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

…somewhere something was drastically amiss; I made a terrible mistake, miscalculated something…but what?!.

I started to pace between the tables, to and fro. The waitress approached, and I explained that I couldn't eat, I forgot something.

"What?"

"My jacket in the toilet," said I the first thing that came to my mind.

At that very moment, the door of the hall opened, and a neat pensioner announced that my jacket was in the cloakroom downstairs.

I went down to the cloakroom barrier where a woman with the juicy Odessa accent gave me my jacket, which the old man brought to her from the toilet.

"And the pockets had been filled to the utmost," she said with the bitter reproach clear to both of us. She meant that Sunny City who saw my arrival after such a long wait had bestowed the gifts which I stupidly lost by the mistake and still stayed in the dark as to what namely blunder it was. I despondently climbed upstairs to pay for the soup cooked of mother-of-pearl…

It's like in that game where you rise higher and higher along the winding path of figures and then fall in a precipitated nose-dive thru the pipe drawn to the very bottom line… I rolled out into the street from the restaurant “Bratislava”, where I had intentionally left my jacket in the toilet because there were documents and money in its pocket at the moment when I was admitted and entered the new shining world that needed neither money nor documents.

On the way to the bus station, I noticed a long slit in my pants. The seam had burst on the right thigh, starting from the pocket. And I went on covering it with my jacket whose pockets held no gifts from the new world spilled and scattered into nowhere because of my fault… The unlocked cell at the bus station was also empty of things I'd left there.

For the last ruble, I bought a ticket to Yuzhny and shoved it with the kopecks of change into the hip pocket. The bus was crammed with passengers jamming the aisle. My neighbor on the seat kept sighing and silently rubbed the damned un-outable spot in her skirt hem; I knew she had got spattered because of my lapse. And that my flaw caused the stuffed bus to stop at each and every traffic lights, all red with rage. Then the bus stood for a long time on a trenched street, giving way to an endless file of disgruntled pioneers covered with the dust from the heaps of earth on the pavement. It was I who spoiled the celebration…

By and by, the bus got outside the city, the passengers were leaving at the stops. I also got out at the last but one stop, because it was wrong to come to Yuzhny with a hole as big as the wound in the Spartacus's thigh pierced with a spear.

On the outskirts of the settlement, I respectfully greeted a boy of about twelve and asked for a needle and thread. He got it at once what I needed, and led me behind the high hedge of big stone blocks joined by thick seams of mortar, to a secluded place in the weed thicket. Then he ran away and returned with his friend who had a needle on a long black thread.

The boys got seated on the fence with their backs to me; I doffed my pants and started sewing up the burst seam. From the other side of the stone wall came the sounds of the tires screeching sharply, of the clashes and roar of lorry motors along the difficult roads, forth and back, in the endless universal battle… The boys sat there as mere on-lookers as if having no idea that behind their backs a member of RMC was a-darning a wound in his thigh.

With gratitude, I returned them the needle and the still long enough stretch of the thread… When alone, I got seated under an Apple-tree, took out a Belomor cigarette, lit it and stuck the match into the earth driving it full-length in to put out the flame. Ouch! How she cried!. I startled at the wild heartrending holler of that black-and-white cow at the nearby tree, who desperately bellowed with her muzzle turned up to the heaven. How could I know that everything was so intricately entangled and mingled with each other!.

Then I walked thru a dense Willow thicket, and in the sky above there hung a huge bird, like a stork, almost motionless, with an escort of smaller birds stuck to the air around him…

…so, that's it – the highest Head… Devil, or God or What else you could be is more than I possibly can comprehend… the messy mingle-mangle of a whipped up world is entangled too confusedly… and here I am with nothing but the documents, a pocket notebook, a pen and the handkerchief with a small sailing boat… let's sign the contract then as becomes your trade, eh?.

I took out the pen and the bus ticket. I did not know how to draw such a document, so I simply put my signature below the lines of figures knocked out by the cash register at the bus station. I put the pen back in my pocket and placed the ticket upon the long leaves in a pliant Willow fork. Then I turned my back to the contract – it's a fair play, no peeping.

A sharp gust of breeze swirled the bushes, but when I turned around the ticket was still in the same fork, only turned over with its blank side up… so that's your signature?. smart move, no one will ever be able to forge…

I went out of the Willow thicket to a tall brick building, like the central warehouse at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, and started to ask where the personnel department was. They told me that everything had got closed already, but after the second shift,