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

city's name printed on their back, "cigarette factory m. Pryluky." During the years of German occupation, the city of Pryluky was drastically rebuilt, so the streets in it became strictly parallel and methodically perpendicular to each other. Except for the outskirts where the bus station was built later…

Commander of the student construction platoon was Vladimir Maiba, from the Physics and Mathematics Department. The platoon's Commissar was Igor, a Ukrainian nationalist, who suspected Maiba of being a secret collaborator with the KGB and, therefore, was constantly jeering at him and discrediting his authority in every possible way. And I was Leading Specialist, sort of, because in my military ID they advertised me as a "bricklayer".

Besides the mentioned commanding staff, there were 2 girls and 15 guys in the platoon. In the city we stayed at a hostel of "chemists" but just for one night and the next morning, we had to leave for Auto-Depot 4 located by the nearby highway between the Ivkovtsy village and the town of Ladan.

"Chemists" was the general term for convicts who, because of their supposedly good behavior, were paroled from Zona to finish off their time "at the chemistry". Any plant or a factory with production lines hazardous to health, or a mine, or a construction site usually served "the chemistry" grounds for paroled zeks. The regulations for "chemists" were pretty strict. They should be present in the hostel no later than the hour specified, never get drunk, nor bring whores and abide by many other restrictions. However, they were not locked and controlled by the turnkeys and did not sleep in the common dormitory. They even got some payment though decimated by their curator militiaman who decided whether they remain on parole or get remanded back to Zona…

After the shower, I and Igor, who, regardless of his being a Ukrainian nationalist, spoke a very good Russian and dreamed of moving to St. Petersburg, the cultural capital, went out to check the geometrical correctness of Pryluky.

"Katranikha! I am damned! Is that you?"

"Don't shout! Some of my students may be around. I'm a teacher here."

Well, of course, sorry, how could I forget myself. For one year already she was disseminating there the seeds of the wisdom, of kindness, and values eternal…

Auto-Depot 4 was all by itself, neither in a village nor in a town, just behind the trees in windbreak belt along the highway roadside. First, there stood an old two-story building. On the first floor it had some locked warehouses, and on the second floor, there was a spacious hall with beds for students of the construction platoon plus a small room for the 2 girls by it. Then there followed a one-story stoker-house and, still farther, the vast grounds of Auto-Depot 4 behind the tall red-brick wall surrounding a dozen of garages, a canteen, and many other buildings, some of which still under construction, and in the middle of the grounds, there stretched the wide and deep foundation pit. Lots of steel wires crisscrossed the air above the pit. Plumb under the intersections of the spanned wires, our platoon had to assemble formworks and fill them with concrete to produce the "cups" for the insertion of support columns. But all that was to be done later and for the start, there were shovels to exercise "dig-dump”. Everything was so nostalgic familiar, and only the uniform was different.

After a working day, the stoker-"chemists", Yura and Tomato, opened the respective valve inside their stoker-house and from an outside pipe, sticking out high up on the wall, there gushed a broad horizontal jet of water falling to the ground about 20 meters off the wall. You could stand there and take a shower, pretty chilly, sure thing, but it was summertime around, right?.

A week later Commander of the platoon called a general meeting. The agenda of one issue – feeding the platoon contingent, because the food in the canteen was just a…

(…well, I don't know, that same havvage as anywhere else…)

The meeting approved – to cook food of our own resources procured for money borrowed by Commander from the Auto-Depot foreman in advance, on account of our future labor achievements. From now on the girls' position was not only that of paramedics but cooks as well…

Each evening, as it got dark, in twos or threes, we went on a raid to the potato field of the nearby collective farm. Sweeping along the way whatever looking good enough.

"A fiery construction platoonHot as the steppe fire!."

The students paid compliments to the cooking skills of the Phys-Math girls. Well, I don't know, yes, on the whole, it was hotter than in the canteen, but otherwise the same havvage as anywhere else…

A couple of times we went to dances in the village of Ivkovtsy by the water-tanker truck, manned by a young driver. The girls were traveling in the cab, the rest of us wherever they could grab hold at the iron cistern of the truck… We danced to the hits of Leshchenko:

"From the fields, the sadness flees away,The anxiety also hits the road,And the vistas wide unfold ahead…"

After the dances, we whizzed back thru the breeze and the darkness, everyone hugging closely his piece of the steely cistern…

Once for the midday break and meal, we visited the nearby city of Ladan. When translated into English, "ladan" becomes "incense" with all connotations to it. But I also presented the view of manifold meaning with that curly beard and hair hanging to the shoulders from under the twisted gauze bandage the color of earth to keep it from falling into the eyes. You couldn’t make it out at a glance who was that – an excommunicated priest or Rambo from black-and-white photos. However, when Rambo in the central nosh-bar of Ladan demanded a bottle of white to be served in a half-liter beer glass in one go, everything fell in place – a drunk from Auto-Depot 4!

I come back from Ladan with a pleasantly slackened thirst only to find Sasha Chalov, a third-year