Сергей Огольцов – The Tallest Story Ever (страница 2)

”Who am I?”

Bookoff

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01

Bookoff was dying and he knew it.

The process drew not much if any emotion out him. In a retarded zombie-like manner, shuffled the irreversible stages by. He just carried on without making much song and dance about the nearing fact. Anyway, the skeleton like his was of no use for dancing. The SOB jammed too tight at every other joint.

Aging trains you in self-restraint. Gradually, various occurrences of all kinds stur you less and less, and are met equally calm, ‘Yes, and so what?’ And be grateful if your reaction does not trigger a sharp shoot. Especially in the sacrum.

Not quite indifferent, yet rather listless was Bookoff’s attitude to his own demise. Kinda a visit to the dentist. Willy-nilly, you have to, because it pains. Only the date and hour are not agreed upon, but it is soon already. And he knew that.

His awareness Bookoff shared to no one. He never looked for another guy’s ear to share gossip of his very own snags. It was not like him. The suffered heart attacks were survived on his feet. Even massive ones. Only later, many years after. He could let it slip. Maybe, because of sloppiness arriving when the old age got a say.

Secondly, there was no one to cater his consolations to and prepare for the outcome. The shop-assistant boys at the supermarket were the only choice available to him. He patronized the retail shebang twice a week, buying bread, pasta, and some ketchup to put at home to his frige and forget.

He didn’t know the conquerors’ language. The blonde at the supermarket checkout liked to stage a show for his opposite number buddies. The invisible rifle was pointed at Bookoff, the right palm edge struck across the opposite biceps: “pouf-pouf!”. Dumb clown…

Tee fool’s black haired buddy seized the moment in between distant shelves to ask Bookoff tete-a-tete if he knew Russian. The old man made no answer, even though heard the question with his already half-deaf ears. He walked to the checkout and put by the computer monitor the money, his monthly allowance from the Red Cross mission, printed in the language he knew not, collected the change and went away…

Changes in human life are predetermined for 100 %, thanks to the biological sciences. We know beforehand when a human would get ripe, reach their prime, get dry behind the ears and finally plonk into the Lethe, aka River of Oblivion…

(Employing poetic lingo here aids to mitigate the involuntary contraction of the sphincter at the thought kept deep in the dungeon of any human’s conscience, which policy enables them to pull thru their daily tasks.)

To plumb a person’s biographical clearway is a much more complicated operation. Too many factors have to be considered for the purpose: marital status, their participation in social and political life, changes in geo economy situation and lots of other cats as well, always at ready to run across the unsuspecting guy’s way. Effing jinxes!

And this here person was just an average common man who didn’t care a fig about political analyses and the like trash. Otherwise, long-long ago he certainly would get a hunch of no other final to his biography. Such end was preconditioned by the dynasty schooling, which handed the skills of a strategic smiley to the guy at the rudder in the state inimical to the mountainous region where Bookoff had to live his days out. Plus an immeasurable superiority in monetary and demographic resources. Plus the army equipped with the most modern arms exponentially mightier than those possessed by the mentioned mountainous region considered by the formidable neighbor their hereditary backyard. Plus the corruption of the government and authorities in the “independent state” cobbled up in murky waters of the collapsing USSR.

And lots of other noodles would be added onto his ears by charlatans trained for claptrap TV shows. It’s only that he didn’t switch the damn tube on, not just never but absolutely never.

Bookoff was dying in a style. In a self-made mansion built for a big family. The family got swept away by capitulations and refugee stampedes. Only he stuck back like an old nail whose rust started roots in the wood. Easier to break off than rip out.

Now he was dying alone, silently, aware that he was passing away and that the fact had to be carried on his feet.

From time to time, civilian citizens of the power that had achieved the unprecedented victory came to his house to measure it for their big families. The house was big enough and situated in a good location at the end of a quiet dead end. The garden was also good, even though neglected.

