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

I saw the boundless Ukrainian night wrapping us from everywhere and in the blacker dark along its edges, there was raising the buzz of chilly autumn winds already. The only bright spot, besides the bulb overhead, was that face opposite me, smiling and not unfriendly anymore, radiating tiny beams of light which happen when you squint, without fully closing your eyelids. Yet, I was not squinting, not a bit, and maybe even opened my eyes wider, struck with the beauty of that new face. And all that—even myself—I beheld as if from aside, from some point in the immense wrapper who, like me, focused on the vision center, on her face of incredible beauty, kinda warm circle of light in the surrounding darkness, like a lifebuoy to withstand the onslaught of icy cold rattling at the far-off, rimed, horizons.

(…of course, at that moment I was not thinking any of this lofty trash, and, in fact, I was not capable of thinking at all because at the moment all I could do was looking at her face and falling in love irretrievably…)

The next day Eera did not come to the canteen for midday meal, Vera said that she was on duty – cleaning their room. The moment I came up to the hostel, she went out on the porch with a mop in her hands, in a short gown.

(…the most wide-spread methodology for estimation of female attractiveness is gouging her volumes. The self-proclaimed experts and qualified connoisseurs base their evaluation on the volume of the breasts and buttocks, while gourmets, subtractively, measure the waist… Absolute dilettantism. But what else to expect from all those differently aged junior jerks?

The most convincing detail in a woman, with which she will hook you at once and forever, is her knees. If the glimpse of them warms your heart, makes your shoulders straighten up and your breath go deeper, then stay assured – that’s it, nothing more beautiful will ever be met.

If that does not happen, go away and keep looking out, maybe you’ll be lucky someday…)

Spotting her knees, I immediately realized that I was right in raising my paws and flashing dumb wit about the size of the high boots, because on the wet trail thru the corn jungle under her blue jeans were those very knees.

Of course, you’ve guessed already, that it was your mother…

~ ~ ~

Thus, there still remained three full years before your birth, which stretch, supposedly, would suffice for no less than a couple of loves to die away, if we accept naive calculations promoted by the reverend Sigmund Freud.

(…what a blasphemous mockery of the sacred beliefs, eh? Which chesty assault though can easily be parried by the traditional fencing trick of "terz" – to wit, that there are 'no rules without exceptions.' The good ol’ move…Yet, it depends on the rules, you know.

If a certain scientist Galileo, when dropping his balls from the Tower of Pisa would have noticed that one of them, marked, for the scientific accuracy, with something like "E + S", all of a sudden started to soar and put out aerobatics tricks, then there would be no law of universal gravitation.

And on that account, our beloved Ziggy can't be registered as a trustworthy die-hard scientist. He should be moved to some other league. Place him among such illustrious coryphaei as Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and so forth, up to the nameless creators of The Thousand and One Nights. There he would fit perfectly with his Tom Thumb, aka "ego", Evil Giant, aka "super-ego", the royal castle of "consciousness", and impenetrable wilds of tropical swampy jungles of "subconsciousness", on the canvas of which he weaves the lacy patterns of his theory.

How dare I?!. So many generations have been conceived and, in their turn, conceived further generations with the blessing of his psychoanalysis!.

Nature does not tolerate emptiness, man necessarily has to fill with something their gray matter, aka brain, aka (using the apt expression of the brain-tapped Battalion Commander of VSO-11) the "highest fucking stuff". And that's the indisputable truth. Nothing but intolerance to emptiness caused the production of all those Bibles-Korans-Vedas-Iliads, as well as belief in the existence of boogies and brownies.

And, obedient to the naive wisdom of nature, we stop marketing the useless bullshit—it's not worth it from a pedagogically correct standpoint—and start bringing into the picture the three years until you’ll condescend to be born…)

In the girls' room everything was figured out already, that is everyone got it clear who I was after. Olya's eagerness to learn the guitar playing cooled off but, all the same, I tarried with taking it back to the club dormitory. Just in case, so that I would have an excuse to pop up again, like, oh, I forgot here something… No safety measure would be too proactive if they fall over themselves to blast away to your sweetheart, "Gee, he's married!." I was not denying that dent in my biography, since long sunk in the abyss of the past though. And she never asked to show her my passport!.

(…the booklet in red covers asserting your USSR citizenship was more than just ID card. It registered your movements about our boundless Soviet Homeland, witnessed changes in your matrimonial state, reflected variations in the expression of your facial features every ten years, and more… Folks developed and cherished strong belief in the pleonasmic omniscience of Organon, aka passport. They could on the fly invent and endow it with magic powers.

In a separate development, a militiaman checked my passport and on one of its blank pages (reserved for the stamps in future) detected letter “Z” disguised as a casual smear. The sign told him I was an ex-con, aka zek. He couldn’t read the duration of my stretch though and escorted me to a senior in his chain of command who fatherly advised him not to take anyone in a raincoat of unfamiliar cut for a threat to the public