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

place. It depends on the standpoint from which you are viewing the monad: here – it's your father, while on its other end – a homeless drifter speaks up to you by the stall with Burdenko.

Of course, all that is a bit more complicated than to learn by rote: "if you stumbled with your left leg – everything would be okay, but if it was the right one – don't even try, turn back and go home." However, monad, as abstruse and hardly comprehensible as it is, still explains a lot…)

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A certain Odessa Preferans player in his youth was a part to the illegal underground. But later he reformed and began to collaborate with the television studio of Odessa as a commentator on the latest criminal news. He even wrote a book sharing impressions from his bandit past, in which he claims that the year of your birth, and especially the summer period, was marked by an unseen, critically baneful, surge of violent crime in Odessa.

It’s a very rare case when a printed text failed to convince me because that summer I was there in person and never noticed anything of the kind. Which speaks in favor of the theory about the existence of parallel worlds. The reformed commentator and I lived in separate parallel worlds, therefore each of us was receiving different impressions from different worlds both of which had in common only the ordinal number of their current year. On the face of it, 2 separate worlds, despite their parallelism do overlap from time to time which explains a couple of criminally tinged episodes in course of otherwise quite quiet summer of ‘79.

In all of my reiterations to and detours within Odessa, I happened to observe just 2 occasions of contact and reciprocative penetration of our parallel worlds. The first one occurred on the morning bus Gvardeyskoye-Odessa when a young slob from the second seat on the left rebuked the driver for a minor change in the route thru the city outskirts.

Upon arrival at the bus station by the New Bazaar, the driver hurried from his cabin into the bus with apologies and technical (to some extent too-too obsequious) explanations. He was forgiven when the other passenger on the same seat spoke for him to her easily irritable companion…

The second interpenetration occurred in the building of the railway station, where I inquired a militiaman about the number of population in the city of Odessa. For an answer, he directed me to the police station on the first floor. The on-duty lieutenant, to whom I repeated the question, told me to wait for a while.

Obedient to his instruction, I leaned against the barrier separating us and watched as the red worms of his lips lustfully closed on, wrapping and twirling, the filter of his unlit cigarette, under the accompaniment of heavy thuds and loud shrieks behind my back.

With a fleeting glance in that direction, I registered a door opened to the next room, where a woman in a chiffon headscarf and the black robe of a janitor aptly wielded the hard handle of her wooden mop to knock the crap out of a bozo draped in only his red underpants. Same red underpants with seldom prints of blue tennis bats as on me, maybe, not as vividly chromatic because of being acquired a couple of years before mine. So I didn’t feel like watching his obviously lost match. Turning back, I dropped my eyes in meek concentration on the top of the high sturdy barrier separating me from the lieutenant… After getting the pleasure due to his rank and position, the officer lit the cigarette, and said that a million was not reached yet, maybe, somewhere about 600 000 people…

That's why, when on my next visit to the city and being late for the last bus to New Dophinovka, I preferred to spend the night in the greens inside the circular intersection in front of the railway station. It turned out to be completely deserted because the underground passage to it was unlit.

Having chosen the most distant from the lamppost bench, I lay down. The bench beams felt so hard that I recollected Edgar Poe killed on a bench in Baltimore, state of Maryland, for $40—a literary fee he had just collected—and partly pulled out the breast pocket in my shirt the advance I received on that day in Pole Explorers Square, like a coquettish handkerchief made of three-ruble notes, for the purpose of self-training and development of my personal courage. The traffic along the circular intersection had almost ceased, but the bench became even harder. However, I kept my eyes shut for the principle's sake because the night is for sleeping. So I was not asleep when there came the tiny sounds of cautious steps over the rounded walk.

He came up and for about a minute stood over me lying on the bench, with the Edgar Poe mustache, in a blue T-shirt and the Soviet three-ruble banknotes sticking out from the breast pocket on it. Then he left, keeping as quiet as he was when approaching. For the sake of principle and training, I did not open my eyes to see who it was.

In the morning, I woke up on the same bench rather chilled and stiff as a board but, unlike the great American romantic, alive. A flock of ravens flew croaking in the dawn sky, flapping their wings. Seemingly, the same ones that coasted above Nezhyn heading north-east on the Day D. It did take them a long time to get over to Odessa. A feather dropped from the wing of one in their squadron and, somersaulting in zigzags, kept falling down.

The face upturned, I followed the jerky trajectory and walked to intercept it, not heeding the dug up beds with sickly flowers. At the meeting point, I outstretched my palm towards the black dodger, caught it, and went back to the asphalted walk. There I dropped the catch tenderly into a trash bin