THE OLD WOMEN'S CURSES
In the course of time Cardan fell into his usual habit of constant adventure and binge drinking. An old dog failed to pick up new tricks, so to speak. He could not live a quiet life of a decent family man and the marital relationships came up to the brink of precipice. The family life was approaching a disaster. Meanwhile, there were a lot of rumors about his tricks in the village. The number of naive people had greatly decreased: everyone knew about the insidiousness of the cunning swindler. "Ah, well, you'll be cheating again," the old women said. "We won't have anything to do with you," was heard from the men. Cardan was like a hamster in the wheel, he was running in it as fast as he could, letting his talent off "the leash". He put blood, sweat and tears into it but his attempts just flopped. There was no way of assuming that he wasn’t able to cut it out any longer, he just needed a short break. The turmoil has to come down a little. He simply was the talk of the town and there was nothing to be done about that. His tricks were the favorite topic of any conversation, even among school children. When they ran into him in the street, they pointed their fingers at him and laughed. He was a local star for them, a great con man, almost as smart as the famous Ostap Bender.
At noon several women got together near the shop and started vividly discussing the latest rural news.
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"Guess what," said one of them, "yesterday Cardan rushed into my house with a saw in his hand and hurriedly, as if he had been doing something important, said to me, "Quickly, give me a liter of vodka! A trailer of firewood is being delivered to you! Look, look out the window!" I took a look. Indeed, a tractor with the firewood went past my yard. "Come on get a move on; we're in a hurry! We are preparing timber for the collective farm, the guys wanted to get warm and sent me to you! Let's settle it quickly! I have to run back to help them unload the trailer!" I paid him and started waiting. Five minutes passed by but the tractor didn't show up. I went outside – there was nobody there. I waited for half an hour longer – silence. Well, I guessed the bastard took me for a fool again. Oh, my dear, God will punish him one day! I swear he will be punished for such tricks!”
“Just the other day he comes to my house and says,” continues the second woman. "We are delivering manure to the collective farm field. The guys decided to get warm and sent me to you. Quickly, give me a liter of vodka and I'll run back! I'm in a hurry. They are waiting for me! The tractor with the manure is already on its way!"
“I paid him, hung on for a little while, then went out to the garden - no one. I went out into the street – nobody there. I waited, and waited, and waited – no tractor, nobody. Oh, that swindler, oh, that bastard! Just for the record, heaven will punish him one day for his tricks. Oh, he'll be punished!”
"My husband went to buy some furniture to the district center," the third woman began. He met Cardan there and told him about his plans because of his naivety. Later Cardan came running to my house and said, "Has your husband returned from the district center?"
“No,” I answered.
“I helped him to load the furniture. He said that if I came back late, my wife would pay you for it. So give me a bottle of vodka."
“Well, I paid off. My husband came back home and couldn`t understand what I was talking about.
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Then I quarreled with him because of that accursed Cardan. I hope he will not escape God's punishment. Mark my word, one day someone will play such a trick on him that he will remember it till the day he dies!”
"He sold me salt instead of sugar," the fourth woman added. Suddenly, the women's curses started pouring on Cardan`s head like a torrential shower.
Cardan's reputation got a serious beating, he had to rehabilitate it somehow. He realized that he needed to take it down a couple of notches and to actually fulfill a few of his promises and to weather the storm. You cannot eat your cake and have it. He was going to regain the trust of some simpleton and when he lost his vigilance, Cardan would make a move by a chess horse. He always played for keeps and that required patience and perseverance.
Such a simpleton, in his opinion, was approaching Victoria. He got his nickname for his passion for poking fun at others. Rumors about his playing pranks on the fellow villagers spread far beyond the village. Cardan knew about his experience in pulling practical jokes but ventured "to play with fire" and give it a shot. He was used to rolling with the punches and made up his mind to draw on his own experience to get out ahead. He decided to take advantage of his hospitality to make things work and leave him with nothing. Victoria was good at his craft: Cardan could deceive old women, Victoria knew how to make fools out of men. Admittedly, he wasn't going to be another ball in Cardan's juggling act. Nobody could say for sure, who would get out ahead this time – both of them were experts of the highest degree. Victoria invited Cardan over to his place. They had a few drinks, talked about their lives and said goodbye to each other.
