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

the Assistant Paramedic from the Detachment Medical Unit (that same villager from our draft, but already in "Pe-Sha" outfit) took me to the Stavropol Military Hospital. We reached the city on some team-squad truck and there got on a bus because the city public transport served soldiers for free.

When we arrived in the hospital, he told me to wait and entered some of the buildings. The grounds looked quite attractive with a lavish garden of yellow Plum trees. Yet, I did not have the appetite for them because my hand hurt, so I just got seated on a bench in the green alley between the buildings and fell asleep. Opening my eyes, I got a smack bang close-up of some round muzzle with long cat-like mustache, right next to my nose. I startled, but the bench back safely kept me from falling. Another glance disclosed Captain's shoulder-straps on the cat. Everything got radiant clear – seeing a soldier dozing on the bench, the officer stooped for the alcohol breath test.

Then my escort came out and led me to another building for the hand check. They twirled my thumb, and I hissed like a gander and slapped my other hand against my left side, like a broken wing. From those indications they diagnosed a bone fracture, bandaged the hand, plastered it with gypsum and left me in hospital. Thank you, Alimosha!. Yet, washing the face with one hand was fairly inconvenient…

What could be better than a fracture? No jabs at all, just kick back and wait until the bone tissue grows over. In the dining room, there were square tables for just four persons and chairs instead of benches. The havvage also was much better than in our Canteen. Quite understandable though, because the hospital treated officers as well. Of course, all patients wore pajamas with no insignia, only the wards for officers were on the second floor and those for soldiers in the basement. Who cares if there’s a bed to sleep at any time of day? Besides, the dining room was nearer to us – in the end of the corridor.

The hospital was a quiet place and anything but overcrowded. In my wardroom, apart from me and a Georgian named Rezo, there were four vacant beds. The Rezo's black hair was long enough to be combed back, an obvious mark of a grandpa. He kept his left arm tightly pressed against his chest which attitude resulted from his patronizing help as a driver at wheat harvesting in some steppe kolkhoz. In the field camp, he started fooling around with the cook, and her husband stabbed him in the back with a large kitchen knife, and now the cook kept visiting the sufferer at the hospital. They usually went down the abundant garden, and coming back from there Rezo was offering me yellow plums from the pocket of his pajamas jacket, but I had no appetite although my hand didn't hurt already…

The neighbor wardroom was filled up though. One of the patients there was from our construction battalion, also a grandpa like Rezo only a Russian, named Sanya. Besides, his hair was fair and his right brow missing, licked off with a flat scar. He was a driver too and went AWOL by his tractor and collided somewhere with something, or maybe capsized. They had to amputate both his legs above the knees.

He did not visit the dining room. They buddies from his room were bringing the havvage directly onto his closet-box, although he had crutches and a pair of high leg prostheses next to his bed. On the front cover of The Rural Life magazine, he liked the picture of a shock worker of Communist Labor from Stavropol against the background of her combine harvester and wheat ears, and started writing letters to her. "Hello, unknown Valentina…"

Sometimes his fellow-drivers from our conbat came to visit him. After their closed-door meetings, he screamed songs and quarreled with the on-duty medical personnel. But he got off with it because they would exempt him from the army anyway…

On the second floor, there was a library, sort of, because its two shelves were filled with only translations from Chinese novelists about how socialism was being built in the villages of China. The books were printed in the fifties' before the exposure of the personality cult at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. To wit, before Mao Tse-Tung took offense for disparaging his bosom friend Generalissimo Stalin, and in both great powers they stopped singing:

"Moscow – Beijing,Eternal friendship…"

And what would you do when left with no choice? You’d go and read social realism masterpieces in the best tradition of the newspaper Renmin Ribao…

A commotion broke up in the next wardroom, splashing out into the corridor – the combine driver Valentina answered Sanya's letters by her live visit. She got seated in the yard, on a bench under a tree. A swarthy-faced woman of Moldovian type, beautiful as movie stars from the first Soviet color flicks about collective farms in the Cossack villages. The most handsome buddy-patient from the neighbor wardroom alighted by her side with explanations that Sanya would presently come from a medical procedure.

And Sanya, in hysterical jitters, was sitting on his bed in the ward, fastening his prostheses. They helped to pull his pajama pants over them, and, sticking two crutches in his armpits, he clumsily dragged his body to the exit door. But Valentina—well done!—for whole 3 minutes she sat next to him on the bench that he finally reached. Then the same handsome buddy led her along the shortcut path to the unofficial exit thru a hole in the fence…

Two days later along the same path…I watched and I couldn't get it… It just couldn't be! But who else was that if not Olga?!. Yes, it's she!.

The same evening, I went with her to the park in her trousers and some sort of a turtleneck while she, sure thing, had her mini skirt on.

On the dance-floor, a pack of local