The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 143
“You could ask the money from Aunt Lyouda.”
“So? I did ask and she said she wouldn’t like to see me too.”
“What? Come on into the khutta!”
And at home, she squabbled with her sister, and Aunt Lyouda retorted it was all bullshit and she’d only said she wouldn’t see me too if I hadn’t come. But I obstinately repeated my bullshit. Mother and Aunt Lyouda screamed at each other louder and louder. Grandma Katya tried to calm them down, “Stop it! What a shame, all the neighbors would hear, and the people in the street too.”
Natasha, Sasha, Irochka, and Valerik, their eyes rounded by fright, crowded in the doorway between the kitchen and the room where Father and Uncle Tolik were sitting with their silent sullen stares stuck to the TV box…
That’s how I committed the second meanness in my life – slandered innocent Aunt by my false accusations. And though her response to my questioning I got exactly the way as related to Mother, yet after the Aunt’s interpretation, I could agree that, yes, so was her answer, however, I never admitted my base calumny.
That lying without words filled me with compunction because the quarrel in the khutta was my fault. I felt guilty before both Aunt Lyouda and her kids, and before Mother, who I belied, and before everyone because I was such a sissy dishrag, “Woe is me! I’m left alone in the whole world!” My contrition was never voiced though because we were not bred up to make apologies. True, at times they could be heard in movies, but for real life, when inadvertently you had someone pushed, run into or stuff, “Excuse me for not trying harder!” was enough.
All that annoyance about nothing triggered off a slow, inconspicuous, process of my alienation and transformation into a “cut off slice” as Father used to say. I began to live a separate life of my own although, of course, I did not realize or felt anything of the kind and just lived that way…
~ ~ ~
Mother and Aunt Lyouda made up rather soon, after Aunt Lyouda showed Mother how to correctly sing the popular at that time “Cheremshina blossoms everywhere”, besides, she was bringing from her work the chow you couldn’t buy anywhere because at any store any goods beyond the pretty niggardly scope of staples were sold exclusively under the counter to the circle of trusted people: the kindred of salespersons and those who could potentially scratch your back in answer…
Aunt Lyouda’s tales about the midday-meal break at their deli were so funny!. After they latched the shop entrance for the midday break, the saleswomen gathered in their locker room and started their show of delicatessens brought that day from home in their half-liter glass jars. They were comparing, exchanging comments and judgments, evaluating the appeal, sharing their recipes.
The store manager ate separately in her office and when the telephone on her desk rang, she answered the call and hollered thru the open door who was wanted. The woman in question would hurriedly travel from the locker room to the manager’s office and back but—however short and hurried the phone talk—her jar content, by her return, was heavily reduced by cluster degustation. Everyone too eager to see the taste. One lick is better than a hundred looks, right?.