самИздат

(…coming back to The Godfather…

Unfortunately, there remained no writers in the American literature – Pearson, Salinger, Pynchon and you're plumb at the list bottom. All the rest are scribbling away with their both eyes on selling their production to Hollywood, compilers of cartoon stories and soap opera dialogues.

No! I'm far from blaming them! Not me, not in the least. Basically, we all are like each other and differ in only how deep we manage to keep hidden our hunger to sell us individually. And though being nothing of a Christian, I cannot but admire Mr. J. Christ’s instruction, “Let him who never sinned trigger off the slaughter of the slut,” by which he wholesomely absolved the motley team of the human race for infinite millenniums to come.

Is there any alternative? Absolutely, yes, and it’s all contained in the approbation by which the writer rewards his own efforts in the self-appraisal, “Damn nice artifact! At times, it did amuse me and helped to kill twelve years of my stretch!” which surely won't keep your pot boiling. That’s why I’d better head back from so high a curve and once again pick up the literature for a subject.

Look at the Briton Maugham, the very first paragraph in a story by him is a chord, a fugue tuning up. In his first paragraph, among the surface details, he scatters nodules, which will develop and reach their prime in the following narrative and flow into the denouement containing a flutter of echoes from the first paragraph. That's real craftsmanship. Exactly what the Hollywood jacklegs are lacking. My father would say, "Pfui!"

Puzo is the role model from the same and for the same Hollywood writers. He was the first to get a six-figure sum of dollars for his creation, the accountancy pathfinder, yet his The Godfather suffers from the infirmity common to all the action bestsellers: while the protagonists fight for their survival in the unfavorable environment of hostile mafia clans, you can still read it, but with the start of the prize elephant distribution, that is methodical extermination of bad guys whose only slip was leaving a chance for the equally bad guys to outsmart them because of the author's biased sympathies, the interest dwindles rapidly and evaporates.

The same snafu as in the 19th song of The Odyssey, when the hero returns home from his wanderings and whacks the suitors of his wife, one by one, with aesthetic relishing of the details in what manner the assholes' brains were smashed or guts were ripped out. I couldn't finish reading the song even in a good Ukrainian translation, not because of being too squeamish but simply getting bored…)

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I marked him a split-second sooner than he saw me. With our stares fused intently, we were nearing each other on the sidewalk by the Railroad Distance Trade-Union building. Both of us knew that only one would survive. Or no one.

With my lateral sight, I detected the rare figures of passers-by, freaked-out, careful to make room for the invisible line between him and me. Steadily, inexorably we kept making that line shorter. Step by step.

The dwindling distance rendered the forthcoming duel inescapably lethal. His hand darted to his right hip, but no sooner his palm touched the handle of his Smith & Wesson than my Colt erupted in a series of shots blended in a thundering staccato… If you are going to survive in Konotop, you have to be the first to draw.

His hands flapped up to clutch his bullet-riddled chest. In unsteady sway, he careened over the spiky line of the ruthlessly short-shorn bushes bordering the lawn upon which he would collapse the very next moment. I thrust my Colt back into the holster, he straightened up, and we embraced.

"Kuba!"

"Gray!"

The passers-by kept bypassing us along the sidewalk… Yes, that's him – Kuba. Grinning with the gold, that had replaced his teeth lost at the bar brawls in faraway ports of the oversea wanderings, but this was him – Kuba.

"How d’you?"

It's strange that everybody changes—they grow fat, they grow bald—but for your old friends. Fleeting eye contact works a miracle, you no longer see scars, or false teeth or any other distracting trifles. You see your friend Kuba with whom you have had bike rides to the Kandeebynno or the Seim, attended Children Sector, rode the "sausage" of a streetcar. It's just that now Kuba has what to tell about the life of seamen plowing the World Ocean…

We are sitting at Kuba's. His old folks are at work, but on the table, we have three eggs in the frying pan next to the three-liter glass-walled jar with transparent, lethally powerful, moonshine, in which the lemon peels float not yet below the half-jar. We drink, snack, and listen to the stories of Kuba the Seafarer.

