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

shining world had a firm foundation of instructive inscription running below, "The Northern Caucasus". When on the stage, Commissar assumed such a stance that his tattoo would face the audience and, blowing his horn aloft, he squinted proudly at the sprawling masterpiece of an unknown author.

Probably, it went against Gray's grains that Commissar was swaggering with a more ostentatious splotch than his blueish spider-cross (a Zona sign for the initiated) hardly bigger than a ping-pong ball, which cheeky inequality, even in absence of any Zona regulations as regards geographical tattoos, provoked Gray's picking at the cheerful Hornblower.

(…however, wherever I use the word "probably" you don't have to take all that follows for its face value because there certainly might be other assumptions besides it. There can be a whole lot of variants and interpretations, but that "probably" sweeps them all aside and leaves just one, maybe not the truest to life.

Word requires a cautious approach. At times you blurt something out, like, say, "lahboohs (aka musicians) – are one family! We support each other like a wall!" just to run into nagging qualms: oops! I did it again…

Because all those general statements are good for slogans only, like: "Workers of all the countries – unite!"

Or else: "Bipeds! All you need is love!"

Such spiffy words work only until the common interests coincide with the interests of the given, individually taken, mammal but whenever the interests diverge then at once – you get along and let me alone…)

Let's take, for instance, that same Yura Zameshkevich. After locking up the stoker-house he came to the Club. The place where he would safely keep away from the eyes of Fathers Commanders, where he could strum a guitar, serenely drink a mug of chiffeer concocted in the Canteen kitchen (mix a 250 gr. pack of tea and 250 ml of water, bring to boiling) where he's one of us – a person of a subtle soul constitution, an exquisite connoisseur of the music which is something, a loyal friend, a reliable comrade, and simply a brother – a lahbooh, in a word.

But now his wife has arrived to visit him and waits in the checkpoint guardhouse, while he races around looking for a parade-crap and a greatcoat to go with her to the city. He gives his bristles a hasty shave, and gets the Leave Ticket at the Staff barrack, then for some reason drops to the Club with me sitting peacefully in the back row of the empty hall. He briskly jumps in and out of the musicians' and, leaving the Club, grabs my completely unaware cock and all in his bearish grip and raises me up in the air for a goodbye. Of course, I scream!

Then the pain gradually dissolves leaving behind inescapable puzzlement. What for?

(…I have found no answer in the writings of the naive primitivist Freud and his bro-scholars, neither in all the Upanishads and Bhagavatas, nor in Testaments, both Old and New, nor in Quran. Only in The History of Russia from Ancient Times, a brief passage mentioned the case of Dmitry the Pretender hiding at the back of the palace where a Cossack found him and, grabbing at his "secret knot", dragged the usurper out to the raging mob. But there at least you may trace a certain purpose for the deed, in contrast to Yura's… What was there for him in it?.

Some questions are beyond the power of human comprehension, we only can point at them for the edification of the inquisitive, and, with a sad shrug, spread our hands wide apart – alackaday! ‘tis beyond the human plumbing.

By the by, they have even invented a special scientific term for the like cases. When, say, you are so high and mighty that taking a leak you send forth a squirt powerful enough to bore thru a three-meter-thick layer of glacial ice, yes, quite in a breeze, before there suddenly pops up some crap that even you don't fucking know what the fuck it could possibly be at all. Know then that you’ve come across that very opaque doodad which by scientifically bent fobs is called transcendentalism…)

So, what else did we do in the Club besides solfeggio, rehearsals and surly contemplation of certain transcendental enigmas from all their respective angles?

Fooling around with chiffeer mentioned en passant? Its bitterness was a rare delicacy. And vodka happened hardly oftener…

We used a special code-knock at the door of the musicians' for a smooth admittance. To the right rhythm in your tap-tapping, the door would open, otherwise, go where you had come from, or shout thru the closed door what was your fucking message.

One time, after the right code and the click of the lock opening in response, the doorway was filled with the stubby figure of Zampolit, bodyguarded by the Ensign from Fourth Company who had tap-tapped the code, to be sure, the fucking excursion guide.

Our cook-vocalist Volodya Rassolov, handled Pickle, was fast and up to the situation: while the two officers gaped around what's what, he glibly slipped the bottle into the top of a kirza boot from the pair standing by his side. Of course, Zampolit labeled us a gang of drunkards and parasites all the same, but there was no direct evidence already…

But most of all we talked: who was what in his civilian life, what would he do coming back to it (we innocently believed then it was possible to come back anywhere at all in the stream of the flowing, ever changing space) and that Third Company went to kick the shit out of Separate Company, but the black-ass fuckers fought the assault back with their belt-plates, and the pigsty soldier-oversee seemed really be fucking his swine harem…

The champion of talking was, sure enough, Karpesha. In a hushed, brotherly confidential tone of voice, for hours would he spin a yarn about his ten-day furlough when he six times broke up and reconciled with the girl he dated, his former classmate…

Got bored with listening to the same minutiae