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

But then there arose a serious problem: how to store the abundant harvest? To keep it under the bed in the Hosty?. Very funny, indeed.

I walked around all of the hostel looking for a suitable nook but in vain. And then in the washroom on the fourth floor, I saw a desk with a drawer. I did not know how came it was there, or for how long it would tarry in the washroom, but being desperately pressed for finding any storage place (I couldn't just leave the weed in the park with the rains setting in, couldn't I?) I just dumped it in the drawer. As a precaution measure, I turned the desk and pushed it with its drawer close to the wall, so that no one would horse around. Then, as necessary, I was visiting the washroom to pinch off a few heads for the current consumption…

From the patronized collective farm, my course-mates returned in a state of complete shock, dumbfounded, all lost in the deep contemplation about life's purpose, meaning, and requirements. That is, was or was not their former understanding of and approach to those concepts correct? As it turned out, during their patronage assistance 2 of local guys there had a knife fight. Because of whom? Because of Tanya who was studying at my group.

A year before, those ruthless bitches of my course-mates asked me to pretend I fell in love with her. Just for fun, because she was most inarticulate and unattractive. And I—the stupid moose—was quick to execute what asked. "Tanya! I love you with all of the depth! And what is your shared feeling?" For 2 days I pestered her at the breaks until she asked to leave her alone. It looked like she was going to cry, I got ashamed and shut up.

Well, now, how do you like it, ladies? Who was chosen by the guys as the prize for their berserk passion? That's why the girls were now following her with furtive looks of envy and respect. And she walked the corridors with pensive pride as if she got it something about herself which she had never expected. And her glances at me became not as negating as they used to be. What if I had not been just sporting last year? Thank you, dagger guys, for the alibi…

But I still was worried about the cannabis stored in so inappropriate manner. A desk drawer in the washroom was anything but the right place for it. Any block with elementary literacy level on the subject would inevitably get attracted by its poignantly alluring fragrance and deduct the source of the whiff because the desk somehow did not belong among the tiled bare walls and sinks of the washroom. Besides, the Phys-Math students might start to ask themselves unnecessary questions as to why I started to frequent the washroom on their floor.

So with the first snow in November, I took weed out for relocation to another place of storage. My plan was to hide it in the dormer on the Old Building roof because I noted a mighty welded ladder leading up there from behind the building…

Late in the evening, Slavic, Twoic, and Eera accompanied me to the Old Building backyard, like, the state commission at the launch of a manned spaceship from the Baikonur site.

I passed my overcoat and hat to Eera, thrust the package with weed under my shirt and started off… At the initial after-launch stages all went on in a standard mode. The ladder vibrations stayed within the safety gauge, it’s only that the iron rungs were icy cold making the lift endless. In the times of Gogol, they built the floors two-three times taller than presently.

At the point of entering the roof, there cropped up unforeseen problems. The ladder did not reach the roof itself, ending under the eaves. It was necessary to catch hold of the tinplate above the ladder and go over its jutting edge onto the roof. Of that moment I recollect the uncompromisingly dark night, in the surrounding void, there were just 3 of us – the tinplate, the darkness and I…

The roof itself was rather slippery, although not overly steep; I had to plant my steps onto the low ridges of seams between the sheet blocks. Getting to the dormer, I found its window sealed tightly with thick planks nailed from within. Thank you for your visit!.

On the way back, I suddenly slipped, when nearing the place where I had to get over the tinplate at the roof edge, yet I did not fall, but straightened up, gnashed my teeth and, addressing myself, spoke up to the darkness, "Tickling the public’s expectation, eh? You bitch!" Then I went down on all fours, dangled my legs over the roof edge and groped with my feet for the uppermost rung in the ladder.

Halfway down, I was caught up by the mortifying belated thought that the evaded dive from the roof wouldn't be as bad as crash-landing on someone from the commission in the launch-pad.

(…certain thoughts are better never to be thought at all…)

And again I kicked in a door. Remarkably, it was the same one though Ilya Lipes did not live in that room anymore. It was inhabited by the current fourth-year students and among them Vitya Kononevich, who imprudently borrowed from Zhora Ilchenko The Godfather, together with A Learner's Dictionary of Current English by Hornby, both imported from India.

How insignificant and trivial, at first glance, might seem the things eventually leading to a real jolt in the flow of life! Say, you ask Zhora to lend you The Godfather for a couple of weeks, and then you come to the hostel and see the door of your room kicked brutally in… By the way, this time no shaky fingers were observed, the skills of vital importance get formed surprisingly quickly. Probably, the fact that I was working not for Veerich but