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

Admittance to the trailer was granted us because he miscalculated me for a champion-bro in a specific line which irrevocable mistake he entertained since my "engagement" with Olga back in summer as we just started going out together.

One evening starting off to the Plant Park, I spruced my little finger up with a ring cajoled out of my sister. A casual tawdry fake it was with a splinter of glass or something. Rather reluctantly, Natasha farmed it out after I swore it was just for that one time.

In the Plant Park, Olga and I climbed up to the projectionist booth in the summer cinema whose key was obtained from the younger projectionist, Grisha Zaychenko. The moment she saw the ring on my little finger, Olga clung tighter than a leaf from the sauna whisker in the steam-room: who gave me that?

Borrowed from Kiddy, said I, my younger sister.

With outright disbelief, Olga demanded the thing for a closer inspection. Hardly had I passed the ring when she clapped it on her finger, some other than the little one though.

Okay, says I, that was enough for showing off and let her give it back for I had promised Natasha to return, it was, like, from her boyfriend.

At that point, Olga took heed and tried to take the ring off but – no go! She twirled, and pulled, and spat at the darn thing to no avail, the ring snapped real tight on. The date turned into a dungeon torture session until she somehow managed to force it over her finger joint.

When, at last, I shoved the cursed ring into my hip-pocket, we were not fit for kisses and stuff with Olga's finger hurt and swollen and me feeling sorry for her. So I locked the booth and we left…

Now, Kolyan at that same period was picking up steam in the ticket office together with the Plant Park watchman, and he observed who it was coming down from above. And what could he possibly have thought, if from the booth portholes, for some half-hour the female moans were floating over the entire summer cinema?

"Oh, my! Mmmm! Ouu! Ay!"

That’s why, he kinda thought: where, in such a small…well.. thing…could it…sort of…be sitting? In a word, he respected me as a bro hero, only from another branch.

And for all those reasons, coming on a visit to the sheet-iron trailer and having sat in heated expectation thru the ongoing stupid debates of the present booby jerks on that it was high time to kick the ass of the Peace Square hippies who lately had become way too hippy, and when at last they’d free the premises of their presence happy with their being such cool goons, we still had to wait until Kolyan would finish his endless explanation as to where…well…to…kinda put…the key…well…of…sort of…the trailer…

The warmest feelings were left by the long sheepskin coat of Aunt Nina in which Olga once ventured from the khutta wicket. We descended into the snow-filled Grove with the patches of smooth hard ice of the frozen Swamp and it was good, but, as always, not enough…

~ ~ ~

At Plant, the term of our apprentice training expired and we began to get the payment of 70 rubles a month – almost as much as other locksmiths. Now, cutting the iron with a chisel, we no longer hammer-squashed our fingers and we (the hairy yobbos) were even trusted with the manufacture of an experimental product from scratch… It's interesting.

We scrutinized the intangible speculative thought turned into the visual lines of blue-prints specked with countless figures to indicate dimension. Observing those figures, we asked the gas cutter to cut the necessary pieces out from 20 mm-thick sheet iron, asked the marker to delineate the contours, asked the planer to scratch odd metal off to the markings, asked the welder to weld this one to that, and that to another…

Why so many requests? Well, because everyone's busy, sort of… Sometimes from the request to its execution, it took weeks of waiting, or go and ask once again…

And—lo!—the skeleton of the product-in-progress on the deck-rack outta the Repair Shop Floor grew with the added assemblage parts, began to gradually acquire engaging looks. Overseer ceased to call us "hairy yobbos" at every turn, and the Experimental Unit locksmiths drop the stale joke about the launch date of our "Lunokhod-2", aka Lunar Rover.

At that point Manager of the Experimental Unit ordered to deliver the already thoroughly-smeared cardboard folder with the multitude of blue-prints to Yasha and Mykola-the-old letting the more skilled workforce finalize the disembodied technical idea in weighty tangibility… It hurts.

The following product was simply ruined by us… Using lots of material, we assembled the massive stand “Glory to Labor!” on the deck-rack and called Borya Sakoon to assess the accomplished work before erecting it on the square in front of the Main Check-Entrance. The overseer looked thru the blueprints and said something was wrong though he couldn’t put the finger on it.

Engineer-Technologist climbed down from the Shop Floor Management Office above the locker room and joined Borya’s negative appraisal – yes, something was certainly amiss, not quite the thing. However, neither separately nor together, they could tell exactly what’s not right, even after checking the dimensions of the manufactured monument with a tape measure.

The author of the ill-starred project was called from the Design Bureau by the Plant Management. And it took a while even for him to discover the reason. We faithfully preserved all the subtleties of his idea and executed it in metal without any deviations except for producing the mirrored reflection of the blueprints. The product was cut to pieces and the square remained without the prospective architectural beautification…

After the New Year, a special team was sent from the Experimental Unit to the construction site of a feed mill in the village of Semyanovka. The team comprised three locksmiths: Mykola-the-young, Vasya, and me, under command of Borya Sakoon, our Overseer.

On the first morning, as