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

Thus, there remained only a minor drag of finding content for those ripping lines, an easy quiz for an expressed (or manifest?) graphomaniac. I simply grabbed a book about the adventures of a group of circus actors in the turbulent years of the Civil War, added a pen and a thick notebook, not finished off during the last academic year, and dragged them to my study—so to say—room…

(…here’s a queer, yet scientifically noteworthy, fact – the written exercises assigned at school for homework somehow made my graphomania fade into the woodwork…)

There, the book and notebook were placed on the desk of unvarnished plywood piece, and I started to copy the content from the first into the ruled—but otherwise untouched—pages of the latter. And I did not bother to ask myself about the purpose of such an occupation. Would it make any difference? I just enjoyed the process of doing it.

After a week or so, the process neared the middle in the second chapter, when a spell of bad weather made my study room too damp and chilly, and the printed adventure story remained un-hand-copied….

In good weather, I even had a private reading room, not of my personal creation though… The plots, unfurling behind the long sectioned shed and the lean-tos over the earth-pit cellars, were split by narrow treads between the beds of turned soil for kitchen crops. Those beds, however, did not merge into integral landholdings of respective owners because sundry historical processes led to land swapping, as well as using it as a means of paying for goods or services obtained from the adjacent landlords. As a result, the land possessions turned into the streak of complicated patchwork. For instance, our tomato bed was located right behind the common shed and followed by Duzenko’s stretch, which separated it from our cucumber-and-sunflower bed as well as from the booth of our outhouse next to the slop pit. And our potatoes were planted past the Pilluta’s strip, at the very end of the khutta's garden, beneath the old sprawling Apple tree.

After our potatoes bed, there began, or rather ended, the plot belonging to the khutta in Kotsubinsky Street, which ran parallel to Nezhyn Street. So, the vegetable and fruit gardens, embraced by the khuttas of 3 adjacent streets and 1 lane, composed a vast area with vegetable beds and fruit trees of different sorts.

The Apple tree, on whose widely sprawling branches I lounged in clear summer days reading a book under the blue dome of the sky with the remote motionless cumuli, was called Antonovka Apple. Some of its branches were long enough to allow stretching out at full length over them and lightly sway until a gentle breeze would run up to you from the heat-swept expanses of the summer.

Whenever my sides felt sore from so hard a hammock, I’d climb down and go on a stealthy visit to the raspberry plot somewhere between Numbers 15 and 13. In the gardens, you might occasionally come across a short span of a fencing fragment that served a landmark splitting the possessions, but not a barrier to a sneaky raid…

From among those environs I was carried away with The Interstellar Diaries of Jona Calm and The Return From a Space Mission by Stanislaw Lem, Khoja Nasreddin by Vladimir Solovyov, The Odyssey of Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, among other pulp fictions for unsystematic reading by the younger generations.

But then, for no obvious reason, I suddenly decided to meet the requirements of the school curriculum and started to learn by heart the novel-poem Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, although at school your home assignment would be to memorize not more than the opening stanza from the poem. In breach of the modest requirement in school curriculum, after solidifying the first stanza, I went on to the following ones and murmured, day after day, to the Antonovka Apple tree about the constant alertness of the Breguet watch, and the profitable merchandise enriching scrupulous London, and the pitiful lack of a couple or two of slender female legs about all of Russia…

When the number of memorized stanzas grew over twenty, I began to lose my way in the countless threads of lines at recital them all at once until Mother helped me out. Returning from a Sunday visit to Bazaar, she mentioned meeting there Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna, a teacher of the Russian Language and Literature from our school, who asked if I would like to go to Leningrad with an excursion of schoolchildren at a modest price.

You bet I would! But where could I get the money from? Mother paid, and she also gave me an incredible sum of 10 rubles for the journey. I made a firm decision to spend that money on a miniature billiards, like the one we were playing at Children Section using steel balls from crushed bearings.

(…yet now, not as a consistent narrator, but as a layman archaeologist wrapped up in my sleeping bag in this tent surrounded by the eerie symphony of the wild forest nightlife – would I be able to unearth the root reason for the strenuous memorization of the Pushkin’s masterpiece?

It seems, that only now and just from here, I would.

To begin with, the scheme “I decided and started to…” does not apply to me. Developing a use case is quite okay, especially if an accurate and reasonable one, but my way of doing things is exactly opposite. I act first, and only then start looking for a suitable reason to justify my action and give it some resemblance of logicality. That is, instead of being motivated by well-defined decisions, I do things on the spur of the moment.

But what or who is prodding me to act then?! Which are the secret springs and goads? The answer is simple: It’s because of my credulous and all-too-ready submissiveness to the impact of the printed word. Yes, the stuff read by me determines my subsequent actions.

The episode, when the Soviet secret agent, Alexander Belov, forces the fascist intelligence officer