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

A week later, when I called him with the payphone fixed in the glass-walled cage by the second, permanently locked, entrance door to the hostel lobby, he instructed me to come to the railway station, and there proceed to the wooden house of the station militia, next to the public toilet, and enter the first door to the right in their corridor… Behind that door, under his dictation, I wrote the application to enlist me in the secret contingent of the KGB, to which end I chose the conspirative by-name "Pavel" as my operational pseudonym…

At our third meeting, Captain said that the response from the commanding staff at the military detachment of my army service indicated they were of extremely poor opinion about me. Like, I was a hopelessly lost and utterly spoiled fraction of the society dregs.

(…it seems like at the KGB everything was turned upside down – first, they recruited me as a secret agent and then waked up to collecting information if I was worth the while.

Though on the second thought, there could also be my fault, to some extent, by presenting myself so awesome good guy in the forged testimonial.

To quote the great sage Gavkalov, in charge of a truck crane at SMP-615 (of whom later on), “what is all too good is not good at all”…)

So, I asked if Zampolit reported of me as an accomplice in a bank robbery, to which Captain grinned but all the same wished to know why the commanding officer was so negative in his estimation.

Well, I didn’t attempt at jejune justifications or puerile lies, nothing of the sort. I told him the whole truth about how it all happened. It’s only that I substituted myself for the projectionist at the construction battalion club and part-time postman collecting daily mail for the battalion personnel from the city main post office, whom Zampolit trusted with running errands and passing presents to his (Zampolit's) young passions.

By the adjusted version, it was I who accidentally laid up one of the girls who was silly enough to blab it before Zampolit and now, in his jealous fury, he besmeared me with the stamp of a drug-using rowdy…

After that talk, the halo of my dream of becoming a spy on the USA soil grew dim. It dawned on me that I might have been needed for only local use, in the capacity of a snitch, another "Gestapo's ear inserted into Everyman's pocket".

The future confirmed my gloomy boding… There were no more talks about intelligence service school (which bullshit served to hook the fool) instead, twice a month, I came to the room in the station militia corridor to report that I hadn't heard any political discussions among the students of the NGPI.

On the one hand, I felt guilty for letting Captain down and the hopes he pinned on me, but on the other – what could I report? Was the KGB really interested that Igor Recoon, both a Konotoper and my course-mate who entered the institute straight from school, fell in love with the fourth-year student Olga Zhidova from Chernigov?.

All his evenings Igor spent in her room while her roommates exploited the feelings of the young enamored, sending him with a kettle after water from a tap in the washroom.

Once he was checked on the way by my roommate, the fourth-year student Marc Novoselytsky. "Made an errand-boy of you, eh?" asked Marc with his usual mocking grin.

"So what?" the yesterday's schoolboy did not give in, but defiantly threw up his sharp schnozzle with the tea-colored glasses on it and kept chewing, in the attitude of a big-time indie dude, his bubble gum.

"In love with Olga Zhidova, eh?"

"So what?"

"Wanna marry her, eh?"

"So what?"

"How can you marry her? She was my lay!"

"So what?"

The youth withstood even that deadly blow, yet the treacherous kettle slightly lowered its spout in his slackened hand, letting thread-thin trickle onto the gray concrete floor. Poor boy…

My roommate did not lie, of course, and he explained his action as a good-will wish to save young Igor from a fatal blunder. Yet all the same, that Novoselytsky was an ornery bastard, notwithstanding his being a Jew…

In short, I had nothing to curry favor with the KGB and mend my reputation ruined by the finking Zampolit.

(…still and all, if only they ignored what he had rolled on me, and if they winked at the baptizing of my daughter, as well as being so rude to the unknown KGB officer at the foot of Komsomol Gorka Hill in the Stavropol city, then—you never can tell—I might have easily risen to the presidency in present Russia, even without a spy school… My mother always said that I was mighty clever.

As it is, I poisoned my student years with my own hands. Seeing Captain twice a month excruciated me like an incurable toothache. However hard tried I to suppress the thoughts of a pending meeting and think of something…anything else…they returned to beset me like the thoughts of the inescapable end keep coming back to the terminally ill.

Midst the heated revelries in the young-Lomonosov style, there'd pop up a sudden thought that in three days I was to go to a hateful interview which broke me out from the current merriment and made me switch over to morose ruminations that "seccol", aka secsot, which was just an abbreviation of "secret collaborator", sounded much more disgusting than chmo.

And there was no escape – they had my application and reports telling on no one in particular but signed "Pavel". So even if I, say, got to Zona, another "zampolit" would approach me and order to keep on knocking on the inmates if I had no wish of a certain part from the KGB archives to be leaked to the resident master-thief, aka Zona's pakhan.

My life got screwed and cramped up like that of Sindbad the Seaman when in some of his travels a nasty old man nestled around his neck strangling and kicking with his