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

other Beatles fans were hanging out around the city. I had been told on, and no doubt about it.

However, I couldn't have words with Father for too long because I was sitting on his neck, and Zampolit threatened him with firing if I kept my hair any more…

A vigorous infection swept over our school in spring. The acutest cases of grave epidemic forms were registered in our grade which definitely turned its main locale and spiller…

Vladya and I were seated on stools at the last desk. Quite ordinary stools whose black-painted seats had oblong holes in their center to insert your hand for conveniently moving it to some different place if needed. Their commonness became a challenge… When we wiped off our foreheads the sweat from selfless toil, the black seats of our stools bore deep white scars crying out, ‘THE BEATLES! THE ROLLING STONES!”, and we looked around – what else could supply us a sufficient pastime?

Some unlimited naivety indeed – what could be out there to busy yourself with in a graduating class? Actually, nothing… Still and all, we gave the boredom a slip – we started writing poetry.

It was a prolific poetic eruption turned out in various forms and genres. At the break, we presented our creations to the classmates. We laughed and they were laughing too, unaware that the virus of poeticizing had already started the invisible undoing of their immune systems. Many of them began trying their hand at the production of rhymed lines. Even Chuba turned out some trifle of an epigram. But the indisputable crest-riders in that wave were sitting, sure enough, on the maimed stools at the last desk… Fortunately, the epidemic eventually died down without fatalities.

(…if those scattered pieces of ruled paper torn off from various notebooks were put together, it could become a collection of aspirant poets. And, stashed away in bookstores stacks, it would accumulate the dust there submerged into its drowsy dreams of eager readers' hands and rising to the fame…

It is highly improbable that any of my classmates would recollect that overweening epidemic. None of them would recognize even their own lines, betcha. But, after all, who cares? The final goal is nothing. The main buzz is in doing. Although, I'm still not ashamed of the lengthy elegy crafted at a lesson in Organic Chemistry:

“The day will come for me to join the robbersTo earn my honest daily breadI'll sleep all day and chew on dried grasshoppersAt night, stray walkers will I intercept…”

Then, of course, I would get killed because elegy is a traditionally sad genre and, lying in the tall grass by the highway:

“I won't grasp it with my headby nearing Death already chilledIf so urgent was indeedFor you to have me killed?Of wood was made my pistol, it wouldn't harm a lamb,With gentle "Hello!" I fleeced the clientsYet left them kopecks for a tram,“Take ‘t easy, folks! So’s my job.”Then soft "Adieu!" and – parting bob…”

A lot of water has flowed in the river of Varanda since then and, quoting the classic poet, handled Monkey, who worshiped banks of the Neva river:

" Some aren't there anymore, and I am far away…”

Okay. That's enough for flashing up my speckles of erudition… It's time to confess that I wasn't a stranger to swindling too. There are things you'd prefer not to remember before starting to recount them…

However, showing oneself off entirely good and irreproachable is foolish and dishonest. It's not a righteous thing, I mean. Anyway, I am not a good guy, I’m way too unsteady for that…)

So, as it was said already, that year we lost the CJR final to the prestigious School 11. In the Contest of Greetings, we schlepped on stage a dummy ship of cardboard, exactly the same as two months before us they dragged out at the Central Television CJR. And they also joked our jokes there, two months before. Both the ship and jokes were still fresh in the memory of the jury members and we were accused of blatant plagiarism in the end.

The team of School 11 came out in top hats made of blackened Whatman paper and finishing their Greeting they presented the hats to our team. I did not get my share, because their Captain left his one on the jury desk to bribe them into the right choice when taking the right decision.

After the defeat, going home without shields yet in top hats, our team members were doffing the paper head-gears at the Settlement crossroads to bye-bye each other and I felt hurt that only I didn't have the thing.

By the moment when the streetcar stop at School 13 was reached, there remained just 2 of all the team – Valya Pisanko and me. And then I insidiously asked Valya for her top hat, like, just to try it on. She credulously gave it and, clapping the paper thing onto my head, I ran away along Nezhyn Street.

I knew she wouldn't follow, she lived in Podlipnoye and had to turn in the opposite direction. Indeed, she didn't chase and only screamed behind, "Sehrguey! Give it back! It's not fair!" I knew it was not fair, but I did not return and did not give it back. Why should I?

The next morning in the lean-to which served my summer bedroom already, I was nauseated by the sight of that piece of Whatman paper blackened with gouache, some disgusting loot.

(…so, I'm assembled of divers parts and meanness enters in the aggregation…)

~ ~ ~

And so the decade was over. But it was not for me to decide whether that term was long or short, because 10 years later I became a different I from that I who 10 years before was handed to the educational system for them to format me into one more usable member in the current society. It’s only fair to admit that the goals set before my didactic cultivators were, in general, achieved. I grew up from a snotty Octoberist to the Head of School Komsomol