Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
While busy with the production process, I, invisibly for my fellow-bricklayers, turned and twirled those pieces in my mind, slit-split them then re-assembled anew, then threw them out of my head to dogs, to devils, to scrap fucks, but the most persistent ones came back after the bum’s rush, and French walk, and kicking-out (consecutively) to stay brazenly there as if they never were away, not for a sec's sliver. Then there remained the only resort – to stick them with a pen down to a piece of paper and forget.
(…in six years there gathered about 30 pieces of those unsolicited self-willed buggers in 2 languages, because each one was coming the way it fancied.
Among them, there happened graphical sketches like that one copied from the landscape around a construction site: "the apple of sky skewered with the blade of beam at sunrise…"; or those marked by their onomatopoeic stickiness: "Carkalomna barcarole…"; or philosophical pieces like that about God devoured the day before; and simply rhythmic chants for marching: "what do we laugh at?."…)
One of the first pieces I showed Eera, and she cocked up at once – who was that Madonna in a padded workman jacket? As if I could know, just one of those queuing in the workmen canteen at the midday break.
As for "To the Tune of V. Kosma" she did not ask anything, it was about her, undoubtedly and clear. Later, she said that they told her it was a good poem, and I stopped showing her any of them. Probably, I was jealous of the unidentified someone, to whom she gave it for evaluation.
When I read to my brother Sasha "The Scythian Interview", his reaction was instantaneous, "You have to be ratted on!"
(…if your poetry piece turns an ombre's train of thoughts in the KGB direction, it holds a worthy idea…)
Ivan, a carpenter from SMP-615, somehow liked the line about a cabbage leaf on the knife blade's edge. After 6 months, he asked to recite for him about that cabbage once again; I'd never imagine the bulky block had a sweet tooth for salads.
At times, when at the end of a midday break there still remained 5 minutes before to leave the trailer and go on with laying the walls, the women on our team asked to read something new, and the recital would be concluded by Grynya’s yell: "Sehryoga! They do not shoe horses with fire, there are horseshoes for that! Gelding you are ungroomed!" He was brought up and educated in the village of Krasnoye on the Baturin highway and should know such things better.
When the number of poems exceeded a score, my attitude to them changed qualitatively. Why should they lie around? Ain't it a pity? And I started to send them to the editorial offices of diverse monthlies and publishing houses, just like Martin Eden from the same-named novel by Jack London. And they kept returning back to me, exactly as his ones to him, with typewritten responses, which looked like one and the same carbon-copied answer.
They informed that the material received from me was inconsistent with the thematic orientation of their publication, besides, their editorial portfolio was filled for 3 to 4 upcoming years, yet not a single word about the verses themselves. Thus, Grynya's review remained unsurpassed: "Gelding ungroomed!"
However, the literary collaborator at one of the journals shared, that a similar style was the vogue in the 1930s. Probably, he aimed to point out the deprecated nature of the stuff, but it rather made me happy – they recognized poems as having some sort of style!
(…and what a style it was! In the 1930s the Union of Writers had not been gelded yet with political purges and spy-hunting repressions. In those days people still wrote poetry and not conjuncture-prone materials dedicated to the nearing Party Congresses…)
It gradually began to dawn on me that none of the eggheads, slurping from the trough of literary collaboration, was interested in all those poetic "beam blades in the sky" any more than in prosaic skewers in their personal ass.
The final eye-opener arrived with the response from the monthly Moscow to "Tired Alla". A fleeting glance made it quite clear that the literary collaborator perused the suggested piece in the most serious and conscientious way. The meaning of a certain word in the second stanza was not quite evident for him, so he took pains to check the term with a dictionary… He forgot to erase the working marks of his assiduous pencil in my verse. The word "craving" remained underlined and its interpretation—"lust"—was added nearby.
I did not know which dictionary he used to dig it out, but the result offended me. The ultimate blow was dealt by the name of the reviewer who signed the response – Pushkin! Aw, fuck! The mental picture of Pushkin looking up "craving" in a dictionary made me draw the line under my fucking the brains of editors with my f-f..er..formidable, I mean, simplicity. I realized at last, that I was not a Martin Eden and it was anything but America around.