On a closer inspection, they left tsk-tsking their tongue in disappointment. The house sat on the edge of a sheer precipice. It was doomed to topple down there in one or another of future earthquackes inevitable in the mountainous country.

The South Caucasus mountains always were a zone of seismic instability. When building his house, Bookoff missed the point, he didn’t know such words then. He was happy that the city council allocated a plot of land without a usual drag. And of course the house was built not on the edge. In decades the cavity crawled nearer, Together with the stream of open canalization, stinking rivulet along the bottom far down…

That’s how Bookoff learned the words about seismic instability. But now he had again forgotten them. There was time, when crevices in the kitchen wall under the hood of the gas stove drove him into a dismal rage. Then he got used and stopped seeing them.

And now he is just sitting amid the huge silence of his big house, too big for him. He looks at the window whose blinds are never closed. He cannot see the garden thru the window, just as he can’t make out where ends the nose and start the eyes in the unfocused spots of faces by those shop-assistant boys at the supermarket.

Yet, even without looking, he knows that the garden gone grown with rangy grass up to the waist. The garden which turned his arms into accessory tools for the spade, scythe, rake, which farmed his back out to the incessant aches.

He had neither what with nor what after to take care in the garden… There lingered just one business for him – to die.

Vasiok

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02

Scary silence reigned in the convolutions. Straining themselves to the utmost, logic and memory united their efforts in lost attempts to roll out at least a single one, however flimsy, reason for my appearing upon the bench intended for a set of three sitters. How to justify my presence in the boundless waiting room smack-bang in the middle of unknown MutterSpraheLand, whose PA system sounds so dissimilar to the all-purpose native to all Global-English-Mother-Tongue.

In futile confusion rushed heady vain thoughts hither-thither rubbing against the winding brain partitions like the tremulant mute school of fish caught with the narrow mesh-work wire cage: where am I? who am I?

In place of answer to their mute pleas there grew and widened emptiness so dense that you could feel it when pulpating thru the cranium and pelage. And only from somewhere absolutely faraway, it’s hard to say behind which bend or membrane in the dura mater, there came a ghostly, vague, and tiny echo echoing another echo. The indecipherable sounds added up into, like, “cockina malia” or something. What the hell?!

But then, if taken without quotes and capitalized, it looked like a family name and the first one put vice versa or< maybe, equally plausible, some African state from the same pod with Burkina Faso and other subjects of international law consisting of a couple of words. However, even the geographic aftertaste didn’t attach much reality to the perversely convoluted echoes.

But soon, maybe, too soon, there appeared an undeniably visual sign.

It surfaced out of nowhere and watched me with a pinch of doubt. Reproach and mistrust were also admixed to its attitude easily discernible against the background of the bendy-screwy confusion of wrinkled furrows and rutted traces of routine mental activities imprinted in the cerebral cortex. Then it stuck to the wall on the left, like a decorative magnet in the fridge door. At the mentioned angle it acquired a striking resemblance to 2 letters, both capital: “K” and “M”. At that point there remained no space for maneuvering, acting fool, playing for time, like, I know nothing, officer, seen none…

But not this time, smart Alec, no putting on – see? There is a sign for you big as a house, slip-splashed in rushy graffiti, white on gray, in a daredevil kid style who plunges headlong for taking the first spring swim across the ice-cold river.

Short rows of the shoulders-arms-head-elbows-palms knit by the united effort into a single body swimming thru the streaming icy ripples. Twist and turn, hither-thither – hooh… shi… hooh… it… hooh…

We two, the sign and I, watched one another with fixed stares. Face to face. In cheeky challenge. None of us needed any further tip there would be beating of crap out of the match. Tooth and nail. Till one of us would kick off. Or both…

For me to surrender or merely retreat was out of question. It’s my last chance to get the main answer. And the rest – ho-ho! – scared out of their wits, would confess to everything even before being asked. Otherwise…