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

of a landed saboteur. The driver grinned his bad-teeth smile from under his thin mustache – he was in high spirits from that sort of gypsy romanticism.

The exhaust pipe of his truck was trained to give out loud bangs but he withheld the fun for riding along the city sidewalks, to rough the passers-by. Bang!!

"Oy, Mommy!"

The buddies tried to explain me about those engine backfire bangs and the carburetor, but such things always were above my head…

On one of the first days in the new place, I went to the wooden toilet on the frontier of the site territory. When urged to take a leak we loosened bowls at any nearby nook, so I wouldn't go that far for such a trifle. Yet, because of the frost using the detachment sorteer harbored not a little risk. The whole floor there became one solid yellow skating rink too slippery for walking and even when a-squatting over an ochco your high boots’ treds slid slowly apart on the smooth ice…

While defecating at that faraway ruin of a toilet, I felt like having some odd auditory sensations. I kinda heard…well, not quite voices…rather, echoes of voices. A distant, cohesive buzz of voices, some low even hum with no splashes nor distinct words.

Then I took a letter from the inside pocket of my outfit jacket, which I never re-read but kept on me. Without looking who the letter was from, I used it as toilet paper, stood up, buttoned my pants and suddenly saw the source of that noise.

The shabby walls and stall partitions were scratched in toto with inscriptions. Names, dates, settlement names were written and snicked, with pencils and ball pens. Some climbed on top of others because there was left no spare space around… The territory had obviously been used as the Stavropol Collection and Distribution Point of Draftees, betcha, and they, already fallen thru into the two-year-long eternity, smitten, swept, engulfed by it, were hurriedly leaving on the deals in rotten whitewash their parting scratches:

"Sakha, from the village…"

"Athos, from the settlement…"

"Drun, from the city…"

They were already there—swallowed up—because their voices were not heard, but turned into some mutual wordless hum, yet the hands were still finishing their farewell to themselves:

"Andron, from…"

(…in the construction battalion, the universal urge to leave a meme of oneself does not disappear, but becomes anonymous. You would not see there the classical "Vasya was here", they used one, common, mark for all at once:

"Orel, DMB-73".

Read it as, "Drafted from the Orel-City (or region) demobilized in 1973".

With graphite, chalk, paint on walls, on pipes, on the tin, on anything. In every construction site or building erected by the Stavropol Construction Battalion about a year or two before 1973, there was such a mark.

Then there came Tula, DMB-74 .

The time would come for Sumy, DMB-75 , and Dnepr, DMB-75 but it still was so far away…)

~ ~ ~

The Orion took part in the city musical contest. We performed 2 numbers there without securing any place. As it seemed, the whole affair was started for the sake of a local singer. A young guy could sing without a microphone filling the whole auditorium with his voice. That's some singer!

(…I have never heard him any more neither on TV nor over the radio, they had no vacancies there, muslim magomaevs and iosif kobsons kept their positions for decades…)

The second of our numbers at the contest was "The Indian's Song" from the repertoire of Tom Jones. No one knew what about he sang in it, but in the Soviet adaptation the song bemoaned the bitter fate of American Redskins (as it turned out later, Tom had nothing to do with the song sung by Raiders):

"They took the whole Cherokee nation,Put us on this reservation…"

At the contest, the Orion’s "brass" group comprised already two horn players. Ensign Jafar Jafarov had been transferred to our battalion I can't say where from or what for, because I didn't care. He came to the Club and announced that he was playing a horn…

Jafarov’s eastern appearance imparted a pleasant impression of softness. A rounded face with the soft swarthy skin, the soft glint in his black, olive-like, eyes, his soft smile when he uttered his, "I swear to you by my Mom!" And he really played the horn which he was bringing to the Club for the rehearsals and carrying away in an unexpectedly hard case… Kolya Commissar started to blow his horn much better with Jafar around…

Gray, the tamer of Karlookha, became a frequent visitor to the Club too, not as a musician though, just because it was a secluded spot in the everyday conbat life. At work, he fucked it all from the very beginning of his service and was just doing another two-year time at the construction battalion. As if it was much fucking different from a penitentiary colony… just that conditions were a bit easier and the spetzovka in khaki color instead of indigo.

Brought in the morning to a construction site, he ventured to the city and returned only for the evening truck home. At times, he was locked up in the clink, but even Battalion Commander, notwithstanding his chronic brain leakage, clearly realized that suchlike correctional efforts would be lost on that well-developed, stiff-lipped jail-bird. The bald patch of a scar in his left eyebrow somehow humanized the crisp face thrust in wolfy way forward from his broad shoulders… In his life, Gray was treading along the guilelessly straight, unpretentious, path of a hereditary thief.

At the Club, he shared stories of his recent adventures in the city, or roughed Commissar. That was not right, because both Commissar and he were from the same draft, but for Gray, the Zona Code overweighed that of the construction battalion.

On the eve of becoming a pheasant, Commissar decorated all of the rear of his right hand with a gaudy tattoo depicting a craggy ridge of fuzzy mountains and the sun rising from behind them in a spiky halo of sharp rays, and all that freshly