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

the lowered fallboard of the upright piano, I strummed the chords of the rhythm-guitar part. Behind the piano, Olga stood with her arms folded over its top board and bored she was. "Kiss me," demanded she from behind the piano.

I turned my head to the left and, over my shoulder and the black upright thing between us, merged into a long kiss with her warm soft lips. My fingers knew without me when to go to the next chord…

With the public kiss over, I modestly turned my face down to my guitar to regain the normal breathing and heard the shocked exclamation from Olga, "Oy! Mother!"

Her stifled cry signaled that the end of Heorot was at the gate… Midst the gooey hugs and swoony swaying of the dancers, like a rigid rock stood and watched her her mother who had unexpectedly arrived from the Crimea to take Olga back to Theodosia down there…

And from another end of our boundless, vast Homeland, from another port city in another sea, The Spitzbergen band arrived in Konotop from the Murmansk city to start playing dances at Loony, as arranged with Loony’s Director, Bohmstein.

We were undone by The Spitzes in a fortnight. Two weeks later, the Mirror Hall at Club was empty because the dancing crowd spurted to the dances in Loony, to the concert hall on the second floor, which used to be the listing for CJR competitive battles, and now, freed of all the audience seats, was turned into a parquet ballroom.

However, not the parquet became the decisive point. The restaurant band from Murmansk, made up of 4 musicians of 20-to-25 years old, came with the Western instruments and rock-group equipment available in port cities, including the organ of the "Roland" brand, and (most importantly) they sang. Moreover, they sang into professional microphones producing the echo effect. "One!.. un!.. un! Two!.. oo!.. oo!"

The Orpheuses with their homemade stuff went kaput. Yes, there still remained concerts in Club, "playing trash" but the dances just faded out…

Olga's both mother and unregistered stepfather left Konotop taking along her most solemn oath of coming back to Theodosia in two weeks, yet The Spitzes got firmly anchored in the city…

End February, I saw Olga off in a train leaving from Platform 4. She boarded the last car, the conductor locked the thick iron door and went inside. When the starting jerk pulled the car, Olga waved to me thru the door glass.

Grabbing the handrails by the sides of the locked door I jumped onto the steps under it. The train was quickly gaining speed, she freaked out and frantically cried behind the glass I could not hear what, as if I did not know what I was doing. I jumped off at the very end of the platform, because farther on you could indeed break a leg or two against the rails, and the crossties half-buried in the gravel…

In March I sent her a letter. It was very romantic stuff of how above the locksmith vise at my workplace I was seeing the heavenly features of her dear face.

No, I didn't copy the lines from Pushkin, but the essence and spirit were the same, and only the lexicon was upgraded for a century-and-a-half. In the opinion of the locksmiths at the Experimental Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, such a letter could be written by only a total cuntsucker. They had not read it though, neither had she because the letter did not find her in Theodosia. Olga returned to Konotop to inform me that she was pregnant…

At those rational days of planned economy and growing concern of the Soviet Government and the Leadership of the CPSU about the needs of population, condoms could be purchased even at news stalls, three kopecks apiece. Yet, for me a condom was just a word from the dirty jokes folklore, and I had no idea what "protective care" was about. Then she took the pill and everything got off easy…

Spring came early, amicable and warm… In mid-April, I started the "dacha" season of sleeping in the lean-to. I swept it and moved the mattress and blanket to the iron bed that spent the winter over there.

The same evening in the Plant Park, I invited Olga to "my place". She easily agreed. All the way from the Plant Park to Nezhyn Street I was walking on clouds. We strolled in the dark, tightly holding each other at the waist. Thru the yard of the Turkovs' khutta and the back garden, under the sole window in the ours, we sneaked into the lean-to, and I latched the door.

In the breaks between the rounds, I, obedient to Valle-Inclan's commandment, was restoring the equality between my "hands that knew already everything and the eyes that hadn't had a single glimpse yet…" for which purpose, I lit up matches, one by one, and stopped her shy tries to screen the glimmer of her body emerging from the darkness in the flicker of a tiny torch…

We woke up at dawn and walked thru the deafening silence and strangeness of empty streets to the khutta of her girlfriend Sveta so that Olga would have an alibi for her Aunt Nina. On my way back I met the first pedestrian of the breaking day. It was past Bazaar, the man was walking in the counter direction along the other side of Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street…

I was fine with her, yet I wanted to get rid of our affair. Firstly, not always it was really good. The time when we went to the Seim and I spread her in the Willow thicket, everything turned out somehow flat and not exactly the thing.

We, certainly, rehabilitated ourselves later, when she invited me to the shower at her workplace. Yes, she had already got a job in the city and was delivering telegrams from the Main Post-Office.

(…it is hard to believe, but even way back in the 1970s, in absence of as yet undreamed of mobile phones, people still managed to survive.

Telegrams helped