The prankster knew that there was no need to hurry things up, and as a cat, patiently awaiting an appearance of a mouse from the hole that forgot about vigilance, so he expected a favorable moment for the realization of his intention. The great deceiver of old women, in his turn, like a sparrow, eating food put out to chickens, outstayed his welcome. One day he lingered at Victoria`s table longer than usual.
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Magical effect of alcohol and a pleasant conversation brought off guard. The host filled and filled his glass with alcohol and the guest drank and drank. The party was getting into full swing. The prankster realized that it was time to make a move. He intentionally touched the mug of water standing on the table, which fell into Cardan`s lap and moistened his trousers in an intimate place. "Oh, you're soaked wet. I'll lend you some dry clothes. You can get changed in the adjacent room. Otherwise, people might say that you wetted yourself like a baby," Victoria offered his help benevolently. Cardan went to change his trousers to another room. Taking advantage of Cardan's absence from the table he emptied a flask of castor oil into the salad. He could not forgive Cardan a hoax that he played on him back in the day. One day Cardan traded him an ax for vodka and managed to leave Victoria's home with the vodka and the ax. After that he had been plotting for revenge on Cardan for years. Their friendly party dragged on for three days because Cardan could not stay away from the toilet for more than a few minutes. He had a terrible diarrhea.
Cardan's wife rushed to look for her husband all over the village. "He is nowhere to be found. Where has he got to? A couple of times he spent a night somewhere else but not three days in a row," she lamented. She walked around the whole village but her husband seemed to disappear into thin air. As it turned out, no one had seen him in the village for three days. Finally, she was suggested that she should check at Victoria`s. Rumor had it that he had been there recently. Cardan's wife came to his house. "If he is not here," she decided, "I'll call the police and inform them that he went missing."
The door was locked and the curtains on the windows were drawn. She walked around the house, trying to find an opening between the curtains. In the end she got lucky. She found Cardan closed in the outside toilet. Her hands began to pound at the door. "Open the toilet! Open it, you bastard! Where have you been all this time?" she cried in frenzy but the door was not opened to her.
"I have a horrible diarrhea. I can't walk. Can you ask someone to help me get home because I won't be able to do it on my own," he explained the situation to her; tears running down his eyes.
Finally, she ran to the neighbors, so that they helped her take her husband away from the cruel prankster. Victoria, sensing trouble, quickly assisted Cardan to get out of the toilet, led him out into the street and sat him down on the bench in front of the yard.
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The great deceiver of old women underestimated Victoria. That was his fatal mistake. He could neither sit, nor stand, nor, especially, walk after such a friendly visit to him. The men came running. They took Cardan under his knees with their hands, putting his arms on their shoulders and carried him home.
Thus ended the party arranged by two lovers of a game of chance. Nobody knows what really happened there. Someone would blurt out some nonsense with his black tongue and rumors would spread all over the village, then it would turn out that it was just slander. Therefore, I don`t want to fantasize here and say that it was really so as well. But people in the village laughed and reiterated, "There's definitely God in heaven. How deservedly he punished Cardan! This man could deceive almost anyone in the village, and who could imagine that he was himself tricked like a child.”
His wife could not get Cardan under her thumb, so she broke up with him and returned to her mother`s. Cardan, having spent a couple of weeks in bed, recovered and got outside. "Either my intuition failed me, or it all happened because of the old women`s curses," he mumbled but quickly cast aside the sad thoughts. He hoped that ignoring the incident would make it fade away. People will gradually forget about it if you don't make a big deal of it. "Am I going to sit around and spin my wheels? Am I going to keep to myself for the rest of my life? One ought to be always on the move! When the going gets tough, you have to spin twice as fast to set things right. Cardan (driveshaft) is spinning - the car is moving." He flung his coat over his shoulder and straightened up, raised his head high, and went out and about to face the world.
Inadvertently, I have recalled the words from the Ukrainian cartoon There Lived the Dog, "And Cardan began living as before, even better; forgotten were all his past troubles - all forgotten."
While I was writing this book, I got lucky to bump into Cardan. One morning, when the sun just started to rise over the tops of the trees that were growing in the distance, he dropped by my place, tuning into the rustle of the awakening nature. “What a great piece of luck,” I thought. I couldn't have been happier to see him if he'd been Santa.
“Do you need honey mushrooms?” he extended demonstratively a full bag in my direction. I accepted a weighty load.
“Wow, such beautiful mushrooms!” I sniffed in the forest flavor of the honey mushrooms. “And how do you manage with things so early?” I expressed genuine interest.
