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

I unbuttoned her coat to make my way to the beloved breasts, she recoiled and said she could not allow everything to a man who, in fact, was no one to her.

Was it me that she considered no one?! After all that had been between us?!.

(…sorting out the toppled relations, like, who’s righter, who’s wronger, is just a farewell cannonball fired with the stern cannon after the ship sailing away…)

We broke up. Fare thee well, sweetest Natalie…

"Ah, tender rosebuds killed by the cruel frost…"

~ ~ ~

End February, a year after I told Mother that I agreed to be operated on, I had to lie under the knife. A manly man should keep his word, ain't it?

Starting in the evening and all night long, my stomach ached sharply and the ambulance, called in the morning, diagnosed the appendix that had to be removed before too late. I walked to the vehicle myself but there I had to lie down in the canvas stretcher placed on the floor. Mother also wanted to go, but along Nezhyn Street, there was walking an acquaintance of hers, who was late for her work, and Mother forwent her place to the woman who she always praised as a very good legal consultant deserving all the possible respect.

In the City Hospital, despite the urgency of my diagnosis, they were too lazy to carry me on the stretcher, and I had to walk up to the second floor myself. There I changed into the blue hospital gown over a white shirt with no buttons and walked to the operation room.

They helped me to lie onto the long tall table and fixed all my extremities to it by wide sturdy belts. A white sheet was thrown over a tall frame above my face so that I could not see what they were doing to my tied up parts. A nurse, whom I also could not see, stood behind my head and asked all sorts of diverting questions. The interview was obviously intended to substitute the general anesthesia because they only syringed some local anesthetic in my stomach.

The injection took effect, I followed how they were splitting me down there and getting into my abdomen but it felt somehow in a distanced way as if they were doing it to my pants, although at the moment I had nothing on but the hospital shirt on me. A couple of times it really hurt though, so that I even groaned but the invisible nurse behind my pate began to pour a fiddle-faddle of what a gutsy patient I was, she never saw so brave, so I shut up to let them finish their business without any distracting noise. However, to a cot in the long corridor, I was taken on a gurney, after all.

Two days later they brought me a note from Vladya. He wrote that he was down in the reception hall but they did not let him pass thru, and our class would come to see me when I was allowed to get up, and I should recover as soon as possible because Chuba grew violently untamed and kept jumping at Vladya like a Mazandaran tiger.

After the surgery, they warned me to hold back coughing and avoid any straining so that the stitches keep the cut. But could you really avoid it when having such friends?

"Chuba Maza.." And, crushing the paper slip in my fist, I pushed my face into the pillow to keep back the rolling up round of laughter.

"Mandara.. tiger.”

Hha! Haha!

"Ouch! It hurts!"

And even after I managed, with a lot of preservative stops, to read up the note, there was no way to ward off the jerky lines popping time and again up in my mind.

"Tiger Chuba Mazanda…”

Haha! Haha!

And tears seeped thru my eyelids squeezed so tightly. Vladya! You're worse than a tiger, O, son of a bitch!.

Ten days later I was discharged, and in one more week came to the hospital to have the stitches thread pulled from my stomach, and collect the reference releasing me from PE classes for one month…

By the by, Vladya's scrawl was more cryptic than a team of famous detectives could possibly decipher with all their methods of elementary deduction.

Half of the written essays he handed in were not even read by the Literature teacher who returned them unchecked but fiercely gashed, crisscross, in red ink. On some occasions, he even failed himself to make out heads or tails in his own graffiti and turned to me for assistance.

I was the expert arbitrator in his cryptographic disputes with Zoya Ilyinichna, "No, there is nothing wrong with the spelling, he always writes "e" that way, and this one stands for "a" by him."

"What "e"? What "a"? They're just ticks!"

"Yes, for sure, but that tick's tail is, like, a bit longer. See?"

I had a rough talk with Father when he said I should have my hair cut, for it already was as long as it’s damn hard to find a name for. And because of my looks, he was summoned to the Zampolit at the RepBase.

The enterprise repaired not just helicopters, but military machines and instead of Directors or Managers they had high-rank officers and Zampolit’s post was that of Deputy Commander at the RepBase. Now, that Commander simply ordered Father to stop his son from being a frightful sight in the city.

True, I did have a yan for sporting long hair like that by The Beatles. And even though the length of theirs was beyond my reach, my hair had already grown enough to touch the top of the shoulder blades when I threw my head back as far as I could to marvel my profile reflected by the mirror in the wardrobe door. At a recent CJR match, I performed the Dean Reed's hit "Jerico" hopping on the stage with a muted mike and whipping my face with my hair.

One good whipping deserved another. How would the RepBase Zampolit know that I was a son of their worker? As if few