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

No bus came after us. Instead, a “goat”-Willys with a canvas top drove into the glade, and we were told there had happened some pickle. The collapsed tents and four girls filled all the room there was in the vehicle, and the rest had to go to the city on foot, carrying the 2 tent stocks that also needed transportation to the House of Pioneers, yet did not fit into the “goat”.

It turned out that twelve kilometers on foot were a damn long distance, especially when dragging along a wooden tent stock even if not too heavy.

The guys from School 12 soon disappeared from view together with their stock, and we lagged diminishing in numbers because some people went ahead and we never caught up with them, neither saw them that day.

When we reached a streetcar stop in the city outskirts there remained only three of us: I, my classmate Sasha Skosar, and the smooth stock of pinewood coated with green paint.

(…Oboy! We got bone-tired. I remember that stunned by fatigue we were not up to chewing ham when reached the streetcar stop nearby the Tram Depot, which memory leaves me indifferent. Perhaps, any kind of sentiment got dulled by multiple repetitions of that same state in my following life. However, the picture of a moose dissolving in the twilight among the trees, I can vividly see even now and it brings a little smile to my lips – hey, Mr. Whopper, pass my best to Bambi!..)

~ ~ ~

In spring Father switched his workplace. He left his job of a locksmith at Car Repair Shop Floor of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant and moved over to Shop Floor 19 at the Konotop Electro-Mechanical Plant, aka KEMZ, aka the “Red Metallurgist” Plant, to embrace the same position there.

The salary of workers at KEMZ was a trifle higher. The trifle’s exact size though I didn’t know, such matters never interested me because it’s Father and Mother who were in charge of getting money, after all. I had cares of my own being up to my chin in CJR, and Club, and all sorts of Groups, not to mention the books non-stop exchanged at the library. Well, kerosene and water fetching were also my responsibility, but if they needed something from the Nezhyn Store, let them send Natasha or Sasha…

Besides his salary, Father earned some side money by repairing TV sets considered hopeless cases even by the specialists at the TV Repair Atelier. About once a month, coming from work, he would collect his pot-bellied satchel of green leatherette with his multimeter tester, soldering iron, some spare vacuum-tubes, and other necessary things before leaving till late at night. Then he’d come back, sozzled pleasantly, and hand Mother a crushed three rubles of earnings. To parry her loud rhetoric disparaging his shameful alcoholic propensity, he reiterated one and the same, unbeatable clue, “Was my drink on you?” Probably, Mother’s eagerness to upgrade his moral standards took roots in her suspicion of 2 more rubles stashed away by Father, I don't know, I've never been keen on monetary matters…

Sometimes, the procedure lasted for two evenings. If so, on the first one, Father came back home sober with neither money nor his satchel left at the client’s khutta until resolving the complicated case. The most critical ones were delivered to our khutta. Father put the dead box on the desk under the only window in the room, where he freed it of its case transferred then out of way onto the wardrobe, so that the desktop held now just the box’s entrails—the electronic tube within the skeleton of aluminum panels with the thick growth of divers radio vacuum-tubes. He would turn it over and over, checking from all sides, muttering, “Well, so what’s that that you want then? Eh, sweetheart?”

In the dead of night, I would be waked by sharp hissing—Father, in the niggardly light from the desk lamp, had brought bouncing white stripes to flick across the tube screen. “So, that’s why you couldn't shoot, girlie! Not loaded you were!”

Then, for a couple of days, we watched the repaired TV because its screen was wider than that of ours until the owner came to take back home the box he’d almost crossed out from his life. So, it’s not in vain that Father made the filings of those The Radio magazines…

Mother also wanted to change her job but couldn’t find any. It was Father who helped her to get a job at KEMZ. He repaired the TV of Personnel Manager there, and when asked about the charge, Father answered he did not want money, let his wife be given a job at the plant. Personnel Manager replied, “No problem, bring her.”

At first, Mother could not believe it, because six months before that same Personal Manager flatly turned her down saying there were no prospects of any jobs there.

When the parents came together, Personal Manager suggested Mother apply for a presser at Pressing Shop Floor. Though they worked in shifts there, the salary depended on the production output, and no one took home less than a hundred rubles. While Mother went to his secretary to fill the application form, Personal Manager laughed and told Father that he remembered her, but the previous time he thought she was pregnant. Women in a family way were not supposed to be given a job, after a month of working they'd get a year of paid maternity leave. Personal Manager wouldn’t be petted for admitting the pregnant but, as it turned out, so was her bodily structure.

That way Mother became a presser at KEMZ. Her job there was filling all kinds of molds with special powders for melting by the heating press to transform them into this or that spare part of plastic. She worked two shifts—a week from eight to five, the following one from five to half to twelve, because of the shortened break for meal.

In summer the press radiated infernal heat, and the molds were awfully heavy