The realization of my non-American origin and whereabouts cut postal expenses for envelopes and registered letters. Sending such a letter was not big deal though, about 50 kopecks, the equivalent of 2 "Belomor-Canal" cigarette packs and 6 boxes of matches because the cost of living in the Soviet Union was fairly reasonable, and treatment of askew illusions, practically, free of charge…
~ ~ ~
In summer, you came to Konotop again, yet without any carriage already. Our team was working at the 50-apartment block near the Under-Overpass, and one of the riggers, Katerina it was, shouted from the ground that I had visitors. I went downstairs and to the sidewalk outside the gate.
You stood next to Eera who was wearing a red sarafan with white Mongolian patterns. I don't remember what you had on, but I do remember how lovely you were smiling… I carefully lowered my plastic helmet onto your straight fair hair, and its visor slid down to touch your nose but it failed to put out your happy smile… I remember that smile from under my helmet.
In a couple of minutes, you both went on down the sidewalk and I watched, and the riggers, Katerina and Vera Sharapova, they also watched from behind the gate, suddenly so silent and pensive, because such beauty was going away – a woman in red, hand in hand with a child of fair straight hair.
You had just turned 3 years old, and I decided that the best gift for you would be a familiar face among the strangers at 13 Decemberists. I went to Nezhyn and, despite my tongue-tied speaking manner, did manage to convince Tonya to let her son go with me to your birthday in Konotop, provided that my father-in-law would arrive the following day and take him back. Tonya was a really brave woman, she was not afraid of my reputation, drenched beyond any hope for restoration after Romny.
The local train was overcrowded and for about an hour we had to stand in the aisle, vacant seats appeared only about the station of Bakhmuch. But how happy you and Igor turned when I brought him to 13 Decemberists! A fountain of joyful squeals!.
The following week my vacation began and 4 of us—you, Eera, I and Lenochka—went to the Seim with a permit to the RepBase recreation camp procured by my parents for us. It was a wide grounds whose low plank fence enclosed a few large Pines and several wooden cabins with 4 beds in each and windows on all the sides, like a veranda. When we first went to the river beach, everyone there got just stupefied, they never saw a Greek goddess go, moreover with so snow-white a skin as Eera's.
Another day the 4 of us went hunting mushrooms in the forest plantation nearby the village of Khutor Taransky. Halfway there, we met a pair of horses, but I worried only about Eera, she always was afraid of those animals.
The forest planting was of young Pines lined up in parallel ranks. Long spider webs stretching across the passages between the lined trees made the plantation almost impassable, but there were suillus under the Pine needles layer on the ground. We were combing thru the corridors walled with the Pine trunks, forth and back. You grew thirsty and I asked Lenochka to take you to the camp—the path was wide and it was no more than just 300 meters—because I wanted Eera all too madly.
For a long time you did not want to go with your sister before, finally, you agreed, but a moment later your loud crying rang along the Pine corridor, and Lenochka explained that you did not listen to her at all, although there were no horses anymore.
In the evening, there was a thunderstorm and downpour, but you were not afraid and only laughed because I was lying on my bed and you were stomping on my stomach. Someone's joy might hurt someone else – at your 3 years you were a weighty kid, but Eera cried out to be patient with my own child. I endured a little more and then I hardly managed to persuade you that's enough, please.
It was a good summer…
On the day of your departure, you squared up with the clothesline tied from the wicket to the porch, which certainly was not the right place for it. You took a mop and started knocking it at the half-dried laundry hung over the rope. My mother yelled at you and darkened in the face, but you already were too big to lose your footing, and only the mop was snatched from your hands.
It was time to start for the streetcar terminal, Lenochka volunteered to take you there on the trunk of her bicycle. Eera agreed though I was against the idea. My misgivings increased when I noticed the glances exchanged by my mother and Lenochka. The most frightening about it was that they did not look at each other, but into the ground at each other's feet, while their averted eyes kept a mute dialogue:
"Sure?"
"Yes, do it!"
I do not invent, neither distort reality by wacky fantasies, which is proved by what followed the unspoken dialogue overheard by me with I don't know what.
You left, sitting on the trunk behind Lenochka. Yet, Eera and my mother were ping-ponging empty clues for one minute more, before we left going out into the street. With the bags in my hands, I hurried along leaving Eera behind.
