Сергей Огольцов – Rascally Romance. The Vagabond Cherub (страница 8)

However, the cooking can wait a bit; I'll set up the tent first, because the rearing up tumb over the river has completely blocked out the sun, and a hint of twilight is drifting in from Varanda…

(… there's a pyromaniac in every person…

"The pyromaniacs feasted on Pirosmani pies…"

At first, it sounds like a half-polished tongue twister, but then, slowly, a terrifying disjunctive question creeps in: was Pirosmani also feasting in the company, or was he present as pie filling?…)

It was flat fortunate that I didn't manage to break this thick branch while preparing the fuel. And now, to avoid setting the entire field ablaze, I walk systematic circles around the cooking fire, like that learned cat upon his chain, and thwart the escape attempts of the fiery protuberances, the more shifty ones…

But gradually the fire is outlined in a black retouch of burnt grass. The club-bearing sentry is replaced by an idle onlooker, gaping at the fiery dance atop a pile of branches. And the unbreakable club is transformed into a staff for propping up my musculoskeletal system…

And what do you see in the tongues of flame, or in the slow flicker of blackish-gray burnt firebrands that crumble into embers?

(… we were a seed, then a sprout, then branches, buds…)

Now, turning my staff into a poker, I rake through the heat of their memories of the past—to make a hole big enough for a dozen potatoes: lunch and breakfast, two in one.

Fire eats wood, I eat potatoes, the midges eat me…

(… he who doesn't eat doesn't live, even the quiet goody-goody crystals silently devour space with their inexorable growth.

But gobbling time is an impossible task, for it's impossible to chew what doesn't exist.

Time is a rred herring, designed to lure gullible simpletons off trail. A clear-cut scam.

No! In reality, it doesn't exist. "Time" is a fraud designed to cover a series of different states of space.

Here's a place illuminated by the sun on the left—that's morning; And there it is, highlighted on the right—evening. That's all there is to it.

A day as a unit of time? Ah, stop blabbering! A day is just the difference between two states of space…

An apple plus an apple equals a pair of apples, not a unit of time, damn it! Hooey! Utter malarky!…)

Oh, sorry, my dear! Hush-hush… Just don't get scared, everything is fine, the gray wolf is far away, beyond the mountains and valleys, and here everything is under control…

Well, this… it just comes naturally… a chance brush with this sweet couple, space and time, and I live through a sudden expansion of consciousness… But just slightly! Almost unnoticeable, if you don’t watch too closely.

It's all their fault, of these 2 bastards. As soon as they pop up in my mind, even in passing—crack!—a short circuit at once. I get all worked up and—start babbling utter nonsense and drivel.

Spouting like devil knows what, where even God would break a leg… Like, damn reincarnation of the holy fool Vasyok the Blessed, but he was nuts, while by me, it’s all pure science…

And I'm not going crazy at all. No way on that score. Hell, and God forbid.

They can both confirm that there were no civilian casualties during the attacks, and the animal world was never damaged in any way. I'll just go on for a stretch giving out some nonsense, and then I'll get tangled myself up in it—that's the end of the fad, and then I'm back to dragging water, or whatever else they deem necessary to load onto the meek yahoo's submissive back…

~ ~ ~ Genesis

Some sticky lack of doubt assures me of your insufficient awareness of your personal roots, genealogically speaking, on your father's side.

I feel more at ease about your maternal lineage; that half of your family tree certainly receives proper care, nutrition, and water. I’ll bet my bottom dime that your grandmother, Gaina Mikhailovna, did disclose in detail who's who two generations before her. If not deeper. A dead sure wager.

And I still suspect that you were raised in a house with my family tree securely locked up in a closet, out of sight. The prisoner was mentioned rarely, and exclusively in your absence. With you about, the topic was grabbed, handicapped, gagged, and harshly dragged back to the closet cell. Any family practice taboo of this or that kind.

My suspicion has developed into certainty thanks to your mother's letter. It informed me of my pretty sudden death.

