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

him by his name, he was from the graduating class at our school, and a couple of times I saw him in Club too. Well, so he moved near. Hey. Hey. How’s all? So-so. And we went on standing silently.

Then I saw the jerk started clamping me as if I was a girl. On the right, there's the window with the handrail across it and the driver cab behind me, with those darn Rules above another handrail. Now, the clown grabbed those 2 handrails and pressed me into the corner.

“Piss off! Stop horsing!” says I, but he only giggled and squinted his stupid eyes, yet didn’t let me go. Such a shame. I looked at the passengers. They were not many, like, about a dozen and everybody, as if mimicking each other, was looking out of the windows intently so, like, on an excursion to a famous city, like, something could be seen thru the ice-coated panes.

To put it short, I barely managed to wriggle out of his grip and stood on the steps by the cab door. There, I had to put my clothes in order because of both the jacket and the sweater, well, everything up to the naked skin, got jerked up. Some stupid asshole, if so was your bent, go and enroll the Greek-Roman wrestling group at the Club Gym and rub against your partners on the mats. But what a humiliation for the big-time CJR Captain getting into a such sinusoidal flop!.

And the next breathtaking crest rolled up end April at the All-Union military-patriotic game Zarnitsa, aka “Heat-Lightning”. Nominally, the game was for pioneer organizations but still involved all the senior classes. And I was appointed Commander of the United Formation at School 13!

No paper shoulder straps, no division into “blues” and “greens”, and everyone should have by themselves a knapsack with the field ammunition: a bowl and spoon, a needle and thread. After the line-up in the schoolyard where a PE teacher, Ivan Ivanovich, checked a pair of knapsacks for the presence of the told items, we went along Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, past Bazaar and turned into Budyonny Street. There we passed the Plant Park and went down to the Swamp, aka Grove. Thick fog was hiding progress of the column on march.

We stopped at the Grove and the PE teachers—Ivan Ivanovich and Lyubov Ivanovna—opened a sealed envelope with the directions for our further route and mission. The column proceeded to the bridge in the high railway embankment. Besides the main tracks, there was a sideway forking-off from under the bridge to the Meat-Packing Plant, we followed that lone track and outflanked the Grove from the left.

The fog was thinning and thru its rising wisps, there peeped fragments of a bumpy field. Ivan Ivanovich roared “To attack!” and we ran across the field shouting “Hurray!” I ran amid the disordered crowd and didn’t feel my body, which, like, dissolved in the general stampede and of all my senses there remained only the sight relaying sketchy pictures of torn fog locks over bumps and tussocks jumping before and past me…

Then we stopped not far from Podlipnoye in the field with occasional mighty-trunk Elms. The fog cleared up completely, and the day became glad and sunny. A real army field-kitchen arrived from the village and we were fed with hot soup. Then after a short-cut march thru the Grove, we returned to our schoolyard and lined up again. As the commander, I stood to face the ranks, ranging from the sixth to the tenth-graders, and some unknown cameraman shot us, buzzing his hand camera.

The following Monday Volodya Sherudillo mockingly (but very funny) acted me facing the ranks of my schoolmates, a slouch-shouldered weakling with a stoop but, whenever the camera turns my way, I'm bravely thrusting my chest out and stretching at attention almost to tiptoes.

(…at times I wonder if not for the daily fetching water from the pump to our khutta, might I have still become for at least an inch taller than the fourth in the line of boys when our class fell in at PE classes?..)

That spring I had a dream of a long journey and by no other means if not a raft. Most likely, I was impressed by the Tour Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition. The dream was shared with Kuba and Skully, and they approved it, yeah, that would be cool, they said. And we even began to discuss the details of its realization. If, say, the raft was built on the Seim river then, carried by its flow, we would reach the river of Desna and farther downstream to the mighty Dnieper, that flowed to the Black Sea. And the journey should be completed before August when Kuba had to leave for entrance examinations to the Odessa Sea School and Skully to some Mining Technical College in Donetsk.

The dream lasted for two weeks, and then it began to wither. Problems of growing magnitude cropped up in the way of bringing it to life. Well, suppose we’d made a deal with the watchman in the Pine forest on the Seim river. Then how to move a heavy log from the forest to the river? Dragging it for half-kilometer? But when constructing a raft, you needed more than a log or two. Eventually, I ran into a thought which shattered the dream irreparably, into fine useless shreds. Because I remembered that on the Dnieper, following the Lenin’s GOERLO plan, they had built several hydro-electric power stations whose dams across the river put raft navigation out of question. Dismantle the raft and drag it, log by log, to bypass each dam? Damn!. I did not tell my friends about the incompatibility of the advanced electrification with our beautiful dream and simply stopped discussing it with them…

Volodya Gourevitch made another fiery speech and declared it was time to annul the hegemony of School 11 at the city Ballroom Dancing Competitions. At the first training of the group of ballroom dances, there were formed five pairs