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

(…initially, CHMO was the acronym of "person messing around with the society" but soon because of its so impressive sound form the term forced to forget the original meaning and nowadays everyone thinks that chmo is a synonym to "wafler" only more degrading…)

Before his return to civilian life, Yura Zameshkevich showed me the location of the water well with the main water supply valve-wheels to keep the proper water level in the tank above the stoker-house. He taught me to light the nozzle in the steam boiler furnace with a handmade torch, to read the steam-gauge, water-reserve tube and pressure manometer. I was transferred to Fourth Company where all the chmo was listed, and Yura got demobilized.

The young draft was from the Crimea and Major Avetissian chose me a partner from them named Vanya who sported a thin mustache and thick eyebrows. It's highly doubtful that Major Avetissian's choice of Vanya was prompted by the eyebrows' thickness of the latter. Most likely, Vanya's father, who came to see his offspring on the third day of sonny’s service, forwarded convincing arguments in his negotiations with Major. I shared Yura Zameshkevich's lectures to Vanya and we split 7/24 into day-in, day-out.

The stoker-house of the Military Detachment 41769, aka VSO-11, consisted of two high halls in a red-brick one-story building. Each of the halls contained 2 massive boilers encased in their common lining of refractive brick, and a slew of pipes with valves and cocks – for hot water, for cold water, for steam, for fuel supply… On the concrete floor before each boiler, there was planted an air pump forcing the fuel to spray thru the nozzle inside the respective furnace. However, in operation was only one boiler, the farthermost from the entrance, the rest were reserved for the heating season in winter.

The stokers' task in summertime was providing steam for boilers in the kitchen of the Canteen plus hot water for the Dishwashers'. And, once a month, we heated water for the bath day of all the personnel at VSO-11 and Separate Company. Anyway, each day you had to sit at a round table by the high window opposite the deafening rumble of the air blower and the howling buzz of the nozzled flame inside the boiler’s furnace for about 4 hours until the on-duty cook knocked on the locked door of the stoker-house to say the havvage got ready. Then you could turn it off. The runs for breakfast and supper were shorter though. Silence is an invaluable grace… Until the next, one of the remaining 2, shorter, 2-hour stretch.

To the right from the entrance door, there was a narrow room of the pumping section to drive hot water thru the heating system in winter. But if going straight ahead, in the corner behind the twinned boilers of the first hall, you found the door to a small workshop. It had a window, a wooden workbench without a vice put by the butt wall across the room, an iron box in the corner between the door and the window, a hammer and a blunt chisel in that unlocked safe-like box, and a narrow mirror shard embedded in the plaster above the box, next to the switch for the bulb in the ceiling.

~ ~ ~

The arrival of summer was celebrated by the chmo of VSO-11 by a collective booze. The battalion's truck delivering havvage to the watchmen at the construction sites and those kept there even at night by urgent works came back with a box of vodka smuggled utilizing a huge thermos pot emptied of havvage. The on-duty officer at the checkpoint cast a fleeting glance into the bed of the returning truck, and it passed the gate.

The orgy, to which I also was invited because a stoker is a necessary accessory in the soldiery life, started after the lights-out near the remote car-boxes. In the bright illumination from the full moon, some fifteen chmomen sat on the ground in a wide circle, kinda aboriginal tribe of that field. Everyone faced the center of the circle where the glass of vodka bottles, and the sides of two pots full of meat fried by cooks in large baking trays at the Canteen kitchen, glistened in the moonlight. On the spread burlap of two empty sacks there piled several loaves of bread chopped in the Bread-Cutter's. Never before I had vodka from the bottle’s neck. The initial gulps were somewhat disgusting but the following kept pouring in smoothly.

The snack, regrettably, disappeared all too soon… I never finished the bottle in my hand. Having risen on unsteady legs, with the most best wishes to the honest company, I informed of the immediate departure of me to the village of Demino.

"All's nyshtyak, buddy-bros. What fucki' on-dut' what fucki' office..rr… It's me on-dut'… fuck!.."

Nevertheless, so as not to run into, I crossed the perimeter fence near the pigsty, away from the barracks. And there I made for the round face of the full moon that shone from above the distant village of Demino and was swaying back and forth like on a swing. I muttered reproaches to its treacherous inconstancy, and to the field as well for arranging a sea-rolling in my way. Then I fell down and tried to hoist me on my elbows but the earth gravity occurred too powerful and the field was so irresistibly soft…

I woke up in the dusk of dawn, only a hundred meters from the pigsty, dying from thirst, and went back to drink water from the tap in the stoker-house before crashing onto the workbench in the workshop room…

Looked like I’d given too free rein to my wishful thinking, imagining that till the end of service I would live my life between the Club and the stoker-house. On some morning after a night shift, Major Avetissian found me asleep in the workshop and ordered to retreat to the Company barrack. And that at the time when the majority of chmomen