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

me, there was a tall and white, yet shabby, refrigerator in the truck-bed, and a pair of black chains, like from a chainsaw only much longer. They looked like a couple of mating snakes who, with the jostling of the truck-bed over the bumpy road, kept sneaking up along its floorboards, gradually closing in on me.

In the village of Vapnyarka, the truck entered the grounds of somewhat manufacture. The engineer told me to drop the chains from the back and I hurled the damned stalkers into a deep puddle, although there was a dry place too.

"Got crazy?" shouted the chief engineer, but I saw that he liked my exploit.

The truck driver dragged the drowned serpents into the open door of the warehouse… Then we drove to another place in the village and schlepped the refrigerator into a summer cottage in the group of the like cabins, surrounded by a common meter-tall palisade. The chief engineer stuck the cord into a socket for a check, and the fridge hummed in satisfaction.

"I've nearly forgotten," said I, "Maria wanted you to send her some car."

In fact, I remembered those signal words all the time and only waited for the proper moment…

The chief engineer explained how to get to a water tap in the street. I went there, took off my jacket, washed my hands and arms up to the short sleeves, and also my face and neck. Two militiamen with officer stars in their shoulder-straps stood on one side from me, and two army officers in their fatigue uniform on the other. They all waited patiently while I was splashing because I was with the chief, and after that water, no needle would ever be able to pierce the skin in my neck. Then I walked away wiping myself with the tiny handkerchief that at once soaked thru.

The truck left the village and rode on along the highway and very soon the road dived into a steep tilt to the right of which there unfurled a vast limitless field. I could not understand what it was until a moment later it woke up and stirred in movement, and long low waves with white crests ran to the shore. So that’s the sea!.

I took out the pocket notebook and, consulting the watch on my wrist, made the entry on the inside of its back cover:

"July 20, 1979

13: 30: 15

Eera

Sehrguey

Liliana"

The highway went up again. At the top of the ascent, the truck turned left onto a country road, and thru the outskirts of a village went to the field where the road ran along a windbreak belt. Two kilometers farther, after a long gentle slant there appeared and were passed two or three barrack-like structures and, after another hundred meters, the road ended in a wide pit rigged with a narrow-gauge track running past the office-cottage labeled "Mine Dophinovka" into the dark hole of a cave-tunnel in the opposite wall…

Three worn-out armchairs with wooden armrests stood in the shaded room. In the one with its back to the window curtains sat the mustached mine foreman, about 45, of a placid countenance, with the hair thinning away on his pate.

From the chair opposite him, the chief engineer with jovial laughter recounted my flinging the chain-snakes into the water. The foreman did not partake in his mirth, and the chief engineer subsided guiltily. His guarded respect to the foreman made it clear who was in charge there.

Seated to the right from the foreman, I handed, at his request, my passport over, a little ashamed that it was so sullied.

He opened it and, without touching, passed his right palm over the pages.

And I beheld how the paper in them brightened getting filled with life as if it had just come from the printing house, and there even appeared some ectoplastic transparent glow from its innards. Both the chief engineer and I watched fascinated, doing miracles was outside our limits. Seemed, like, I, after all, managed to reach the most supreme…

He had long since left the clouds and acquired the form of a foreman at a shabby mine. His name? It shall not be taken in vain. Bypassing the ineffable name, I can only disclose that he had fancied the patronymic of "Yakovlevich"…

Then I said that all my things were lost at a bus station in Odessa, and there was no money by me, but I had to call my wife because she would be worried. The chief engineer at once outstretched a dark-blue five-ruble note to me and announced that I would live in the hostel above the pit.

I needed no explanation that the hostel, as well as the mine itself, were a deceptive illusion for gullible dupes in the world where one should constantly be on their look-out. So I pinched the tiny brownish mote off the bill and gently placed this fuzz-mark on the wooden scarred armrest getting rid of it…

~ ~ ~

Besides doing my jobs – at first, a mine roof-fastener, and later on an assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator, not to mention some short-term labors, I constantly was in the state of ceaseless alerted search for an answer: what's hidden behind the seeming facade all around? My quest for clarity continued also in Odessa, where I often went for making long-distance telephone calls to Nezhyn from the intercity telephone station on Pushkin Street. Where was the money from? I borrowed it in the hostel from Slavic Aksyanov, or his wife Lyouda.

In the, let’s assume, hostel, seemingly, adapted from a, supposedly, cow-farm-house there were four rooms on both sides of a long corridor from end to end of the barrack-like building. In one of the rooms lived the young childless family of Aksyanovs. Their neighbors were a Bessarabian family with a one-year-old baby. An elderly single electrician occupied the room next to them.

I was given a room across the corridor from which, reportedly, they moved the radio set away but left the grates in the window. First of all, I pulled the iron frame