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

or two that he goes to serve in the army and has already passed the city of Rostov. In the end, he would read his literary production out loud for all the present in our car section.

All of his writings were alike and concluded by the inevitable, "My best wishes, Valik". On the second day, I suggested him to vary the word order—at least in some postcards, for a change—to make it, "My Valik wishes best". All laughed then, but he laughs best who laughs last and, standing on the platform in a soaked sock, I did not feel like laughing at all. The kickback to my innocent pun left me without a shoe which, most likely, never arrived in the city of Stavropol but stayed way back, mateless, strange and foreign to the rank grass in the embankment wet after the rain in darkness… To a whimsy play on words, the redhead bastard responded by the rude practical joke. However, who's not caught at action is not the joker…

We were told to get into the beds of waiting trucks, that took us thru an unknown, not yet awaken, city and left it by an outgoing highway which also was left for a worn-out asphalt road and, after three more kilometers along an unsubstantial forest edge on the left, there popped up a long white-brick wall by the right roadside, a meter-and-half tall or so.

The trucks drove into the openwork high gate of iron pipes (cross-section 2”) by the whitewashed guardhouse. The glazed red-&-yellow tablet by it outer door announced it was Military-Construction Detail 11, Military Detachment 41769, while the empty road outside the gate went on to the nearby horizon…

We were lead to the bathhouse, before which they asked us whether anyone was going to send his clothes back home. Quire predictably, no one planned anything of the sort, keeping the time honored tradition, draftees were leaving for the army service in their junk clothes which were eventually dropped on the grass about the bathhouse porch.

Only in the canteen at the Rostov Collection and Distribution Point, I saw a draftee in his suit and necktie. He fell out of the picture by his age too – about ten years older than the surrounding skinhead yobbos, however, he was not twenty-seven yet, otherwise, they wouldn't draft him. And his hair wasn't cut. He ate nothing, just sat without a motion staring in front of himself, or rather looking inward.

(…because it's only from outside that we all look the same, while inside there is a hell of a lot to consider, the epics unfolding in there are way cooler than the Illyad added by the Odyssey…)

There he sat in a tie loosened on his thick neck, paying no notice to empathetic nor to sarcastic ogles, not knowing what was ahead where they were taking him…

The Military-Construction Detail 11, shortened to VSO-11, had basic minimum engineered for keeping lots of humans in one place.

A close group of five long barracks, paneled from inside with painted plywood sheets and overlaid without with white bricks in shiner position, squatted behind the white brick fence run along the roadside. The barracks were interconnected by the common system of steam-heating pipes running up in the air on tall iron props. For heat insulation, the pipes were wrapped in glass wool, fixed with white glass cloth, and covered with the finishing layer of black roofing felt kept in place by twists of thin baling wire.

Three of the barracks to the right from the gate were lined along the brick wall separating the military territory from the road outside, each of them surrounded by an internal asphalt path. Across the path behind the leftmost barrack, there stood a wider, but also one-story, building comprising the Canteen with its kitchen, and the Club of the detachment.

In the third row, counting from the road, there was the stoker-house, the bathhouse, the shoe-making and sewing shops under one common roof for all.

The drill grounds covered by the layer of rough concrete, started from the gate and stretched on to the Canteen. Opposite the Canteen, across the drill grounds, there stood the last two barracks of the five, parallel to each other and the wall along the outside road. Behind them, next to the far left corner of the drill grounds, there stood a brick toilet, aka sorteer, accomplished with 10 holes, aka ochcos, in the concrete slab alongside the left wall and the cemented urinal runnel along all of the opposite one.

To the left from the sorteer, there stretched a ten-meter tin trough of a washbasin raised by meter-tall rebar props above the ground. The water pipe with a dozen taps ran along over the trough.

Farther on, behind the drill grounds, there stood three tall truck boxes in a raw, each one without the face wall and—to their left—2 rows of sturdy sheds of ware and food storehouses. Behind them, a bit on the outskirts of the detachment’s rectangular grounds, stood the squat structure of the pigsty.

Ah, yes! The last but not least – the narrow brick hut of the military store by the gate, opposite the checkpoint guardhouse…

The narrow white wall of bricks stood only along the asphalt road, and the rest of the perimeter was guarded by the fence of barbed wire, so familiar from the early childhood. Behind the truck boxes and the barbed wire fence, a wide field rose hiding in the invisible hollow a deserted sandpit and the village of Tatarka, which was visited by the soldiers of VSO-11 on their AWOL's, aka absences without leave.

As for the road by which we were brought to the detachment, it entered, after another six kilometers, the village of Demino, where the soldiers also went on AWOL's, as well as to the city of Stavropol, sure thing.

But all that I hadn't known yet leaving the bathhouse in the cotton khaki outfit and high kirza boots on top of badly wound footcloths – two strips of light coarse calico or