The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 4

Still of the two of us, I’m better off because so more of you are there in my life than you will ever have of me in yours, much more… I easily can recollect your kick at my nose as you turned over within your mother’s belly. As well as that sterile white cocoon in my arms which I walked with all the way from the maternity hospital and you sleeping inside so calmly… Up to this day, the video record in my mind where you’re walk dancing in the string of your kindergarten partners round the Xmas tree warms my heart. The most beautiful kid is you, straight fair hair in a middle bob, a quilted vest of black silk, red pantyhose, and felt black high boots, so tiny…

I remember lonely Sundays—not a living sole but us—at the empty playgrounds of another kindergarten in the neighborhood, forlorn and quiet on days-off, which we frequented for you to take a ride on the swing pended on two iron rods. At swaying, the swing screeches pierced the still somnolence about the playgrounds strewn with the fallen leaves. Those shrieks, so like to sorrowful gull howls, gripped my heart. Because I was just a weekend Daddy… On weekdays I was far away, working like a dog, a mule, a slave at The Construction Train 615, aka SMP-615, at various building sites in the neighbor region to earn by zealous, selfless labor an apartment for our young family, and have a home, sweet home for us….

Then there arrived that weekend doomsnight and, in the narrow bedroom divvied up by your grandparents from their 3-room apartment to give a start to our young family, laying on the hand-me-down double bed next to my beloved wife, your mother, I was crushed into pulp by the road roller of her story… A couple of days before the weekend, a friend of hers took my wife for a ride in his Volga GAZ-24, drove miles away from the city to the Hare Pines Forest alongside the Moscow highway, which he left and parked among the trees… He leaned to her side to take from the glove compartment, just over her knees, a bottle of champagne… a mellow tune poured suavely from the radio in the dashboard whose soft demi-light assisted in stripping the foil off the cork… She sipped a bit and sadly said, “Please, take me home.” And he obediently started the motor…

The whispered briefing on the unswerving chastity of my wife dried up sunk into deafening silence tolls. Stretched on my back, spread-eagled under the suffocating mass of the walls toppling in a mute avalanche, I had only one thing to hold on—your innocent breathing somehow reaching me from your cot in the narrow corner. The air felt dense and oddly liquid, the inhales left some oily, stale aftertaste. Mighty severe grip squeezed my heart and, to withstand the pressure, it turned into a hard flintstone. The only good news that the mucky, pitch-black darkness empathically hid the odd icy teardrop which rolled out of the corner of my eye and crept so soundlessly slow down my temple to get lost midst the hair roots… the last tear in my life… Later on, that trail was deepened by wrinkles digging over the temple skin surface but never again no other tear left my eye in any direction. Except for the tears wrung out by high winds but those do not count.