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

executioners could not understand that they were burning not the right ones, and at the wrong moment.

My point is, no matter how – at the stake, on the pale, in the guillotine, on the electric chair, in the gallows, against a wall facing the firing squad… well, whatever!.. they always execute the guiltless. These are not those ones, those were not these. No!. Wait!. Oops… Too late… The pattern iterates in the same endless vicious loop…

But even those, at the moment of wrong-doing, were simply order-executing tools. Whose orders? Who were they toiling for? Well, if I had the answer to that question, would I be still living here, eh?

One thing is clear, though. Between the tool engaged at the operation end and the don of mafia there lies a chain of several links making the "who" practically untraceable. Because, if we paraphrase the favorite expression of my Uncle Vadik, which he picked at the history classes in School 13:

"a zombie of my zombie is not my zombie"…)

Hearing your heartrending cry from the bedroom, I rushed there and was just in time. You were wriggling in the carriage under the open leaf in the window, and your grandmother, drooping over you, went on with her incantation, "Little angel! Little angel!" While you were getting torn apart in screams.

"Gaina Mikhailovna! She's not an angel but a girl!"

In her responding glance, there glinted the malice from the one who had sent her, but lacking arguments to refute my statement, she silently left.

I knew for sure that prevailing upon a baby whose infirm psyche hasn't got adequate training, who, as of yet, too feebly orients herself in the world, was wrong, especially persuading her that she was an angel. And more so under the window open widely! Like, inviting – fly to where it's nice, where angels like you frisk and flutter around happily!

I started to convince you that you were a girl named Lille and nothing of an angel at all. You still kept crying but not so desperate as before when the soul was being wrenched in efforts to escape the mortal body.

Yet, what was the matter? I put you onto the bed and unwrapped the swaddle; you cried on, arching your infant torso… The reason was found in the soles of the tiny feet both wearing the stretches of whitish arachnoid fiber like those rascal-marking fluffs on my camel's-hair coat. I rinsed them off. Blinking your blue eyes in surprise, you calmed down. I swaddled you back again and took over to the carriage where you peacefully fell asleep…

Ironing your swaddles was my responsibility so that I would keep everything under control, watched closely. And it was also me to hang them, after washing, out over the common linen ropes in the apartment-block yard.

The ropes ran from the central pillar like spokes from a wheel hub. It’s where I learned that I had allies in this world because alone I would hardly solve the problem of hanging swaddles the right way. I mean it, really, which way to put them on the rope – face down or back down? I put the first one this way, the second upside-down. And that very moment, a white dove came from above, lit on the central pillar and cooed in protest.

Aha! Thank you, friend! I'll keep to the instruction!

Since then I was hanging a whole load of swaddles homogeneously…

Zhomnir suddenly lost all of his interest in my translations from Maugham. He cut off his usual cheerful threats to take them one of these days to "matchmaking" in Kiev. Instead of encouragements, there came languid explanations that it was necessary to take into account the ongoing changes in conjuncture. That the following year there would be the centenary of another English writer. Translations from that one would be much easier to shove thru. And Maugham, actually, was a gay person…

Well, let's say, rendering the story about a young suicide pianist, I was able to figure out his orientation by myself. However, in what gutter would this here best of the worlds be today without the gay composer Tchaikovsky? Either Maugham or nothing!

Alexander Vasilyevich shrugged his shoulders…

In the living room at Red Partisans in the presence of Gaina Mikhailovna, I complained to Eera about Zhomnir's double-dealing. They both knew about my ambiguous ambitions to become a literary translator. Eera started pathetic exclamations while my mother-in-law, without any comment, went out to Tonya's bedroom and returned with a powder box. She opened it, powdered her face in front of the mirror in the wardrobe door, and took it back in the same tacit manner. That's all.

In the evening, Zhomnir rang the doorbell and invited me to go out with him into the yard. His bicycle leaned against the house wall by the staircase-entrance. Under the dark foliage of the thick Cherry crowns behind the common linen ropes, twilight was already gathering and creeping towards the hung laundries. From the neighboring apartment block sounded The Eagles' Hotel California:

"Warm smell of colitas rising up in the air…"

I did not know at that time what a tragically creepy end the song had, and simply was getting on high from the concluding guitar break…

Zhomnir obviously envied the atmosphere around, but then he started to talk business. As it stood, my translations had ceased to be mere scribbling, yet still remained in a ballpark, kinda a beta version. He did not insist on changing the author, but let them be upgraded to the alpha…

He left, and I respectfully admired the skills of the old school. With all their ignorance about the textual formatting of the world, and with the naive belief in bewitching thru the cooked sausage, yet just a single powdering was enough to overpower Zhomnir and seize him by the gills! Well done, mother-in-law!.

Apart from the baby’s security considerations, the swaddle ironing was needed to pass the time… Eera, as a mother with a newborn, was exempt from working off for her diploma. I got an appointment somewhere