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

appeared even in the territory of the would-be Medical Center… I was nearing the place where the truck usually picked us up, and those two girls walked in the same direction some 30 meters ahead of me. Probably, they were taking a shortcut somewhere and leisurely paced ahead, talking to each other.

Suddenly, their chatter broke off. Bypassing the truck arrival point, they accelerated to quick strides and disappeared from the view… And at the spot, there was already sitting Sasha Khvorostyuk – the first to pop up.

Seated on a half-meter stump, he kept his knees wide apart resting his hands on them, like, in the KGC—King of Gay Cocks—posture and, happy with himself, kept turning royally his beak from side to side. From his unbuttoned fly, his cock was drooping languidly… That's why the girls trotted away, and hardly would they shortcut here anymore. Because of that fucked in the head platypus!.

And sometimes in the construction battalion, you might quite unexpectedly get into another world – away from all those trenches, shovels, pallets, humiliations… That Sunday morning everything went on as always, yet on entering the city our truck changed tack.

Probably, our Lance-Corporal Alik Aliyev knew where we were going, but his vocabulary limitations did not allow him to talk of anything beyond the usual commands and responses, so he kept enigmatic and puffed up mien. The truck pulled up by the city circus building. We jumped off after Alik and were met by a man in the civilian who explained what we had to do. There was a change in the circus – one troupe was leaving and replaced with the touring circus of Lilliputians.

(..what is the role of the construction battalion in the interval between two circuses?

Exactly! To load one and unload the other…)

But still it was a holiday, and we festively dragged large boxes into long trailers with canvas tops, and festively pulled boxes looking quite the same out from looking the same, but already other, long freight trailers. And then we ate ice-cream, drank kvass from the wheeled barrel in the circus square, entered the building and got seated wherever one chose, on the velvet crimson seats in the empty amphitheater around the arena.

The artists from the newly arrived Lilliputians troupe walked admired circles around the shortest serviceman in our special-mission loader-group.

Were he wise enough to grow two centimeters shorter, they would not press him in the army, not even to a construction battalion, but now: Taller than a meter and fifty-six? Wow! A ready-made non-combatant!

One of the Lilliputians even spoke to him in an undertone—the soldier never confessed what about. Most likely, it was an invitation to enter the number of power acrobats, when the whole pyramid of light-weight Lilliputians was built upon the propping shoulders of the midget strongman…

One of the Lilliputian women invited me to follow her. We left the building thru a side passage and she led me to a row of house trailers.

(…it's somehow strange to follow a woman not taller than your waist, feels kinda being an elephant in a small Indian village…)

She climbed onto the high porch way, shot her arm up, high above her head, and pulled at the unyielding door handle. Plaintively asked she for assistance. I lowered my hand on the handle which readily turned down, and pulled the door.

"Thank you!" said the voice of the highest-pitched flute.

"You're welcome."

It's so inconvenient to live in a world not made to match you…

I returned to the circus where Alik Aliyev trotted enraptured circles in the arena chasing the white pony who openly resented flirtations from any stray Lance-Corporals in kirza high boots.

In the pit above the curtained arena entrance, the brass band hurriedly rehearsed bravura marches with the slight streak of impudent outa-keyness innate in circus orchestras.

A group of Lilliputians gathered by the heavy folds of the arena entrance curtains, following as one of them, the size of a kindergarten kid, was giving hell to her husband whom she had caught pants down in a trailer with another Lilliputian woman. When fired out in sparrow squeaks, foul language loses its specific weightiness, but the intensity of the infuriated wife's emotions was on a par with the deepest Shakespearean passions…

Olga arrived in the middle of the day. We were brought to the midday meal and they told me, "Your wife waits in the checkpoint guardhouse."

I raced there, then to the Staff barrack, they gave me the Leave Ticket only until next morning. Battalion Commander was not there, said they, the Ticket would be prolonged the following day after the Morning Dispensing, they said. Then I barely found some parade-crap, the Master Sergeant was not there together with the wareroom key. But in a canvas outfit, the military patrols in the city would rake you in at once, be there even dozens Leave Tickets on you.

So we got to the city only in the evening, but she had already had a room in the hotel: a one-person suite with a washbasin on the wall.

Then some red-haired guy knocked at the door. Olga introduced him, meet please, we arrived by the same train together. The fellow-traveler invited us to his room, where he had a party with his friends. We went over and on the way, Olga asked me to pretend that she was my sister – when on the train she jazzed him that she was visiting her brother.

(…well, okay, then…

Sarah and Abraham had also been there…)

He had a long table in his room all filled with wine bottles, sort of a hussar banquet. Sometime earlier, he was a cadet at the Stavropol Military Aviation School but got expelled and now came there to see his friends, and all those already were third-year cadets…

I knew their Aviation School, out squad-team once were laying partitions in the basement of some building there. When the bell sounded and the cadets rushed to the classes from the yard, we combed trash pits in the gazebos hunting cigarette stubs… Now they were sharing common memories