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

evinced a graver nature and we staunchly endured the whole hog of the procedure throwing up into the basins everything that we had for breakfast that morning. The doctor, impressed by our obstinacy, gave us exemption for the current working day.

We changed and left thru the Main Check-Entrance in the crowd of workers going out to the canteen for the midday break. Thus, for all our pains and labors we got just scarce 4 hours of freedom, all in all, and the next morning – get back to the mill, O, boy!.

The Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, kept us informed that Club was fixin' to buy an electric organ Yonika to be played by Lyokha Kuzko as the fifth Orpheus. Lyokha had thinning but long, reddish hair and sported a horseshoe-shaped mustache a-la The Pesnyary to somehow distract the public attention from the severe bend in his nose, the legacy of some old-times fight. Because of that disfigured nose, his handle was Rhinoceros.

He was seven years older than us, yet he was a cool dude who had The White Album by The Beatles on his tape-recorder which he played to Vladya and me when he invited us to his place. His father, Anatoly Efimovich Kuzko, the teacher in button-accordion class at Club, had built for Rhinoceros a red-brick two-story house in the yard of his fatherly khutta. The first floor was the garage with a sheet-iron gate, and on the second floor, there were two rooms and a kitchen. Some folks could live conveniently, anyway. Yet, the garage stayed empty of any car because Kuzko Senior did not buy it for Lyokha who was drinking like a fish for which reason his wife Tatyana left him taking their baby daughter away.

Besides The White Album, Lyokha also shared The Forensic Medicine Textbook to look thru. The yellowish aged pages had lots of black-and-white photographs with explanatory notes beneath them.

Knowing the illustrations by heart, Lyokha shared his favorite spot in the textbook, where there were rows of small-sized pictures (3 by 2 cm, like for a passport), demonstrating the difference between intact and dented hymens.

(…I have a strong suspicion that because of that textbook, all kinds of pornographic publications give me so dreadful shudder.

No kidding, they cram me with panic, I fear on turning a page in The Playboy to get smack midst a murder with the household scissors sticking from the open chest of the body up into my face, or else a guy strangled against an upturned stool, you never can tell…)

Climbing up and down the Plant concrete wall at midday-meal breaks was a real shortcut that spared a half-kilometer walk if compared to going thru the Main Check-Entrance.

At home, I warmed up soup or vermicelli on the kerogas in the veranda and took the meal into the kitchen where I doffed my spetzovka pants and jacket keeping only my tank top and underpants on. It caused no inconvenience to anyone because with the parents at work and the younger ones at their College I was home alone.

The reason for taking off my working clothes was those surplus ten minutes before going back to the Plant. While eating, you could use a stool even with your dirty spetzovka on, yet smearing the couch or an armchair with it was not right.

To fill the odd ten minutes up, I strummed the guitar and screamed different songs to train my vocal skills which I have never had. Yet, I sang all the same – may Beata Tyszkiievich, a professional Polish beauty torn from a color magazine and pinned above the folding bed-couch, forgive me as well as The Who in the black-and-white photo next to her. They also witnessed one time how my wild wails happened to bring about a boner and, grabbing from the desk under the window a ruler left behind by the younger gone to their college, I measured my cock. Locksmithing definitely instills respectful attitude towards knowledge of specific details…

One day, coming back after the midday break, Vladya and I saw Skully on a bench of the Overseers’ Nest in the company of Borya Sakoon and some stranger in clean clothes.

"Here they're coming," said Overseer, and the man suggested us, including Skully as well, to go along with him. From the flitting farewell grimace on Borya Sakoon’s mug, we could get it that the invitation was issued by a representative of law-enforcement organs, staying in the dark though as to why.

Clad in our faded T-shirts with no spetzovka jackets on because of a sunny, hot, October day, we followed his athletic figure in a tartan shirt walking contrary to the flow of latecomers who leisurely sauntered from the canteen in the square outside the Main Check-Entrance gate. Everything went as usual, and only we were pulled out and estranged from the routine life of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.

"Where to, smarties?" asked Peter Khomenko flashing a broad smile from the counter-directed stream of workmen, yet, at the abrupt turnabout of our escort, his mirth dried up at once and he accelerated his pace towards the Mechanical Shop Floor, not caring to wait for an answer.

"Who's that?" asked our guard-and-guide alertly. I replied that was my tutor, and we left the Plant thru the Main Check-Entrance.

He told us to get into the Volga thru whose windshield shimmering in the sunshine, there peeped Chuba’s face wearing a nervous smile, and they took us to the City Militia Department, which was next to the Passport Bureau.

Behind the gate to the City Militia Department, there was a wide yard-coral bounded by barrack-type one-story buildings. We were separated and led to different rooms in different buildings where different people began to ask us questions and write down our responses.

Of course, not everything in the proceedings got recorded. For instance, the interrogation of Skully started as follows, "Do you know that fucking moron?"

"Which moron?"

"The one who brought you here."

"No, I dunno."

"That was Head of the Criminal Investigation Department."

"No, I dunno."

At that moment I was interrogated by the