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

my classes attendance increased enormously. I couldn't bear staying in the apartment when Eera went to the institute… At the lectures, I submerged into the endless story of Joseph and his Brothers. It became deeper and more palpable, sort of a bass-relief of tranquil streamflow, in the wake of a joint smoked in the restroom during the break.

Under the unbearably long ding-donging final bell, I went down to the side hall on the first floor filled with the students' coats on pegs along its walls and helped Eera into hers. Then among the strident hullabaloo of donning students, I looked for a tiny piece of white fuzz on my coat, and took it off; only after that inspection, I put my coat on and we started home.

That white thread of arachnid yarn appeared on the gray fabric of my coat each time after I had a joint at the educational institution. Yes, in place of the sheepskin coat I wore a demi-saison camel coat bought from Alyosha Ocheret when he was in his final year. I did not share my discovery of the fluff phenomenon with anyone, but for myself dubbed it "God's marking a rascal"… Sometimes, to check it experimentally, I refrained from a joint at the break, and then the fluffy piece did not appear. That’s why, before putting my coat on, I checked it searching for the white mark. It never skipped its duty…

My love for Eera grew ever deeper. Sometimes she asked me not to gaze at her so steadily, especially in public, but I still hoped to stop the fluid moment.

"He gazed at her the way a dog regards a crystal vase,the stare was answered by a look of crystal vase considering a dog…"

Occasionally, we visited the hostel for a pool at Preferans. Because of Eera’s being in the family way, we did not smoke while playing; only Twoic at times, with an air of a schooled hussar cadet, asked her for kind permission and smoked to the envy of me and Slavic… And Eera, sitting with absent air on a bed by the window, would finely jag with scissors a Belomor-Canal cigarette taken from me…

She did not make a secret of her pregnancy, and still in the second month ordered from Lyalka's mother an elegant loosely fitting sarafan-shift of brown broadcloth.

Once, already in springtime, she left the hostel first, while I was tarrying in the lobby with Twoic. When I went out on the porch, Eera stood near the corner of the building in a quarrel with a student of the Biology Department drooping from a window on the second floor. Unfit to grasp the meaning of the sarafan, the dunce of a sophomore tried to pick up an unknown beauty. I demanded of him an apology to the lady but received an insolent refusal.

While I was climbing up the staircase, Twoic joined me but there were three more guys in the room. There followed a muddled battle with varying success and steady reinforcements to the inmates arriving from the neighboring rooms. I recollect a moment in the scrimmage with me standing on someone's bed while one of the opponents kept his stupid mug in front of my shoe toes begging for a kick, but I restrained myself because he wanted it too openly.

Pretty soon, I was overpowered and leveled with the floor, immobilized by the weight of 3 adversaries, yet hearing that somewhere in the corner, Twoic was still fending off the outnumbering enemy forces. And then the door flew open – Eera stood on the doorsill with a wooden ruler in her hands and issued a shrill cry, "I'll stab them all!"

I was so impressed by the absurdity of the situation—Eera's pirate warcry, that unknown ruler in her hands, and you in her belly—that I laughed. All the present followed my example.

It is not possible to fight in earnest with whom you've laughed along right now. I was helped to get up and we left…

~ ~ ~

Being unfit to immobilize the flowing moment, I had to change priorities. My task became to protect her; protect from the babel turmoil in the crowd of students putting their coats on; from the insidious viper bites of her begrudging bosom girlfriends with their snaky forked tongues, "Hi! You do look ugly today!" To guard against her fears of the things to come – they said, the paramedic Kerdun in the maternity hospital was so cruel, every woman in labor was complaining of her afterward. And protect from so incomprehensible but negative Rh factor in Eera herself…

Protecting from all the world, ready to attack at any moment from where you do not expect, calls for being alert; so, I kept low and was on a constant look-out. That position led to my alienation from the hostel, from the course-mates, from the institute. Only with Zhomnir I still kept in touch. He was the scientific supervisor to my term work The Means of Irony in 'The Judgment Seat' Story by W. S. Maugham. Besides, I needed him as a means to stake off some place for me with Eera in this hostile world. He promised to take my translations for a "matchmaking" to one of the publishing houses in Kiev, where he had connections. But it had to be a collection of 20 to 25 stories in Ukrainian… So, I kept visiting his place, and he was saying in jest that his wife, Maria Antonovna, fell in love with me.

The 2 of them lived in a three-room apartment on the fifth floor in an apartment block of those along Shevchenko Street, because their children had already come of age and separated. The sons moved to Russia, and the daughter lived in Nezhyn at her husband's.

The Zhomnirs used only 2 rooms for living, the third one Alexander Vasilyevich turned into an archival study furnished with a desk, a chair, and stacks of shelves, up to the ceiling, made of mighty planking and filled with a welter of cardboard