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

go well with the rhythm because of using balalaika beat. Unable to stand it, I returned to the Club entrance door. It was open.

At the end of the hall, on both sides of portholes from the projectionist's, there were two doors. The left one stood wide open and it was where the guitar sounded from. The grated window in a narrow room was abutted by a wooden hospital couch seated by a soldier with beastly bristles, in a faded piss-cutter, black overalls, and slippers who kept the guitar in his paws.

Another soldier, also in slippers, sat opposite him on a chair with its backrest against the wall.

"What's your fucking need here?"

"It's by "Shocking blue" that you wanna play, I can show how."

They exchanged glances. "Okay, show."

(… "beauty will save the world…" Well, no one can say for sure. The thing is way too vague, that elusively meaningful 'beauty'.

Music is much more tangible. It can do wonders and work miracles as well as create bridges canceling all that’s vain and unimportant.

Instead of a pheasant (Y. Zameshkevich), a dipper (V. Rassolov), and a salaga (S. Ogoltsoff) there remained just three young fellas passing the guitar from hands to hands…)

A couple of days later, a young from Dnepropetrovsk knocked in the tin-veneered door with his fingers eaten by plastering lime "dirt". The musician Alexander Roodko, who in his civilian life worked as a bass guitarist at the regional Philharmonics. That is how started up the creation of the VIA Orion in our construction battalion, based on the equipment and instruments left after the servicemen from previous years.

The guys went to the Stuff barrack, they talked to Zampolit of the VSO-11. Alexander was appointed Director of the Club. But he never got himself a "Pe-Sha" outfit, and he spent nights in the barrack of Second Company and stood at the evening roll-calls there…

He knew the musical notation; he played on anything that would turn up. He taught us the warm-up chant of "mi-me-ma-mo-mu" and he blinked, painfully and mutely, thru his cloudy blue gaze at my crap in singing.

He had a big nose constantly swollen with rhinitis, and he burred. But he was the Musician…

And I started to lead a double life. After the working day and havvage at the Canteen, I was taking the left turn, to the Club…

"May I join the ranks, Comrade Master Sergeant?"

"Why late for the evening roll-call, Ogoltsoff?"

"I was at the Club."

"And what do you, Club-goers, exercise there?"

In the ranks, sounds snickering supportive of the hint.

"We exercise solfeggio there, Comrade Master Sergeant."

The commander's face stiffens stupidly, he's never heard such words in all his life. Chuckles in the ranks increase in volume, yet now in the opposite direction.

"Battalion Zampolit is aware of it, Comrade Master Sergeant."

"Get to the ranks, suffle… sulge… Son of a bitch!"

But during the working day, I was like anyone else… We were transferred to the five-story building construction site in its concluding pre-delivery phase. Vitya Novikov and Valik Nazarenko called me to an empty apartment. They had a bottle of wine to share. We finished it drinking, in turn, from the neck. A forgotten buzz. Everything was gone before the evening roll-call because what was there for three of us?

At the evening roll-call, Captain Pissak sent the on-duty private to the Dishwashers' to fetch a washed-up cup for breath alcohol testing. Moving along the rank, Pissak selectively handed the cup those soldiers he cared to check, commanded them to exhale into it and sniffed the content. Soon, a couple of servicemen were ordered out of the ranks and face about.

When he handed the cup to me, I realized that I was fucked up beyond salvation even before the test. The uncontrollable waves of chill and heat were rolling, in turn, over, telling on me. For the loosened belt on my outfit, he had ordered me five fatigues, and now I was fucked up totally. Pissak sniffed out from the cup, sadistically downed his gaze and announced, "Well, I say, if a soldier hasn't drunk you can see it at once."

After the evening roll-call, Vitya Strelyany told me with a smile, "You were whiter than the fucking wall." As if I did not know that myself! Pissak, bastard! What the fucking games at cat-and-mouse?.

~ ~ ~

It was hard to believe, but there came another day-off. In the evening they showed a movie, some Polish one called "The Anatomy of Love" with certain hints at eroticism. Maybe in Poland, there were more than just hints, but before reaching us it had been shortened by repeated cut-outs. There was a whole pack with scissors, starting from the censorship down to acned projectionists, snatching out whole pieces of film wherever there flashed bare tits in a frame. For special friends and personal use. Fucking morons.

The next morning in the line of leak-takers alongside the sorteer runnel, I gave my cock the thoughtful shake to shed off final drops and silently addressed it in my mind, inaudibly in the general hubbub, "That's it, buddy, for the two-year stretch you're just a drain cock." And I buttoned the fly up.

At work, we were removing construction debris and excess earth out of the basement with the stretchers, it's called "doing the planning". All of the buddies looked somehow sullen, kept silently introvert, the after-effect, so to say, of that Polish film.

At a smoke break I, having nothing better to do, began to get at Alimosha. He did not talk back replying with brief fuck-offs but then suddenly jumped to his feet and pounced at me with his fists. I had to brush off as best as I could, yet, as always, not too proficiently.

Then Prostomolotov dropped into the basement and shouted to stop, so we again took up the stretchers. When doing my turns, I noticed that the pain in my right hand was not going to cease. Something happened to my thumb hit against the Tatar-Mongolian mug of Alimosha…

The next morning my entire hand was swollen, and after the Morning Dispensing