LITMIR.BIZ

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the depths of the Ryazan land, there is the district center of Sapozhok and at nine or eleven kilometers from it (the distance depends on who you ask the question), lies the village of Kanino. My father liked to brag that in its fat days the village had about four hundred households.

      The shallow ravine with a sluggish soundless brook rolling along its bottom splits the village into two halves. Back in the blessed days of yore, the stream banks served the grounds for the long-standing folk amusement “Battling Walls”, aka collective fist-fight. The men from one half of the village devotedly punched the other-half dwellers, smashing their teeth out to mark some of church holidays or celebrate a mild-weathered Sunday. Yeah, once upon a time folks knew a thing or two about stimulating entertainment…

      And so it went on for centuries before sinking into oblivion. Only vague memories remained of Alesha the Saddler, the legendary fighter and obedient son. But his Dad was a truly uptight geezer! “Where to?” would yell he at the scion. “Too filthy rich you are, eh? Back to work and no nonsense!”

      And the mighty three-and-thirty-year-old son would stoop his hefty shoulders over the unfinished horse-collar poking it with his awl while all of him was out there, at the lists by the stream, from where little boys ran panting in with the updates, “Oy, Alesha! They are pressing indeed! Ours give in already!”

      Yet, the warning snort from his father would keep Alesha silent and concentrated on his toil until many “a-heck!” and “plunks!” of a dogged retreat in the street reached the hut. At that point, Dad would no longer keep his temper down. Springing up to his feet, he would run to Alesha and deal him a huge box on the ear and yell, “Fuck it! Ours bite the dust but this dickhead still sits home!”

      But Alesha didn’t hear the whole oration, he's out already, bypassing the battling “Walls” thru the village backyard kitchen gardens because the rules forbid attacking the opposite team from behind, a good game deserves fair play.

      “Alesha’s out!” And “the ours” get a second breath right away while the opposite “Wall” show streaks of wavering. Some weaklings start falling down in advance—the rules do not allow to beat a fighter lying on the ground. And Alesha, deeply concentrated, knocks the standing fighters out one after another; and, mark you, without a single f-f..er..foul word… Yep, the village was in the pink then…

      The Rural Collectivization in the USSR finished off that innocent merry-making and the well-orchestrated Great Hunger, called to solidify the revolutionary changes in the Russian rustic life, knocked Alesha off, and his father, sure enough, also starved to death…

      My father’s mother, Martha, remembered the life under the Czar because at the break of the Great October Revolution she was a girl of about thirteen. Ten years later she was already married to Mikhail Ogoltsoff to bring forth three children: Kolya, Sehrguey, and Alexandra (respectively).

      Mikhail lived thru the collectivization phase but the Great Hunger made him pass on and Martha remained a single mother. She cooked soup of saltbush and less edible herbs. Both she and her children were swelling up from starvation but survived.

      Then there arrived the era of hard labor at the collective farm, aka kolkhoz, with its miserly paid workdays. Life kept spinning around those “workdays” paid in kind with the same products the villagers produced slaving in the kolkhoz fields, and the collective recreation at the kolkhoz club where twice a month they brought Soviet movies "Lenin in October", "Pigwoman and Shepherd" and other suchlike stuff. To make movie-watching possible, the village lads had to hand-pedal the crank of electricity-producing dynamo machine brought for the show together with the projector and cans of film spools.

      In the summer of 1941, Comrade Joseph Stalin surprised everybody calling them in his address over the radio “dear brothers and sisters”. Then he announced the treacherous invasion of the fascist Germany into the Soviet Union, and the village mujiks were driven away to the war.

      Germans never reached Kanino though the thunder of the front-line cannonade was rolling in from the horizon. Then in the village came detachments of the Red Army reserve, the mujiks from Siberia with their amazing custom to sit after taking a steam bath in the frosty winter night outside and have a thoughtful smoke in just their pants and undershirts on.

      The Siberians left in the direction of the cannonade and soon afterward it ceased to be heard. In the village, pervaded by thick silence, there stayed only women, girls and boys too young to be drafted. And—yes!—the collective farm chairman, a one-armed cripple in the military outfit.

      And so it went on and on, not for days or weeks but for months, from year to year. Under the circumstances, there sprang up a veritable sexual quirk permeating the womenfolk. They would gather in one or another hut with a view to inspect one or another cunt from theirs, exchange comments and judgments, evaluate the appeal…

      Getting on the scent of this Sapphism Renaissance, the kolkhoz chairman had a crack at eradication of the collective lesbian kink before the rumors of it reached the authorities in the district center, and he called a general meeting of exclusively women and girls in the kolkhoz club.

      The male youths participated also, on the quiet. They penetrated stealthily the projectionist booth in the club and, with their jaws a-hanging, witnessed the chairman to cheer the congregation up with all the mighty curses. Repeatedly knocking his only fist against the rostrum top, he took his most solemn oath to cut out that rotten cunt-watching by use of an incandescent iron pry. (I mitigate, in part, the artless charm spread throughout the bucolic figures of speech in the chairman’s proclamation.)

      My father never knew if the cripple did keep his promise because he (my father) was drafted into the Red Army. Or rather, in his case, it was the Navy but Red all the same…

      ~ ~ ~

      The WWII was burning out but pigged up the cannon fodder as voraciously as always. Kolya, a youth from a Ryazan village, and lots of other youths from other places got outfitted in the striped Navy vests, black pants, black shirts under black pea-jackets and for a couple of months kept at a recruit depot to drill them military basics and know “Attention!” from “Dismissed!” They also were taught to tell between the bayonet and trigger before, finally, loaded, in their anti-khaki uniform on high-speed cutters for a landing operation somewhere up the Danube river in Austria.

      But, for all the speed of the landing operation cutters, they didn’t get there in time because the fascist Germany had just capitulated and there was no one to attack.

      (…long ago I secretly regretted at this point: eew! they left no time for my Dad to become a hero! Now, on the contrary, I'm glad that he never shot and killed anyone, not even accidentally…

      Still, he was considered a vet of the Great Patriotic War and on special anniversaries, like 20 or 25 and so on Jubilees of the Great Victory they always awarded him commemorative medals which he stored in the sideboard drawer but never wore like those vets dangling their collections on their civvy jackets to mark another Victory Day…)

      Then his detail were guarding for a couple of months the empty Serpent Island off the coast of Bulgaria, or maybe Romania, from where they transferred him to a minesweeper, a minuscule Naval trawler manned by a tiny crew.

      My Dad’s seafaring career began with the passage from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk over the ruff Black Sea; it was not a full-blown storm but the sea was pretty choppy… Riding a swing in the park is fun but if you go on enjoying it for a couple of hours the stomach will throw up anything stuck in it from the day before yesterday’s breakfast. That sea crossing continued much longer…

      When Red Navy man Ogoltsoff came ashore at the port of destination, even the land itself kept swaying under his feet. He tried to puke between the tall timber-stacks lined along the pier, but to no avail. The young sailor sat on the ground just where he stood and, watching the towering rows of timber that kept swaying up and down, decided that he'd inescapably die in that naval service…

      (…you may easily figure it out that was a wrong assumption as long as he had not yet met your grandmother, nor persuaded her to go with him to ZAGS. And your grandmother hadn’t yet born three children without becoming a single mother, which constitutes an unprecedented instance in this story

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