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

I had neither desire nor occasion to share that knowledge to anyone, because it was so complete crazy nonsense. Nutty hooey. That's why I silenced it and kept it hidden and buried away, even from myself, but it came back to me over and over again, even at my not-stoned moments, that I was irredeemably indebted to the long-suffering people of Cambodia sweating in the swelter of the sub-equatorial hothouse climate of South-Eastern Asia. And there was no forgiveness for me…

Nothing comes from nowhere, and it is the immutable truth. The tactile sensations at my maiden getting high, in the stoker-house of the construction battalion, established an inextricable link between blowing jive and getting smashed in the brains.

Subsequently, the rigor of the correlative interdependency dissolved, but the buzz continued to flow in. Which gives rise to a question: if not me, then who is smashed in the brains?

By the end of the five-year-plus period there came the answer. The Khmer Rouge troops, when seizing another village, killed its inhabitants, the same Cambodians as themselves. To save the ammo, they were butchering them by bamboo club blows against their skulls. Then they turned the bodies on their backs and photographed dead faces, like for a passport. In those pictures, the right eye is half-closed and the left one bulging out.

I saw them. Multiple rows of those pictures—dead people with feline faces—were regularly placed in the central newspapers. They looked like some different non-human race, them those people with their, as if skinned, faces. I had what to feel guilty about.

Of course, after the events accompanying my first flight to Odessa, the peasants' brains were not any longer being smashed out for me, which did not stop the show so that someone else would get a kick.

In Odessa, I found myself amid a universal battle of who knows who against whoever else. In the course of inconceivable vicissitudes, I became a some who's ally, making enemies with whoever else, still remaining in the complete dark as to who is who?

One thing was totally clear though, that those, with whom, as willed by fate, I happened to be on the different sides of the barricades, would not fail to track me down and square the accounts. It's no coincidence that, the moment I got off the Kiev-Moscow train in Nezhyn, a window in one of its cars opened and a glassy-eyed (apparently from the monad of the chief engineer) spit out a long streak of saliva on the platform. He undoubtedly was leaving a signal mark for other militants from their dark legion where to pick up the trace of my further perambulations and follow my subsequent movements up to Konotop. And there, they would easily and inevitably discover the cannabis plantation at the end of the garden of my parents' khutta in the Settlement. With incalculable and unimaginable consequences of the most horrid nature.

My duty before the unknown allies, and before the remains of still not finished off peasants at their squalid villages in the humid depths of jungles in South-Eastern Asia prompted the only right decision…)

In the shed at Decemberists 13, I took the bayonet-type spade and went to the plantation in the remotest bed.

They stood proud of their almost three-meter height; issuing the piercing rich aroma.

…forgive me, I know you're eager to live, forgive that I was late for that train to Odessa, but now I have to do what I have to, forgive me…

And they were falling—one after another, one next to another, one on top of another—from the bayonet strikes piercing deep, slicing the roots, cutting the life off…

I stacked them in a high pile, went back to the shed and returned with the jerrycan of gasoline. The crackling fire rose up, the thick white smoke floated.

Alerted by auntie Zeena, my mother hurried to the garden, "Sehryozha!. What are you… Why?. How is it?.."

"It must be done."

She left, and my brother Sasha came instead, "Sehryoga, what are you at?"

"It must be done."

My brother always believed that I knew what I was doing, even when I did not know it myself. He stopped asking me and just stood there, and we both watched the fire turning the dense green of the trunks and branches dumped on a pile into black charred sticks and fine ash, brittle, white…

~ ~ ~

The aircraft landed in the Odessa airport at midnight and I managed to be in time for the 6.00 bus from the New Bazaar bus station. Outside the city, irresistible slumber overcame me so that I missed the stop and woke up only after 300 meters past it. At my request, the driver stopped the bus atop the ascend, and I crossed the windbreak belt.

In the garden of the outermost cottage amid the thinning dusk of the retreating night, an elderly mujik in his underwear and a woman in a white nightgown swept, for some reason, the beds with brooms. They moved in a strange, robot-like, way. The mujik's eyes were filmed with the glassiness. I did not see the woman's eyes though, she was careful to keep them averted. Rather strange agricultural practices for so early an hour, but I could hardly be surprised by anything already.

In my four-day absence, they did not bring any asphalt. But the pinkwashed outside plaster of the old hostel walls had got spattered with blue splashes and dispersed lines as if to camouflage the barrack. But why blue?.

I got in the everyday groove at the mine. The weather changed because one day coming back from Odessa, I found that in my pocket remained just a single three-kopeck patina-blackened coin. "That's not money," thought I to myself and threw the coin back over my shoulder, among the trees of the windbreak belt. For exactly 3 days thereafter, the cold wind blew from the sea, refuting my dismissive opinion of the 3 kopecks, and making me get the message in the byword "to throw money to the wind".

The