening wheat halted immovable, as well as a boy of ten by the roadside post, his hand aloft over his wheat-color-haired head to wave goodbye to the departing bus…

I mean, all those mental slides with you in them are from the second set…)

~ ~ ~

After coming back from Odessa, I lived in a never-ceasing fit of panic, in agonizing fear of what, sooner or later, had to happen or, maybe, had already come to pass. The fear was fueled by jealousy and resentment at not some specific one, but at his taking my Eera from me. The excruciating dread was kept deep hidden as some shameful want, but no camouflage eased the choking grip of misery that never let me go.

Occasional reprieve happened only when Eera was nearby or when I was slaving at a construction site, or worked at the translation of another story. But even then, the crushing anxiety did not disappear entirely, but only receded into the background. Physical pain is more merciful – the part of the brain receiving the pain signals gets inured and eventually turned off, so the pain no longer reaches you.

I did not attempt to alleviate my situation. Firstly, because I never learned to