Сергей Огольцов – Rascally Romance. The Vagabond Cherub (страница 10)

The Germans never reached Kanino, although the frontline cannonade toss-and-rolled on the horizon. Then units of the Red Army reserves arrived in the village—men from Siberia, with their remarkable habit of sitting outdoors after a steam bath and pensively smoking a hand-rolled cigarette; being clad in only pants and an undershirt, below the starlight in the dark sky of a frosty night.

The Siberians moved away in the direction of the cannonade, and it soon died down. In the village, plunged into deep silence, only women, girls, and boys too young to be drafted remained.

Oh, yes! And the collective farm chairman, a one-armed invalid in a military tunic.

And so it went on, not for days or weeks, but for months, year after year…

And, from this life, the women suffered a collective sexual quirk—they'd gather in some hut or bathhouse, and—well, start considering each other's vaginas; they'd comment and pass judgment: whose is prettier…

Taking the whiff of this Sapphic Revival, the collective farm chairman attempted to put a stop to this annoyingly widespread lesbianism before the district leadership got wind of it. So he called a general meeting for women and girls only at the collective farm club.

The village boys also participated. Not showing up. They'd sneaked into the club's projection room and, agape, peeked through the narrow movie projection windows as the chairman cursed the meeting at the top of his lungs. Pounding the podium with his only fist, he swore to the assembled crowd, on their motherfucking mothers, that he would quell this fucking lechery with a red-hot iron.

(… I'm somewhat softening the unpretentious charm that permeated the bucolic directness of the speaker's speech…)

My father never knew whether the invalid kept his promise, because he (my father) was drafted into the Red Army. Or rather, in his case, it was the Navy, but still the Red Navy…

~ ~ ~

The Second World War was dying down, but it still fressed the cannon fodder with unabated greed.

Kolya, a boy from a village in Ryazan, and many other boys from various other places, were given striped naval singlets, black pants, black shirts under black pea coats. And they spent about a month to hammer in the boys the basics of combat training, learning to accurately follow commands like "Halt! One-two!", "Attention!", "Disperse!", and to be able to see a rifle butt from its bayonet.

Then they were loaded—just as they were, in black—onto high-speed landing craft to seize a bridgehead somewhere in the upper Danube, in Austria.

But no matter how fast the nimble little vessels rushed, the landing force did not manage to seize the planned bridgehead—Fascist Germany had treacherously capitulated, and there was no one left to run at in a black mass with bayonets at the ready.

(… once upon a time, a long time ago, I secretly grieved the fact: oh! They didn’t leave Dad time to become a hero!

Now, on the contrary, I'm glad that my father never fired a shot nor killed anyone, even accidentally.

And yet, he was registered a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, and on special anniversaries, like its 20th, or 25th, or (so on) Anniversary of the Great Victory, he was awarded participant commemorative medals, which he kept in a drawer but never pinned on, unlike those veterans who jingle their collections on their civilian jackets on the occasion of yet another Victory Day… )

Then, for a couple of months, his platoon guarded (for some unknown reason or from whom) the uninhabited Snake Island off the coast of Bulgaria, or perhaps Romania, from where he was transferred to work as a motorman on a military minesweeper, a tiny vessel with a small crew.

My father's seafaring life began with a crossing from Sevastopol to the port of Novorossiysk, by the choppy Black Sea. It wasn't exactly stormy, but there was a fair amount of chop…

Using on a swing in the park is fun, but after a couple of hours of such fun, your stomach will throw up everything that was lingering in it from the day before yesterday's breakfast. That sea trip lasted longer…

When Red Navy sailor Ogoltsoff disembarked at his destination, even the land continued to rock beneath his feet. He tried to puke in between the tall stacks of long logs stacked along the pier, but he had nothing within him.

