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

f-f..er..I mean, flooding Niagara Falls without the tiniest splash of response to her words from the thrumming waves of strange faces.

I pitied her and slowed down by her stall, "Hey, girl,” says I, “Call it porosyonok."

"This is a piglet! This is a piglet!"

(…at that time the two great nations were not prepared for a dialogue yet…)

I and Slavic went out and sparked in the dank spring wind around the giant Quanset Hut. When back in Nezhyn, I reported to the black-haired that those Americans were too introvert. He realized that both "introvert" and "amorphous' stuff was not the right building-blocks for his career and grew sad…

That mission turned the last one because soon after I dug a hole for myself to fall into… The black-haired KGBist really fretted me already with his importunate demands to write a report and not to just play with the word order. And there popped up something to make him happy without harming innocent civilians… In the institute reading hall, on the second floor of the New Building, I was leafing thru a biography of Bogdan Khmelnytsky when on one of the pages I saw a mark in pencil: "Bogdan Khmelnytsky is a traitor to the Ukrainian people". I mentioned it in my next report to the KGB.

The guy was delighted – calling the initiator of the Ukraine and Russia reunion a traitor was visibly steaming with the Ukrainian nationalism. "On which page?"

"Well, somewhere in the middle."

So, they arrested the book, found the subversive page and, at the following meeting, "But it was you who wrote that."

"What?!."

"The hand is yours, that's what. No use of denying. You better admit." And he started to intimidate me with full-scale expertise. 2 weeks later, he explained that the letter "a" in the pencil inscription was very like to mine but a little different; so the graphologist told him. Yet—which is characteristic—he did not even apologize.

In general, I, like, got offended and stopped to turn up for the loathsome dates, no matter how diligently he flashed his semaphore newspaper. And at chance meetings in the city transport, I was cutting him dead with a disinterested indifference of a stranger. He seemed to understand that such a secret collaborator is as beneficial as 2 aces in the kitty when playing miser at Preferans, and pissed off. So the KGB archives ceased to accumulate the reports with my handwriting signed "Pavel" of which I never regretted. My affair with the organs was anything but a happy one…

~ ~ ~

(…yes, but now I have to rewind, who were they – Slavic and Twoic?..)

They were a couple of first-year students, who entered my life at the Hosty to substitute for Fyodor and Yasha. Slavic was from Chernigov, he matriculated the English Department and even lived in the same room with me. And he had also served in a construction battalion, but being a member of the well-to-do society stratum, he spent his hitch in the capacity of a warehouse manager. I mean, he came from a family wealthy enough for keeping successful negotiations with the Commanders of his military unit.

(…lots of things in my life flowed by unquestioned because I was never good at analyzing and just lived on with any bullshit implicitly taken for granted. Now I know why in our great Soviet Homeland of working people by working people for working people with equal rights for all and everybody, certain people happened to have their rights equaller than the average.

It’s only there’s no way to pass my present wisdom to that hairy yobbo of myself, happy with his/my blissful ignorance. There’s no way to reach over there, I cannot re-run my life, I can only re-tell it.

But, hey! Who cares? Probably, those hyper-equalized folks had just found a maverick treasure in their stove chimney…)

To the construction battalion, he also got because of some sight problems hidden behind the smoked lenses in his glasses. The long forelock of straight chestnut hair slid across his forehead – from edge to edge alongside the glasses rim, and he did not shave his upper lip, saving soft female tendrils trimmed with scissors…

The guy, schooled at his hitch in a construction battalion, knows the meaning and origin of the all-forgiving mellowness and omni-comprehension in the optics of his roommate returning after a short absence to the nearby Count's Park. A former conbatist will find in himself enough determination to ask a direct question and, after a direct response, to beg for a joint. In the enlightened circles, it is termed as "clinging to the tail".

Weed cemented us and made, practically, inseparable. I recollect the case of a winter empty suction, when bang in the middle of week I rushed to Konotop, by 3:15 local train – there and by 19:05 back to Nezhyn. So, Slavic kept me company because of being such a sterling loyal friend.

In Konotop, we went to Lyalka’s who asked me if I remembered that bastard on a visit from St. Petersburg.

How not to remember? I liked his boots right away, obviously weighty, you could see at a look it was some sturdy footwear. Lyalka then was at conquering the visitor with the sweep of lifestyle in our provincial backwater. The Petersburger was taken to the host’s section in the basement, where weed was reaching the condition; we sparked there – not bad it was, some real stuff for high flights in circles of any height…

"So 2 days ago," sez Lyalka, "that bitch bombed my basement. Broke the door and took it out. Sehryoga the King saw him at the station getting on the Leningrad train with a backpack."

Yea, that's what you call a cleanly done job because St. Pete had always been the cultural capital of our country… In short, Lyalka forked out a couple of heads, but warned that the quality hadn't been tested yet. Then I, just in case, dropped on 13 Decemberists and found one or two twigs in the attic of the brick shed.

On the train back, it became