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

– like a god's fool only without a besom… At home, she happened to have her mother and a daughter of 3 years old.

Then her mother took her daughter for a walk to a store and we got seated on the carpet where she brought and opened her album with photos. Both in the pictures and on the carpet, she looked real cute that quiet mouse blonde Tanya.

All there was to do for having a sex on the carpet next to the spread album was just to reach out and put my hand on her shoulder skin inside her gown, but something hampered the most natural move. I do not know what exactly stopped me. What did I wait for?

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)

Then her mother returned from the store bringing back Tanya’s daughter and a mesh-bag bulging with bright oranges…

Our following meetings took place outside her apartment, and she began to show interest in studying my military ID. The balls about my ID locked up in the safe at the Commander’s office did not roll far with her – she was two years older or have I told so already?

Then there cropped up some nagging predicaments and confusions in the otherwise peaceful flow of my service. I got in a scrape or two, and we lost sight of each other. Already before the demobilization, I went to visit her again, but her mother said Tanya was not home.

I waited for her at the staircase-entrance and, when she eventually appeared, we went out to a wide night courtyard between the five-story apartment-blocks and she succumbed both readily and quietly on a table in the playgrounds. However, I cum too soon, much faster than in that staircase-entrance which outcome I did not like at all and broke off our relationship, in conformance with the demand of Captain Pissak, Commander of First Company. Because, as it stands in the Statute of the Internal Military Service, "an order of the commander is the law for a lower-ranked serviceman"…

~ ~ ~

The closer the demobilization, the shorter is your sleep. Where have you retired, O, the euphoric times when I, still a salaga, was falling asleep the moment my head touched the pillow? An enviable bliss.. And now, the evening roll-call over, the long aimless visit to the Club paid, again I'm plodding back to the barrack without any hope to get a wink of sleep… So, we get together, the nighthawks of the same feather, an upscale insomniac detail of buddies from undercover Royal Troops infiltrating the SA,

stretched upon bunk beds in one or another koobrik. We gossip of this, we gossip of that, or just drive a fool.

(…many years later I learned from Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago that it was an old traditional pastime among zeks, inherited from the Czarist times when someone in the cell retold some novel by some Dickens with adaptations and retouch of the details to bring them closer to the everyday contemporary life. Only instead of "driving a fool" zeks called it "stamping a novel"…)

When it was my turn, I stamped a novel of revenge about two young lovers and a cruel baron from the castle on the hill. That heinous brute of a baron imprisoned the young man in the dark dungeon cell illuminated only when he brought in a couple of torches along with his beloved to use her as a sex slave right in front of the poor guy. A month later, the prisoner tore out the peg that fixed his chain to the wall and paid the bills for lodging and warm hospitality.

(…the plot had nothing to do with Dickens or any particular literary work because when driving that fool I, with my closed eyes, watched the gossamer blouse of Michelle Mercier presenting her nipples in the first sequel of "Angelica". However, here arises the question: if I have farmed out my Michelle to the baron applying her (one whole month!) to tickle his senile fantasies, taking turns with his wolfhound and various objects of medieval utensils and implements, then (even though jerking at the peg in the futile attempts to pull it from the wall, but still collaboratively keeping time with the concurrent porno scenes) may it be I'm a pervert?

Of course, the question was forwarded not by the listeners but by myself, and much later too, but still and all…)

During the epilogue centered on the methodical dismantling of the baron into the constituent parts performed in monstrously graphical manner, Khmel suddenly wailed, "Hey, on-duty!"

From the cabinet-box by the faraway barrack entrance, the on-duty came and Khmel told him, "He had fucking fucked already with his snoring, dome the fucker, let him RIP."

"Who?"

"In the koobrik over two passages."

The on-duty bent over the peace disturber and listened to the sleepy breathing, "No, not this one."

Lyolik joined in the conversation, "Who the fuck cares? Dome the fucker all the same!"

(…the depth of philosophical wisdom of the utterance still brings the tears of tender delight to my eyes.

"Who the fuck cares? Dome the fucker all the same!."

Here! Here it is – the quintessence of statuary and other service relations, the pledge of having a well-trained army, marked with combat zeal and readiness…

I’d be happy to add of the "Soviet army", the one that's plopped into oblivion… but who nowadays believes in Father Christmas?..)

A soldier-dembel pines away under incessant tension. A state of incomprehensible, groundless anxiety deprives him of sleep, appetite, and the ability to assess and conform his actions to the requirements of elementary logic and common sense… Every morning, the buddies from your draft get lined up in groups facing the ranks of the