There stayed about a hundred meters to the street corner, when I knew that I was right being so hasty because I heard your shrill scream. You stood by the fence and kept screaming. Lenochka, holding her bicycle, tried to persuade you not to cry, but you did not listen to her and just screamed on and on. The rusty iron pipe stuck up from under the ground in between you 2. The only iron pipe in the half-kilometer leg between 13 Decemberists and Streetcar 3 terminal… Everything fell into place, I got it all. Very calmly, so as not to show that I was aware, I asked Lenochka to go home, no need to see us off any farther, no, thanks.
Then Eera also came up and tried to comfort you, but you cried while walking on to the terminal because of such a big bump on your forehead… We rode by the streetcar in silence, Eera was blankly looking out the window. You sullenly sat in her lap, and I in the opposite seat, feeling crushed. How to live in a world where a grandmother blesses her granddaughter to kill another granddaughter of hers – this beautiful kid with the copper 5-kopeck coin pressed by her mother to her forehead for the bump to dissolve?. Eera was silent on the train too, and I never attempted at sharing what shouldn't be shared…
(…now Lenochka has 2 children, beautiful daughters.
You and she are strangers to each other, and no one of you remembers anything of all that, especially that pipe thanks to the mind’s conventional blessing—forgetfulness
My mother, eventually, became a witness of Jehovah amassing piles of glossy eye-candy booklets for the saved or those who want to get saved. And it's only I am to blame for all what happened then but, upon my word of honor, in that recreation camp I wouldn't stand Lenochka on my stomach – she was already 9 years old…)
~ ~ ~
When I joined our team after my vacation, the pavement before the 50-apartment block was cut with a transverse trench for the tie-in to the main communications under the road on Peace Avenue. However, the carpenters of SMP-615 assembled a robust lumber bridge, wide and secure, with beam railings for the convenience of pedestrians.
I was at the trench bottom, digging, when I saw Beltyukov on the bridge. He strolled up there dressed in a dapper colonial style. I did not want to attract his attention, but he recognized me from above even in my spetzovka and helmet, stopped on the bridge to greet me and introduced to his mother, a lady in an aggressive neckline.
Then they went along. He was nervous and she guarding him way too closely, so that I understood the roots of his bitter resentment at the matriarchy when under the influence of insulin. And I also thought that our meeting in Romny was not his final stay in a mental hospital, that they wouldn’t let him run loose for long because he was wandering up there, defenseless, controlled by so exacting mommy which would imminently bring about the next relapse. Learn from me, sonny! See? I'm below, in the trench, with my helmet on, no SOB of a paramedic buster would ever reach me here. As for my stay in the madhouse, I went there of my free will and got fed up to the ears, when they were making me wiser thru my busted ass…
Accepting another of my translations, Zhomnir, in return, handed me a thick hardback volume. It was a monograph about schizophrenia which he bought when his daughter had problems with it before she got married. Monograph means a collection of articles by different authors concerning some mutual subject. I thoroughly studied the friendly shared volume; after all, that was not boiled sausage with admixed charms to win my love.
(…in their articles, the contributing authors considered diverse aspects of the same subject from different standpoints, each one according to their respective specializations. Thus, a chemically trained writer presents the listing of biochemical blood components in a number of notorious schizophrenics at the peak of their spiritual activity compared to the periods of relative calm in the same persons. Alas, no exacerbation of amino acids level in leukocytes was detected.
Another contributor scrupulously measures anything which turns up to their measuring devices, which data showed equally indefinite results.
The third one just takes a seat next to the bed with a fixed up patient and, while the aberrating fictionalist drives him a fool, he writes down some tremendously fabulous stuff. Like, he was boarding his trolley 47 awfully careful not to touch anyone and all the same there suddenly was a sand desert all around and he had just a tattered cloth round his loins, as anyone else in the pack of similarly skinny, naked, and sunburned fellers, when a band of horsemen galloped from behind a dune and started to massacre the unarmed fugitives sticking them by spears…
Yet, on the whole, it's quite a useful monograph because the authors, despite the fact of their being representatives of the decaying West, had the courage of real scientists to honestly put their hands up and acknowledge, "Okay! I do not fucking know what the fuck is this fucking schizophrenia about!"
"Try to approach her tenderly,
Look deeply in her eyes,
You'll find the treasure you have never seen!.."
Presently, despite the progress in the methods of modern research, all the finds by this particular field of science is just that nicely scientific term – "schizophrenia", everything else is wrapped in the dense mist of uncertainty.