The young sailor got seated right on the port structure, which was slipping away from under his feet, and, looking at the wall of timber stacks that continued to rise and fall, decided that he would certainly die—he wouldn't survive a naval career…

(… it's not hard to guess that such an idea is false, since he hadn't yet met your grandmother and allured her to the registry office. And your grandmother—on your father's side—hadn't given birth to three more children, never becoming a single mother: an unprecedented case in this entire excursion into genealogy…)

So, seasickness didn't kill my father. He learned to endure, or at least tolerate, the nausea. A blue anchor tattoo was pinned to the back of his left hand, and along his right arm—from wrist to elbow—clung the indelible outline of a swiftly flying swallow (as blue as the anchor) with a tiny envelope in its beak ("fly with my greeting!…"). On his flimsy minesweeper, he plied the vast expanses of the Black Sea, clearing it of naval mines.

That's precisely what minesweepers are for in the Navy.

. .. .

The main difference between naval mines and their land-based counterparts is that naval mines must be anchored, otherwise they'll scatter in all directions and tear apart anyone, regardless of whether they're "ours" or "theirs." That's why a naval mine is secured to an anchor, which in turn grips the seabed.

The mine (a meter-wide iron ball filled with air and explosives) floats above its anchor, but never reaches the surface. It is held tethered by a thin, strong cable, the length of which is determined by the depth of the channel where the minefield is laid. There, these naval mines hang, a few meters below sea level, waiting for a passing ship to trigger one of the detonator horns jutting from the mine's hull in various directions, like a child's drawing of a sun…

Thanks to its shallow immersion depth, the minesweeper passes above the minefield touching none of the set up detonators. Behind its stern, the vessel drags a wide loop of thick steel cable along the seabed, which sever the mine's connection to its anchor.

Freed from its tether, it rises to the surface to be destructed. At the final stage in the act, a rowboat departs the minesweeper, heading for the now stray mine. The rowboat's crew's task: attaching a stick of dynamite and a fuse to a floating iron ball. (And this task is carried out not on a quiet park pond, but among the rushing waves in the open sea, where the mine's spherical skull rises above the rowboat, then falls beneath it, trying to gore the boat with its detonator horn.)

The full stop in the mine's adventures is put by the boatswain, perched on the stern of the rowboat with a lit cigarette in his bared teeth. The cigarette isn't just for show—like, look, what a daredevil I am. Nope, it's a tool, prepared to light the fuse.

His job done, and—row! catch! catch!

The oarsmen spare no effort; there are no slackers aboard. As far away as possible, while the cord hisses to the deafening "BOOM!"

The TNT charge in a naval mine is designed to rip apart the hulls of armored battleships…

. .. .

When broken down into its component parts, romantic heroism evaporates, and clearing sea lanes of mines begins to resemble the work of a tractor, snorting and clanking in a collective farm field.

Similarly, early in the morning, a navy minesweeper sets out for a designated square of water, and all day long it plows its area—back and forth—with a cable dropped from the stern.

And the next square awaits the little vessel the following day…

In short, the heroism of the navy minesweeper crew is a team effort, and the fact that my father survived is a shared achievement: everyone did their part well.

A simple example:

At the end of a typical workday, Nikolai Ogoltsoff was tending the winch at the stern, where the thick cable that trailed behind the minesweeper all shift was wound back.

Suddenly, he spotted a mine closing in on their ship. Seems like its broken tether got spliced with the cable crawling along the seabed. So the mine, for who knows how long, had been dragging behind them underwater, unable to surface.

And now the bottom-scraper cable was reeling in, along with the mine clung to it. It was too late to turn the winch off—it would revolve from inertia: briefly, but long enough to pull the mine to the stern, butt it with the horn of a detonator.

Dad's shirt peeled off his body, swelling out like the fur off an animal in deadly danger, and he roared, ‘Full ahead!’

The cry was so inhumanly piercing that the Captain on the bridge instantly obeyed and slammed the EOT command to the engine room.

The engine driver, Dad's relief, responded immediately. The propeller blades spun rapidly, churning the water up, its turbulent force loosened and released the tangled remnant of the tether. The mine fell behind, bobbing in the water…