"An early bird catches the worm. You have to be always on the move. Cardan is spinning – the car is running.”
“Yes, it is important to keep spinning,” I agreed. The deal was struck.
Once more he swings by half an hour later.
"So, what kind of worm has the bird got this time?"
“Do you need fish?”
“Yes, I do. You never seem to lose your touch.”
"I'll bring you some more tomorrow," he promised.
"All right, I will be waiting for it," I played along with a benevolent smile.
And this time I paid him for the fish.
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A bit later he shows up on the scene for the third time.
"Wow, look who's here! You always get your timing right."
"I`ve just thrown a net; I'll bring you some more fish, first thing tomorrow morning. I came to say to you that I didn't forget about you, or else you may think that I got drunk and fell asleep. I was wondering if you could give me a bottle of vodka and at the dawn, as soon as I pull out the net, I`ll come to you straightaway."
There was no doubt that he was lying. However, it was done so beautifully, the process was depicted so meticulously; he did not leave anything to imagination. He depicted to me the net that he threw, how he got into the water, what kind of fish were there; he told me everything to the minutest details.
"You know, I can make a fool out of anyone but you. He looked sly for a moment as if he had outsmarted me in a game of cards."
“I've been meaning to ask you if it's true that when you served in the army near Moscow, you traded 100 trucks of sand for booze?”
“Yes, it is, Andrey. I was sent to a Kazakhstan regiment in the middle of nowhere to serve up the rest of the term as a punishment.”
“Have there been many interesting things in your life?”
“Oh, Andrey, I've been through thick and thin. Some day I will tell you all about it. Do you happen to need a used bicycle?” he brought the conversation back to business.
"No, thanks! This time I'll take a rain check." I responded vehemently.
"You do like to play things pretty close to the chest, don't you?"
"It's a trick of the trade." He excused himself.
I couldn't wheedle out more details of his life from him: a man will not saw off a branch that he is sitting on. He just kept promising that he would help me do any work about my household when I asked him. I listened attentively to him and was thrilled that there were such funny people on earth. One might have called him a liar, a swindler, a bastard, but every person who had ever met him, somehow, deep inside wanted to be deceived. Otherwise, why did those people, who knew his deceptive nature, always fall into the same trap? There must have been a kind of inner attraction in that man, some kind of purely human charm ... Like a child is forgiven for his mistakes because of ignorance and a lack of experience of life, so Cardan got away with his tricks because you wanted to see him again, to listen to him, to have a laugh, to enjoy life. It's as simple as that.
Honestly, it was one of the most exciting conversations that I had had. I enjoyed every single moment of it. It was a win-win situation. Although, I had a slight edge over him, since he did not suspect of my playing along. Eventually, I just could not resist his charm and fell for his promises. Against all better judgment I paid him upfront for the fish, even though I suspected that he was lying to me. But he laid out things so nicely, so vividly painted his actions, so sweetly promised that there was nothing to be offended of.
I stood by my house, looking intently at Cardan, who was walking away in a quick and confident gait. Sad and warm thoughts filled my head: so much enthusiasm was in that man, so much ostentatious virtue towards people, so much life! He seemed indestructible, endowed with more energy than anyone I had ever known. Of course, he was not infallible, he had quite a few flaws, but he was a jolly good fellow. The kind of which is considered to be larger than life these days.
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He was able to inspire a person with hope, even if it was temporary, that the world was not without kind people; he was able to lighten people's mood by talking to them, to fill the boring and monotonous routine of a rural worker with rainbow colors. Probably for those positive emotions, received after a conversation with him, he was always forgiven.
"Wow, and what a nice guy he is, just a joke of a man!" I stood and reiterated those words in my mind, which aroused a friendly smile on my face, while Cardan was disappearing around the corner of the deserted street.
Nowadays Ukrainian villages are dying out. I remember how a few years ago I visited one of them. Life was boiling there: people planted vegetables, kept cows, went to work. Dilapidated houses are dispersed here and there now, and only wind blows through the ruins, - the evil wind of change. There was their own "Cardan" in that village either, so as in hundreds of the similar villages that have remained only on the map of Uraine. There also were the men who were the life and soul of the village, about whom you can write whole volumes, but, unfortunately, nobody remembers them now. This is exactly the reason why I decided to save the memory of Cardan and the stories about his tricks that amused people in the village, smoothing their rugged and gray days for dozens of years.
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