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

A beautiful Russian woman Valentina, by her husband's last name – Zhelezina, my cousin and the mother of Maxim, the outstanding student living in the house of his grandparents, would encourage me to visit her house, where she kept the younger ones – the hooligan Volodka and post-toddler Tanyooshka, who still did not want to part with her pacifier.

She would retell me the village gossips, and her life in Moscow, where she was courted by a Frenchman, and in Kustanai, where she was married to a German from the local colonists.

Her current husband would take me to the village store, and I would drink bottled beer and listen to mujiks' talk of nothing but with so native intonations that it takes your breath away with the sentimental sympathy.

And by that time my aunt would have already bestowed a black padded jacket, which was the obligatory outfit for anyone there, except for kids and teenagers, so that I did not stick out like a sore thumb in my checkered jacket…

Some ante-biblical simplicity of life, and at the same time with so many admixtures… An old woman came to the store to exchange potatoes from her garden for kolkhoz kopecks, her utter poverty showed thru but the mujiks around were next to bowing, caps in hand, before her. She’s a relic of their past – the embodiment of the old-regime landowners, yet they needed that relic and would create it from a poor retired teacher if only her facial features were delicate enough…

Returning from one of the supper evenings at my aunt's, I, for some reason, stopped in my tracks at nothing around, and for a long stretch was staring in the dry tall grass. What for?. The next evening my aunt affirmed that, yes, my grandmother Martha's hut had been exactly in that spot.

On the last night before leaving, I came with the farewell visit to Valentina's house. My checkered jacket turned out exactly her husband's size, they were obviously impressed with such generosity and were calling the jacket "a suit". To Valentina, I presented my suspiciously feminine bag. I did manage to get rid of it after all…

We went out into the darkness of the street without houses. Everyone understood that we would never see each other again. Valentina embraced me and wept. I stroke the shoulder of her padded jacket and said, "Boodya, sister." Then I shook hands with her husband Zhelezin and went away.

It's so strange, in my whole life, I never heard or used that soothing word of "boodya", it came out all by itself, spontaneously… I come from here, it's where I belong, sad pity I’ll be of no use for my own…

~ ~ ~

People started making wry faces at me as early as the bus station near the Izmaylovo Park, where the Ryazan-Moscow bus arrived. At Zhulyany airport in Kiev, where I disembarked the midnight flight from Moscow, the hostile attitude to me from the folks around increased exponentially to confirm the correctness of the old saying – people judge you by your zek outfit.

The public opinion on my account was voiced in the morning by a passenger on the platform in the underground metro station, "Where the fuck do you barge thru among the people?"

I differed from them by my being a black man. The black padded jacket, black pants, black army boots. Only the "cock" hat on my head fell out of the ensemble with its brown and blue stripes. It would seem more or less excusable were I loaded with some kind of luggage, but a black man with his hands in his pockets is outrageous, it's a challenge to the social order, it's a cheeky bomzh… We bypass them with an unseeing glance, so that to avoid any eye contact—save, God!—or we bark, "Where the fuck do you barge thru among the people?"

True, in those days we did not know the word bomzh yet, and for such sort of people, they used the term bych. "Where do you barge, you bych?.. Get out of here, fucking bych!"

The word was brought by the seamen who had sailed abroad. There, in the port cities, the drifters spending nights on the beach, collecting the scraps and offal left by vacationers were called "beach-combers". Our people did not care for the whole word and borrowed only the first half of it. So the folks without a certain place of residence and of obscure occupation got labeled byches. A short, biting term. However, it died out.

Firstly, those who did not speak English and never went to the sea began to slip into synonyms, substituting knoot (which in Russian means "whip") for bych that in Russian also means "whip". And, secondly, abbreviations are always stronger, especially when supported by the state.

(…we are all from the USSR, got it? Whoever does not understand will receive clarification in the CheKa, aka the KGB…)

When the law enforcement organs abbreviated the "without a certain place of residence" that turned in Russian into BOMZh, other terms had no chance for survival.

In the great and mighty Russian language, you cannot find a synonym to bomzh. The nearest to it "tramp" or "bum" smack of mothballs and infantile lisp of the Indian cinema…

Once upon a time in Russia there lived peddlers, aka offenny. In order to survive, they invented a language of their own. Dark for uninitiated, the Offenny language went into oblivion together with its carriers – no one bothered to compose its dictionary.

The current fenya of the criminal world is also for initiated but has nothing to do with the defunct Offenny except for echoing the latter's name. Considering fenya the language of Russian mafia is not correct because from Russian it borrowed only grammatical structures, and the vocabulary is fairly international. Kicked out of secondary school, half-educated students when continuing their careers as jail-birds poured in fenya the bits and scraps of words they heard at foreign language classes. That way fenya feathered its hat with atas!