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

uppermost, third, level bunk, undressed, and climbed into the bed on the second level in the compartment of the first-class car. The lights in the car had been turned off already, yet behind the window, there stretched Platform 4 whose crust of firmly trodden snow reflected the glare of arc lamps above it.

At last, from the locomotive in the head of the train, there rolled nearing clangs of cars that yanked each other in turn. The domino effect hit our car too, it jolted and gaining smooth acceleration glided forward. To Moscow! To Moscow!.

On the evening of the following day, we left our skis in the vestibule of a huge school scarcely lit and empty except for a small group of tenants from the surrounding neighborhood who came to take us to their different apartments as bed-and-breakfast guests at their hospitable families.

Next morning, my hosts treated me to tea and hurriedly left for their work telling their teenage son to see me to the same huge school closed for the vacations. On the way, he insistently warned me to mark the route well, so that in the evening I could find their apartment where I was billeted to stay.

We had three meals a day in a huge canteen, not too far from the huge school, both surrounded by the neighborhood of huge multi-storied tower-blocks. And we skipped only one visit to the canteen, which happened on the day when we, together with our skis, were taken to the Taman Guard Division stationed outside Moscow.

There we ran to the attack thru the deep snowdrifts between young Fir-trees, and a soldier in his greatcoat also ran on skis among us smiling and bursting profuse blank rounds from his Kalashnikov assault rifle spilling the spray of spent cartridges into the deep snow. Later in the day, together with two hundred other guys, who arrived for the winter-stage 'Zarnitsa' in Moscow, we were fed with the midday meal in a soldiers' canteen at the Taman Guard Division.

The following day after an endless excursion around the city, our Konotop group arrived in the Red Square to visit the Lenin Mausoleum. We joined the dense line of people moving to it across the Red Square and for a long time kept nearing the Mausoleum while the twilight grew ever thicker above the slick black flagstones showing in patches thru the snow. The icy chill from the pavement pierced the feet even thru the thick soles of winter shoes, and I got pretty cold.

When there remained about fifty meters before the Mausoleum entrance, we learned that the working day was over and they locked it for the mummy to have a night’s rest. The supervisor led our group back across the Red Square to get warm in the brightly lit emporium of GUM, aka the State Universal Store, which worked to later hours. I doubted that the half-hour he allotted for getting warm would be enough to save my feet, however, the stretch did the trick.

In the subway car carrying us back to the hospitable neighborhood, the supervisor announced that 'Zarnitsa' was over, yet we had one more day in Moscow so the first thing in the morning we'd pass thru the Mausoleum and then go loose for a shopping spree.

However, the next morning after leaving my hosts' apartment, I tarried in the huge canteen and, on coming to the huge school, was told that our group had left already to visit Lenin in his casket. The watchman also was leaving until five in the afternoon, so he locked me inside (the weather outdoors was frosty) and all of that day I spent imprisoned in the huge empty school.

Almost all the doors in the building were locked. In the watchman's room, there was a phone and, having never used the device, I started learning. Not a too knotty task to stick your finger into one of 10 holes along the edge of phone dial-disc and wind it collecting random digits until there sounded beeps in the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Hello! Is that zoo over there?"

"No…"

"Then why the call is answered by an ass?"

(…yuck! you wanna puke even recalling…)

Soon after the watchman unlocked me, our group arrived and I was expressly reminded that we were going home the next morning.

In the apartment of my hosts, I saw Twenty Years Later by Dumas inside their glazed bookcase and asked where they sold such books. The hosts began to explain how many crossings were along the way to the bookshop, though it should be closed already. But I went out all the same…

It was dark and very quiet with rare fluffy snowflakes coming down from above, one after another. I stood by the glass walls of the locked bookshop with the feeble glow of distant light inside. Some supernatural emptiness wrapped all around in a profound immense silence… Then a belated passer-by walked soundlessly along leaving shallow steps in the soft virgin dusting over the pavement, and I went back to the home of strangers. There was "The Vertical" on TV, starring Vladimir Vysotsky…

~ ~ ~

We knew exactly what we wanted, we aimed at becoming a vocal-instrumental ensemble because in the then USSR there were no rock groups. Rock groups were an attribute of the decaying capitalist West, but in our Soviet state, free from the exploitation of a man by man, rock groups were named vocal-instrumental ensembles, aka VIA's.

The songs about the prosecutor, who raised his blood-smeared hand against the happiness and peaceful life of an honest pickpocket, were just a spring-board in our glorious career. Those upstart crows, so popular VIA's as The Singing Guitars, and The Jolly Guys, actually, stole our songs. It was us, who should have performed the hit about fetching the ring of Saturn to ask the one we loved to marry us, and no other but we and only we should have turned out that thrilling electric guitar vibrato ending to "The Gypsy Girl" in the LP Disc of instrumental numbers. But while we were busy