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

yobbos started to close in, probably, attracted by the pattern of huge yellow flowers all over my borrowed pants. A couple of dippers on AWOL from our conbat had identified me and approached. One of them rigged out with a civilian citizenka and the second was in a "Pe-Sha" outfit, I didn't even know their names. The locals got it that the construction battalion was having a pleasure-walk and dissolved…

Olga had a whole heap of news in her life. She had again moved to Theodosia, but in the day nursery there were no places for babies. So she took Lenochka and went to the city executive committee on the chairman's reception day.

He parroted the same thing – there were no places and that's it. Then she just put Lenochka on his desk and walked out, he ran after her to the stairs, "Citizen! Take your baby!" In short, they found a place.

Her mother was looking after Lenochka, while she went to Stavropol, only on the train they stole all her money. And my wedding ring was also gone. But it happened still back in Konotop. She was wearing it on her finger though it was too wide and when washing she did not notice that it slipped off into the basin, and she splashed it away with the soapy water into the drain pit…

The next day she borrowed money for her back travel from the cook, who came to visit Rezo, and walked away down the same shortcut path…

They took the plaster off my hand and discharged me. By free of charge trolleys I traveled to the south-eastern outskirts of Stavropol and from the ring road there walked on under the tall roadside trees bordering the highway to Elista, towards the Demino fork.

Bright yellow leaves scattered the ground here and there, the sun was shining, yet it felt like it was autumn already. But when was the summer?

One of the conbat trucks pulled up on the highway. The driver shouted to me, "Home?"

I said, yes, home, and jumped into the truck bed. Because neither from work, nor from AWOL's we never returned "to the detachment", or "to the barracks". We were coming back “home”…

~ ~ ~

At home, it wasn't without news too. During my absence, our squad lived thru a rampage of torturing humiliation at the hands of grandpas who drove them after the lights-out out the barrack to the drill grounds and they had to walk "goose step" in a circle before getting beaten.

Karlookha from Second Company was particularly atrocious – he liked to jab a young with the knife, not so as to stab but aggravate by pricking. And he himself was just a dwarf, half-head lower than normal human height. Then in the basement of the 50-apartment block, he rushed with his knife on Sehrguey Chernenko, handled Gray, from Dnepropetrovsk. But Gray had his Zona skills for such incidents and knocked him out. Karlookha thief-swaggered only on the grounds of being a grandpa, but those grandpas from his draft, who had done their time before the army, hadn't supported him against Gray. So everything, like, subsided but the tension held on.

On the wave of that suspended tension, some pheasant clung to me, "Are you from thieves?"

Answering such a question in affirmative, you had to make it clear which stretch the prosecutor demanded for you and what was the final verdict, but for me the articles of the Penal Code were as closed a book as formulas from Organic Chemistry. Saying "yes' without having done some time, you became an impostor from the view-point of Zona code, liable to hard consequences.

So I said "no" and he took me to the Leninist Room and began to shear my hair in a "zero-like" style with a hand-held machine – the length of my hair was a crying impudence for a young. I did not mind though, it had 2 years ahead to grow back. However, the machine was blunt and a couple of times it pulled very painfully.

There was a plasterer from Third Company in the Leninist Room, who came to see his Armenian buddies-countrymen. So, he suggested the home-made barber letting him finish my haircut. The pheasant himself was not already happy that he started that job, and yielded the machine to him.

In short, Robert Zakarian did my haircut, and when the machine jammed he said, "I am sorry". I had completely forgotten there were such words in existence…

Later, Robert started visiting the Club and became a vocalist at The Orion. He had the purest Russian pronunciation because he grew up in the Far North where his father served his time in a camp, convicted of dissidence or something of the sort. When the old man was paroled to "chemistry" in the same region, Robert's mother moved there too, taking Robert and his younger brother north, far away from Armenia.

With his stretch completed, Robert's father applied for emigration of his family from the Soviet Union. Two years passed, and he passed away before they gave permission.

There remained some time before the fixed date of their departure, and Robert went to spend it by his Armenian relatives in the seaside city of Sochi. There he met a Russian girl Valya from the Tula city and fell in love. They exchanged their addresses and, on his return to the north, Robert bleared out that he refused to leave the Soviet Union.

Yet, the papers were drawn up already for the whole family and, without him, his mother and brother would not be let out. The brother tried to make him understand the situation by fighting him, yet Robert daringly maintained his intentions to keep true his promises to his dear beloved. Then the mother began crying on a daily basis and, eventually, he landed with them in Paris by their Armenian relatives because of whose invitation they were let out.

In Paris, he found a job at a construction site. He did not know the language, he had no friends, and all his