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

light back into the dark. Soon, he opened it again, went in, and all again turned the dark night. Been out to take a leak. Nothing to do here. I go home…

The following day brought news. My sister said that Sasha Plaksin, handled Esa, who lived in Gogol Street, had seen Olga by the fishermen huts at the Seim river. He did not speak to her, yet saw there, for two days in a row.

With the exam in Latin on the following morning, I couldn’t wait for further developments, the main thing she was alive and kicking, so I left for Nezhyn.

My proficiency in Latin Lupus evaluated with "four" after my preparatory action by the door to the auditorium where he examined our course. Sending mighty echoes along the whole corridor, I roared at the top of my lungs:

"Gaudeamus igitur!.."

The disappearance of my wife, followed by her popping up, in absentia, at the place I wouldn't like to think of further, was surely putting me off, but having started you couldn’t but go on:

"Juvenes dum sumus!.."

Lupus jumped out of the door to make sure it was I who loved his Latin so loudly, and later, when I got seated in front of him at the examination desk, he acted like a skilled worker at a conveyor belt – opened my grade book, entered "four", closed it, handed back to me. Fare the well, O, Lingua Latina….

Right after the examination, I hurried to Konotop and my mother told me that Olga came home in the morning. Unaware of her mother-in-law’s presence in the bedroom, she, first of all, rushed into the living-room towards the mirror in the wardrobe door. Standing in front of it, she unbuttoned her shirt to examine the hickeys on her chest.

…the owner’s brand… everyone bears theirs, of this or that kind… for someone, it's the hieroglyphs nail-scarred on their wrist, another one gets adorned with a necklace of monkey bites on their breasts…

"I yelled at her and told to go back from where she came. She gathered her clothes and left. What now?"

I shrugged, "What can there be?"

"No way for her to get Lenochka," my mother said resolutely.

All that was so weighing down…

Olga came the next morning wearing a turtleneck. She said she was staying at aunt Nina’s because my mother kicked her out. Then she poured forth a pack of lies about going to the Seim with Sveta and spending time in the hut of uncle Kolya's friends. I advised her to spare her breath because we were to divorce anyway.

"And Lenochka?"

"She'll stay here."

Olga went over to threats about her taking her daughter to her mother in Theodosia. Then she said it was I who made her do it because of all my whores in Nezhyn of whom they were telling her everything but she just kept silent. And, yes, she went to the Seim, out of spite, but there was nothing there, and we could still put everything aright.

(…in life, there is always a choice. You may dig a hole or you may not dig it…

By filing for divorce, you affirm that you're a cuckold who takes retaliatory measures within the framework of the current moral code. Neglecting the move, you still remain a cuckold but only if you look at yourself thru the eyes of society or—but not everyone is up to that "or"—you become a hooey-pricker who does not care a fuck and lives for his/her own pleasure. The teeny nuance is that the true hooey-pricker does not see any insoluble dilemma about all that stuff – they just live for their pleasure all the time.

I always had it good with Olga but a whole lot of centuries-old morals and codes of "honor" bulldozed me and I was faced with the choice: to become a cuckold or go over to the other league? Making a choice is always a tragedy – choosing one thing you lose the alternative…)

I never liked to choose, I preferred leaving tragedies to others – to fate or, maybe, chance and, at that point, Olga served a tossup coin for the purpose. I told her that all would be scratched out and forgotten if she fetched weed for just one joint by the end of the day. She left and returned already in the evening, fairly weary. She said she had walked the whole city but no one had no weed.

That was the cruel finger of fate, some chance empty suction. Alea jacta est!.

(…were Olga lucky in providing the joint, then I, as a noble man of quality, would only have to keep my word. We would have started living on and now someone else would be composing this letter to you.

And maybe no letter would be needed, with you having Dad and Mom, and stuff. After all, replacing just one, even the tiniest, detail harbors a host of other outcomes…

If, say, you flick by time machine to Mesozoic and there you accidentally slap-kill one single mosquito then, returning back, you find yourself in an irreversibly changed future – yes, the same year when you had left, but you yourself do not conform to the contemporary standards. And there’s no one to blame, you should have watched out better in what you were stepping in that Mesozoic past…

Just a single joint would give me back the family idyll with an ideal woman. She was not trading herself for money or some other assets, she cheated on me just for her personal pleasure. The eternal pattern of the most natural exchange of joys – you to me, and I to you.

The fact that she was exchanging with someone else did not tell on my having it good with her. Why did I so stupidly gave up what I wanted and was getting in full? The moral foundations of the society left me no other choice but to join the crowd of dumb-ass "seminarians"…)

She gave me a great blow job for a goodbye and asked to come the next day to