The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
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In summertime Mother grew fat and Father, with a somewhat uneasy chortle, asked us—their children—what about having one more brother? The babe might be given a good name, like, Alyoshka, huh?
Natasha wrinkled her nose, Sasha kept silent as well, and I responded with a shrug, “What for?”
The suggested increase in the family seemed unnecessary not as a threat of deterioration our living conditions, but because of the awkward crying difference in age between the would-be parents and the suggested baby. So Father effaced his ingratiating smirk, dropped the subject and never picked it up again. A couple of weeks later, I accidentally heard Mother’s casual gossip with Aunt Lyouda, “I used the pill and the same day draft beer casks were brought to the stall, I rolled them in and – that’s it.” That way the proposed quantity changes in our generation of the Konotop Ogoltsoffs were canceled, yet Mother stayed looking fat forever…
Her stall, a round sheet-iron hut under a tin roof, was advantageously located in the main alley of the Central Park of Recreation opposite Peace Square. The heavy padlock from the back door was taken off and brought inside to start trading thru the front window whose square ledge served the counter jutting over the asphalted walk in the shade of mighty poplars.
Besides the draft beer running from the faucet which she connected by a removable hose to the dark wooden casks, in turn, the goods on sale included briquettes of packed cookies, loose candies of a couple of cheap sorts, cigarettes, lemonade and bottled wine – the Ukrainian fruit-and-berry “White Strong”, the dark-red Georgian “Rkatsiteli”, and some wine of uncertain origin named “Riesling” never asked for by anyone. “White Strong” was going out like hotcakes because of its price – one ruble and two kopecks for a half-liter bottle. Cigarettes also did not stick around for long, yet the main trade-pulling engine was draft beer. When there happened a delivery delay and they did not bring beer casks from the trade base of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, Mother began to sigh and complain beforehand that the trade plan for her stall in the current month seemed hardly doable and they again would cut her salary…
My life rollicked on along its tracks which somehow bypassed the Central Park of Recreation, although my sister and brother occasionally boasted of dropping to Mother’s workplace for free lemonade. However, there occurred one day which I spent at the stall from its beginning to end because of the secret service agent Alexander Belov, under the guise of Johann Weiss…
In those abysmally past times, to get subscribed to The Novel-Gazette was next to impossible. The monthly justified its name being turned out on inexpensive newsprint and in two columns per page, yet the thickness of an issue was on a par with The Pioneer or The Youth magazines. Albeit absent from the subscription lists at the post-offices, The Novel-Gazette could still be found at libraries or borrowed from one or another luckier person who had asked it from the previous lucky beggar who, in their turn… If some novel happened to be too long for one issue, it was continued in the following month. At times, deviating from the magazine name, they printed collections of stories or (quite rarely) poems, but no more than by a couple of authors per issue.
Now, getting the word of mouth that in The Novel-Gazette they had recently published The Shield and Sword by Vadim Kozhevnikov, I rushed to the Club Library and was told that all the three consequential issues were already lent out, and they had to put together the queue-list of those wishing to borrow the masterpiece. No wonder, after Mother casually mentioned some colleague lending her all the issues of the epic spy saga for 3 days, my accustomed routes got torn from where they were embedded and with the inaudible tectonic bang swayed over, re-cast, to reach their new terminal by the standard snack-stall between the hefty trunks of drowsy poplars in the center of the City Park of Recreation shadowing the main, asphalted, walk where I arrived the very next morning soon after the opening hour…
The initial issue I read in the stall, sitting on a wire box of empty bottles, before I got smart enough to move over onto a nearby bench outside, returning only to exchange the issues or act the Sale-Assistant in Mother’s absence while she went to the park toilet when I even sold something.
By the end of that day, I had lived thru the career of the Soviet intelligence officer Belov, aka Johann Weiss, starting as a private in the German Wehrmacht up to an officer for special missions in the intelligence service of Abwehr.
The trade during that day was rather sluggish, because 2 days earlier the stall ran out of draft beer, and the empty casks piled up outside the back door. However, by the onset of twilight, when I moved back to the booth to finish off the final issue under a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, at the very end of the Second World War, the flow of consumers began to increase.
That’s it!. And, with the collapse of the Third Reich, I stacked all the 3 The Novel-Gazettes on a box by the door and saw that the trickle of customers had turned already into a tight swarm across the outside counter-ledger. There cropped thick growth of hands held up, kinda in the Nazi salutation, only balled about crushed