The main trump ace, the touchstone and litmus test, provided by the science, are "the voices" which you meet in any textbook on the psychiatry. If you hear some voices and there is not a living soul around, then you are a schizophrenic. But if them those unsubstantiated voices tell you, "Save France!" then you're the hero Saint – Joan of Arc.
The only weak point in the said monograph is absence of an expert in theology. Suffice it to recall St. Inez, whose body in a jiffy got covered with long fur, so that the rapists were stripped of any chance of breaking her hirsute chastity…
They are enjoying cakes and ale in their picnic in the bed of roses, those specialists in the trade whose luminaries can't see the misty core of what they are, actually, about. To concoct a diagnosis is easier than making a fig. Pour half a glass raw schizophrenia, spice it with a pinch of double-barreled adjectives, shake the ingredients…Enjoy! "Fur-coat form of schizophrenia", the favorite drink of St. Inez!
Tamara at the fourth kilometer on the Chernigov outskirts was not in the know of all of my exploits. For the burned down plantation of cannabis, I could be easily stamped with "autodafic form of schizophrenia aggravated by Torquemada complex" to commemorate that absolutely normal inquisitor who regularly sent packs of heretics to the stake.
As for the term itself, they used (as is the tradition in producing scientific nomenclature) the words from old Greek which, when putting ancient roots together, reads "cracked mind". And now – lo! – "The mind cracked in the form of a fur coat."
So, who of us is schizophrenic after all?!. Do they think that if they don the white smocks, and trumpet a trump from the terminology they don't know a damn thing in, I will trust them more than I trusted the Ichnya sorcerer in his khaki shirt and mambo jumbo about the moon "quarters"?
Oh, my dear aesculapius-kindergarten kids! Mind you, I am from Konotop. My classmate Volodya Sherudillo could casually give out: "I cannot ignore the data of pseudo-quasi-illusions to avoid the ultimate diffusion of my transcommunicability skills."
After the eighth grade, he went to "the seminary", aka GPTU-4, to become a turner, otherwise, by now he would be Head of the Academy of Sciences, and you would be sitting in the ante-room to his office, waiting in nervous jitters if he would admit you, the petty CEC khannoriks.
In short, while no one knows where schizophrenia comes from and where goes to, and how much is her fee for a visit, you could just as well go and f-f..er..fumble yourself against something else. I mean it, and shove all the hep-talk-blah-blah up you know where, the Settlement fellas can share a more detailed route to those in doubt…
That is to say, get along, sweethearts, keep moving…)
On the weekends in Nezhyn, the 3 of us took walks to the kindergarten in the narrow streets of the neighborhood. It did not work on Saturdays and the entire playgrounds—all those stalls and slides—were at your disposal. The swing on iron bars when set into motion gave out brief screams, shrill, heartbreaking.
Eera stood in the distance. And then you began running over the yellow leaves strewn on the ground, from me to her and back, but even that was not bringing us closer. As we returned along the same empty streets without sidewalks, I held your hand and did not take my eyes off the smooth play of round hips under the light dress of Eera walking ahead of us. It was so too clear to me that it’s our last autumn together, no one told me that, but all the same, I knew it…
Tonya got an apartment for her family somewhere on Shevchenko Street. Gaina Mikhailovna was planning to rent the freed bedroom to one of the military pilots from the Airfield-Area, who were howling in the sky with their training flights each Tuesday and Friday. I was not present in any plans, and even could not be there because of Lenochka who I refused to leave in Konotop without a dad either. The impetuous spats between Eera and me abated in their fury, yet grew more frequent, which changes told me of imminent end closing in, creepily, to bring about the final moment and make me a chunk cut off clearly, completely.
(…probably, Dostoyevsky had the like feeling when they were carting him to the scaffold along the familiar streets, and he calculated by them how much time remained before the execution.
The difference was only that I did not know how many words remained to hear from Eera before her final: "Get lost to that Konotop of yours! And never show up in Nezhyn!"
Yet, I knew that I would hear it…)
When Eera voiced the words, they, strangely, brought not only pain but a speck of relief too – there remained nothing to be afraid of anymore. It is finished.
