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

table, I had a hard time convincing her that I had nothing to do with the vagaries of the tipsy mantrap. I was supported by Valentina, a female of the most remarkable physique, who sat next to Eera. Farther on, there was seated an insignificant, on the background of her mighty forms, Armenian.

His Armenian identity was revealed when he was giving the 3 of us a ride thru the early night… On the street leading to the Moscow highway, the big Valentina told him to slow down, and left the Zhiguli to yell at Tolik, her fifth-grader son. The boy was replying to his mother in pure Ukrainian, and I felt somehow knocked out of rut by the winter snow all around so sharply discordant to the boy's Negro face.

Later, Eera told me that Valentina had born Tolik after working at a canteen in Kiev, or maybe she found that job after the delivery, I'm not quite sure on that point because it’s where things get always somewhat messy, I mean them those canteens.

Valentina's current life partner of an Armenian was not messing around with the instance of upbringing. We rode along the highway, and after a couple of kilometers stopped on the roadside snow. The driver turned on the tape-recorder and took out a bottle of foil-necked champagne.

(…the beauty of Armenian music does not open to listeners right away. At that time it was still incomprehensible to me but I kept patient – he, who gives a ride, orders the music…)

A patrol car stopped on the road, and two militiamen in greatcoats and, despite the winter, forage caps approached the Zhiguli. The Armenian stepped out to negotiate and make it clear that everything was safely controlled. In the meantime, Valentina started to resent that I and Eera were staying in a so shabby khutta, and undertook to bring her indignation to the bride's parents, who were some kind of her relatives. As a result, the second night we spent in a large, freshly renovated house in the well-to-do part of Borzna.

The moon could not peep into our room there, only a dim reflection of the moonlight made its way to us thru the glazed door of the adjacent veranda. The bed frame was way too creaky, so the mattress had to be thrown on the paint-coated floorboards. Not too bad, in general, but I liked it better in the shabby khutta…

We were taken to Nezhyn by the Armenian… Along the way, I was, for some reason, thinking about Tolik, the Negro boy. Catching sight of him, old women in Borzna dropped their jaws and kept crossing themselves behind his back. How does it feel being not like anyone else?

(…the grandfather of Pushkin was an unalloyed Ethiopian but, at least in his childhood, he saw normal people…)

When we got out his car by the hostel, the Armenian asked me to tarry a second, and after Eera went along, he inquired if I knew the address of the beauty with theatrical traits, he kinda heard she was at some college in Nezhyn. I neither knew nor wanted to know it…

Eera and I went up to a vacant room on the third floor and after half-hour swaying and seesawing the more accustomed bed frame, she said she felt something she never had experienced before.

Well, and thank you! So it was not in vain, exerting myself all that year and a half. Or was it that she just pitied me?.

~ ~ ~

As mentioned already, in February I went to the hospital for more than a week because of my staunch faithfulness to principles. After a week of treatment, my sister Natasha found me there. On the whole of Decemberists Street in Konotop, there was just one phone in the khutta at Number 26. I did not know their phone number and even if knowing it I'd hardly call. One and a half weeks were not two years…

I left the wardroom and at the end of the corridor, we went one flight down the stairs leading to the basement. Natasha took out her filter cigarettes, I stuffed a joint into a Belomor-Canal, and we mixed our smokes.

"Well, and how are you?" asked my sister after I reported about Pill going crazy.

"And I also have Eera," said I, and hurriedly began to convince my sister that Eera was not like everyone else, not in the least.

"Well, well," replied Natasha indefinitely…

When I was discharged, I suddenly felt that the struggle for just cause cost me some real straining. On the way to the hostel, I even had to untie the ear-flaps of my rabbit fur hat and let them loose. Never before, even the most severe frost could make me do so, I only rubbed my ears against the turned-up collar of the sheepskin coat, and demanded from the saleswoman at the stand on the station platform to sell me a bottle of frostbitten beer and, despite her exhortations, drank it in small sips thru the ring of ice growing, thickening, narrowing the orifice in the bottle’s neck… And now? You could hardly put your finger on anything more hazardous to your health than hospitals…

In spring at full swing, I was approached by Vitya from the Music-Pedagogical Department. That same student with the ancient Roman's curls of short blonde hair on his head, to whom in the first year of study I was lending my guitar, and who later gave me the key to the vacant room on the fifth floor. Now he came up with a request on behalf of his friend Volodya.

But why didn't Volodya speak up to me directly? After all, we were together in the United Mus-Ped and Anglo-Fac CJR team and took the honorable third place from the available 3.

Well, he, like, was shy. In general, his wife got pregnant and now he had to give blood for the abortion, but he himself was still in the middle of the treatment, tripper, see?

Yeah, clear. Of course, I'd do it for him,