It’s only that year when I climbed the second highest (and clean completely) peak in the region, the Keers, I had an imitation of a Swiss army knife, a present from Nick Wagner. It had a whole bunch of things in its handle: a fork, a corkscrew, and even a nail file. I can’t remember where I misplaced it afterward.
But, however long were I patting myself on the back, the region’s peak number one remains beyond the peacock tail of my vagrant achievements. The front line of the unfinished war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis runs across that mountain. So, if not one side, then the other wouldn’t let me pass up or they’d just bang from both sides synchronously.
The point is that manual breaking of dry branches is not a big deal, and before long I readied up two sizable heaps of fuel for the fire. With the first one burned up, the unpeeled (so is the recipe) potatoes are buried in the hot ashes and the finalizing heap goes in the fire restarted upon them. But not right now, first, I have to put the tent up; the sun already gone behind this wheeling football field of a toomb, the dusk begins to slowly creep in from over the river…
(…in every human there sits a pyromaniac…
“and then the pyromaniacs partook of pies with Pirosmani”
Looks like a half-baked jaw-breaker, eh?…then, gradually, a creepy disjunctive question crawls in: was Pirosmani among the banqueters or, after all, inside the pies, turned into toothsome filling?.)
Luckily, I was not able to break this long thick bough when crushing the firewood and now, so as not to set the field and all ablaze, I systematically use it to kill the fugitive spillovers of lively flames. When the bonfire gets bounded by the black ring of burnt grass, the club-armed sentry becomes an idle onlooker considering the merry dance of fire atop the piled wood pieces while the club transforms into a staff to lean my locomotion apparatus onto…
And what do you see in the rollicking tongues of flame or in the sedate embers scintillation?
(…we were a seed, then a germ, then buds, then branches…)
Now, turning the staff into a poker, I rake their smoldering reminiscences, push them aside to open a hole for a dozen potatoes—dinner and breakfast, 2 in 1… The fire eats wood, I eat potatoes, mosquitoes eat me…
(…who do not eat, they do not live. Even considerate and prissy crystals devour space when growing.
But no one can ever eat up time because it does not exist at all. Time is nothing but a red-herring for distraction of innocent suckers. What they call “time” is just a series of different states of space. Some place sunlit from the left is morning, the same place sunlit from the right is evening. As simple as that. Day as a unit of time? Bullshit! Day is just the difference between two states of space. An apple adds to an apple to make a pair of them and not a unit of time, damn!.
Oh, sorry!. There, there! Don’t be afraid, sweetheart, gray wolves gone to their forest, no loose ends, all’s under a strict control…
Well, yes, it’s no use denying that space and time, when brought up, make me a bit spacey, quite a very tiny little bit, not noticeable, almost, especially if you don’t watch too closely. Yet, a brush in passing with that sweet couple and—ta-dah!—a short circuit sizzle and I’m emitting some folly accomplished. Kinda reincarnation of that crackpot God's fool, Vasily the Blessed, only cocked up by more earthly matters.
Still and all, I am not a violent case. Not in the least! I swear! And both Devil and God, (alphabetically) might absolutely safely attest that in the course of seizure no one gets harmed in any way because the hooey I pour forth is quite enough to tangle myself completely and—voilà!—here am I, the same submissive genteel yahoo, ready to carry on whatever they see fit to load onto the beast of burden…)
~~~~~
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The Genesis
More likely than not, your ken of your own lineage on the paternal side feels kinda rickety, right? In the same breath, I feel comfortably confident in your Mom’s family tree being properly watered and presented to you in detailed feeds by your grandmother. About 2-3 generations, if not deeper.
The reasonable belief that my pedigree was a taboo subject when you were around took a firm root after a surprise letter from your mother breaking the sudden news of my death. Not too sharp though, the impact was softened by a kind roundabout introduction: you were told that your Dad was dead and I should prevent exposure of the child’s fragile psyche to any chance running into the revenant ghost of her drifter parent…
As a spook of quality, I politely kept to my grave ever since. Yet, when in a pub a fella next to me got in the mood for bending my ear with a plaintive tale of his being nobody these days while in his prime he walked the bridge of a nuke submarine as her Chief Mate, I felt a solid right and no scruples to cut his lamentation and drive it back that I used to be a famous pilot tragically killed at the shakedown flights of a jet fighter starting the newest, highly secret, brand… For which unparalleled achievement I was honored, by the way, with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Gold Star medal. Posthumously, of course, and that’s a sad pity the decoration didn’t find the hero because those lazy sons of bitches never search in earnest…
The bullshit, to be honest, was not an instance of my snappy creativity but a commonplace mass-product because in that romantic epoch, when a single-mothered kid exacted the reasons for the incomplete composition of their family, Mom dished out the traditional stopgap, “Your father was a pilot and he crashed.”
The brute facts of life were saved for her bosom lady-friends, “He was a junior bookkeeper, guys, and spread me on his office desk, O, my! Never will I forget that fucking abacus trundling back and forth under my ass…”
Nonetheless, don’t expect of me a fine-grained presentation of your roots because my knowledge of the matter is way too shallow and fuzzy because the interest in eugenics was truly frowned at then in no less degree than now…
The name of your father’s mother’s mother was Katerinna Poyonk and she was brought from Poland by your great-grandfather, Joseph Vakimov, a commissar in the 1-st Cavalry Army of Semyon Budyonny, as a trophy, or maybe a keepsake of that period in the Civil War when the Budyonny’s cavalry all but turned Warsaw their spoils.
Their relationship was legalized by the then Civil Registry Office, aka ZAGS, and eight years later my mother, Galina, was born to be followed by her brother, Vadim, and their sister, Lyoudmilla. In recollections of those three, Joseph was very clever. He knew Jewish as well as German languages and was embracing the position of a Regional Trade Auditor in Ukraine. During that period Katerinna had a separate pair of shoes for each of her frocks.
Seven more years passed and, in the late thirties, Joseph got arrested. However, they did not put him before a firing squad to purge away like millions of other “enemies to the Soviet people”, supposedly, some clever way was found to buy his life back. He was only deported to a very northern, but still European part of Russia. The family joined him in exile and in the early forties, they all returned to Ukraine to settle in the city of Konotop which soon afterward was captured by the German Wehrmacht.
After two years of the Nazi occupation, when German troops retreated driven westward by the Red Army blows, my grandfather disappeared from home one day before the liberation, together with his bicycle—rather a valuable item in those times.
The next morning, heavy bombardment made Katerinna and her three children flee as far as the suburban village of Podlipnoye, where a shell fragment cut an apple tree branch right above my mother’s head (a telling detail, if not for the odd inches I wouldn’t now be composing this letter to you). By noon, the advancing troops of the Red Army liberated both the village and the city. Katerinna came back to Konotop where she brought up, as a single mother, her children – Galina, Vadim, and Lyoudmilla…
