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

Dietrich to flip thru a folder with top-confidential documentation before his eyes, so that later, in a safe house, to dictate to his helper-asset hundreds of addresses, names, and figures from his memory, becomes the hidden underlying reason for my endeavor at memorizing the rhymed lines by Alexander Pushkin.

No, I did not want to compete or check my abilities, the root stimulus is the plain fact of my reading The Novel-Gazette filled with the work by Kozhevnikov which, frankly speaking, does not deserve the name of a novel.

Or let's take another case, when, impressed by the book The Baron in the Tree, about an aristocrat who refused to walk upon the ground anymore, and moved to live in the trees, I mounted the heap of bricks stacked under the too thick trunk of the American Maple and, from that elevation, climbed the less impregnable part of the tree. And from there I went on getting higher and higher, to the very clouds that floated quite low on that day, almost brushing the crown.

Viewed from the upper branches, distant khuttas far down under the tree decreased to the size of matchboxes. Taming fear and dizziness, I observed the bird-eye view of Bazaar, and the Plant, no more hidden behind the tall wall along Professions Street, and of the Station on the other side of the Plant.

The magic power of the printed word by Italo Calvino made me compliant like melted wax, turned into a docile slave, who was alighted atop of the American Maple tree…

Of course, the secret springs slip at times – how on earth could I possibly compete with D’Artagnan and ride twenty leagues in one day running down three horses which I did not have? Keep your legs to the length of the blanket, they say.

That’s why I like this sleeping bag so much – it fits any leg size…)

~ ~ ~

To Leningrad, we went thru Moscow. Besides me and Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna, School 13 was represented in the excursion group by 2 more girls from my class – Tanya and Larissa, as well as by 2 students from the parallel, 7 “A” grade – Vera Litvinova, and Tolik Sudak, the rest of the group were students from other city schools herded by a couple of their teachers.

The train arrived in Moscow in the morning, and we spent there one day which time was enough for me to make 3 major discoveries. The first one was the discovery of the existence of foreshadowing dreams. It was proved undeniably when we rode an excursion bus on our tour in the city—look to the left! look to the right!—until at some place, they asked us to leave the bus for a close look at something from anear.

Our group tagged along with the guide, I also followed straggling at some distance, when, all of a sudden, the surroundings looked so much familiar to me—both that bridge above no river, and the far-off tower of the Moscow State University, and even the locked stall on the pavement I walked by.

Someone from our group turned back and called me, “Don’t lag or we will leave without you!”, to which I answered, “When you turn back, I’ll be the first!” And exactly that moment I felt having seen already that view in all its details and pronounced those very words because all of that was in a dream dreamed by me a week before. I felt freaked out and even stopped, but not for long – the excursion group was indeed returning to the bus.

(…in my subsequent life, time and again I had the like instances of getting back to once-seen dreams. Some of such dream recollections could precede for a split-second the actual development happening live, in real, so that I knew who and what would say a second later, and by what gesture they would accentuate their words because the going on scene was just an echo of what had been already seen by me in some earlier dream. Duration of such presaging dreams is not exceedingly long, and at times it can take years before their echoing in my wake hours.

I never discussed my discovery with anyone and much later, with a mixture of relief and disappointment, I learned that such things happen not only to me, and that folks in Scotland even have a special term for the phenomenon – “second sighting”…)

After the second revelation, we went to the All-Union Exhibition of the Achievements of National Economy, aka Veh-Deh-eN-Kha. There we were taken to the Astronautics Pavilion, with the gigantic white needle of “Vostok” spaceship put in front of its facade, one from the series by which Gagarin orbited the Earth. Inside the spacious pavilion, several excursions were wandering at once among the stands, and mock-ups and mannequins donned in red spacesuits and bulky helmets.

I did not know what the other guides were sharing to their groups, but ours ruminated things known by anyone from the times immemorial, so I kept lagging, or running ahead, and at some point sneaked off into a wide side door. Stone steps led upward following the arrowed inscription “The Optics Pavilion”. I reached the landing where the steps U-turned going up to the pavilion itself. But I didn’t follow them any farther immobilized and fascinated by the extravaganza of colorful airiness unfolded on the landing. A whopping cube of space was filled with a motionless, as if frozen, family of soap bubbles of all sizes radiating silently diverse hues of the rainbow colors. What a delight!.

My deviation from the programmed rout was noted by someone in the group and they called me from down there, “Come back! We're leaving!” After a parting look at the unreachable pavilion entrance on the upper landing, I joined the excursion.

(…what was behind that door I do not know and the discovery itself is as follows: sometimes a single step away from the trodden rut opens new shining worlds, but, as runs a popular folk adage in the country that