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

Army at least somehow, occasional freight trains brought to the camps agricultural products looted from the occupied Soviet territories. Among other food brought to Ivan's camp by such an echelon, there were several burlap sacks of sunflower seeds. The German guards could not guess at the purpose of the arrived product not described in any of cookbooks. When the prisoners demonstrated how to use those seeds, rational Germans were still unable to understand that the final result (chewing of a scanty grain) was not as important as the process itself – gnawing and secreting the anticipatory saliva.

So those sacks just lay around, irrationally cluttering the storage room, until one of the guards figured out how to use the seeds. He organized a sports event: a 100-meter race for a packet of seeds as the award to the winner. Under the scream-and-shout of the guard-fans, the young and tall, although as skinny as the rest of the prisoners, Ivan ran first and received his prize. In the second race, he again was out of reach, but the guard said that he had enough already, and gave the seeds to the second to come. My father-in-law took offense and ceased to take part in the subsequent competitions, but he told me that those seeds were the most delicious in his life…

Sometimes the prisoners of war ran for 100 meters, sometimes they ran away from the camp. Then they were invariably caught, brought back and executed in front of all the other prisoners, which did not prevent the following escape attempts. Which is quite natural because sometimes there comes the feel that you don't care anymore and fuck it all. When such a moment rolled up to Ivan, he, taking into consideration the experience of previous fugitives, did not go east but turned west and, therefore, got to France.

For about 1 year a French farmer family hid him in a barn from German patrols, and when the coast was clear, he helped with the work at the farm. Once the three-year-old son of the farmer, not speaking yet any language, warned him with his gestures about the unexpected arrival of a patrol…

Then the Americans started up the Western front and liberated him. And they moved farther and farther until they brought freedom to the Ukrainian girl Gaina from her unpaid work for a well-to-do German family… When Stalin demanded from his allies to return all the Soviet citizens freed from German captivity, Americans did not argue.

Ivan and Gaina, among many other sons and daughters of the Soviet land, were brought to a French port city, where, by the way, they met each other, and were taken to Leningrad by a steamboat. The fate favored them because the overwhelming majority of the Soviet war prisoners were taken to the East by trains. On the border with the USSR, where the railway track gauge gets different, they were walked to the awaiting echelons of freight cars and brought, over the vast expanses of our Homeland, to the camps of Gulag in Siberia and the Far North.

What for? Just in case. So that their memories of what they had seen in German captivity would not spoil the picture carefully engineered in the brainwashed minds and collective memory of the Soviet people.

"Nothing is forgotten, nor anyone…"

Provided that the unforgotten matter had undergone retouching corrections by the censorship… Even I, a chump brought up on vivid examples from Soviet literature and cinema masterpieces, lost plenty of stereotypes when I got accidentally exposed to my mother-in-law’s talking on the phone to her friend, who also passed the inferno of the German captivity.

"…and do you remember how on February 23 we bought champagne and went to congratulate our pilots?.."

Ta-dah! It turns out that on the Day of Soviet Army and Navy not only secret agent Stirlitz was using alcohol in the fascist Germany, but the captured Soviet aces as well…

In Leningrad, Ivan and Gaina arranged for their marriage and directly enlisted to work in one of the Soviet Central Asian republics. That was a wise move. The subsequent purges and combing for former prisoners of war, and other citizens who had seen a non-Soviet way of life, did not reach them out there. In the Soviet camps, they would not have to eat sunflower seeds. Our camp system, aka Zona, is the most human in the world and it does not protract your sufferings with humiliating prizes for sports achievements…

After the central press announced the elimination of the consequences of the cult of Stalin's personality, they moved to Ukraine and settled in the countryside, just in case, and from there they rose to Nezhyn.

(…once my father tried to explain to me that the progress of life is going on in a spiral. I did not understand him, even though his index finger drew circles in the air to assist the grasping…

The fate of Ivan Alexeyevich can serve as an argument in favor of that theory. In our life, we walk in a circle of the same events, but they, because of the spiral-like proceeding of life, acquire new aspects and details, so we don't recognize them when they are repeating themselves, we just move by and on, and farther.

I do not know whether my father-in-law had ever been drawing any parallels between the seeds he won in the 100-meter dash and his position at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant. In both cases, it's grain disposal. But then, what would he need such a Geometry for?.)

Before stuffing a joint in front of the pier-mirror loaded upon the table in the bedroom, I, first of all, switched off the radio. The rare seeds dropping on the table top from the dried-up cannabis heads were shoved into the hip-pocket of my jeans. The Ryazan-peasantry layer in my genes balked at riddance of them right away which proved to be an unnecessary atavism because sowed at springtime in the Count's Park they didn't grow up…

In the fourth year of study I became an almost exemplary student,