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

by the soldier-clerk at the Staff barrack of the VSO-11. He did not write a single line but, as arranged between us, enclosed a blank sheet of paper stamped with the Construction Battalion seal. It only remained to fill the page with the testimonial for admission to an institute.

I banged out a text to stuff the page up to an appropriate measure depicting myself rather positively, as a determined soldier at both military and political training, an eager participant in the amateur art activities of the battalion, a reliable comrade, an experienced warrior of the Soviet armed forces in general and the military construction troops in particular… Because not only zampolits could do the job, after all.

Then I asked my father to re-write the composition into the sheet with the stamp since his handwriting looked more like that of an inveterate army officer. He copied the list of my virtues, but somewhat hesitated when it came to signing the testimonial, "What if they catch you?"

I had to assure him that our Battalion Commander had no chances to disown his signature which he had to re-invent for every paper to be signed because of his chronic memory leakage. Grateful for my valiant labor that summer, my father scribbled a signature (any colonel would be proud of such a one) next to the seal stamp of the military detachment 41769…

I did not go to Kiev but, on the advice of my mother, I took my papers to the Nezhyn State Pedagogical Institute which also had the English Language Department. It took only a 2-hour ride by a local train to get to Nezhyn, twice shorter than to Kiev, and I did not care for the institution’s pedagogical quirk, most importantly, I would be able to read in English…

For the period of the entrance examinations I, as an applicant, was allocated a bed in the hostel by the main square of the Nezhyn city, opposite the Lenin statue and the massive building of the City Party Committee and District Party Committee (2 in 1) behind his white back. It took a bus ride for just one stop to get from the square to the institute, yet on foot you got there much sooner.

The English Department was located on the third floor of the Old Building, erected in the times of Decemberists by Count Razumovsky, and in those times of yore, it served already as the educational institution for nondescript students along with Gogol, the great Russian writer. For that fact, the institution had nailed down to its denomination the name of N. V. Gogol and planted 3 monuments of him around the edifice.

I liked the black-and-white alley of giant Birch-trees by the foot of the steep porch in the Old Building, and the white unembraceable columns carrying the classical pediment, and the Firs tall enough to peek even into the echoing corridors in the third floor paved with parquet, and the high-ceiling auditorium rooms.

And I liked Dean of the English Department, named Antonyouk. The sympathy was based on his not picking holes in my lame knowledge of English. I do not think though that he would be as lenient if knowing that my grandfather's name was Joseph, and my father-in-law was Abram. Dean Antonyouk belonged to the militant anti-Semite type. In the gloom of late evenings, Antonyouk sneaked to the time-table of the English Department to cross with his wrathful pencil the names of Jewish teachers out, and in the same manner, purged he the faculty wall-newspaper hanging by. Like a youth from an underground resistance cell struggling gegen Befehle issued by the occupant authorities of the Third Reich. However, Alexander Bliznuke, one of those Jewish instructors, as alert as Gestapo, tracked Antonyouk down and caught him red-handed for which the latter lost his position. Yet, all that happened later…

At the written examination on Russian, I turned out a composition, graded 4, which, actually, was an untraceable plagiarism – an adaptation of the memorable message-statement that Zoya Ilynichna, the teacher of Russian language and literature at the Konotop School 13, rolled out in red ink under my subversive babbling about meditations by the window. And at the oral examination, I was in luck to pull the ticket asking to describe the character of Prince Andrey from the War and Peace by Tolstoy. However, the bitchy examiner still tried to set me back by an additional question, "Could you recite some poem of a Soviet poet, anyone of your choice?"

That was, as you call it, a question below the belt, but I recollected that Yesenin also lived some time under the Soviet regime, and started pouring out with a restaurant drawl to it:

"Oh, my leafless Maple,Ice-coated Maple…"

Before my getting into the second verse, the examiner surrendered and yielded a passing score…

In the interim between the exams, I bought a couple of balloons for Lenochka. In the trade network of Konotop, such goods were seldom on sale and I did not like that her staple plaything remained the old suitcase preferred by her to a couple of worn-out dolls. She used to drag the scratched suitcase out of the bedroom and drop it in the middle of the kitchen to announce, "Cry, Grandma! Grandpa, cry! Lenochka is leaving for the BAM!"

It was about a year already that the Central TV news program "Time" was night after night presenting reports of labor achievements at the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway track, aka BAM.

>"Come to me at the BAMI am not a stuck-up Ma'mOn the rails, we'll have a sex…

I did not like that the child was growing so over-politicized, and I had warm recollections of how at the Object we loved to play balloons.

And so, one evening stretched out on the hostel bed, I watched the smoke from my cigarette swimming up to the ceiling which view suggested an idle idea of staging an experiment in Physics because there was nothing else to busy myself with… By its behavior, the smoke very clearly indicated its