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

with bars out and put it outside in the tall grass reaching the window ledge. Then I whitewashed the walls, and for one entire evening was thrashing them with a tube of a rolled-up newspaper in the battle with a myriad of vampire mosquitoes. The following morning Slavic Aksyanov, looking fairly battered, asked what I was doing there all the evening after repair.

"Safari," curtly said I without going into detail for he obviously got his share in the battle.

The rest of the doors in the corridor were locked, except for the first to the right from the entrance where there was a shower.

The mine workers were brought in the morning by a truck from Vapnyarka and New Dophinovka villages. They arrived whistling and screaming in the truck-bed like devils, but they called themselves Makhno bandits. Every 2 days, a pair of them were filling the large tank of the shower with water from a small hut in a hollow, some 30 meters from the hostel. There was a deep well with a bucket tied with a chain to the iron windlass. Electric heaters heated the water in the tank long before the end of the working shift.

Aside from the barrack-hostel, on the slope overgrown with tall grass, stood a tin-walled outhouse. There was no door in it, and the facility had to be approached with some kind of a warning tootle, so as not to catch a user in the posture of an eagle on the roost… From the doorless toilet there opened a magnificent view of the long sea inlet and its sheer opposite shore.

(…there is a concept of "stream of consciousness" which presumes that a person is capable of making mental comments on anything happening around them, or to think about something extraneous, having nothing, at first glance, to do with those happenings. Following the widely entertained assumption, "the stream of consciousness" was invented by an Irishman named James Joyce, although he tried to bring into play a certain French author from whom he, allegedly, picked up the idea. However, much earlier that same stream, even though not on an overly prominent scale, occurred in the meditations of the failed-to-become mother-in-law of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky.

Thus, "the stream of consciousness" seems to be one of those discoveries which have to take place repeatedly and in different places, just in case, to ensure they would not be missed. The "stream", when boiled down, announces to the human race that a person is really able to exchange thoughts with themselves.

What happened to me in Odessa in that crazy summer of '79 which turned out to be the most beautiful summer in my life, could hardly be called a "stream of conscience". A stream? I pray, desist! No! It was a waterfall and a refreshing one too, tuning up my tensely strained senses on their constantly alerted lookout…

I exchanged thoughts not just with myself but also with any-every-one-thing I came across. Starting from a small pebble stuck in the dust of roadside up to the night stars with their dew-like glint in the sky.

"Seen that?"

And the stars would answer with high-and-mighty indifference, "And more than that, and more than once…" And they went blinking on the way they did the millions upon millions of years before our era.

And it did not bother me at all, that tireless, constant, wide-spray fire-pump, gush of thoughts. After all, the human brain is engaged for some scanty 10 percent of its natural full capacity. So, let it have a knock-up, sweep away the cobweb and dust motes accumulated in the remaining percent!

Of course, during working hours the intensity of my single-handed brainstorm somewhat decreased – the workplace environment seemed more static and settled when compared to split-second changes of circumstances on the city streets. However, I can proudly state that even as deep as 38 meters under the earth surface, the intensity of my mental labor was much higher than the obnoxious ten-percent standard…)

The mine "Dophinovka" produced cubics – three-dimensional freestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm cut out from the underground limestone strata. For which purpose, there was a drift tunnel dipping from the wide pit and going under 38 meters of other stratification layers. Down the tunnel, here and there, the shafts were branching out on one or another of its sides—also tunnels, but lower and narrower—just like boughs from a tree trunk. At the end of those shaft-galleries, there were placed the stone-cutting machines which cut cubics from the wall in front of their noses. Such was the general, birds-eye-view, picture…

As for the details, my instructor in the roof-fastener job bore a sonorous name of ancient Russ princes – Rostislav. However, he never responded to this name because even to him it sounded strange and foreign, since everyone knew and addressed him as Charlic.

First of all, he led me to the shaft of Machine 3 because of his humble trepidation before its operator, whom Charlic titled exclusively with his patronymic "Kapitonovich". Being just a petty demon, Charlic at every turn made up to Kapitonovich, a stout devil of esteem, who had once served a stretch of ten years.

Both Charlic and I walked holding a flashlight in hand. Going down to the mine, everyone received his flashlight from Lyouda Aksyanova, the lamp-rechargeress, in her cave by the entrance to the main tunnel. Without the light, down there you got into the wholesome pitch-black darkness and could easily stumble over a rail of the narrow-gauge track, or against one of the rarely put ties under it, and have a nasty fall. That's why everyone in the mine wore a plastic helmet and each morning, before going down, they scribbled their signatures in a ledger to testify that they got instructed on safety rules and now knew their risks and were up to them.

The temperature in the mine was always above zero, even in winter. A constant calm and pressing, underwater silence reigned in the shafts if no