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

The most miserable lot was that of dembels who had pulled, and pushed, and dragged the un-embraceable lump of 2 years to the finish.

For them each hour became an eternity filled with soul trepidation, anxiety beyond any good riddance, disbelief that that was possible at all.

Soldiers from the lower rungs of the ladder tried to spur time employing for the purpose card calendars where all the 12 months of the year were printed on one side, while the card reverse called to keep money in the saving banks or fly by the Aeroflot airplanes.

They ruthlessly pricked each day lived thru with a needle, one by one. The card calendars lost their glossy appeal, but when raised against the sky, they showed quads of pin-thick holes – 1 for a month lived thru.

Such calendar-pricking calls for a disciplined unswerving mind and remarkable willpower. Not by a single pheasant have ever I happened to see such a calendar. Eternity humbles and crushes any high-and-mighty pride…)

The first day in the service ended about midnight – we were trained to fit into 45 seconds when going to sleep or getting up after it. In the time specified, you had to remove all your outfit, carefully stack the items on a stool in the central aisle lit by the long daylight lamps under the ceiling, and dive into your bunk in the koobrik, and cover yourself with a sheet and blanket.

Koobrik was four two-tier bunk beds set in two rows closely, side by side, separated from the neighboring koobriks by narrow passages where you collided with those who slept in the next koobrik's beds. The collisions were just inevitable because the width of the inter-koobrik passage was dictated by the 40-centimeter-wide cabinet-box crammed in between the bunk beds and bounding the passage with 8 newbies who rush to their bunks. Oops!. Ouch!.

Under the top of the 70-centimeter-tall cabinet-box, there was a drawer. The door below the drawer provided access to the inside shelves. Those 2 shelves and the drawer were allotted to 8 people whose bunk beds towered above the half-meter-wide 4-meter-long passage. If any of the beds in the passage was occupied by a grandpa, then all of the cabinet-box, the drawer as well as both shelves under it, was his sovereign stowage whose indivisible immunity was not a matter for the feeblest discussion. In case it was a pheasant but not a grandpa, he could farm out the lower shelf, still, not every pheasant would.

Construction battalion trained you to live lightly and not burden yourself with things you could do without. As for your safety razor, it could find a place on the shelf of the buddies from your draft who happened to have neither oldies nor birds in the passage of their koobrik…

Raising questions before commanding officers had undesirable backwash on the state of health. The "pheasant-grandpa" system was the pledge of military discipline in the army, and an officer with disregard to it was sawing off the bough he sat upon. Therefore, in case of being addressed with some complaint, he complained about you to the "grandpas". In the evening, the officer would go home after his day at the service, and at night the "grandpas" were damaging your state of health.

Yet, all that was to be discovered later, and now the Sergeants were walking along the central aisle of the training barrack, looking for a footcloth wound not accurately enough around its boot top, or a belt dropped in a hurry over the stool in a careless manner, or the absence of any part of outfit – the son of a bitch had dived under the blanket half-dressed!.

Finding where to find fault, they commanded a general "get up!" and the training began anew. No chance that we had started doing the job any better, most likely, the Sergeants themselves wanted to sleep. After another "lights-out!" they did not command "get up!" and the long fluorescent tubes in the ceiling over the central aisle were switched off, except for the one over the cabinet-box at the entrance to the barrack. Its remote light was not a hindrance, you could close your eyes and…

"Get up!!"

What? What for?! O, shit, it's morning! And where's the night?

(…I have told already that time in the army is a dirty bitch, ain't I?.)

~ ~ ~

A couple of "get up!" were conducted without much of nit-picking though, just to remind you're in the army now, bastards. Which leniency was caused by the breakfast ahead, and if we were late for it, the cook-grandpa would hail the Sergeants with his "J'ai presque dû attendre" from the dispenser window.

(…the kings of France had a special courtier whose job was to clap his pole against the floor and thus bring attention to the monarch’s entry to this or that hall in one or another of the royal palaces. The clap was coupled with the strident yell, "His Majesty the King!"

So, one day at the Louvre, Louis of Certain Number, approaching the door to the general hall, noticed that the announcer was not in place. Maybe, dropped around a corner to correct a certain kind of mess in his outfit…

Yet, at the very last moment, directly from nowhere, the courtier with the pole ducked in the doorway and—as required by the statute—boomed his bang into the floor, "His Majesty the King!"

In fact, the King hadn't even had to march on the spot, and passing by the servant, without much fuss, he reproached him in a royally dignified way:

"J'ai presque dû attendre."

When translated from French, it means "I almost had to wait"…)

But the grandpa in the window would translate it another way:

"You, fucker! Got too fucking cocky, eh? They threw that Sergeant stripe-snot across your shoulder-strap and you lost your scent? I fucking fuck your fucking rank and you too! You once again be late and I'll have you dispensing the fucking pots. You fucking cock!"

And the Sergeant would have