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

Farewell, Nadya. Whatever and regardless, you're the most cloudless love in my life…

The senior overseer kept true his threats to me. And there was a general meeting of the English Department with just one issue on the agenda: petitioning the Institute Rectorate to send me down.

The day before it, on Veerich's advice, I called the meeting of my course-mates—well, of those living in the Hosty—who gathered in Room 72, to rally the ranks, so to say… Veerich was a current fourth-year student, who also entered the Institute after his hitch.

They crowded in, got seated on each other's laps – all girls, except for Igor and Volodya. I'd never have believed that such a swarm could fit into our pencil-box room. So, I had to perch on the window sill. It was some rally of supporters! Damn! They came together united by one wish – to admire me crushed, wrung out of my image, crucified on that windowsill. The saliva was dripping even from their eyes, like by those public execution goers. They came to lynch me beforehand, impatient to wait for the general meeting, because in Bolshevik I turned my nose up at our Department girls. They craved to quarter me, impale, to put me at the stake for that unpardonable slogan – "Phil-Fac forever!"

One of the girls even accused me of uttering to her something eye-to-eye, which she wouldn't forget until her last day and never forgive me for saying that. She even had to quench a sob, when telling her sad story. Everyone rushed to ask eagerly—what words were they?—but she only blew her nose and repeated her oath to carry them with her to the grave. Even I got intrigued – what kind of so stirring words might I have known? Moreover, until that moment it never occurred to me she was from my course, I could swear to see her for the first time!

Then I got tired of that Lynch trial session. "Okay," said I, "many thanks for your most kind support, but I still have to prepare my homework for tomorrow's classes." Irina from Bakhmuch nearly choked with chortling…

At the meeting, after the overseer's declamation, a couple of my course-mates took the floor to confirm, that, yes, I went to work only when I wanted to, and shamelessly slept on the oilcloth.

Then Veerich attempted at breaking the monotonous mood. He leaned on the lectern and, facing the audience, began to broadcast what kind of a reliable comrade and friend I was, and recently I did my best to rescue a couple of freshman girls subjected to hooligan harassment in the Count's Park. I bravely rushed at the villains, although one of them had a neck from a broken bottle in his hands… Here, Veerich stepped out from behind the lectern to demonstrate for the audience the proper way of gripping a spalled off neck in your hand, and commented that such a weapon was more dangerous than a common knife. The audience froze in awed attention to the disclosed details…

On the whole, he did not deviate too much. That day Slavic and Twoic ran up to Room 72 from the hostel lobby. There was a first-year student, they said, in a fit of hysterics 'cause some guys had stopped her girlfriend in the park and were keeping her there. The 3 of us raced to the indicated place and shooed off 3 local guys. And the saved mantrap started to scream her guts out, that we were busters who ruined her personal life. It seemed one of the would-be rapists had become her target. Damn! Don't call me anymore to rescue a twat gone a-hunting!. However, the detail with the bottle's neck was a free-style fantasy flight brooded by Veerich’s imagination.

In the end, I was given the floor. "Everyone is forging his own destiny. Here is mine, white-hot, right from the forge and now it depends on you how it will turn out…" Then I gave out a repentance à la Marc Novoselytsky at the meeting dedicated to the Game of Parties and with a minimal margin—who's for? against? abstained?—I received a severe reprimand with the final note of warning…

(…although the outcome of the meeting was clear before it even started – were I kicked out then where would you come up from?. Certain shell-fragments cannot but miss…)

~ ~ ~

Every good news has some crappy lining. Hardly I rejoiced that sending down whizzed harmlessly by, as it was time to stick my neck again into the hateful noose. The KGB Captain beaconed with his newspaper: come to report and get instructions. At the secret meeting, it turned out that I became a hand-me-down item at their enterprise. The Captain for his heroism and vigilance displayed during the Game of Parties was rewarded by the rise from the provincial backwoods to the capital city of Kiev. He did not hide his joy passing me as a stock-in-trade to his successor.

The successor was a black-haired young man who had just graduated from some institute in Chernigov. The educational institution had a special Historical Department there at which they were forging Party Cadres. After that Department you weren't sent to a village to work off for your diploma, you got a job no lower than at some District Party Committee and then – grow up in your career to become a Member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, if your liver can cope with the amounts of alcohol on the way and you've got a felicitous gift of assuming, pliably and aptly, the right position under current leadership.

But not everyone was up to graduating that Department. 2 students from the Philological Department at the NGPI got transferred there, and a month later they blew off all the career prospects and came back. The discipline at the special Department was like that in a cadet school. With