Well, it wasn't exactly a bang to lay my brain out, like: what? Can't you get it you're a stiff? And while you're sniff-and-puffing in utter confusion, trying to somehow come to your senses, a pair of burly devils are already there to pinion your left and right—the bitchy buggers wring your hands behind your back, and in a mighty sweep hurl you to a rugh landing in hell—slam!…

Nothing of the kind! The gentle, delicate, manner of breaking the news softened the piquancy of the fact. Nevertheless, I had to realize once and for all: the child was told that dad was dead. Now, it would be an act of beastly cruelty to subject the child's fragile psyche to visions of the wandering corpse who every now and then still bubbles up from the otherworld…

A thoughtful presentation works wonders, like a resque cushion…

From then on, like a ghost of polite manners, I avoided leaving my grave for long, and as a result, I rarely suffered from a runny nose, even in the thickest of slush and sludge.

And besides, the news gave me a trump card for my social life. If my neighbor at the pub started spouting off his sad tale, how, although he was now a nobody, he had once been First Mate on a nuclear submarine, I would retaliate, without any scruples and based on a true story, by recounting my career as a famous test pilot.

Yes, I had to crash, tragically. In a top-secret, new-generation model… By the by, for this unparalleled achievement, I was awarded the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. Posthumously, nothing doing…

The sad fact is that the award didn't find its hero, because the lazy bastards didn't even look hard enough, as always…

Frankly, this bunk can’t serve a confirmation of my ability to crank up my imagination on the fly. Sadly, no.

That was the fruit of the collective creativity of the masses, that I rolled out. In the romantic era of the period, when the child of a single mother would ask questions about the reasons for incomplete number of members in their family, the under-equipped mother would offer the traditional excuse: "Your dad was a pilot, and he died."

The bare facts of life were saved for friends from her immediate circle.

‘He was a junior accountant, girls, and he spread me on the office desk. I'll never forget for the rest of my life how those fucking abacuses rolled under my ass. Swirl forward! Swirl back! Hither! Thither!…‘

However, don't expect a detailed report; my knowledge of own roots remains rather sketchy. To tell the truth, it's shamefully superficial: the science of eugenics was kept in the same tight rein back then as it is today…

~ ~ ~

Your father's mother's mother’s surname was Poyonk, baptized as Katerina.

Your great-grandfather, Iosif Vakimov, Commissar of Budyonny's First Cavalry Army, brought her back from Poland as a trophy, or perhaps as a souvenir of the legendary episode of the Civil War when Budyonny's cavalry nearly sacked Warsaw. The muddy roads and high freshet messed things up.

Their relationship was formalized by the civil registry office of the time, and eight years later, my mother, Galina, was born, followed by her brother, Vadim, and their sister, Lyudmila (each born in two years after the previous).

From the scattered recollections of all three, Iosif emerges as a very intelligent man. He spoke Hebrew and German and had the position of Trade Inspector in one of the southern regions of Ukraine. During the NEP (aka "New Economic Policy"), Katerina had a separate pair of shoes to match each of her frocks.

In the late 1930s, Iosif was arrested (like most former commissars), but he wasn't put up against a wall to face a firing squad or purged, unlike millions of other "enemies of the Soviet people". One might assume he found a clever way to buy his life.

The supposed deal resulted in exile to the very northern, but still European, part of Russia.

The family moved there, and in the early 1940s, the entire family returned to Ukraine, settling in the city of Konotop, which was soon captured by the German Wehrmacht.

After two years of Nazi occupation, when German troops were retreating westward under the Red Army's blows, my grandfather disappeared from home one night, literally the day before liberation. His bicycle—a considerable treasure in those days—was also missing.

The next morning, a massive artillery barrage forced Katerina to flee with her three children to the suburban village of Podlipnoye, where a shell fragment cut off a branch of an apple tree above my mother's head as she stood beneath it (an important detail: without those ten centimeters, I wouldn't be writing this letter to you now).

By midday, advancing Red Army units liberated the city and the aforementioned village. Katerina returned to Konotop, where she raised her children, Galina, Vadim, and Lyudmila, as a single mother.