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

The Uzbeks were rocking with laughter and the Sergeant liked it too, "Very well, Vasya!"

Here, the truck pulled up at the traffic lights and I, without a superfluous goodbye to the nice company of music lovers, slipped over the tailgate and down the short ladder… That time I slipped away to see Quiet Mouse.

Actually, her name was Tanya and she did not know that, to myself, I was calling her "Quiet Mouse" because when I first approached her in a trolleybus she was answering so quietly. And could I possibly not approach? Several times I saw her on the trolleybus when going from the ring road to the MCU.

She told me later, "I noticed you still in February, at the very frosts, your pea-jacket collar was wide open with the whole your neck sticking out." So motherly attentive. She was 2 years older than me.

In the morning, when she agreed to a date after the working day by that same ring road, I was not alone going to the MCU by a trolley. From our stop, we had to march yet along a lane, and there I said to that Moldovan, "Rahroo! Would you bet I doff now?" In general, there was snow all around, although it was March already, and I stripped to the waist strolling along in just high boots and the canvas pants with Rahroo carrying all other items of my outfit behind. Because I had got filled with so irresistible delight; but that was before her telling me about my bare neck…

Most likely, my topless folly walking resulted also from the meeting that god's fool… Back in February, I was for about a week hanging out at the 50-apartment block – that same that we had started with rebar-rod breakers, now it was already nearing its delivery.

So, buddies from a squad-team there told me about some old man walking barefoot in one of the nearby lanes. And I went there twice, on purpose, before I met him… It was a bearded old man, his beard was white and slightly yellowish, and apart from it, the man had also a hat and an overcoat on. His pants were rolled up leaving his legs bare down the knees; he swept a path in the snowdrifts with a besom. Though long and skinny, he hardly was a junkie because he had a drift of his own.

The snow was falling in big rare flakes, and he walked barefoot and swept an empty path in the empty street. I stood by for a while watching him, and he gave me a sidelong glance or 2 while busy with his business. We both kept silent, and then I left.

(…everyone believes that they are right and that their way of believing is the rightest one.

In Stavropol mujiks, the faith, for some reason, has a firm connection to their feet. Already in the third millennium, on TV they showed a man who had crawled on his knees from Stavropol to Moscow. To withstand the trying deed, he fixed pieces of automobile tires onto his knees and scrambled on along the highways roadsides, replacing the tires as needed. For the revival of faith in the Christ-loving people of Russia and to bring God's blessing to them…

Well, I, personally, don't mind. My present confession is that of Tolerant Non-Believing. I entertain a strong conviction that true tolerance could happen exclusively among the unbelievers. All the rest are only pretending it while, in fact, they want to convert everyone else into a follower of their faith. Even the atheists are a confession like others, all too happy to bring you to their flock of believers in the absence of any god.

An unbeliever is the one who has nothing to believe with, because of the absence of corresponding organ, responsible for believing functions.

yet, being overly-blind, he chopped off the thing producing fluids of crucial importance for believing…

So now, crawl as far as you please, sit in full lotus until you bloom, knead the floor with your forehead—whatever!—if not in my kitchen garden, of course. Don't put to try my tolerance, please…)

But at the construction battalion that spring I did not care a damn about any theology when awaiting Trolley 5 by the Ring Road stop… Several of that number passed by before she arrived.

We quietly walked along the sidewalk by the host of five-story blocks laid of white silicate brick in the Lipetsk masonry fashion. Then we entered one of the staircase-entrances in one of the five-story blocks.

We embraced warmly and quietly, standing by the heating battery on the first floor, at the bottom of the staircase. Still standing, we quietly copulated.

Then we went out again to the endless sidewalk and I saw her to another entrance in another five-story block…

And for a long time after, it was not possible to repeat the warmly quiet pleasure; the staircase-entrances, for some reason, became too crowded… A couple of times we went to the movies for daytime shows but there were too many kids around.

One time Captain Pissak spotted me leaving a cinema with her. He called me aside and demanded to immediately cut all sorts of relations with her, although he could not present any sound foundation for his insistence. And that was most annoying – okay, suppose, you're Captain Pissak, then go and command in your First Company, why meddling if I had Tughrik to report to?.

But then I finally visit her at home. As it turned out, her staircase-entrance was different from where I escorted her on our first date, and the building itself was half-block farther along the endless sidewalk.

When I took my high boots off in the hallway and stuck the footcloths into them as deep as I could, so that they wouldn't propagate their smell too freely, it turned out that I was barefoot and even slippers did not hide that fact