 Big Rooster-Little Rooster By Serhiy Kharchenko |
The radio station located in the village of Big Rooster-Little Rooster was seized unexpectedly, that is to say, on Monday. And as anyone around here knows, Monday is hangover day, following the usual Sunday festivities.
Even an idiot could tell that it had been seized: The radio announcer, known as the Seaman, was cut off in mid-sentence. He had just made a live announcement about the arrival of new plastic bags at the village store. Then he went into his usual admonitions, in the name of the village council, against the dumping of potato skins and carrot tops behind the church. Then the microphone went dead.
The people of the village began to gather on the central square, a patch of dirt surrounding the well. They loved their radio announcer, and not for nothing. Having served in the Soviet navy as a radioman on a sub, the Seaman had for some reason come back to the muddy little settlement, where the most expensive real estate consisted of two rusty tractors that had been donated brand new as part of a USAID project.
With his own two hands, the Seaman had fixed up a shack no longer occupied but at one time serving as a makeshift cow house. The village chairman, in violation of the law, rented him the premises free of charge, and even designated him an official salary of $10.00 per month (some of it to be paid in produce collected from other residents). This was no trifle. The annual budget of Big Rooster-Little Rooster was calculated to equal the cost of 20 barrels of salted cucumbers. The only drawback was the location of the shack, which stood 10 quick steps from the communal outhouse, referred to locally as "the Five Star Inn" owing to the number of holes in its wooden door. Maybe because of these inconveniences, businessmen from the regional capital had overlooked the village during the privatization wave.
At any rate, the Seaman soon converted the shack into an operable communications point, whitewashing the walls and adding a top floor that could be reached by means of a winding metal staircase. On the roof, he painted the word "Radio Station," in big white letters against a red background. And for added effect, he hung up a loudspeaker in the shape of an old fashioned, steel belfry.
Seaman collected the metal for the belfry, the staircase and much of the radio apparatus itself from various junkyards in Ukraine and Russia. It took him nearly a year to find enough. A lot of it, admittedly, was dug up from the ruins of the now-closed state meat-processing plant, StateHogKHoz
With time, the radio station became virtually the sole source of information available to the villagers, aside from over-the-fence gossip that originated from truck drivers who made weekly deliveries to the village store. Of course, Big Rooster-Little Rooster wasn't the only population point in such a predicament. Newspapers couldn't be bought for garden produce and, like everything else, had to be 'imported,' and thus were always at least a week old. There was also no radio or television, because there was no electricity.
The "terrorists" who had seized Seaman's station wore masks. There were three of them, and one was wielding a hammer with a big crack in it. They wanted the ex-underwater DJ to turn the microphone back on and announce that a round up of Ukrainian nationalists would be conducted throughout the village. Seaman sat slumped over his control panel as if he were trying to lift it up. Occasionally, his eyes rolled to the sides in a strained attempt to see what the masked men were up to behind his back.
More tormented by his hangover than fear, the naval nerd began to contemplate the situation he had found himself in. The broadcast of mostly folk songs was meant to sooth the nostalgic longing felt by the village's primarily elderly residents. Music therapy had worked great during long cruises in the Baltic Sea. Moreover, during his subsequent work as a merchant marine, he had accumulated a sizeable collection of tapes. Seaman liked the idea that he could influence people's moods by playing just the right song at just the right time. This was one of the main reasons he had returned to Big Rooster-Litter Rooster in the first place.
More recently, he had been replenishing his stock of songs by copying tapes borrowed from friends and acquaintances. He paid for the blank tapes and other necessities, like fuel for his generator, by running the occasional advert from local merchants. The village chairman also got a cut. But this year, an election year, ad revenues had gone through the roof, as orders for political commercials came trickling in. The chairman would broker the deal, but he always insisted that it was up to Seaman to decide which offers to take. As an appointed state official, the village executive had no right to get involved in partisan politics, and wouldn't even discuss the matter in simple, straightforward language. The only thing that the record-spinning swabby needed to know was that the village could really use the money.
