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

the extra bottle too, sharing a doughnut for a snack, and I passed away on that same tablecloth. Like, enjoy our specialty dessert… Later, the senior overseer in his accusatory speech focused on the fact that the students, returning from the plantation, had to pass by me served-up in that spread flat form. Although the distance between the road and the trench was about 5 meters, I was still ashamed to hear about it. But that was later…

3 days after, Vera went to Borzna, and I accompanied her to make a telephone call to Eera in Nezhyn.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"How d'you?"

"Nothing."

"You… well… come back… eh? I wrote a song here for you." And what more sensible could be expected of a balmy fop like me?. In fact, I did not write a song but made a Russian adaptation of the then-popular hit "It's raining, it's pouring (you might be sorry)…"

"The weary whisper of this endless rainDrowned hopes of seeing you again,Dripping drops with their low droneMake me feel forlorn and loneAnd drive me mad with their stance:"You can be happy only once!"What's the use of all your weeping, rain?Keep it back, don't spend on me in vain,Let the wind dry up your tearsWith a swarm of fallen leavesI don't need any preaching rainsThey can't bring back my happy days…"

Zampolit wouldn't approve that again it was about the recidivistic rain, but so was the lyrics in the original, and the chord sequence was really cool…

Coming back with Vera, we didn't go along the road but took a shortcut over the vast fields which she was familiar with. There happened some secluded square hole nearby the path, like a former dugout, all overgrown with inviting carpet-like grass, where we entered for a midway repose. Vera was a beautiful black-haired girl of dark complexion and commanding air. When she got fed up with my incessant babbling about Eera this, Eera that, we hit the road again.

Getting out of the hole, I noticed candy wrappers in the grass. It seemed to be a local dating house, where I failed to live up to my image… Many years later, Eera told me how on one of the endless evenings in Bolshevik, before my drifting to their room, they arranged shaman dances behind the closed door. Vera hung a piece of sausage and a pair of onions from her sports pants and went off to roll and jump in that disguise: uh! Uh!

(…those swarthy Slav females would out-sex anyone when left on their own, and here lies the clue to the music by Igor Stravinsky…)

Eera came back to the village, and I spent the night in their room. It happened all by itself. We lay dressed on her bed and kept hugging and pressing more and more tighter and closer to each other, and then there remained nowhere any closer. Only I did not want to creak the bed, like Marc and Katranikha, which called for slowing down the action…

(…Anna did not sleep then and she later told Eera that at some point she couldn't control herself and kissed her own forearm…)

…but I still liked it.

The next day Eera admitted, "Seems, I'm thru the psychological barrier."

"Gosh! I kinda thought the physical got done with too…"

~ ~ ~

After Olya refused to marry Jan, he instantly grew Russian. The sufferings inflicted by his turned down love peeled all the varnish of civilization off the Czech European. He never learned the language though, but he dropped shaving and walked around in bristles wearing a black padded jacket, from under which he took a bottle of vodka—at uneven intervals—and swallowed from its neck, like Validol or some other medication. Sort of homeopathy in the Bolshevik style…

On the last night before our departure from the village, Vera, with a lot of care, prepared a bed for me and Eera in the next room, which had already got vacated. I did not turn the light off, and later Eera told me how much she was confounded at the sight of what I was getting on top of her with.

In the morning, before the arrival of the buses, she kept mum, hardly talking to me except for "yes", "no", "nothing". I did not manage then to bring out, that her mood resulted from Olya's forewarning that all we had had there was merely a "collective-farm affair" and back in Nezhyn, I would not give Eera another look.

When the buses came, I boarded neither of them, but put the guitar over my shoulder and walked towards the windbreak belt along the Moscow highway at the distant horizon, to go hiking to Baturin and from there to Konotop…

"Rumors have it, you've got an affair with a teacher's daughter?"

"They say, you've got married?"

Yes, she had and was in Nezhyn on a flying visit to get aright some papers, and dropped into Room 72 in the Hosty, before leaving for Mongolia where her husband was sent to serve after graduating his military school. By the by, he realized she was not a virgin. After the first wedding night he asked, well, they say, that women, usually, as if would, like, compare… "Yes, that's true," she answered and didn't add a word to it.

(…that's how she fucking crushed the poor fool. Just stepped on and smeared away.

Why not spread it thick and comfort him affectionately, like, there’s no one quite like you, babe, you’re the best man I’ve ever had, nobody's fit to hold a candle to you, my hero lover?.

Women are the most cruel creatures if you ask me. And should we really be so much surprised at having Tughriks among us?…)

However, sometimes you'd better make love, not talk. And we lay on the former Fyodor's and currently my bed because it was by the window. The first and only time in my life, I was with a married woman, and that's only for the old sake's' sake.

When we got dressed and hugged goodbye each other, she exclaimed, twice, "I'm a whore!"

Yes, and sounding way too happy, like, Archimedes in