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

trade. The book was titled The Jaws, about a shark-cannibal. On the whole, a professionally mixed vinaigrette – a little scrap of everything: bitten-off limbs, a love triangle, a short yet impressive visit by mafia to persuade the sheriff be subtler and show more respect. True, the final scene of the shark's assassination was unscrupulously copied from Moby Dick, but who nowadays reads Melville?

While rendering all that in Russian, I finished off a pack of thick copybooks. The translation was completed in Konotop, in winter. So, it was the night from Saturday to Sunday, or else during the winter vacations… The clock on the kitchen wall was showing some of the small hours. Putting the final period, I draw it as big as half-page – I wanted to finish off the ink in the ball-pen but it never ended. Then I turned off the light and lay on the folding coach-bed in the living room. Behind the 2 windows, there stood a whitish night dimly fluoresced with the snow. And it seemed that the night was leaning heavily against the window panes, just about to break in. I tried to get asleep as soon as I could, for I never liked horror movies.

By spring, my sister Natasha read those notebooks, and then leased them to someone else and they dissolved, leaving no trace, in nowhere…

Well, all that's fine; but when about the most important?

Eera…

~ ~ ~

My relationship with her at the reunion stage can be characterized with just a single word – "torture". Trying real hard, one might extend it – "torturing torture". Firstly, taking our relationship up again in Nezhyn ran into a number of stumbling blocks.

Why resume? But I was in love, damn it! It was love at first sight on that tread thru the wet stalks of corn. And it should be kept in mind that, by my nature, whenever I fall in love it is forever. I mean, falling in love, then falling out for just to fall in again, and out… no, such bouncing is not for me. Yes, my father was right applying to me his winged byword about my Laziness-Mommy being born a moment before me. Besides, the return to Nezhyn fully confirmed the accuracy of my choice – with all the multifacedness, multinosedness, multileggedness, multibreastedness of the assortment, Eera was the second to none. Starting with the clothes: in the era of totalitarian shortages, she managed to look dressed in a soigne European way, as in the movies of Italo-Franco-German production. Turning to the undergarments: yes, unprecedented lacy slips under – I've never seen so delicately feminine lingerie in my life. Getting over to the item of most vital importance, the body itself: such bodies as hers, I saw only in the bathroom at the Object, when sitting next to the fire burning in Titan and considering the Goddesses, the Dryads, and the Nymphs of Hellas in the black-and-white illustrations interspersing The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece.

However, her gait was quite modern – the German-like resolute pacing coupled with the sway of her right hand. She had a round face with high cheekbones and a nose with a weeny hump, wide, yet not turned out, lips. The light brown hair of the ideal length, in my favorite hairstyle. I liked to watch her, approaching along the street that lead up to the Old Building, and to follow how in the distant circle of her face the fuzzy, as in the full moon, lines began to merge into my Eera's features. But all that came about not immediately…

At the beginning, Eera trusted in the sinister prognosis by Olya. And even Vera, who had so sympathetically been preparing the bed in Bolshevik for 2 of us to bathe in the fiery stream of lascivious carnal pleasures, dubiously shrugged and hesitated – O, my, they tell so heinous things about him! That's why our initial encounters in Nezhyn didn't look encouraging at all. I even started to suspect that all that happened between us in Bolshevik was just a "collective-farm affair" of a teacher's daughter that used me. So, I pissed off.

After some time, a group-mate of Eera, Anna, came to the Hosty with the errand from Eera who waited for me in the room of their Department hostel by the main square. I followed the messenger cursing on the way my shameful lack of the most elementary male pride…

Eera was lying on one of the beds, for some reason without a sweatshirt, wearing only her skirt and beautiful, as always, lady's undergarment. The girls whose room it was tactfully left us alone. I sat down on the bed next to her, doing my best to conceal how captivated I was by the beauty of her torso and the strangely pale face.

She said that she had had a pregnancy, and a young surgeon-gynecologist made the abortion at his home, under anesthesia. Is abortion done under anesthesia? At home? Young?

(…certain thoughts are better never being thought at all…)

Feelings of guilt and compassion only added to my love. I couldn't help it, I put my arms around her shoulders and, lifting her from the pillow, pressed to my chest. "I love you, Eera. You always know that I love you."

(…and again I run into my being born at the wrong time. I behave like an ancient Greek from the times when the birth control was females' responsibility – certain herbs, special amulets, you know.

And in the modern enlightened age, the weaker sex has already saddled us and mounted, while still pretending to be weak…)

The start-up misunderstandings (thanks to the kind care of her girlfriends), were further aggravated by unwanted predicaments at establishing normal sexual relations at the first stage of our love affair. Not because of being short of favorable conditions for having sex, on the contrary, when Eera visited Room 72, my freshman-cohabitants, on their own accord, went to the first floor of the hostel to click the TV channels in the hall with