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

those who could or were willing to turn up and… A-and with a pair of handcarts rattling their iron wheels against the ragged cobblestones in Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, or creaking wearily along the rest—dust'n'dirt-paved—streets, we ventured into the Settlement in search of scrap metal. Where exactly were we looking for it? It depended. Sometimes a classmate reported a neighbor willing to get rid of a heap of perennial metal layers in the corner of their yard. “God bless you, kids! Drive your handcart in, take all of that away!”

Yet, rusty basins, folding coach-bed springs, and bent nails were a too lightweight stuff to add much of respectability to your grade's scrap heap. Besides, champions for environmental purity were not an ofttimes species in the neighborhood. “So, what's wrong about that trash behind the shed? Rusty thru and thru? But you never know. One of these days it might come handy. A length of wire would nicely fix a fence plank so rotten that nails crash it to pieces. Get along, kids. Go! Go!”

That’s why the newly amalgamated collective of our ninth grade moved for a free search dollying their handcarts along the Plant wall in Professions Street… Like vultures circling in the westerns to locate a prey… At the far end of Plant, where the tracks of the marshaling yard multiplied innumerably, we wheeled around an obviously no man's wheel pair from a railway car. Yet, you couldn't load the multi-ton wheels on a pair of handcarts, otherwise, we'd win at the scrap metal competition in just one go.

On we soared seeking along the railway tracks, to no avail though. But then the guys peeked into a concrete tube section lost in the tall grass alongside the railway to discover a watermelon and a box of grapes.

"Clear as daylight, the station loaders lifted the fruits from some car in a freight train and stashed away for a while." supposed Volodya Sakoon from the former parallel.

We looked around more attentively at the rows of freight trains stilled silently in their tracks, immersed in the torpor of waiting…

Some dude from our party took out a knife to cut the watermelon from the find. Yet, it did not open even when gashed all the way about its equator because of being too big for the knife length. Only when hit against the concrete tube, the watermelon broke up in two, but its core, the so-called "soul", remained in one of the halves. Moistly red, and sugary, stitched with dark brown seeds… Soul… With swiftness never expected from myself, I dealt the sweeping "falcon strike" and by both hands claw-snatched the watermelon's soul. Stunned by my so completely out of the blue deftness, I magnanimously refrained from partaking in the remaining halves. The guys sliced them into handy pieces, while I enjoyed the rindless juice-dripping ball of watermelon flesh from out of my capped palms.

Even the girls couldn’t say “no” to grapes, yet about half of the box we left for the absent loaders who stole them so that they did not feel offended…

An hour later, following the lead from a stray acquaintance, we stroke it real rich on a scrap metal deposit, although at an entirely different spot… In the fence of iron pipes separating Bazaar from the Seminary, aka Vocational School 4, there was a hole thru which we dragged out lots of iron pipe offcuts, long and numerous enough to make a good load for both handcarts.

Next day the House Manager of the Seminary came to our school, identified their pipes in the scrap metal heap collected by our grade, and took them away by a dump truck. He asserted they served as the material for training seminarians in the turners group. However, our Principal, Pyotr Ivanovich, did not even scold us. But then what for? How could you guess the purpose of material dumped into the thicket of nettle? Nonetheless, when giving it a careful thought, you'd always find a good underlying reason for anything. And only my violently swift seizure of the watermelon's soul remained completely inexplicable for me… but it was groovy.

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys, ups, and downs, all my silly mistakes, and breathtaking insights sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)

~ ~ ~

Unpredictable is the inception of friendship. You go home after school, and there Vitya Cherevko, your new classmate from the former parallel, also walks along Nezhyn Street.

"Oh! How come you're here?"

"Just goin' to Vladya's. He lives in Forge Street."

"Hmm. I'm with you."

Since that day I had two classmate-friends: Chuba, aka Vitya Cherevko, and Vladya, aka Volodya Sakoon…

Vladya hid his acned forehead under the long forelock of brown greasy hair that streamed down from the parting above his right ear. 2 or 3 half-ripe pimples on his cheeks were absolved by the beauty of his gorgeous large eyes sufficient to give heartburn to any cutie.

Chuba's black crispy hair had no parting, and his eyes were pale blue. He had a healthy blush in his cheeks and a finicky sprinkle of freckles over his neat nose.

For hanging out, we gathered on the porch way to Vladya's khutta where he lived with his mother, Galina Petrovna. In fact, it was half-of-khutta comprising a room and a kitchen. A box-table, an iron bed, and the brick stove filled the kitchen to the utmost, nothing else could ever be squeezed in, except for the hooks on the wall by the door to hang coats. In the equally narrow room there stood a wardrobe, a bit wider bed, a table with three chairs pushed under it (otherwise you couldn't pass by) and an up-stand shelf topped with a TV. Both the kitchen and the room had a window in