The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

you” because no one knew how much Raissa ripped off the directors in eye-to-eye talk in their offices at kindergartens, but I did not care. First, every day Raissa treated us to ice-cream of the most expensive Plombir flavor, and one time she took everyone to a movie show in the Vorontsov Movie Theater, and it was not her fault that “The Western Corridor” turned out such an eerie splatter film. Besides, and most importantly, the money we had earned that week wouldn’t amount to the price of watching films in Club with the check-passes from Director, that we enjoyed for years after her lead…

The Club alone was not enough to satisfy my natural proclivities. Even though attending the temple of Melpomene disguised as Children Sector where the worshipers got blest by free access to film shows (which, undeniably, enhanced their faithfulness), I felt an additional pull to architecture and the only available grounds for practicing it was our khutta’s yard.

The parents allowed erecting an experimental structure there propped by the fence of the Turkovs from Number 17, if and only if it would in no way block access to the shed sections in the yard, to eschew complaints from other dwellers of the khutta.

Together with my brother and Skully, I went after construction materials to the Grove and from among the quagmire bogs of the Swamp, we cut a couple bundles of two-meter-long whips, added to the booty a generous bunch of green twigs, cinched everything onto two bikes and transported home.

A number of the procured whips became the lattice roof secured by pieces of wire and all sorts of strings. While the roof's one edge rested on the fence, the other one was supported by the lattice wall produced of the same whips in the likewise manner. Our skills at tying knots and diligent stickability to the task in hand resulted in a crisscross-styled contraption, a kinda sturdy cage where you could pace to and fro for three steps almost without stooping. The project was accomplished and furred with the finishing layer of leafy twigs over the roof and 2 walls because the fence served the third one and the concluding, fourth, wall provided, by its absence, a conveniently wide entrance. Wow!

When entered, the structure smelt pleasantly of withering leaves and, from outside, it caressed your sight by its presence in the yard corner… A week later, the foliage wilted but the delight and ecstasy with the creative efforts drooped even earlier because there arose the unavoidable pesky question which makes each and every creator scratch the back of their head: What now?

You would not organize a clandestine pioneer group like that in The Timur’s Team just because there was a suitable structure for the headquarters of such an organization in your yard, would you? Especially if you were past the age for pioneer games…

So, Skully and I switched over to our usual pastime – vain hurling of a kitchen knife into the trunk of the old Maple tree by the stack of bricks crumbling with age because that year the first Soviet Western “The Untraceable Avengers” reached, at long last, the Konotop cinemas and the Gypsy’s knife swished across the silver screen to deeply stuck in the white slender trunk of a young Birch tree. In real life though, the home-made knife just bounced from the hard bark even when hitting it with the tip of its blade, and that’s the meaning of being born into a wrong era after all the romantic revolutions and splendid wars dried up and left you no chance of riding a horse after the scattered enemies or shooting a fiery machine-gun to beat off their assault…

The leaves of the structure dried, blackened and fell off but the cage-like skeleton withstood another couple of years…

~ ~ ~

Still and all, my itch for architecture did not subside, but the following, inimitable, creation I built all by myself. The sheds over the Duzenko’s and our earth-pit cellars stood slightly apart and the half-meter gap between them was boarded up from the yard, yet squeezing behind the sheds, along the neighbor’s fence, you got access to that narrow board-sealed cleft. That was where I built my private study room.

A piece of plywood, fixed horizontally to the aforesaid couple of boards nailed from the yard, became a decent desk squeezed between 2 walls of the blind passage. A length of plank, inserted lower the desk edge, served a stool. Absence of any other item of furniture made the interior truly Spartan, but then the study would attract no intruders, neither my sister-'n'-brother nor the little Arkhipenkos. Okay, let’s imagine someone sneaked in when I was not home and… what then? Of course, Natasha made sure to check it all the same and to wrinkle her nose scoffing at my level best creation—that fairly snug and cozy nook in the inter-shed cleavage space.

On finishing construction works, there again arose the mentioned doggone question: what now, eh? Well… let's say… Aha! the place could be enjoyed for unobserved secluded speculations neither disturbed nor seen by anyone, except for Zhoolka who resented my presence on his turf, even behind the clumsy stop-boarding in the gap. And he never cared to conceal his indignation, but got upon his paws and scornfully retired, the chain rattled in his wake, jerked in over his kennel sill, kinda his slam to the door, whenever I squeezed into my Spartan cleft from behind. Yet, what namely can a person use the nook of solitude they've so cleverly created for?

That’s when I had to give free reign to my next long-standing itch, that for graphomania. I have no idea what specific label from their scientific cant they use for my particular case—expressed or manifest graphomania—yet I always felt a certain longing for clear notebooks, albums, block-notes, and suchlike stationery items. It gave me real thrill to spread them wide open and began to cover their innocent pureness with the jerks and strokes of my crinkly