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

Was I sure they were exactly people? Well, I did not have another name for them… Letting out? What namely? What about?. About things that did not belong to the life which we were taught to see and no deeper.

…Ivan unable to get thru…(repealed on his emissary mission)…and whose side are you on?. (the fire at the Bakery Plant just an episode in the universal battle)…

I had to find the ways and means for collecting the strewn puzzle pieces of concomitant reality, turn them into some-wieldy-thing, without getting lost on the way midst all chance hints of recondite raw truth. Who's for who? Who's against who?.

A thunderstorm broke behind the black window in the living room. The ramble of falling water outside got overpowered again and again by thunderclaps fighting blindly in the flicker of mighty flashes. A pillar of enormously white light struck the transformer box in the yard. And the pitch-black darkness engulfed all around.

Tonya groped her way to their bedroom to calm down the children and Ivan. When she came back with a burning candle, I saw in its feeble light that I was talking to Mothers. Those very Mothers mentioned, in all too cautious, cut-and-run, manner by Goethe… Three Mothers were they: the old yet powerful, the middle, and the beginner – Eera. She was not my ally, she was one of them. I needed to persuade them, otherwise, nothing would come out.

With the storm raging outside, behind the blinking candle reflection in the panes of black glass, I still managed to get their go-ahead… In conclusion, their eldest, the leader said, "If something goes completely awry…in a hopeless, extreme, situation…turn to the very Head…"

At night I had a prophecy dream… I lay on a gurney, trying to become inconspicuous in the cold and dim fluorescent light flooding from everywhere thru the pale gray, semi-translucent, ceiling and walls, so as to exclude the slightest possibility for even a sliver of a shadow. A group of someones in white robes stood all about me. The one standing out of view, behind my head, asserted, "If not for the fat, it still might come out…" Even without seeing, I knew that the one in the white who pronounced that was also I. With a furtive glance from under my half-closed eyelids at the stomach of me lying raw upon the gurney, I saw thru the sheer skin a thin yellowish layer, probably, the fat I was talking about…

I went out into the train car vestibule and sparked. Thru the sky of dusty glass in the automatic doors, a small harem of seahorses floated with their tails curled forward under their bellies. Lined from the taller mare to the smallest colt, they were also fond of a system, like the lost figurines of white elephants. The train hurriedly raced ahead, yet couldn't leave their formation behind…

A man entered the vestibule with a dangling row of medals on his civilian jacket breast. A war veteran; here's the one who once knew who's for who, who's against who. We shot the breeze for a while without advancing any particular line of thought until at one of the stops, a man with a bundle of long thin planks in his hands stepped in from the platform. He carried his load between us 2 and went on into the car. The veteran freaked out, his staring eyes stuck to something in the upper corner behind me. I knew that there was nothing there, but since he saw it, then there it was. I left them to sort it out between themselves and followed the fascia-bearer into the car, to the window under the rack carrying my things, because Kiev was running towards our train…

~ ~ ~

At the station, I took my luggage to the cool huge underground checkroom hall. Then I came back up to the hot surface of the station square in whose right corner I slipped thru the inconspicuous passage leading to the steep and long stair flights that descended to the canteen once shown to me and Olga by Lekha Kuzko.

At the bottom of stairs, I sparked and went on, but had to stop smoking, when a platoon of militiamen poured out of the canteen and marched towards me along the sidewalk, so that I had to pad thru their ranks, with a smoldering joint between my fingers…

From the canteen, I returned to the station and took a walk-round. There were not so many glass-eyed as on the night watch at the Nezhyn station, probably, because of the different time of day. Still, there were some and at my approach, they hurriedly pretended that they were there just so, kinda ornery passengers.

I went up to the third floor where there was the mother-and-child room and explained to the watchwoman that in a month I would be passing their station together with my wife and baby daughter, and now I dropped in to check the conditions. Well, in general, rather a clean corridor, thank you.

Near the toilet rooms on the first floor, a young militiaman with a black eye of deep purple hue took pains to avoid the least eye contact with me, although both of us perfectly knew that his black eye resulted from my walking thru their formation and that he, who had suffered in the universal battle, would not forgive me that.

Then, for quite a stretch, I stood in the waiting hall on the second floor, in front of the huge news stall counter keeping heaps of diverse newspapers, magazines, postal envelopes. But all that time I looked at just one postcard with the bluest blue sky in its picture.

It was a long wait until there at last sounded footsteps behind me, barely audible in the joint buzz of the crowd filling the hall… My eyes stayed fixed at the picture. The footsteps stopped. A copper coin the size of an eye iris fell from behind my back onto the blue in the postcard.