…that time he was late after the vacation, or rather his boat had sailed away sooner than scheduled. So they assigned him to a self-propelled barge for about a month until some other suitable boat would turn up. The crew consisted of him alone, but he strictly kept the maritime regulations on the barge moored at the far wharf by the mouth of the river.

Standing on the bridge he shouted loudly, "Cast off!" And he ran from the bridge to the wharf and removed the lines from the bitts.

Then he jumped back to command "Slow Astern!" and execute it…

“Good fellow, Kuba! Let them know the ours! Down the hatch!”

…and in foreign ports, there are special houses for seamen recreation. Equipped like a luxury hotel, with a restaurant, rooms, a swimming pool. Now, whenever Soviet seamen dive into the pool, the water around their bodies gets spotted with crimson. Abroad, they’ve become way too advanced and add some chemicals to the water which turns crimson when in contact with urine.

Well, and you know how it goes by us, the first thing after you plunged is to take a leak in the water… So, they have to drain the pool and fill it up again, and the Germans have to sit for another hour over their beer on the tables and wait: "Rusishe Schweinen!"

“They themselves are pigs. Half-whacked fascists! Down the hatch-y!”

…in Hong Kong, it was, or maybe Thailand. The ours got moored, visited the city, and were coming back to the pier.

There was a team of dockers, so skinny them all because they live on just rice and seafood. Our boatswain was a hero, two meters tall, he grabbed one of the dockers by his overalls collar and lifted up in the air, like a kitten.

"Yea, bro. Slaving all your life, eh? Bad luck." He put him back and went on.

So that yellow did not understand the brotherly solidarity, and he did not appreciate the Slavonic generous breadth of soul. He runs ahead, jumps up—ya!—and kicks the boatswain into the nose.

Then the ours had a whole hour to water the giant on the pier to bring him back to life.

“And dat's rightee! Here's to Bruce Lee! Down the!”

…Nah! Kuba ain't gonna get married at all. They all are but fucking sluts… A boat in the roadstead ready for sailing off. The captain's wife comes up by a towboat to kiss him goodbye. Happy voyage, dear!. Coming back to the harbor, she's fucking the helmsman and two mechanics, in turn or not quite, in the wheelhouse.

“For freedom! For whores! D’n th’tch!”

…and it's real difficult to smuggle goods from abroad. Any boat zampolit has at least 2 rats among the crew.

"You mean, there are zampolits on boats?!"

"That's the rule."

"I'd better stay a land rat then!"

“T's rightee! For rats! D’nnnnn!”

But I still remembered clearly enough that I was going to the drugstore because my mother asked to fetch her some medication before I went to Nezhyn. Therefore, I most warmly said goodbye to Kuba the Sea Dog, although the lemon peels were not yet scraping the glass of the bottom in the three-liter jar, and in the frying pan there still were glittering, here and there, spots of sunflower oil not fully wiped up with bread.

"No! No! I know! All's gonna be nyshtyak."

After the Under-Overpass, I boarded a streetcar to City. I neatly got off it by the Department Store and went round its corner to the drugstore where, by my mother's lead, they sold the needed medicine. Entering the glazed door, I reached the glass partition and, to the question of the woman in white, inhaled a lungful of the air preparing to answer but suddenly realized that even if I could recollect the medication’s name then pronouncing it, or anything else for that matter, was simply unfeasible. Ruefully, I turned around, exhaled and staggered out.

Nonetheless, I somehow managed to cross Peace Square before getting aware that I was done in beyond all bounds and switched over to the guidance of my guardian angel. He steered me into the yard of a five-story apartment block, chose the proper staircase-entrance and took care that I did not spill down the dark stairs to an unfamiliar basement. Then he led me along an endless cemented corridor to the place, where the scattered light from the opening to the outside pit outlined a mesh bed frame, leaned against the wall. It remained only to lower it onto the floor, crash down upon it and conk off. The sheepskin coat and the hat substituted for a sleeping bag.

I woke up in a thoroughly stiff state, but still managed to be in time for the last local train to Nezhyn.

The next weekend, I again volunteered to go to the drugstore after the medicine if my mother reminded me of its name, but she said, no, it was not necessary any longer…

the most final
concluding work

:from the personal
site
of
a graphomaniac

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