the wedding veil.
A month later our marriage was registered in Loony. The Hall of Celebrations was on the same floor with the ballroom only in the opposite wing. For the ceremony, we arrived in a hired taxi. At the entrance to the Hall of Celebrations, we were met with loud electric music by the guys "playing trash". I knew the guitarist with a long deep scar in his cheek playing a red Iolanta. He watched me with rounded, not understanding, eyes and shrugged… Ah! To hell! Makes no difference… I never was good at football anyway…
A woman in a dark dress, with glasses and permanent curls in her bob-cut hair, read to Olga and me the rights and responsibilities of a young family, which was a cell in our Soviet society. We signed the form, Lekha and Sveta seconded.
"That is all,Say "bye!" to dreams…"
The trash playing band broke out with Mendelssohn's march, and a photographer from the photo studio across the road shot us with his camera on the tripod. In the picture ready a week later, there was a hairy yobbo with a not too happy smile and the guiltily scrunched collar of the jacket from the last year's graduation suit. But Olga turned out nicely, only somewhat sad in her face. Probably, she did not want to get tied up at her sweet sixteen…
The music at the wedding party was played by The Orpheuses, for free, sure thing, it was not a playing trash occasion. A couple of boards sealed Zhoolka up in his kennel so that in the circle of ground cleared of grass with the chain he dragged after him throughout his dog's life, they'd put the instruments and the equipment.
Between the stack of brittle bricks and the sectioned shed, there was set up a long table, parallel to both, in the shade of the two age-old American Maples.
Olga and I sat with our backs to the fence of the Turkovs' yard. Two kitchen chairs under us were coupled into one seat by spreading over them the Father's turned inside-out sheepskin coat with long wisps of fleece, not overly golden but black and maroon anyway.
Around the table there sat the Arkhipenkos, Uncle Vadya with his wife whose Adoptee he was, Olga's mother, Maria, who arrived from the Crimea with her eldest daughter, Vita, Aunt Nina and Uncle Kolya, some nondescript relatives of Solodovnikovs, the immediate and more distant neighbors from Nezhyn Street, the Kreepaks, the Plaksins, the Kozhevnikovs, Vladya's mother Galina Petrovna, and all sorts of close friends either to the newly-weds or to the musicians, as well as flying parties of the Settlement bros, always ready to drink for free…
The wedding party rambled on till late at night, under the light of a couple of bulbs fixed up in the Maples.
They chanted "Bitter! Bitter!" for me and Olga to stand up and kiss each other while they would count loudly how long we kept the kiss.
Father, together with Olga's mother, was put into a handcart and shoot in it along the street (Maria was not quite happy with that ancient beautiful folk custom).
Quak bared himself to the waist and danced holding aloft the large ax which he grabbed from the lean-to, but Uncle Kolya started to clap in time as if he also was a rocker and, seizing a moment, took the ax from the merry Viking. The Settlement bros dragged Quak to his khutta because he was all mops and brooms already, while Skully kept copulating with Glushcha's sister in the most primeval posture, under the gloomy Elm in the back garden.
In short, quite a normal wedding it was, in style to the classic canons and traditions of the Settlement…
Already after the midnight, Olga and I retired to our lean-to conjugal bedchamber… To commence the nuptials, I first had to tidy the place scraping Quak's vomit by the door with a shovel and sweeping out the cigarette butts left by Olga's girlfriends smocking in privacy. If I imagined beforehand that friendly openness might run into so a callous inconsideration I’d better hang a padlock on the door.
Even the tape in the tape-recorder was obviously played, wound and rewound from the particular place with the erotic French song, which I was fixin' to switch on as the background for Consummation of Marriage. Hopeless to find it in a snap, and in a way of ad-hoc solution to regain so meticulously arranged but sabotaged first-wedding-night musical back-drop, I just switched the tape on from the very beginning—the song eventually would get played anyway—but as we finished the mentioned consummation it turned out that the brown mass of the tight wound tape had collected on the right reel and ticked its empty flips by, next to the stilled reel on the left… I somehow missed enjoying those erotic grunts by Brigitte Bardot.
Then over the tin roof of the lean-to, a heavy shower clattered pouring down on it and onto the long leaves of corn crowding in its plot up to the glazed frame wide open into the night garden outside, and we just lay clasped in a tight embrace and it was good…
Our honeymoon coincided with my vacation from Plant. The first squabble happened on the third day of our married life. I was sitting in the yard deciphering sheet-music of some Spanish guitar piece. Olga walked past from the khutta to the lean-to and called me along.
I still picked strings for a minute or two, no more, before coming. She was on the bed shedding tears because I did not need her nor paid any attention: was that the right way to treat wives?
So I had to iron out my wrong-doing in the most effective, as far as I know, way, though I still couldn’t get it what was my guilt.
(…and only by now I have figured it out that so works the female instinct for self-preservation, "If you have already got me, then who do you keep practicing that fucking guitar for?"
However, quite possibly, that