~ ~ ~
I went to Konotop and began to live a half-life. I worked with our team, read, wrote, talked, but half of me disappeared somewhere, together with the aim for which I was doing all that before I got cut off…
The dullness of half-life was somewhat alleviated by a business trip to Kiev. There, I was alone from SMP-615, and I did not know where the rest of the workers came from to the reconstruction of a dairy factory. We lived in a passenger car driven into a dead-end track in the factory grounds. They gave us bed linen yellow with age and fairly fretted, but gently soft because of that. I occupied the upper bunk in the compartment to skip folding up the mattress in the morning. Everywhere in Kiev there sounded one and the same song:
"The leaves of yellow are in a flurry o'er the city…"
And I remembered the leaves in the playgrounds of the desolate kindergarten…
On weekends, I visited the library of Kiev University, in the building on the left from the bulky monument to Taras Shevchenko. People were allowed there without any diploma, leaving their passports to the registry in the entrance lobby. In the huge and pretty quiet reading room with long tables but separate chairs for readers and separate lamps as well, under the green shaded one of them, I read John Stuart Mill's treatise "On Freedom" in the original. That's what real philosophy is! He instructed me that there are just two kinds of people:
1) law-abiding loyal subjects;
2) experimentalists.
As for all the race, class, confession and other differences, they only serve a means to split and set people against each other…
Then I found the House of Organ Music, which surely used to be a Catholic temple before. It’s in Red Army Street now, beneath the Republican Stadium. I was a little late for the concert and they had already locked the entrance, so I began to knock from outside.
The door opened and I cried as on the bus to Romny, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!"
"Very well. But could you be quieter? The concert is on."
The hall there began right next to the entrance, without any vestibule.
"Excuse me."
But the grudger went on to murmur in resentment.
"Wanna me apologize anew?"
And he shut up because I had the time to doff my brown raincoat of the meek-geek-in-a-deep-shit cut and disclose the brazenly proletarian corduroy bob-coat from the shocking blue slice of the specter. Any not too deeply touched porter would see it was not his chance for molesting spineless intelligentsia here. Moreover, with my secret agent hat off, a strand of hair sprang like a spring stuck up from amid my pate. There was no way to suppress it, even after the shower the stubborn strand, when it got dry, cocked up again.
(…about thirty years later, the hair style of explosion imitation became an everyday fashion. That's how gravely I was shocked by being cut off from Eera…)
So he shut up. Quite reasonably.
In the concert's first part, they played some modern atonal symphony – a tormenting screech of shredded notes from abrupt tunes smashed into sharp shards and swept up into jugged heaps… But in the second, the organ sounded the fugues of Bach…
The miracle come to pass in January… I arrived in Nezhyn to visit Zhomnir and, on a bus starting from the station, I saw Ivan Alexeyevich. He asked me how came that I had not been seen for so long.
Keeping back a sob in my throat, I replied that Eera forbade me to show up.
"Forget it! Come on, let's go!"
I still got off the bus on Shevchenko Street and later phoned from the Zhomnirs. Eera also said, yes, come. The remaining 7 bus stops to Red Partisans I rode outwardly calm but breasting the storm-churned waves of the tempest inside…
Lots of changes occurred in the months of my absence. Eera, together with you, moved to the former bedroom of Tonya's family. Her parents went over into the narrower bedroom.
The living-room was left as it was: "The Unknown Beauty" with the same contemptuous air looked from the hutch, and the rich merchant's daughter crookedly trotted from the major pinching his mustache. But in your bedroom there stood a new dressing table with a crowd of un-figure-outable but so necessary cosmetic tubes and vials. A wide yellow ring of gold lay close-by the mirror.
To my cautious inquiries, Eera said that the pier was bought by her father, and her mother presented her with the ring. And we began to live on further…
The construction site… Nezhyn… The construction site… Nezhyn…
Eera worked as a caretaker in the kindergarten 200 meters down Red Partisans Street. Her duties included registering the state of health among the kids in her group. The copybook with records in her handwriting slanted to the left, about how the kids were each day of the week, was dropped atop the dressing table.
I only once opened that copybook, and ever after I tried to not even look at it, so as not to die of jealousy. It became absolutely clear that there was no need to tread along the path of righteousness any farther, and no use escaping the inevitable because it had already happened.
(…certain thoughts are better never to be thought at all but left alone and, if heedlessly started, they’d better be dropped and not thought down the road to their harsh conclusions…)
Shame didn't let me ask Eera of how she lived those months, or what she was doing in between my weekend visits, but when I saw in that copybook that on Thursday only half of Eera's group came to attend and even that half ill with a cold I knew that on Wednesday she had a date.
