The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life). Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Komarov could refuse to go to his obvious death, but then the doomed spaceship would be manned by his backup and personal friend, Yuri Gagarin. On the doomsday morning, Gagarin appeared at the launch pad wearing an astronaut spacesuit and demanded that he be sent instead of Komarov, but he was not listened to…

      After the burial of Komarov’s ashes in the Kremlin wall, next to the ashes of Marshal Malinovsky, Gagarin’s behavior became extremely defiant and uncontrolled. By unconfirmed rumors, at one of the government banquets, Yuri Gagarin splattered his glass of vodka into Brezhnev’s face.

      Americans rule out the plausibility of such an incident not because of the lack of perspicacity inherent in the mixed up nation taking root in simpletons unable to survive among the population of their origin but because of the different grammar. Since in the Russian language “mother” and “death” are of the same grammatical gender, for a Russian mujik, consciously or unconsciously, there feels some similarity in the 2. Well, how to plausibly bring over the meaning of “Death-Mommy” to Americans if all they've got is just “Mr. Death”? Not anything fits into one's mind until they got it under their skin… As a tangent effect, they shove an anti-tank mine under their belt and with the cry, “Try to bear me back, Mom!” throw themselves under the trucks of advancing tank… Then go and rack your brains over the mystery of the Russian soul. To crack the riddle check the language rules…

      Unruly Gagarin was not expelled from the Cosmonauts’ Group – he already belonged to the entire Planet. He continued to attend the classes, flew jets in training flights. Did he realize that the countdown for his extermination had been already set a-ticking? I think, yes, he did. Cosmonauts were selected not only for physical but mental fitness as well. He did not only know when and where…

      On March 27, 1968, Yuri Gagarin was killed in a plane crash near the village of Novosyolovo, Kirzhach District, Vladimir Region.

      On that the foggy morning, the MIG jet was coming in from the training flight, before the airfield there remained a couple of minutes of flight at the altitude of 500 meters, when from the low clouds the SU jet dropped down, though by the flights plan for that morning she was supposed taking flight at the altitude of 14 kilometers in a completely different compass.

      Operated by the experienced test pilot, the huge, in comparison to the training aircraft, SU jet flashed by, too close to the MIG preparing for landing. The MIG, captured by turbulence, twirled like a sliver in the breaker, entered a tailspin and collapsed into the forest. The sound of the explosion reached the airfield.

      Let them endowed with ears hear. Fadeyev – Khrushchev, Gagarin – Brezhnev.

      Let them capable of reckoning get it…

      But again I forked off and the story of my life got entered by strangers I never have met and only recently started to see that they are also a part of me.

      So much for bemoaning the belated wisdom, let's get back to the twentieth century, year sixty-eight, when I am in my fourteenth year and…)

      …and how not to resent them those Czechs who succumbed to the CIA subversive propaganda and started a counterrevolution in the fraternal camp of the socialist countries! And they so inhumanely lined baby carriages to block the way before our tank bucketing along. Of course, the driver turned abruptly, in case there were babies inside, the tank fell off the bridge and our soldier died. So the Central TV news program “Time”.

      Then, of course, the Czech Communist Party restored the order in their country with the assistance of military contingents from the fraternal states, and we again began to live on, the camp of socialism properly united…

      By the by, the Konotop of that period outstripped many of the larger cities in the field of television because by us the TV boxes had two working channels. The first was the Central Television broadcasting the news program “Time”, and the main New Year entertainment program “The Little Blue Light”, and the contest of teams at the Club of Jolly and Resourceful, aka CJR, and the live hockey matches. The other channel was the Konotop TV studio which broadcast only in the evening when people were back home from work, yet it demonstrated movies much oftener than on Central Television.

      The TV-sets in those years were all black-and-white and color ones you could only see in color films from the Western Europe, for that reason Father installed a sheet of transparent isinglass over the TV screen. The sheets of that kind had certain color tints in some of its areas – the upper part blue for the sky, the lower one green for the grass. They even said that thru that isinglass the announcers’ faces looked of more natural color than without it. I could not discern any of the mentioned subtleties though never considered myself colorblind. Such mica sheets became a fashion throughout Konotop, and Uncle Tolik brought one for our TV from the Repair Base, aka the RepBase, where he worked on a milling machine tool. The RepBase specialized in renovating choppers so there they certainly had a better notion in the advanced matters like isinglass and stuff…

      For switching TV channels you turned clockwise or counter it the biggest knob under the screen, it clicked and moved to the next of the fourteen positions. However, in the afternoon both the Central Television and Konotop TV Studio showed the same mute tuning circle, while to switching the knob outside those two channels the tube responded by an unbearable sizzling noise and jumping streaks of white against coarse-grained “snow” background.

      And (returning to the available two channels) every day at 3 pm., the technicians at Konotop TV Studio switched on some music for about 30 minutes or so: “The Nocturne” by Tariverdiyev, the hits of Valery Obodzinsky or Larissa Mondrus served a soundtrack for the irreplaceable fine-tuning circle. We—Sasha, Natasha, and I—always switched the TV on at that time to have some music in the khutta though the tape-recorded numbers changed rarely if ever at all, and we knew beforehand which record would follow this or that particular song…

      Besides, Konotop then was flooded with a wealth of indie radio stations that went on air in the MW range. There was both “The King of the Cemetery” and “Caravel”, and whichever name an independent guy would choose to call his underground station. They all had a common weak point though, which was their irregularity. You had no idea when to switch the receiver on so that to hear, “Hello to all, the radio station "Jolly Stickman” is now on air. Who hears me, confirm…” And he would put on the hoarsely roaring Vysotsky’s songs about the Archer who disgraced the Czar, or how we shoot thru the time in a spaceship, or about a dolphin’s belly ripped open by the boat propeller…

      At some point, the radio station “Charming Nina” would cut into the broadcast and begin to point out to "Jolly Stickman” that he had sat on another guy’s wavelength, and that “Charming Nina” had been airing in that particular length for no less than a week. Little by little, they developed a quarrel: “Hey, you! Don’t swell too much! Look out, if I catch you in City you’ll have two blobs in place of your ears!”

      “Easy, mini-Willie! Who do you roll a barrel against? Haven’t leaked into your pants wet for a whole week?”

      “The more you rant the more you’ll weep!”

      “Close it up!”

      Yet, they never switched over to four-letter words.

      Father claimed that even our radio set could be readily converted into such a station, smooth and easy, if only there was a microphone. However, my and Skully’s wheedling of him the mentioned conversion, and we’d sure get a mike somewhere, met his downright refusal because it was radio hooliganism, and special vehicles were stalking the city to track those hooligans down, and fine them, and confiscate all the radio equipment from their khuttas, down to the TV box. We didn’t want to stay without our TV, didn’t we?

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