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

for the seventh time? Go out into the empty Club hall, get seated next to Robert in the last row of seats, and welcome to the fluctuations of Parisian life. In Paris, everyone knew everything about anyone else. That, for example, Jean Marais was gay. And that's a pity, of course. Although I did not like him starring in "Fantômas", but as D'Artagnan in "The Iron Mask", he was the masculinity itself. That's what that fucking Paris was doing to even manly men…

Gray would share how he used to rough those in love, inadvertently passing along his street. Then he would go out of the wicket, and conversationally ask the guy, “So, what, Romeo? Wanna talk of love?” and cock up the trigger of his dad's shotgun. To which motion the asked, neglecting the chanced discussion, would sprint away, but in fucking zigzags, sort of, while yelling over his shoulder the farewell instructions, "Run! Sveta, run!"

Or, for a change, how he battered his wife for the first time and the following morning she had Chink eyes…

And Jafarov, caressing thoughtfully the soft glitter of his horn, would narrate of when being still just a kid and "playing trash" at some party, he watched thru the key-hole a whore giving some officer a blow job, and then she returned to the hall and danced with someone else suck-kissing him, another officer of a higher rank than the previous one.

"But such a beautiful woman! Upon my word of honor! Fuck it!"

And when he served at the military orchestra, their leader usually walked the city with a tube, which is the biggest trumpet in brass bands. Just donned it and went out hunting for "trash", such a shifty schemer was he, I swear.

He was walking and looking out where they carried funeral wreaths for him to follow. "Would you like a military band at the funeral? Let's talk terms." I swear by my Mom, some foxy wheeler-dealer, but "playing trash" not with the whole orchestra, sure thing. Such kind of "trash" was called "to play a sleeper". Yes.

Now, one time, as usual, we went "to play a sleeper". On the second floor, the door to the landing wide open, all’s socko, good and proper, we marched in.

In the first room, the relatives sitting by the walls, a-crying all, good and proper, as befit the occasion. Only that they were somehow way too much at it, and paying zero attention that the musicians had arrived. So, the leader came up to the one he had made the deal with, "What's the fuss?"

"Oh, we're so distressed! It's a disaster. We may have to cancel the funeral." And she showed us to the next room, also packed with relatives a-crying, but even louder than in the first room.

Now, in the room center, there stood a table with a coffin on it, all’s socko, good and proper. And in the coffin, the dead man a-sitting. Well, upon my word, real sitting, bolt upright.

See, when alive, he was a hunchback and because of so big a hump, they couldn't make him lie down as required. Whoops, that’s how our "playing a sleeper" got fucked…

But the leader was a fucking tough character, he came nearer and pressed at the sleeper's forehead; it went over its hump and lay down in a proper way. Only after the correction its legs stuck up in the air, no way to shut the coffin lid.

"We've already tried that way!" sez she who the deal was made with, and wails loudest in the room.

And ain’t I tell you the leader was a real sport, eh? I swear, some socko, good and proper fucker. "Okay," says he. "I wanna all but the musicians out of the room."

Well, in general, we pulled the sleeper out of the coffin, placed it on the floor, face down, hoisted the coffin over it and – bang! Who would fucking like to lose a "trash", eh?

("It.. helped?" asks I thru tears.)

Well, something cracked, but—I swear by my Mom!—it did straighten out. We put the coffin back upon the table and shoved the body straight in. All in a socko proper way. It’s only that…

("??" I no longer have any strength for asking.)

Well, the sleeper grew ten centimeters taller now and the feet stuck out from the too-short coffin. Fuck!

In the tall tale of the lahbooh about the hunchback "sleeper" reality mingled with fiction… Sprawled over a plywood seat in the cinema hall, I was expiring with laughter, having no idea that in the Stavropol city there was the Regional Committee of the CPSU headed by its Secretary, a certain Gorbachov, the future mortician of the USSR handled Hunchy, yet among the Stavropol "workshoppers" of that period they referred to him as Envelope.

(…"workshoppers" were the people aspiring to do business under the realities of developed socialism, and they had to pay for their dreams to come true.

Gorbachov trained the Stavropol workshoppers to bring their payment to him exclusively in envelopes, good and proper, as it was practiced in all the civilized world…)

~ ~ ~

I don't want you to form a rash notion as if the construction battalion was a dreary desperate hard labor and nothing else. Sometimes even there came the spring, and we switched over to the summer outfit.

We handed our long-sleeved undershirts and pea-jackets to the company Master Sergeant, because the winter uniform had, for some reason, become way too heavy. We changed warm gray hats of artificial fur for dandyish piss-cutters.

It's real nice to stand in the light-dressed ranks at the Morning Dispensing under a freshly blue sky with great sailings of thin transparent feather clouds in the fathomless height, and in the luster of the morning sun ride in the open bed of a truck into the city with so many bright skirts and frocks walking its sidewalks… In spring, the population of girls grew drastically, and they began to spill over and out of the sidewalks.

In any case, at the end of a working day, two girls