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

skipped even mustering the roll-calls before lights-out! Thus, the soldier-clerk from the Stuff half-barrack slept at the Medical Unit hosted by the paramedic assistant sharing a bed from the couple of normal ones waiting for ill personnel whom he escorted to the city military hospital the moment they popped up with health complains. The Club painter Lopatko had a room of his own at the Club. But the ill-fated stoker, after sitting all day in that howling hell of the stoker-house, had to go for the evening roll-call where instead of absent chmomen a voice from the ranks would shout out "on duty!" and there were no questions at all…

To somehow pass the time while they were cooking havvage, I took a book from the library in the Staff barrack, with the assistance of the Staff clerk. The book was chosen because of its thickness so that it lasted longer. The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Wow! That's the stuff! A culmination upon culmination… After those of his works prescribed by the school curriculum, I wouldn't ever think he was writing so cool… And there wasn't anything else to take from the Staff library with its just one shelf of books, because reading the masterpieces of B. Polevoy or N. Ostrovsky was not worth the while after the Dostoevsky's novel.

At the Club, Roodko passed me a booklet The Beatles in America about their tour there. Some of the youngs brought it along. I undertook to translate it because that booklet had more pictures than the text. However, without a dictionary at hand, my school stock of vocabulary allowed me to understand it only here, there, yet not everywhere. I filled the gaps with my wild guesses, but Roodko was happy all the same…

And so it went in a circle – the hiss of steam, the rumble of the air pump, the Club, the evening roll-call, and back to the Club. And in the morning all over again…

Here, Jafarov rushes a-galloping into the stoker-house with his eyes round and bulging, the face as pale as the white marks on his khaki shirt back which he had fucking rubbed against some whitewashed wall.

"Where to hide? Chief of Staff’s after me!"

I watched out the door and who was there but him – making for the stoker-house from the Canteen's kitchen in his boxer swagger. Jafarov barely had time to jump out thru the window in the workshop into the tall grass on the other side of the stoker-house. "No, Comrade Major, no one was coming this way."

But the Major’s scent would surpass that of a hunting dog, and in a moment, from behind the corner, "Ensign Jafarov! To me!"

Fucking caput to you, Ensign, I swear by your Mommy… Why should Chief of Staff chase Jafar as with a fucking prick in his arse? But then, who fucking cares…

And in the evening there's another hunt in the field. The swarthy cowboys from Separate Company ran down a rat and drove it into a stub of plugged pipe there, splashed gasoline inside and set on fire. The rat whizzed out and jumped around the field like a ball of flames and they followed running – some cultural and sports event…

When it was my night shift, I came across a brood of rats in the passage around the twinned boilers. I hollered and rushed to trample them, but they fled. And then I wondered where that sudden rat-hate had cropped up in me from?. The pure instinct of self-preservation that’s what it was. Rats would not forgive the humans, including me as well, the death in flames of that rat martyr, so to forestall their avenge I attacked first. Fucking moron…

One night I was sleeping on the workbench when some strange thing lit on my chest. Something dark like a clot of black fog, sort of, and it pressed to strangle me. I wanted to brush it off but had no strength even to stir or at least scream it away as if all of my strength had dried up leaving me pitifully paralyzed. It took a desperate effort to wake up.

Later Vanya, putting on a look of an expert, began to lecture me it was a bogey. They're just fucking stupid in that Crimea of theirs. Bogeys live at folks' homes, right? The stoker-house is anything but a home. Where could a bogey pop up here from, eh?.

What I omitted to tell Vanya was that the creature sat exactly in that place on my chest which I had shaved by the safety razor in front of the mirror piece embedded in the wall plaster. Well, to get a macho look, of course, because what I had there was like that down on Vanya's upper lip. But it fucking did not work and the chest remained unchanged, smooth and bare…

After the evening roll-call, I went to Demino and there I found the house of Irina whom I met when we played dances at their club. There was also her elder sister in the house. Irina left the kitchen for a while and her sister started a solo Sing-a-song about how Irina was only nineteen-year-old and had never come across a low-grade buster in her life as of yet and would I mind her taking a look at my military ID, by the way. That was her way to hint, sort of, about her sister's being a virgin.

"No worry, I'm not a buster."

The soldier’s military ID, as stipulated in the Statute of the Internal Military Service, each serviceman had always to have by him, and so was mine in my jacket inner pocket. There was a slight problem though boiling down to just one line at the bottom of its first page: 'wife – Olga Abramovna Ogoltsova". Because of that record, I had to drive a fool to that smart-Alec of a guardian-sister about conbatists' IDs being locked up in a big iron safe at the Battalion Staff and given out to us together with the Leave Ticket which