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

When in the wide corridor by the Language Laboratory, I handed Zhomnir a thin copybook with my translation of the Maugham's story, he flipped thru it and with overly exact articulation of Russian words, stated that he did not work with texts in Russian, for which reason Translator presented students’ works in only Ukrainian except for the translations of poetic pieces…

Right, in my school certificate the Ukrainian Language and Literature were marked with "n/c" – "not certified", thanks to arriving to Konotop past half of my school-time which legally allowed ditching Ukrainian Language classes while the younger came too early to also evade it. Nonetheless, in a fortnight after moving to Konotop I was reading books in Ukrainian as well, so in two weeks I surprised Zhomnir with a Ukrainian version of that same man with a scar.

He bucked up and, with a glint of satisfaction in his eyes, smashed and crushed my labors to the finest dust.

I hated being flogged like that, yet I couldn't but see that he was right. Nonetheless, to simply ditch the whole venture was out of the question, not only because of wounded pride but also of getting hooked by wrestling obstinate Slavonic words and making them express what I was able to grasp from among the rolling beads of Maugham's language. The struggle was so exciting that I took the guitar back to Konotop…

~ ~ ~

The rumors I became aware of one year later, that arriving in Konotop on Saturdays I dropped my black plastic "diplomat" in the hallway and started off to whores, without ever caring a fig that, while I was away, my wife got laid promiscuously, readily and regularly, was a gross exaggeration. My relations with Olga remained steady, passionate and invariably brought a feeling of deep satisfaction. Except for that occasion when I staged timing…

My roommate Marc Novoselytsky, for no obvious reason, asked me about the duration of my having a sex with my wife. Caught unawares, I made a wild guess at modest ten to fifteen minutes, no longer. He mocked so tall a tale exceeding any limits of the humanly possible and we bet…

Olga did not get it when I put onto the bedroom windowsill the alarm clock normally stationed in the kitchen, and I did care to clarify the news… With the clock’s clacking on my brain, the shown results were a total debacle…

On Sunday night arriving back to the Hosty, I honestly admitted it had taken a niggardly five minutes, which report turned Marc’s usual smirk into a happy smile… But all of the other times it was all right and time did lose all meaning whatsoever.

Before it, we were visiting Loony and danced slow dances there with a sincere feeling, and we gave free rein to our vigor in the fast ones. She was good at it, in any style. In the meantime, we watched a couple of fights on the floor, which Lyalka dubbed ‘gladiatorial bull-battles’ or took a respite out of the hall, in the unlit corridor of the library wing.

There, leaning our backs against the windowsill beneath the silent dark-black panes, Lyalka and I shared a joint immersing into more and more deep comprehension of the aquarium essence of the interior around, while Olga was smoking her orange-filtered cigarettes. Everything turned nyshtyak and the thoughts about my being a KGB rat in Nezhyn sank to the very bottom of the aquarium…

My matrimonial duties I performed rather accurately, so when Olga said she was pregnant and the abortion regulations called for the husband to donor one glass of his blood in the hospital, I went there without much ado, though I had, like, always tried to keep protective at having it.

In the room for blood transfusions, I was shod in white shoe covers and laid on the table topped with a chilly oilcloth. There were two nurses in the room, and I was stunned by the expression about their eyes, or rather struck by the absence of any. Their eyes seemed being blanked with filmy blinds, like to the stilled gaze of dead fish.

With a needle on the end of a thin elastic tubing, they approached me and tried to stick it into the vein inside my arm to make the blood flow thru the hose. Yet, at all of their 3 attempts at piercing the vein, it stubbornly rolled away from the needle stubbed deep under the skin. Their bewilderment turned the dead-eyed nurses astoundingly merciful and they gave the needed confirmation ref that I had undergone the procedure as stipulated by the respective HealthCare regulations. Streamlined, out-worldly, as any other piece of paper from any other state affiliated institution or boghole…

(…tell you what, guys? Them those organs feeding them those officials since long invented their special dialect to pump snooty mist in the simplest things while all that’s needed, “unattended fucking, fine—250 ml of blood”. Period. And all those mildewed vampires wilt and wither from black envy in their frowzy twilights…)

The surrender was unthinkable and simply impossible. So, I had to learn one more writing—similar to Arabic lettering only with a wider sweep—the hand of Zhomnir with which he scribbled his notes over and between the lines of the manuscripts I kept handing to him. At last, he raised a bushy brow and said that it seemed somewhat like that already, and my translation would go for the next issue of Translator.

Then there came the day when Yasha and Fyodor, standing in front of the typewritten pages pasted in the Whatman sheet on the wall, congratulated Zhomnir with the fresh discover of an upstart talent in the field of Ukrainian translations with such an unmistakably Ukrainian ending in his family name – Ogolts-OFF. Zhomnir responded more directly – he was not to blame that so truly-truly Ukrainians as Demyan-KO and Velich-KO had never scratched their ass in all four years of their studying at the English Department….

Spring came hand in hand with the most cloudless and