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

us, one by one, to his ware-room and meted out one-ruble-plus to each, adding a piece of white cloth for under-collars, a pair of shoe polish cans, and a spool of threads for sewing up the under-collars after washing them. But in the pay-roll, we signed for 3 rubles and 80 kopecks each because everyone knew, whoever you’d ask, that the monthly payment of a private in the Soviet Army was 3 rub. 80 kop., that was as indisputable an axiom as that about the Volga River and the Caspian Sea…

Midsummer, at one of the evening roll-calls, the company zampolit announced sending to my wife, at her request, the reference certifying I was in the army.

"You did not say you were married, Goly!"

"You didn't ask."

(…they had no time for marriage doing their stretch in the penitentiary colonies for juvenile offenders…)

Olga, Konotop, the Plant, the dances seemed something unreal, like dreams seen in another, far away, life. I was receiving letters from her, “…and in the evenings when I see how girls are walking with their guys and I am all alone and by myself it hurts so that I am crying…”

There were also letters by Mother, both brother and sister wrote a couple of times.

I did not know what to write in response. "Hello, I've received your letter, many thanks for it.."

And then? What else to write? "…in two winters, in two summers…"?

Nothing entered my head. And I already couldn't think a single simple thought without "fuck" and "fucking" within it. Such a fucking dickhead!

Just think of it, even to my closest kin people there remained nothing but the feeling of detachedness in me. Detachedness?

Well, something like what I felt when in the thickening twilight we were sitting already in the bed of a truck beneath the white wall in the unfinished nine-story building and waited for a grandpa-bricklayer changing into his uniform.

Another grandpa, in the truck bed already, started heckling Misha Khmelnytsky—just so, to idle the time—for his being a Ukrainian, aka Khokhol.

Misha, averting his eyes, muttered that, no, he was not a Ukrainian and it's only that kind of the last name. The rest of the youngs sat in silence. The grandpa started to scoff – what a lousy draft they brought from Ukraine with not a single Khokhol!

"Okay, I'm a Khokhol, so what of that?"

Only when those words somehow echoed back from the brick wall looming whitish thru the dark, I realized that it was me who said it. It's strange to hear yourself from outside so unexpectedly. Some weird self-detachedness. The grandpa shut up. And really – what of that? Or of anything else?.

Later, Misha Khmelnytsky revealed to me that he also was married, adding intimate details of how he always had the itch to take a leak into his wife's cunt after he cum, just for fun, but it never came out.

Making no comments, I rejoiced in my mind that the evolution process of the homo sapiens species anticipated an anatomical mechanism to prevent fucking jokes of such fucked in the head funny fuckers…

Of course, my comrades-in-arms did not use the terms like "evolution" or "sapiens" in everyday communication, however, it cost them no noticeable effort to recite by heart the unrhymed lines of one or another article from the Penal Code of the USSR.

"What was you locked up for?"

"Article six hundred seventeen, part two ‘by aggravating circumstances’."

"Brain-fucker, you! There's no such article!."

"Introduced recently, for chronic cannibalism."

It turned out that tattoo was not just an ornamental decoration but an esoteric message for the initiated, it reported of what exactly crime convicted, how high arisen in Zona Table of Ranks the wearer of the tattooed skin was. The inmates with life terms were distinguished by the tattoos on their foreheads running "Slave of the USSR".

But then again, not all were the same. One of my buddies returned from Zona with neat 3 words on his forearm in quite a modest typeface – 'in vino veritas'. With such a tattoo one easily may pass off for a Philosophy Doctor. Some fucking Latinist…

There were certain taboos too. An attempt at exaggeration of personal achievements by means of a tattoo faking his status in the criminal milieu by ornamentations which he was not entitled to, called for a severe, brutal—at times the capital—punishment.

And one should also be careful about using the word "waffles". After we got that half-ripped-off payment, Alimosha visited the hut of Military Store by the gate and, pointing his finger at a pack of waffles, asked the saleswoman, "Gimme of those grid biscuits." Yet, the trick did not save him.

"Hey, Alimosha! Got missing waffles, eh?"

"Go and fuck yourself!" snapped Alimosha back.

The innocent word of "waffles” in Zona cant became "sperm swallowed at doing head", thence the pun.

(…and how not to come to admiration, not to arose emotionally, from the unpretentiously artless, but so poetically provocative, mocking couplet-duels of the Zona folklore?

" I have fucked you at the gate,And can present the certificate!..""I have fucked you in the grass dew,Here's the reference for you!..""I have fucked you in the raspberriesWith all of your references!..”

Then, stomping the final, victorious, period:

" No trumps? No ace?Grab my dick and wipe your face!.."…)

Besides play on words, there happened practical jokes as well… After the midday meal, we were standing by the gate waiting for the truck. Sasha Khvorostyuk and Vitya Strelyany had razor-shaved their heads the night before and stood out among us with white-skinned pates above their densely tanned mugs.

"I say, would I look a dick if there was a scratch across my pate now?" asked me Vitya.

"No worry, buddy, you look it just as is with no scratch at all."

"Do me a favor, grab my ears and jerk it. Please, O, please!"

Who would refuse so earnest appeal of a buddy? Naturally, I did as asked.

"Ptui-ptui-ptui-ptui…"

I did not get it immediately – the white saliva of tiny spits dribbled on my tunic chest.

"I cum…" explains Vitya…

A truck pulls up by the checkpoint with a team-squad of plasterers of our draft,