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

(…I have no idea why with a straw, but that's what I hankered for at those periods when there was no time, although I fully understood that the straw would only break instead of moving that iron piece of crap…)

The Mechanical Shop Floor machine tools would slow down and fell silent, one after another. The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit gathered from elsewhere to line the workbench with their backs leaned against their respective vises.

The two-meter-tall Mykola-the-old empties his horse-long nose into the crumpled lump of a rag the color of earth-and-ash. Could you ever suspect so gentlemanly habits by the geezer?! Mykola-the-young froze at pensive picking fresh acne on his cheeks.

Tick! Twenty-seven to five.

Swarthy-faced Yasha begins to tell me a story how the Red Army took him along after liberating Konotop of Germans. A solitary shabashka-tinker at the grinding wheel in the corner does not interfere with the calm flow of Yasha's narration.

They ran to attack and the ours supported them from behind shooting the "forty-fivers" when one of the supporting shells shot off the balls of an attacker. With the slow move of his palm-down hand, Yasha demonstrates the low-arc trajectory of a flying 45-mm shell. After which the poor wretch ran another half-kilometer before he died…

Recollecting how I also felt nothing and only saw the ground of the bumpy field jumping before my eyes, as we ran to attack thru the shaggy fog in the military game of Zarnitsa, I believe Yasha.

He shifts his cap far back revealing the sharp, like an arrowhead, angle from which his black hair runs up under the halo of his cap peak. Not a speckle of gray. Looks twice younger than Borya Sakoon who once told me that at the installation of the TV tower something went wrong with the uppermost section. It was in winter with severe frost and Yasha took off his sheepskin coat, climbed up by the cable and put it to rights.

Mykola-the-old two heads taller than Yasha. They're sort of chums and after work go home by the same diesel train, only to different stops.

Tick! Seven to five. Okay, that's that; time to go to change…

Skully also dropped out of the Railway Transportation College and entered our Experimental Unit which was a smart move. They didn’t pay him any scholarship there but after getting the diploma he’d be sent to slave in the middle of one or another nowhere. Did he really need it?

So three of The Orpheuses got together. As for Chuba, he worked at the Car Repair Shop Floor put there by some protective hairy hand because a carpenter’s profession is cleaner than ours and better paid for, we scarcely ever ran into each other in the Plant.

And we continued to play dances even when Vladya chiseling sheet-iron peened heartily his finger. Club paid each of us thirty-six rubles a month. It seemed too little, but what could we do? At our attempt at talking business to the Club Director, he said that after buying the electric guitar for one 150 rubles there remained no funds to increase our salary.

True, the guitar of Iolanta brand was a classy thing – so neatly streamlined and it sounded miles better than make-it-yourself ones after The Radio magazine guide, Iolanta’s smooth scarlet gleam eclipsed and turned them into pieces of spray-painted plywood.

Soon after, I was sent together with Projectionist Konstantin Borisovich to the city of Chernigov after new instruments from the local music factory there – the bass, and rhythm electric guitars. Pavel Mitrofanovich talked to the Plant Management and I was exempted from work for two days, because of the long way to Chernigov and back.

There we stayed overnight in a hotel as business travelers, and at nine in the morning we were at the factory. Konstantin Borisovich went to talk with their management and I had to wait in the corridor for a couple of endless hours. At last, they called me in for checking the guitars which had no cases, and were much heavier than Iolanta, and covered even if with the glossy but black lacquer. It was clear at once that the factory hadn't yet mastered the electric guitar manufacture or, maybe, Konstantin Borisovich did not have enough funds on him to purchase some better products. Although, when we brought the caseless instruments to Konotop, Chuba admitted that the bass guitar would do.

The following Monday in the Repair Shop Floor locker room, Vladya kicked up agitation for us, all the Orpheuses, to get exemption from work for health reasons. His idea was to visit the Plant Medical Center with complaints about the sausage we ate the day before when playing trash at a wedding which snack was certainly stale. Only we had to go all together and keep saying the same thing.

So we found Chuba in the Car Repair Shop Floor and the 4 of us arrived in the Medical Center facilities all ill because of the bummer sausage we never ate.

The doctor suggested us get seated on chairs under the corridor wall and sent the nurse to the Plant Bath House after tin basins which were brought and lined on the floor at our feet – one basin for each of the ailing Orpheuses. The morbid preparations were crowned with her fetching a bucket of luke-warm water which she made purple pouring in a handful of potassium permanganate.

The doctor came back from his office and explained that the concoction should be drunk in liters before poking two fingers into the mouth, each person their own, to tickle the root of each respective tongue as deep as possible, which procedure would remedy the obvious food poisoning.

The macabre aspect of the basins in their waiting position on the floor as well as the instructions delivered with an unmistakable sadistic pleasure worked like a charm on both Chuba and Skully, their crises was over in no time to speak of and, leaving no traces, they hurried to their respective workplaces.

However, Vladya’s and my cases