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

He immediately recollected Alik the Armenian. When the roof started to rain, Alik had to retreat for 16 meters, backward. Racing, of course, as quick as he could because there was not even time to turn around with the roof crackling and falling and catching up. And so he ran, backward, yelling on the way, "Fuck the mine! Fuck the money!" But how? That was the question… So the roof in mining is not the same as an ordinary roof…

Besides the operating shafts, there also were abandoned ones in the mine. The layer of proper stone dwindled out there, and they were left off. Entrances to such shafts were sealed with a wall of cubic rubble joined by mortar, so that prevent drafts.

However, not all of the left off shafts were sealed. One time the foreman showed me the emergency exit from the mine. Thru one such unsealed shaft, we reached the old trunk tunnel where once the wagonettes were pulled by horses. That drift also led to the same open pit, only on a higher level than the present one. And that old tunnel also had its shafts. When Charlic was on his vacation and I remained the only roof-fastener in the mine, I was pulling the logs from there.

On one occasion, I returned to the newer part of the mine, to Machine 4 shaft, so pleased and proud of myself that I was hauling a whole log alone. With some stupid jest too, like, "Here's for Machine 4 by special order, all the way from Rio de Janeiro!" Then I dropped the log off my shoulder and the bastardy piece of wood—crackle!—fell apart into two, because of being way too ancient material.

But those gossips, as if I was roaming the abandoned shafts without a flashlight, were blatant lies. They started because when someone else's flashlight was on, I turned mine off. I did not even know why. To save energy? It made no difference because after the shift all of the flashlights were delivered to Lyouda for recharging.

A meter-long length of wire connected the flashlight to the accumulator in the small tarp shoulder bag. The flashlight with the clumsy 16 dubbed on its accumulator side was mine.

In the abandoned galleries, I always turned the flashlight on, and one time its beam caught a flash of some unseen, unearthly beauty.

I couldn't make it out from afar what were those brilliant sparks in the tremendous overpowering silence that the dark gallery was filled with. It's hard to describe – some spiky pure-white alien structure or, maybe, like some creature from the ocean depths where even bathyscaphes could not reach, and there it was shimmering with tiny diamonds in the circle of light. Awesomely beautiful.

And I had an ax in my hand for checking if the logs out there were still usable. So the ax swooshed thru the darkness above the light and the white thing fell to the floor. And now instead of the inexplicable beauty, I saw just a huge slimy spittle, only then I guessed that it was a garland of mold. Later I was coming across the like garlands, but smaller in size and only brown, as if being punished for the murder of that pure beauty…

Then Charlic returned from his vacation and a new worker, Vasya, was given the job of a roof-fastener, and I became an assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator. Well, it's not as romantic as walking the no man's shafts and it's deafening, and the nose and mouth must be covered with a cloth because of the dust, but—wow!—familiar all faces! Messrs. Breaker, Shovel, and Sledgehammer…

~ ~ ~

But all the aforesaid was so only at the first, uninitiated, glance. What actually produced the "Dophinovka" mine under the unadvertised supervision of the most supreme chief, that is, Yakovlevich? Well, it depends. Jedem das Seine.

The mining engineer Pugachov, who showed his pyramidally straight nose down there once a month, was interested in gold only or, rather, in the gold sand. He would suck at the gold fix on a fang in his mouth, and quietly ask the stone-cutting machine operator, "Enough sand today, eh?"

After I had (unintentionally) heard him say that I started to dust out my spetzovka pockets at the end of each shift. Like, you're not gonna buy me with your vile metal! Moreover, I did not know the way of turning that sand into gold… Tolik, the operator of Machine 2, got stunned when he saw what I was getting rid of.

But they, no doubt, knew how to turn it into gold indeed and then, under the guise of aluminum castings, stacked it in the tall grass nearby the hostel. Those looked exactly like ingots of bank gold reserves, only of aluminum color, of course, so as to camouflage.

The foreman himself told me that and almost straightly too, "Such a worth and no one has brains to collect them, so they kick back here, littered." And where a mine for cubic production would get aluminum ingots from? Or for what purpose?.

As for the cubics themselves, they were, naturally, souls. Machine 5, for example, whose operator was Hitler, or else Adolf (well, anyway, everyone called him so: either Adolf or Hitler) was producing human souls.

Ivan, from Machine 1, felt hurt indeed that, when his wagonettes were pulled to the pit up there, lots of his cubics were rejected while anything from Adolf—however uneven and defected—went thru. But, if you think about it, so it is – many human a soul happen with flaws. And what is paradoxical, his namesake—Hitler—annihilated so many souls, and this one, down here, turns them out slapdash and keep taunting Ivan.

Whose souls were sawed out by other machines, I could only guess. For archangels? Demons? Titans?. That's what really depressed me most – my ignorance. Yes, I felt, of course, that I was a chosen one,