I was dying of jealousy but kept silent. Life became a kinda racing thru a maze full of stenciled warnings – don't take that turn, don't look that side, don't think that thought so as to dodge the claws and fangs of anguish…
Then Eera introduced the new order of putting you to sleep next to her on the double bed, and I was bedded on the folding bed-armchair. Sometimes she came to me in the dark, sometimes not, and then I did not sleep for long after the midnight, in the bitter pangs of jealousy…
Only once I was happy about not having a sex with her. It happened after a ride on an overcrowded bus with ice-glazed windows from the station to Red Partisans. Somewhere halfway up I suddenly felt an anus penetration. I never experienced the enema, nor probe insertion in my life, so the feeling was unfamiliar and inexplicable amid the crowd of passengers in their coats and sheepskins. After the main square, the crowd drastically thinned but I still felt as if ass-raped midst a bus-load of strap-hangers.
Exactly for that reason, I did not insist on having sex that night, because I was afraid that Eera would later have it with the fucker who had fucked me on the bus. Of course, such positioning of the cause and effect might, after all, be contrary to the actual flow of events, however, I dreaded to consider such a probability and kicked away all of the anal-sadistic speculations on that point…
~ ~ ~
End February, there was a working-day Saturday, aka "black Sabbath". Each year had 6 Saturdays of that color and not only in SMP-615. However, I firmly refused to participate and after work on Friday went to Nezhyn.
I had a lonely dinner in the kitchen because Eera told you not to disturb your daddy when he's eating, and took you away to the living room. Then I went over to the bedroom, so as not to disturb everyone watching TV in the living room. Besides, there was no place to get seated because your aunt Vitta had come from Chernigov to stay with the parents for her vacation.
You also came to the bedroom and we grew a bit noisy, Eera came in to pacify us and make out the beds for you and me. Then she turned the light off, so that you would fall asleep sooner, and returned to the TV box because there was a replay of the New Year release of "Kinopanorama".
I stayed sitting in the dark in front of the new dressing table… I did not make any plans and everything went somehow by itself… After the sound of your breathing showed that you were fast asleep, I waited for another 5 minutes and then took you over to the folding bed-armchair. Then I undressed and lay down on the matrimonial double.
I lay for a long time with my hands under my head. The traffic along Red Partisans Street almost died out, but the noise of the rare cars became even more unbearable and so the glare of their headlights creeping over the window curtains… Poor Tonya. How could they possibly live here?.
Then I began to think about Eera and me: how could we come to live like this? Ladies first, yet for the simplicity’s sake it’s much easier to start with me thanks to my straightforward accountability because there left nothing in me but a mixture of insatiable hanker and jealousy, bitter and sharp. All other feelings got successfully quenched to avoid distressful pangs, but these two proved being stronger than me.
Now, what about her? At the institute, she was lucky to pull such a winning trump from the pack. All the girlfriends pined away from envy. Then the girlfriends went away to work off for their diplomas where appointed, and the trump's reputation got drenched. Here enters mummy with the gold ring: you're so young, a good man still will come round the corner, better if he were a military pilot, whose salaries far above the miserable 120 rubles.
So, what in the end? We just have what we have…that Soviet Pushkin, the sycophant of a literary collaborator, had called it lust…stupid nerd…lust comes when there is no more craving… And again there rose the snarl of a car engine coming from afar, nearer and nearer, from the Airfield-Area.
The creeping light crawls up over the curtains, arching its back, drooping forward, yes, we've found the way to smooth out the pesky wrinkle in the final phase of natural flow and dodge the snapping interruption of the ebullient passionate raptures for the sake of birth control the way like Arthur Clark's astronauts' jumps from one spaceship's lock to the other's without their spacesuits thru the void of cosmos with a side bonus of semen application for the lotions of more beneficial effect for the skin than that of mummia, ginseng, and even fabulous ojb grass because the inquisitive digressions of those loving to love their beloved lovingly will beat any Kama Sutra, I always knew that without reading a single line from it but is it worth the while?. well, I don't know… I've always loved them as they are, without acrobatics, S&M role-playing and stuff… just, "C'mon, babe, let's do us feel good"…straight thrill, you know…no frills and long live vanilla fucking…
