moment in the nuptials – the happy couple were suggested to exchange the wedding rings in a token of spousal love and loyalty. Softly glided the ring on the Eera's incomparable finger – the yellow of the gold over the alabaster white skin… And now, already not as a bride, but the accomplished wife, picked she my wedding ring from the white saucer to don it on my finger. On slid the ring, in moved my finger…my finger moved in…my f-f…finger moved…
Why that bitch of the ring from Natasha got stuck on my finger joint, I have no idea because at the preliminary tests it, like, was getting over. Under my breath, I promised my young wife that, okay, I'll stick it in later, and balled my hand into a fist to hide the under-donned ring.
"The wedding ring is not a frill… Oh, no!.Not an empty decoration…"
Poor Eera!.
But what else could she do? The incipient maternal instinct balked at having to bear you without a daddy… The recollections of my meetings with the KGBist in that very ZAGS room as well as the awareness of the iron print on my pants’ leg made me keep my eyes shyly down, however, my brother Sasha on the pictures taken at the registry office looked very well, like a young Sicilian mafioso…
According to the long-established Nezhyn tradition, the newlyweds together with their witnesses (Slavic had already replaced Sasha) took a ride in a taxi. The taxi drove to the station to honk in the square in front of it (the traffic bridge over the railway tracks had been already completed) and proceeded to the city limit by the highway to Pryluky, where a bottle of champagne was burst open, after which we returned to 26, Red Partisans Street, Apartment 11.
The wedding party was a modest one – for the closest family inhabiting the apartment, plus the two best persons. The TV was temporarily exiled into the corner, the table spread out and cluttered with feasting treats and snacks, mostly of salad Olivier which Gaina Mikhailovna had chopped so finely and profusely, filling, in the preparation, half of an enamel washing basin.
And the drinks were fabulous too. Like those from the traditional refrain in the final lines of every other Russian fairy tale, "And I was at that wedding and drank the mead and beer…" subtracting "the mead", of course. Gaina Mikhailovna, like any other properly erudite woman, had since long gained the upper hand over her husband, bent him to her will and twisted around her little finger, using for the purpose the panicky males’ fear of a possible cuckoldry.
(…fall in with what your dear wife tells you, and be happy with two glasses of beer on a celebration day if you wanna miss yet that proud decoration of stags…)
Hence that beer and only beer on the wedding table… Tonya and Ivan took turns looking after their baby daughter in the bedroom, while their three-year-old son Igor was irremovably present at the table.
Then the baby was also brought to the living room, and the newlyweds together with their best persons replaced her in the vacated bedroom which, narrow as it was, still let the 4 of them dance under a cassette tape-recorder borrowed from the hostel…
When Eera and I retired to our bedroom for the nuptial first night, I turned on the transistor radio on the table under the pier mirror. The nocturnal sconce on the whitewashed wall at the foot of the bed created a flickering red twilight, like a feeble torch in the wall of medieval castle… The blanket was too thick and hot, and we threw it back, twining in the already legalized conjugal embraces. We were going on real groovy when the door to the bedroom flung open and my father-in-law stepped in to turn the radio off.
Surprised, I did not hide my nakedness, and only ceased the action. Eera also froze sitting… In the mute twinkling of the torch from the niche formed by the chiffonier in the corner, Ivan Alexeyevich, with his eyes cast down, left the bedroom. The prince of the three-room castle. How could I know it was too loud? He could just call out from their folding coach-bed. Okay, babe, let's have another take…
3 following days all the meals were of salad Olivier, but half of it went stale all the same. And who would doubt? No way to finish off such a heap without drinking.
That's how, in outline, people get united in misalliance marriages…
~~ ~
On the whole, I liked my father-in-law, and I forgave him the absence of a minimal kit of normal tools on the shelves in the boxroom niche, as well as his distrust in my ability to repair the electric iron, relic from the Stalinist epoch. Besides, when the three-year-old world-explorer Igor pulled a handful of cannabis seeds from the hip pocket in my jeans left in the bedroom, and scattered the find on a stool in the kitchen, my father-in-law did not aggravate the exposure with unnecessary questions though, in his position at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant, he understood the varieties of grain…
The son of a Bryansk mujik, he, as an 18-year-old recruit Ivan, got caught into the "Kharkov Meat Grinder", where the German Wehrmacht, waking up after the defeat near Moscow, proved that they knew their business by crushing several Soviet armies… Stunned by the power and shocked with the spectacle of the artillery mass execution, Ivan, in the endless crowds of tens of thousands of other survivors, was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.
At that time there was a tacit, unspoken of, agreement between the warring parties to reimburse each other thru banks in neutral countries for the cost of keeping prisoners of war. And only the Soviet Land remained aloof from that arrangement since every captured Red Army soldier was unquestionably considered a traitor to the Soviet Homeland. Hence the difference in the havvage for POWs of different nations.
To feed the prisoners from the Red