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

I ventured to look for happiness at the Kiev State University named after T. Shevchenko, taking my school certificate to the Department of English Language there. Unlimited arrogance it was, considering the extent of my knowledge which encompassed a couple of grammar tables memorized from the English textbook for the 8th grade. However, audacity calls for reward and all the ride from Konotop to Kiev (4 hours by a local train) I spent on a seat next to Irina Kondratenko, the most good-looking girl among my ex-classmates. The gorgeous black eyes and long black hair made her so beautiful that I would never dare approach the girl, what’s the use to be unreasonable? And suddenly—lo!—4 hours of riding side by side filled with an eager conversation.

Irina also was going to Kiev to become a student somewhere while living at some relatives of hers and, being already acquainted with the city, she advised me by which streetcar to go from the station square to the University… The ceilings at the University were unusually high to drive it home to the folks it was the right place for getting higher education. At the dean's office, I swapped my certificate of secondary education and the reference about my excellent state of health for the address of a student hostel in about one hour's ride by a trolleybus.

The hostel manager, or maybe she was just a dormitory attendant in charge of forking out the bed linen in exchange for my passport, turned out an unmistakable racist and didn’t care about hiding her ugly inclinations. I deducted it when 2 young Vietnamese entered her office (or the stockroom), immediately following me and asked her for an oilcloth to cover the table in their room. Her crisp retort was, "No oidcloth for you! You're an oidcloth yourself! Get out of here!"

They timidly left, sad and puny against the background of that robust Ukrainian racist. I wondered silently if she was able to pronounce "oilcloth" in Vietnamese.

However, jumping to conclusions when unaware of all the concurrent circumstances might result in faulty evaluation. That whole scene could very easily have nothing to do with racism. There was no 100 percent guarantee that them those bitchy Vietnamese were not asking for the fifth oilcloth on the same day, or else that it wasn't the fifth pair of Vietnamese demanding an oilcloth from the overworked Ukrainian woman utterly tired of their looking so much alike…

One of my roommates also was an applicant for the English Department, only he had already served in the army. The next day, we went to the University together to attend a pre-examination lecture where he chattered with the lecturer so fluently that I felt myself like at that Regional Physics Olympiad, where all of them understood each other and only I was cutting an odd dolt around.

After the lecture, I went to the dean's office and took back my matriculation papers. I do not remember what exactly lie I told them because it was not easy to confess that I freaked out and surrendered without even trying. On the way to the hostel to collect my passport, there gushed such a rain that at times the trolley had to swim from one stop to another. The rain to wash away the slightest traces… The four-hour trip by the local train to Konotop was spent in desolate silence… No cute chat-companions for scurvy cowards…

In Konotop, any knotty question gets resolved on the fly. Whereto? Of course, same place with the rest of your gaggle. Join the crowd, mate.

Skully was already a third-year student at the Railway Transportation College, above the Under-Overpass tunnel. Vladya and Chuba had submitted their papers for admittance to the same institution. So the question "whereto?" was solved before me, I could only matriculate to the Konotop Railway Transportation College. Even Anatoly Melai was there embracing some vague position of a laboratory assistant, but with the academic year not started yet he was just walking the corridors in blue overalls engaged in wiring, when not busy singing.

As it turned out, Anatoly was an avid fan of The Pesnyary VIA who had recently performed "The Dark Night" in the Kremlin Hall. Imagine the picture, eh? All the top geezers from the Political Bureau of the Central Committee in the first row – Brezhnev, Suslov…er…who else?…Podgorny…And the dudes spread it out in full with the unleashed guitar reverberation!… Plus the vocals, of course! All their numbers are in no less than four-part harmony:

And Anatoly, throwing up his face in the pockmarks left by gone acne, filled the empty corridor with echoes of one or another from those harmony parts. And why not? It's summer and no classes around, even the admittance exams hadn't started yet and, the main factor, he's in his overalls.

He promised to put in a word for The Orpheuses applicants, however, only one-third of us was admitted—Chuba and Vladya fell thru and went to work at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant…

Mid-August we made a proposal to the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, which he could not refuse—we would play dances in the Plant Park. For free.

Each of the three parks in the city of Konotop—the Central, the Loony, and the Plant Park—was furnished with a dance-floor. Those dance-floors presented complete replicas of each other: the spherical concha over the band stage abutted the wide circle of concrete guarded by the two-meter tall grating of iron pipes which enclosure had the narrow entrance gate (diametrically opposite the stage) made of the same pipes. Even the paint coat of the gratings was the same gray silver. The only difference was that the paint on the pipes in the Central Park of Recreation had not peeled off so dismally as by two others.

Mother remembered that as a young girl, she attended the Plant Park dance-floor because in summertime there played a brass band. Later, everything ground to a halt and, in the