самИздат

Right after the examination, I hurried to Konotop and my mother told me that Olga came home in the morning. Unaware of her mother-in-law’s presence in the bedroom, she, first of all, rushed into the living-room towards the mirror in the wardrobe door. Standing in front of it, she unbuttoned her shirt to examine the hickeys on her chest.

…the owner’s brand… everyone bears theirs, of this or that kind… for someone, it's the hieroglyphs nail-scarred on their wrist, another one gets adorned with a necklace of monkey bites on their breasts…

"I yelled at her and told to go back from where she came. She gathered her clothes and left. What now?"

I shrugged, "What can there be?"

"No way for her to get Lenochka," my mother said resolutely.

All that was so weighing down…

Olga came the next morning wearing a turtleneck. She said she was staying at aunt Nina’s because my mother kicked her out. Then she poured forth a pack of lies about going to the Seim with Sveta and spending time in the hut of uncle Kolya's friends. I advised her to spare her breath because we were to divorce anyway.

"And Lenochka?"

"She'll stay here."

Olga went over to threats about her taking her daughter to her mother in Theodosia. Then she said it was I who made her do it because of all my whores in Nezhyn of whom they were telling her everything but she just kept silent. And, yes, she went to the Seim, out of spite, but there was nothing there, and we could still put everything aright.

(…in life, there is always a choice. You may dig a hole or you may not dig it…

By filing for divorce, you affirm that you're a cuckold who takes retaliatory measures within the framework of the current moral code. Neglecting the move, you still remain a cuckold but only if you look at yourself thru the eyes of society or—but not everyone is up to that "or"—you become a hooey-pricker who does not care a fuck and lives for his/her own pleasure. The teeny nuance is that the true hooey-pricker does not see any insoluble dilemma about all that stuff – they just live for their pleasure all the time.

I always had it good with Olga but a whole lot of centuries-old morals and codes of "honor" bulldozed me and I was faced with the choice: to become a cuckold or go over to the other league? Making a choice is always a tragedy – choosing one thing you lose the alternative…)

I never liked to choose, I preferred leaving tragedies to others – to fate or, maybe, chance and, at that point, Olga served a tossup coin for the purpose. I told her that all would be scratched out and forgotten if she fetched weed for just one joint by the end of the day. She left and returned already in the evening, fairly weary. She said she had walked the whole city but no one had no weed.

That was the cruel finger of fate, some chance empty suction. Alea jacta est!.

(…were Olga lucky in providing the joint, then I, as a noble man of quality, would only have to keep my word. We would have started living on and now someone else would be composing this letter to you.

And maybe no letter would be needed, with you having Dad and Mom, and stuff. After all, replacing just one, even the tiniest, detail harbors a host of other outcomes…

If, say, you flick by time machine to Mesozoic and there you accidentally slap-kill one single mosquito then, returning back, you find yourself in an irreversibly changed future – yes, the same year when you had left, but you yourself do not conform to the contemporary standards. And there’s no one to blame, you should have watched out better in what you were stepping in that Mesozoic past…

Just a single joint would give me back the family idyll with an ideal woman. She was not trading herself for money or some other assets, she cheated on me just for her personal pleasure. The eternal pattern of the most natural exchange of joys – you to me, and I to you.

The fact that she was exchanging with someone else did not tell on my having it good with her. Why did I so stupidly gave up what I wanted and was getting in full? The moral foundations of the society left me no other choice but to join the crowd of dumb-ass "seminarians"…)

She gave me a great blow job for a goodbye and asked to come the next day to Aunt Nina's for something important. And it was how, because of cruel chance, I became a cuckold…

(…for a long time I couldn't understand my dislike of Lermontov, but now I know – that's because of his lies. Lermontov lied from the very start, from his poem to Pushkin's death:

"…with the lead of a bullet in his chest, he drooped his head…”

Well, let's say this lie was caused by the ignorance of anatomy. A hussar is not a doctor, after all, and for him the loins, where, actually, the bullet hit, and the chest might be the same. Half-meter higher, half-meter lower, who cares?!.

But there is no way to excuse the following lie:

"…he rebelled against the society's morals…"

Pah! Stop kidding, Lermontov-boy. He did not rebel but, on the contrary, he most exactly followed the precepts of the society for such a case. With the utmost rigor and slavish loyalty, Pushkin kept to the rules. And if he himself did not dare disobey the moral code of the society then what can we, mere mortals, do in case of violation of marital fidelity but to file for divorce?.

However, one always looks for some or other way to justify their beloved... What if Pushkin was not at all obeying the dictates of moral customs? What if he intentionally used them for his personal gains? What if the aging, weary, poet worn out by the excesses of poetical lifestyle, threw down the gantlet to the greenhorn French youth on a visit to Russia for a too close attention to his wife, just to simulate a Shakespearean Othello with the hidden agenda of getting killed at the pledged duel and passing away in style?

But the development of this hypothesis requires three doctoral degrees: that in gerontology as well as in psychology, and one more in philology. While having a much more urgent matter on my hands—the letter to my daughter—I’d rather flashback, from the Varanda river to Konotop…)

The next day at the aunt Nina's khutta, she and her aunt performed in duo what I had already heard from Olga solo, about a fresh start from a clean leaf. Then the aunt went to her work. Olga and I drank a glass of hooch each and for about an hour were killing each other all over the kitchen and the adjacent living room adorned by the upright piano.

After we dressed, Olga asked – what now? I replied that the question had been answered and, alas, not by me. She started to cry and said that she knew what to do next, some pills appeared in her palm which she began to swallow. I managed to wring the most of them, yet she still managed to consume some.

I rushed out of the khutta, ran along Budyonny Street and past the Plant Park to Bazaar where a payphone hung at the intersection. Luckily, the receiver was nor cut off yet, and it worked. I called the ambulance.

Probably, it's not every day they were called for a suicide attempt but their vehicle overtook me on my way back. When I came to aunt Nina's, Olga sat limply on a stool in the middle of the kitchen giving reluctant answers to the doctor and nurse in white coats. She had a large mug in her hands and on the floor by her feet there stood a big basin used at the stomach lavage.

The crisis was obviously over and I left without going into details. It was unlikely that she would take another try, and from my own experience, I knew that gastric lavage brings about a general reassessment of values and a fresher perspective on any situation…

Two days later, I was told that they had seen Olga boarding a train of Moscow direction with some kind of a black-haired guy. Most likely, that was the one she'd been cheating on with my active participation two days before…

the most final
concluding work

:from the personal
site
of
a graphomaniac

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