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

kick the ball with it and umpires followed him closely otherwise goal posts were smashed to splinters by his cannonball hits and goalkeepers taken away on the stretcher.

Nah, sharing such prattle wouldn’t be welcome in the dampish cave of the tent with Komsomol activists dropped around over their beds…

One guy from our tent could play the guitar which he borrowed from somewhere in the long low barrack building. All in all, his repertoire comprised just 2 songs: a ballad about a city the road to which you’d hardly ever find, and people there were straightforward bringing up whatever they had on their minds, and they preferred their lovers’ hugs to the comfort of apartments, followed by a lively rock about skeletons walking in a file after enjoying some good stuff.

However, even with so limited number of songs, he always had an audience; the guitar strumming attracted guys from the nearby tents and the girls from their bedrooms in the long building.

I asked him to teach me guitar playing and he showed me the 2 chords he knew and how to beat out the rhythm of „eight“. Deep furrows from the guitar strings disfigured my left-hand finger pads. It hurt, but I still wanted to learn it so much…

In the CJR game against the team from the Sumy group we lost, but not in the contest of greetings for which I didn’t plagiarize a single line from anywhere. We acted aliens who had lost their way.

“It was Mars we were going to!Yeah-yeah!It is you we’ve come to!Yeah-yeah!..”

~~~~~

~ ~ ~ The Youth

After that summer many of my classmates were not around anymore, they moved or went to different technical and vocational schools. Kuba entered the Odessa Sea School, Volodya Sherudillo became a student at the Konotop Vocational School 4, aka GPTU-4, which institution among Konotopers bore the unofficial name of "Seminary" turning its disciples into "the seminarians". Skully endeavored to enter some Mining School in Donetsk but eventually landed in the Konotop Railway Transportation College.

The parallel class also suffered heavy losses and, even though one of their girls bore a baby at the vacations, leftovers of 8 “A” and 8 “B” were, nonetheless, unified into the single ninth grade…

On the first school day, after the ceremonial line-up concluded by the traditionally endless bell signaling the start of the first lesson in the academic year, our classroom was entered by Valera Parasyuk, handled Quak. He was a blonde tenth-grader running after some girl from the former parallel and popped up on the pretext of a casual visit just, like, to hello the guys.

The Ukrainian Language teacher, Fedosya Yakovlevna, handled Feska, with the straight parting in her colorless hair braided into a pitiful crown, came the second having ceded Quak about half-minute. Yet, full of sporting spirit, she indicated the door and ordered him to leave the classroom. Without much a-do Quak satisfied her demand, yet chose another, his own, way; he climbed onto the windowsill and departed in a jump off into the schoolyard. His black, well-polished, shoes flashed in the flight, a kinda bright goodbye.

Not for nothing the Chemistry teacher, Tatyana Fyodorovna, handled Hexabenzyl, was in the habit of bringing those his shoes to our attention, "If a guy's shoes shine that means he's looking after himself. Follow the example of Parasyuk whose shoes are always polished!"

So, Fedosya Yakovlevna, aka Feska, closed the window left open by Valera Parasyuk, aka Quak, and called the class to pay no attention to his antics because he didn't belong here anymore but transferred already to School 14 (which was the other of two schools in the Settlement) as long as he dwelt next to the mentioned school location and from now on he was the resident headache for teachers over there…

The best way to learn the worth of new acquaintances and getting rubbed along with each other is doing some mutual job… After a week of classes, the senior grades at our school were instructed to report present in the schoolyard on Sunday morning equipped with buckets because we were going to help the kolkhoz in the Podlipnoye village with harvesting their crop.

The day was glorious – a warm September day enjoying the bright sun in the blue sky. The clamorous column of students reached the edge of a cornfield and we were tutored on the technique of harvesting at hand. Tear the ear off the stem, shuck and drop it in your bucket. When the bucket’s filled up, take it to the common cob of ears and pour your share into it. The entirety of so simple actions becomes the process of "patronage assistance to a collective farm".

Each patronizer was put before a row of corn stalks to go along and harvest the ears on their way to the other end of the field. And off we went in one united push, mingling the ear dubs at tin buckets' bottoms with yells of cheerful juvenile, and the sagacious admonitions by caring teachers, and tangent yet loud bangs of thunderflashes thrown high in the cloudless sky…

It did not take long before I noticed my lagging behind the general progress. So, hauling another filled bucket to the cob, I paid attention that not all the cornrows were fully clear of corn ears. It seemed, the instructors failed to be explicit enough and emphasize that our objective was not collecting all ears in the field, but to select best of the best, the most gorgeous cream of ears, so to say.

Correcting my working practices accordingly, in no time I caught up with the main body of the patronizers, then got ahead, and overtook the avaunt-garde party which now grew to 4 advanced shock-workers.

Being ahead of the common mass of laborers has a number of advantages. First and foremost, you don't need to go back to the common cobs of the harvested corn ears. As soon as your bucket gets filled, you just pour the ears on the ground, becoming the founder of a new cob for pending contribution