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

off onto the seat, she was looking in front of her and not at the TV on its stand between the two windows. Only Lenochka was watching it from her, not yet slid-out, chair-bed. The subdued murmur of the TV merged with the feeble light from a couple of bulbs in the luster.

After groaning for a while, my mother asked me and Eera to help her to the bedroom because she had no strength in her at all. We took her by the arms from both sides and helped to get up. Giving out weak grunts and shuffling her slippers over the floor, she moved, with our support, towards the curtains in the doorway to the dark kitchen.

In that manner, the 3 of us reached the middle of the room beneath the chandelier of 5 white shades only 2 of which painted the circles of yellowish electric light in the whitewashed ceiling. When there remained a final couple of meters to the doorway, the light around me suddenly dimmed going away and I found myself confined in the darkness, not complete though because I could discern that I was having a sex with my mother from behind. Wild horror lashed me, kinda electric shock, and threw back into the lighted living-room. To the kitchen doorway, there still remained a distance of about a meter.

In fright, I gave Eera a sidelong glance over the white kerchief swaddling my mother's head. Eera, with her eyebrows knit together, took care to keep her eyes on the lowered profile of my mother as if she had not noticed anything. So, that was just a vision, yet more prolonged than that second of running thru the Greek night…

Asking Eera to hold alone for a sec, I hurried into the kitchen to turn the light on there. We took my mother to the bedroom and helped her to sink onto the bed, where my father muttered something in his sleep. Then we returned to the living-room.

Befuddled and kinda reeled, I slid the folding bed-armchair for Lenochka and slid out the folding coach-bed for us. Soon all of the khutta turned into a mutual sleeping kingdom. Only the clock on the wall above the TV was ticking from its plastic box against my temples. It also had no answer to what all that was at all and why that all had to be happening to me…

~ ~ ~

As always before, accepting the notebooks with my translations, Zhomnir jerked his bushy eyebrow up and started to read, inserting his pencil marks in between the widely spaced lines, though he agreed that his options were also not ideal.

"Your trouble, Sehrguey, is that Ukrainian is not your native tongue, you hadn't absorbed it with your mother's milk."

I refrained from stating that the first months in my life I was nourished with the milk of Carpathian cows.

He went over to his archival chamber and returned with a thin book in his hands. "These are Gutsalo's stories. That's how one should write!"

And Zhomnir began to read out excerpt lines from the book, clicking his tongue at the end of especially cool ones, then he handed the book to me for mastering the craft.

(…I had read that collection as well as any other works by E. Gutsalo ever coming my way. What am I to do if singing praises of devotion to the morning dew on cucumber seedlings do not turn me up? (For that same reason, by the way, I do not like Yesyenin even though he's from Ryazan region.) Besides, after The Enchanted Desna by Dovzhenko, who had so beautifully exhausted the theme, attempts at picking it up anew are doomed to miserable copying of the flavors and mood.

And when Gutsalo tried his hand at writing on city life, he dropped off to the level of cartoons in the satirical magazine Perets. I am ready to agree that in one of his stories of that period, he managed to mention the reddish brick dust on the black padded jackets of bricklayers, but the detail had nothing to do with the plot nor with the characters in the story. The good but odd detail just stayed dangling about, a kinda limp cock in an immense vagina…

The constituent parts of a work should add, converge, and develop the whole structure, the way it’s done by pulling the constellation of the Southern Cross and the shimmer of lamplight in the red hair of the doctor on the empty ship deck in the lines opening The Rain by Somerset Maugham, to suggestively send the reader’s train of thoughts down the road towards the clash of priesthood and prostitution…)

Yet Zhomnir should know better and, so as to compensate for the faulty nurture in my early days and mitigate the backwash of skipping the Ukrainian literature lessons at School 13, I took a thin copybook, titled it "Ukr. Lit." and then read all of the books in Ukrainian from the 2 long shelves in the Plant Club library.

There were both Lesya Ukrainka and her mother Olena Bdgilka, and Panas Myrny with his oxen, and the splendidly great Kobzar, and Marko Vovchok, and Ivan Franko, and Jankowski (idolized by Zhomnir) and many others in alphabetical order. About some of them, even Zhomnir knew only from the skimpy notes taken at the overview lectures attended by him in his student years.

(…after sifting all of that thru the sieve of careful reading, I can safely state that in the terms of artistic value most of the authorised authors failed at creating anything above the level of petty amateurs. Quoting a Ukrainian proverb, "Where there is no nightingale, you’ll get nothing but sparrow chirrup."

The sparrow-squealers just kept retelling the latest European fashion in the contemporary belles-lettres. That's great! Glory be to them! The Ukrainian language began to be seen thru the press. However, that's politics and I am talking about the literature.

As of yet, only three authors in the Ukrainian literature would pass with their colors flying in front of the