The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Шрифт:
Still of the two of us, I’m better off because so more of you are there in my life than you will ever have of me in yours, much more… I easily can recollect your kick at my nose as you turned over within your mother’s belly. As well as that sterile white cocoon in my arms which I walked with all the way from the maternity hospital and you sleeping inside so calmly… Up to this day, the video record in my mind where you’re walk dancing in the string of your kindergarten partners round the Xmas tree warms my heart. The most beautiful kid is you, straight fair hair in a middle bob, a quilted vest of black silk, red pantyhose, and felt black high boots, so tiny…
I remember lonely Sundays—not a living sole but us—at the empty playgrounds of another kindergarten in the neighborhood, forlorn and quiet on days-off, which we frequented for you to take a ride on the swing pended on two iron rods. At swaying, the swing screeches pierced the still somnolence about the playgrounds strewn with the fallen leaves. Those shrieks, so like to sorrowful gull howls, gripped my heart. Because I was just a weekend Daddy… On weekdays I was far away, working like a dog, a mule, a slave at The Construction Train 615, aka SMP-615, at various building sites in the neighbor region to earn by zealous, selfless labor an apartment for our young family, and have a home, sweet home for us….
Then there arrived that weekend doomsnight and, in the narrow bedroom divvied up by your grandparents from their 3-room apartment to give a start to our young family, laying on the hand-me-down double bed next to my beloved wife, your mother, I was crushed into pulp by the road roller of her story… A couple of days before the weekend, a friend of hers took my wife for a ride in his Volga GAZ-24, drove miles away from the city to the Hare Pines Forest alongside the Moscow highway, which he left and parked among the trees… He leaned to her side to take from the glove compartment, just over her knees, a bottle of champagne… a mellow tune poured suavely from the radio in the dashboard whose soft demi-light assisted in stripping the foil off the cork… She sipped a bit and sadly said, “Please, take me home.” And he obediently started the motor....
The whispered briefing on the unswerving chastity of my wife dried up sunk into deafening silence tolls. Stretched on my back, spread-eagled under the suffocating mass of the walls toppling in a mute avalanche, I had only one thing to hold on—your innocent breathing somehow reaching me from your cot in the narrow corner. The air felt dense and oddly liquid, the inhales left some oily, stale aftertaste. Mighty severe grip squeezed my heart and, to withstand the pressure, it turned into a hard flintstone. The only good news that the mucky, pitch-black darkness empathically hid the odd icy teardrop which rolled out of the corner of my eye and crept so soundlessly slow down my temple to get lost midst the hair roots… the last tear in my life… Later on, that trail was deepened by wrinkles digging over the temple skin surface but never again no other tear left my eye in any direction. Except for the tears wrung out by high winds but those do not count.
(…back to the usual dull drool, sissy wimp?. of topple-tumbling lumps of hopes to squash the poor weakling against the anvil of his own heart which happened petrified, safe and proper, and in good time too?.
…be a man, buddy, and seek solace in simple truths, whose simplicity makes them so peerlessly unrivaled in their inevitable surety… and the truth is that no busting your balls at construction sites, no sunburns or frostbites will remove or postpone the pending next time, where she won’t say, “Let’s don’t,” and start instead to catch the trick of having it in the environs of the GAZ-24 interior…
…or else this one for your consideration, undisputed because of its simplicity: the most vivid recollections of the delights past can’t fetch the joy back, yet just a speck of mopish memory flits by and – bang! the pain, suppressed, ditched, gone ages ago, pops up afresh to bite you meanly… it makes you wince even here, by the unknown river running through the middle of nowhere, thousands of kilometers away from the crumpled bedroom, after millions of instances of passing the ubiquitous relay baton of “I” from one I on to the next one…
…I tell you what, my dear I… heal yourself with the same dog’s hair… got bitten by a simple truth, eh?. peen it with as simple a tool!. bust the bugger with the wedging edge of a wider grammatical approach, proceed from “I” to “we”… who are we after all?. some shaved and powdered or greasy, bristly, shaggy (whichever is dictated by current fashion trend) cartload of shifty primates… each jumping member must abide by the group’s rules and no trick will ever get you off the hook… ignorance of a law serves no excuse, nor gives a chance to dodge its application to you, right?. now then, comfort yourself with this simple truth, wipe up your mawkish slobber and wait if it’ll dissolve that nasty clutch on your balls core, maybe…
…oh, shut up, man!. such stuff is not for female tender ears… hmm… seems, like, I’d better give it a start over…)
~ ~ ~
Hello, sweetheart
Though our brief live meeting did not bring you to calling me “Dad”, I can’t help being sentimental addressing you…
The day before yesterday in the late afternoon, executing the plan shared in my latest email, I climbed the heights in the neighborhood of the ghost village of Skhtorashen to pay a call on the local immortal—two-thousand-year-old Plane tree, the oldest denizen of the Mountainous Karabakh.
The walk along the scorched ruts in a desolate dirt road winding up the slope would be a pleasure but for the oppressive August heat and my eyes kept unwarranted scanning the steep ahead to pick out the signs of the water-spring asserted by all who had ever visited the place.
Most springs in the Mountainous Karabakh are supplemented with the water-managing structure traditionally made up of a retaining stone wall carved into the slope to protect a 5-6 meter long trough of roughly hewed stone slabs, the other wall (short, just to befit the trough’s width) meets the longer one at the right (and only) corner and is rigged with a stub of iron pipe stuck out from its middle above the trough butt. The softly lapping stream of cool clear water runs from the pipe to fill the stone bowl embedded in the wall for thirsty cupless people, and falls from it into the knee-deep trough for cattle and other animals to drink. Brimming up the trough, the water flows over its left end and moseys meandering down the slope.
However, the water-spring by the giant tree was uncustomary flipped, with the water running in reverse—from left to right. And one more surprise by the backward spring, inability to quench my thirst which, all along the climb started at the roadside diner by the turn to the town of Karmir-Bazaar, prodded me on with the alluring visions of gently bubbling current, but no… Because I ran into a mahtagh.
(… The two most frequently used and thrilling with their depth and beauty bywords in Armenian are: