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

Olga went out just a couple of times and gained respect and authority because in Theodosia she started attending dance-floors at the age of thirteen and, without wasting time on verbal preliminaries, decked them bang off. As a result, if some frostbitten bitch hurt feelings of a girl from the bohemian circle, then mentioning Olga’s name was quite enough to make her realize the blunder and shut up.

Another reason why Olga seemed maturer than me was the attentive attitude towards her from mujiks.

Once after the dances, when we were collecting cables and stuff from upon the stage, a frightened dude raced into the dance-floor, crossed it and jumped over the fence into the darkness of the Plant Park. At the last moment his chaser, a hairy-ass mujik over thirty, managed to deal a glancing strike and the fugitive sprawled into the bushes, but bounced up at once and ran away.

"I'll catch you, bitch!" cried the triumphant and, turning to Olga who stood by the stage, added, "Ain't it, Red-Haired?"

"You yoursel is the word," Olga answered diplomatically, and the latter swagger out the dance-floor.

That's why I felt to be younger than her. But the moment she flinched at the wicket to the dark khutta that feeling dissolved, and everything fell into place. Next to her fear, I felt older and stronger than her, I felt pity for her and compassion. After all, the younger ones should be cared for and protected. Even from ourselves.

I comforted the frightened girl and left without entering the yard. On my way to Nezhyn Street, I knew that I had done the righteous thing and was pleased with myself, yet all the same, I couldn't but agree with the diagnosis by my sister Natasha – "nuts on the run from their having my head checked "…

~ ~ ~

On November 7, the unusually long Indian summer ended and we moved over to Club to play dances there.

The Ballet Studio Gym opposite the cinema auditorium on the second floor was a tremendous room stretching for about 40 meters from its entrance to the small stage at the far end wall. The stage was intended not for concerts but for Evenings of Recreation and, therefore, was just a low deck with two steps running all its front. That way a recreating participant could easily ascend it when called by the mass-entertainer to take part in some funny competition or another event in the ongoing Evening.

The stage-deck took the central one-third of Ballet Gym's width the rest of which was sealed off with vertical bars of black-paint-coated rebar rods on both sides from the elevation. The light cloth curtains hanging behind the bars formed, like, some backstage.

In the center of Ballet Gym, high overhead, midst the roof bearing structures painted with the black Kuzbass-Lacquer, there was fixed a large white ball encrusted with the scale-like mirror shards all over. Besides, among the joists there was also installed a searchlight focused on the ball and one click of the switch set in motion the ball-rotating electric motor and also hit the ball's rind of mirror-scales with the straight beam from the searchlight to get fractured into innumerable dim specks of light idly floating along over all and everything within the huge Ballet Gym.

The length-side walls consisted mostly of manifold tall windows, below which the handrail for the students of ballet art ran from end to end. The butt wall opposite the stage was paneled, according to the ballet school tradition, with large, tight fitted, squares of mirrors which conferred onto the room its second name – the Mirror Hall…

The Mirror Hall served an ideal place for any get-together, both the New Year matinees for the Settlement kids, and School Graduating Parties, and Evenings of Recreation for the Plant youth, and, last but not least, for dances. And the dances it was to reveal the ideal's weak spot – its floor. In less than a month the treds of a couple of hundred dancers scuffed the red paint coat off the floor and bared its timber planks. Yet, the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, said it did not matter.

Behind the curtains on both sides of the stage, there were installed the huge loudspeakers transported from the summer cinema in the Plant Park, and they produced some really bomb sound, awesome nyshtyak! In the common reflection, blurred by the distance to the far-off wall of the Mirror Hall, our figures with guitars stuck up over the rhythmically swaying whirlpool of dancers' heads in the huge murky void whose only illumination was the floating swarm of soft light specks – round and round, and round – and everything went on nyshtyak thru and thru.

And only Chuba fussed and bitched that the sound of his bass guitar put out by the two portable loudspeakers on the stage was lost completely behind the mighty boxes with the meter-wide speakers. Lyokha usually assuaged him that he knew a guy who had low-frequency bass speakers for sale, we only had to procure material for making a box to install those. And it was also Lyokha to suggest the relevant place where to get the material in question – the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant. After all, we needed just one sheet of thick plywood, all in all, 3 by 2 meters.

We, the Plant affiliated Orpheuses, started to mull over a plan… In the Repair Shop Floor, there was no plywood whatsoever, iron and steel were all we dealt with. The proper place to look for plywood was surely the Car Repairing Shop Floor, where Chuba worked. And he admitted that the plywood could be extracted from the cars brought for repair, but how to get it outta Plant?

He resolutely declined the proposal to cut the plywood into pieces the size of the bass box parts and drop them over the wall in Professions Street because his overseer would fire off uncomfortable questions about the source for such immodest quantities of so expensive material.

Thus, there remained the one and only option – to