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

seized he the nearest to him militiaman—the one without a gun it was—and cried, "Run!" There was no need he repeated it twice to me.“ Oh, Gods! How frightened was I! How I fled!

Around and below me some fences, trees, alleys, hills, gullies, ramparts, and mountain ridges flashed… I came to myself only in some shed with wide lengthwise gaps between the horizontally nailed boards structuring its walls, and it took me a considerable stretch to bring my breath into a normal shape.

In the evening only Lyolik showed up in the barrack. He needed to wash his pea-jacket of the blood from the broken eyebrow. I led him to the stoker-house.

There they also had their news. The lining of one of the furnaces was all cracked, most likely caused by the overheating of the boiler. So that’s why last month they took us to the city bathhouse. Apparently, at the time of the accident, the smoke was pouring out from multiple crevices, carrying black soot which settled on the walls and ceiling in both halls of the stoker-house. My cosmetic overhaul was lost under uniformly even, greasy, black.

(…did I wallow in rancor? There hardly was much of gloating though – by that time I didn't care a fuck about anything…)

Loose materials are normally transported in special freight cars without a roof, and the floor in such cars is a series of iron hatches. When unloading, you just approach the car and knock aside the huge hook that fixes the hinged hatch-lid which now falls down allowing the loose material to spill out thru the opening.

I do not know for which organization those five cars came to the station of Stavropol, but I can vividly visualize how they clang-flapped the hatches to dangle open and nothing flowed out, so they took a look from underneath into the car hatches and saw a smooth, fine-grained, monolith. The sand had been sent wet or got drenched by rains while traveling from some much warmer corner in our boundless Mother-Homeland and the frosts, met further on along the endless way, turned it into five huge parallelepipeds of carload frozen within the mold of the cars' iron sides.

There was no time to wait for the reverse transformation, for if you did not return the car within 3 days after its arrival to the station, or to your organization sideway, then it was classified as "rolling stock delay" and penalized with a huge fine which grew still huger with each additional day of delay. The addressee organization of the permafrosted sand lost their head – the problem seemed absolutely unsolvable.

And who, by us, is there for cracking any problems, however unsolvable they were? Who puts to rights the shit fucked up by the managing yet stupid elite waltzing from womb to tomb with their heads never examined but their tongues, and lips, and stuff ever at ready? Well, yes, sorry, you know the answer to this trivial one about USSR slaves… Yet, just in case, which factor have you to throw in for solving a problem of any magnitude, eh? You’re kidding! I know that you know that I know that you know… So, that’s why 4 truck-loads of us were brought to the Stavropol freight station. And for that occasion, they even gave us smooth-bodied steel breakers.

To solve the problem thru the hatches opened at the car bottom was out of the question because the monolith reacted to the hits from below by sending the breaker back at you with the tantamount force as foreseen by the respective law of Physics. We had to fuck it from the top and bore down along the car sides. The rumors had it they even were going to bring some perforators for the job but until then – to attack with what's in hands!

For a while, I was at it but soon kicked because of being much too fed up with the fucking monotony of the process reiterated in all the years of my service. However, idle kicking back around in that cold weather was no good for my tender feet which had lived thru too many freezing ups and thawing offs…

Misha Khmelnytsky handed me some money to fetch "warming stuff". He himself couldn't do it, he was a Sergeant in charge of the Uzbeks…

And where only do them buddies manage to get money from?

Come on, it’s a breeze. MCU turned out mortar of different kinds in the quantities scribbled in the forms of application orders presented by the truck drivers. And if there happened no form with a signed order the driver handed over another piece of paper. To whom? To the Commander of the squad-team working at the MCU…

So off I started in the city… Because of being unfamiliar with the current neighborhood, it wasn’t at once that I found the right store. There I shoved the bottles under my pea-jacket cinched over by the belt, which load made me look so stout. Who’d ever said they poorly fed the construction battalion?

I went back with my head kept down not from shame just because of the snow lashing against my face.

"Why don't you salute? Haven't they taught you?"

By the Statute of the Internal Military Service, you must salute every senior in rank, be it even just a Lance Corporal. Yet, the hard snow pelting prevented zeroing in time the officer who stopped me, and then how could I throw my hand up in salute which surely would set the bottles inside my pea-jacket a-playing jingle bells?

"My fault, Comrade…" I scanned his shoulder-strap and could not make it out – no stripes, like by an Ensign, and only one star, yet much bigger than that by a Major, and only then I saw leaves in his collar patches. "…Comrade Major-General, I was lost in thoughts."

"He lost in thoughts! Dismissed!"

And that was right – a general and a private in black shoulder-straps had, practically, no common gossip even if it was the only officer who addressed me with