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

the lecturer entering the classroom, you had to stand at attention, otherwise the group headman, also a student, would get at you like a construction battalion pheasant at a newly drafted salaga. And in the hostel, everyone kept strict to the rules and peeking after everybody else to catch pants down and knock on them. After all, there were district committees and District Committees, one might be in a muddy district center, while another in the capital city. A trite example of the struggle for survival – the more competitors you outlive, the harder it is to outlive you…

That young black-haired KGB man had a long sheepskin coat and did not inquire about the price of mine. And he was much more mobile than the promoted Captain or, maybe, the upstart hadn't yet grown lazy. Anyway, the secret meetings with me, he arranged at various city institutions. For instance, in ZAGS closed after a working day or in the Tourism Bureau. One time it was in an empty apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story building, not far from the main square. To that meeting, he brought along his new boss. Once upon a time, a male with the looks of that boss was stamped as "an interesting man" – gray hair in a clean cut above a youthful, well-tanned, face; a European gloss was felt at once. I don't know what for he was transferred from Hungary to the provincial backwoods of Nezhyn, where he got interested in a rat whose finking helped his predecessor in the promotion to Kiev. However, I couldn't serve a springboard for him either. Enough was enough; I had got thoroughly fed up with that shit.

My invariable reports to the black-haired KGB young man, that the current student youth was an amorphous mass, indifferent to anything except for the present stock of lard in their "torbas", were almost bringing him to tears. The playful times of gamey gossip were over, I unilaterally stopped narking on my co-students. But he had so irrepressible desire to dig something out, that even send his secret collaborator to Room 72, in case I was a double agent, and kept an underground printing house under my bed.

Of course, that secsot did not introduce himself as a rat with the operational pseudonym "Vova", yet I still figured it out. Would a normal student from the Physics and Mathematics Department ask me for help with his English? With all the “pro” and “cons” secured by my image? Hooey! The shammer drove a fool about living in the same hostel as me. Okay, dude! No problem!

So, here he comes. I hospitably encourage him to take a seat on a freshman's bed and call the exercise number from the textbook he’s brought along, and he starts doing the exercise. So I can return to the table with the players in the already started "pool" of Preferans around it. And what will he sneak into his notebook for his report to the KGB man: "seven in spades", "trick", "pass", "miser"? At those carefree times, the Ministry of Health has not yet started to print its warning on cigarette packs and the malignant deadly tobacco smoke kept filling Room 72 with its tumbling, slowly whirling layers. The non-smoker martyr of a rat learned it from his severe exposure, that stool-pigeoning was hazardous for health. It took him just two visits to make sure that, yes, the student body was hopelessly amorphous and miserably supine – beggarly two kopecks for a trick.

But once the young KGBist dictated me a telling on Zhomnir. There was nothing compromising in the text though, just that on such and such a day, at such and such an hour Zhomnir was coming out from the Language Laboratory. Well, the Language Laboratory was not a safe house and contained just the laboratory assistant at her desk, and a swarm of freshmen behind the glass doors in the booths, parroting the tape-recorded texts "Meet the Parkers" from the headphones on their heads. Some absolutely inappropriate place for disseminating of the Ukrainian nationalism.

I guess, the dictation was done just in case, after the KGB man found out that I was visiting Zhomnir at home to discuss my translations for Translator, which I never cut ties with. Such a piece of paper could always come handy: "Some familiar hand, isn't it, Alexander Vasilyevich?"

My final mission was making friends with an American. There was a ten-day USA Agricultural Exhibition in Kiev, so I was instructed to visit it and make friends with at least someone from their staff. I took Slavic with me and we whizzed by a local train to Kiev, and there to the grounds of the Republican Veh-Deh-eN-Kha with the exhibition held in a huge white-tin Quanset Hut.

A live American was then a rare phenomenon, so at the exhibition, you could hardly squeeze and push thru the crowd denser than that to the Lenin Mausoleum in the Red Square in Moscow, or at the traveling menagerie in Konotop on a Sunday afternoon. Inside, under the rib-curves in the arched roof, up above the streaming crowd, hovered black-and-white Jimmy Carter, kinda Host to the Quanset Hut Show with his best wishes to the Soviet People, white-on-black. And the crowd carried you farther alongside the glossy barriers splitting compartments on both sides – farm tractors, machines, pictures of happy rural life. In one small section there stood a dummy pig, some nice creature, with large flowers painted all over it, in the style of "Yellow Submarine" cartoon by The Beatles. And next to the ornamented piggy there stood a girl, but alive. Not my style though, if not aware that it’s an American you wouldn't waste another glance at her.

So, she stood by and kept squeaking like a clockwork, "This is a piglet! This is a piglet!" But her staring eyes, long since stunned, dim, and glassy, turned kinda swoony slugs and swam over all that rumbling crowd that flowed past her for hours, like some