Seaman took solace in the fact that the chairman wasn't knowledgeable of the campaign issues. Moreover, most of material he'd been given to broadcast seemed harmless enough: Calling on people to vote against revolution, hooliganism and attacks against state officials using eggs. A lot of it, however, was in Russian, and from the very beginning Seaman had stuck to a 50-50 bilingual format.
So when the weekly truck driver offered him what he said was the latest political song in Ukrainian, the musical mariner saw an opportunity to even out his play list. True, the rap melody was a bit too hip for most of the villagers, but Seaman thought the village could use a little shaking up. Last New Year's, he'd played an entire Filip Kirkorov album and no one seemed to mind.
However, the village vinyl king had underestimated the depth of local historical divisions. Big Rooster-Little Rooster was located half in Russia and half in Ukraine. The residents of Russian speaking Big Rooster had always envied the well kept homes and gardens of their southern neighbors, who in turn resented the fact that they couldn't get a gas line put into their homes. But a cordial public detente had developed over the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Big Rooster's children would conduct cross-border raids into particularly well-stocked Ukrainian pumpkin patches, while Little Rooster had set up an underground piping system to siphon gas from Russia during winter. But things had never gotten out of hand.
Now the peace had been broken. "Where is the tape?" shouted one of the masked men, as he rummaged through Seaman's old navy footlocker. The guy with the hammer was looking out the window and munching away on the dejected DJ's lunch. The third man, who might very well have been a husky woman, would halfheartedly try to pry Seaman off the instrument panel and then momentarily let up as if he (or she) realized that he (or she) didn't know how to operate it anyway.
Suddenly, Seaman heard the patter of feet climbing up the metal staircase. "They're coming," shouted the man with the cracked hammer. The man who'd been wrestling with Seaman over the instrument panel who definitely turned out to be a husky woman (the song sailor even thought that they had danced one night during May Day celebrations) rushed to throw herself against the door.
This gave the desperate disc man a chance to look out the window. On the dirt square below, two crowds had faced off and were shouting political slogans at each other. One was wearing pumpkins on their heads, while the other wore World War II-era gas masks that had been spray painted blue. There was no sign of any fighting, but the situation looked as if it might turn violent any minute.
When the pumpkin heads saw Seaman standing at the window, a wave of cheers surged upward to greet him with the kind of innocent exuberance that only Ukrainians know how to muster. The gas masks, feeling at a loss, simply shouted "hurrah." Judging by the way that they angled their heads (their faces couldn't be seen), it was clear that they themselves didn't know what this "hurrah" was supposed to mean. Although Seaman was sure that he'd heard one voicing urging the terrorists to throw him out the window.
Then there was a thumping at the radio station's hatch door. It sounded like someone was beating his head against it. The husky female terrorist stood fast over the entrance. Visibly frightened, one of her comrades rushed to the window, and, after pushing Seaman aside, emptied a sack of Vladimir Zhirinovsky campaign stickers above the heads of the people standing below. The response from the roof of the village store across the road was equally moving. Four babushkas bared their backsides in military precision to reveal a row of orange underwear. Neat letters on the drawers spelled out PORA.
With the terrorists momentarily stunned by the bawdy public spectacle, the Seaman crept toward his work station and carefully began rummaging among his cassettes. Meanwhile the head pounding at the hatch began rising beneath the weight of the husky female. It was a pumpkin head. The sides squared off as they had in the street below and a debate ensued. The head pumpkin head, whose pumpkin had already begun to rot, kept shaking his finger and quoting dairy figures. The leader of the masks, a big clumsy guy, just stood there looking proud but stupid.
By this time, Seaman had found the tape, slipped it in and, with the usual clamber, his instrument panel again came to life. Before anyone knew what was happening, the voice of Verka Serduchka, the cross-dressing songbird from Poltava who sings in Russian, was blaring from the loud speaker. "Vse Budet Khorosho" ("Everything is going to be all right") filled the air. Seaman slumped in his seat and closed his eyes, not bothered about what everyone else was doing at that moment. Probably dancing or at least snapping their fingers, he thought.
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Read also previous issue' articles:
Cows and Parachutists
Vietnam, Cobra-laced rice moonshine and those smiles
Gambling on the Slope
Manners Cost Nothing
A Roger By Any Other Name
Never Underestimate the Mark!
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